#or just generally makes itself smaller to be less threatening

[doodlesofchaos]

Anybody wanna see a nervous boi? ...No? Too bad :)

Meet Skit (They/It)! They're an Eclipse-based (Lunar edition!) OC that I've been brainstorming a story for for a while. It's very curious, but also really skittish and very easily spooked. (This is why they go by Skit, also bc I think I'm funny haha-)

So far the story I have is that Skit is the newest Daycare Attendant! They work with the much quieter, more hands-on kids that Sun and Moon can't watch over along with the rest of the kids.

Sun and Moon... Don't initially like it, but eventually grow pretty close after a while.

(Also yes, the stars on their outfit do glow softly, as well as the star at the end of their tail. It also rattles bc fidget toy go brr)

[jubilost]

the thing that sold me on pillars of eternity was eorn. i tried to play the game three or four times before reaching him. i found the combat unfun and the premise generic, so i didn't touch it for years. i thought i knew what the game was offering: swords and sorcery and binary good vs. evil heroism by the guys who wrote some of the best fallout games. i assumed orlans and aumaua were merely a take on goblins and orcs respectively.

then i met eorn. and he talked about oppression as it actually functions. and i realized this game was so much more than i thought.

orlans don't fall in to the usual trappings of othered groups in fantasy stories, they aren't touched by an evil god or cast-offs from an alien realm or mindless agents of chaos. they're people. they want what everyone else wants, fulfilling lives and warm homes and good company. beyond being visually distinct from the majority races(elves and humans) there's nothing that makes them truly different. but this, coupled with being smaller than everyone else, has left orlans easy targets for social othering and physical abuse.

eorn was happy, he had a good job, he had friends. then a person in a position of power took offense to the idea of someone he saw as lesser disagreeing with him. eorn was terrified he'd be killed to reinforce the social hierarchy. trying to act in self defense lead to his attacker dying, and when we meet him, he's hiding from an arrest warrant. he knows he won't get a fair trial and just wants to leave the city for good. he can't have his life back, an insecure bigot destroyed it on a whim.

other members of the same group, the crucible knights, refer to orlans as animals and "creatures". the narrative itself never entertains this idea. orlans are never presented as uniquely animalistic. hiravias spiritshifts. he's also trilingual, introspective, witty, compassionate- and he threatens to gore anyone who even implies orlans aren't quite people, but this is never condemned by the game or most characters.

his passionate defense of both his personhood and the personhood of others is occasionally painted as comedic but never totally unjustified or immoral. orlans are written like anyone else, with the caveat that all of them are aware of your privilege and their lack of it because that's a pressure they've felt their entire lives. hiravias immediately pulls away and capitulates if you choose certain dialogue upon meeting him, ailef and eorn beg you to simply let them live because most don't care if they die, kurren won't talk back if you snap at him despite being visibly hurt.

i definitely think this was the right call. showing orlans as people makes those who call them lesser seem fittingly close-minded and irrational. so many stories try to "show both sides" of social conflict. to say, yes, it's bad to ostracize and abuse a group of people, but here's where the rumors started, here's an exception to that rule, here's a way to make the player feel less evil for choosing to reinforce the social hierarchy if they just don't like the look of orlans.

by not doing that, the narrative itself sympathizes with the plight of the oppressed(such as they exist within pillars of eternity's universe). it still takes the time to explore grounded situations but without humoring the idea that oppressed people are somehow responsible for the circumstances they were born into or that they're on equal footing with their oppressors. it shows us what life is like under oppression without initially letting the ruling class speak, telling us to observe how people suffer to survive before showing us what rewards the oppressors reap, which in turn makes it even easier to empathize with the oppressed. it's such a refreshing change from, well, the vast majority of genre fiction.

(i don't want to be a coward and hide this in the tags so i'll add that i'm white and that most orlans, eorn in particular as a window into police violence through a fantasy lens, are racially coded. it's not my place to say whether that coding is appropriate or handled well overall. i just wanted to praise certain elements of their presentation, please let me know if i spoke out of turn.)

[forestanomaly]

Funguswalkers lore!

Ok so let's figure out what's the deal with those mushrooms. Life of a funguswalker starts in the mycelium. All funguswalkers grow out of it untill they reach their final size, and only then they rip apart their mycelial threads and begin walking and doing things, this is when they enter the community.

While they are growing they don't talk, but they can see and often have some hazy memories about those times. If something interrupts the process of growing and rip the threads funguswalker will come out as it is, unfinished and raw. Eventually their shell will harden a bit, but those younglings often are weaker than others and have all sorts of problems. In the dangers of nether they rarely survive for long, but it's not unusual that they find their place in the community and adapt. Funguswalkers come in all shapes and sizes and often wary in color of the stem. Mycelium desides by itself what it needs, so not all small funguswalkers are necessarily were ripped early, but those who are are often smaller than they could be if they grew for longer.

All funguswalkers are sexless (this is why any funguswalker is assumed to go by they/them in gendered languages unless specified othervise. Funguswalker's language itself doesn't have any gendered words, so they don't have this problem), as they essentially fruiting bodies with legs and brains. Apart from rare exeptions, most of them can produce two type of spores - they call them spores of life and protective spores.

If funguswalker feels threatened, they will produce a cloud of poisonous spores that irritate the airways and eyes and generally won't feel good. Different subspecies have different effects - warped protective spores take a little longer to have an effect, but make you feel naseous and dizzy if you inhale enough of them, and crimson spores have a les severe, but faster effect, they're just very irritating and cause a lot of coughing and stinging.

Funguswalker's blood can be used to produce a potion with a similar effect to their spores, but they won't appreciate that.

Spores of life are produced passively in small quantities, but some biological processes can cause them to drop a lot of them at specific times. They sprout small mushrooms that after some time in favourable conditions can grow into a new mycelium and new village.

So, the funguswalker was succsessively ripped. They often do that in groups, as mycelium grows them in batches (size depends on the size of the mycelium). Right now and untill they get their name they are considered younglings and everyone takes it as their responcibility to engage them in as many useful activities as they can - this is a tradition, aimed at determining what the individual is good at and how they can most contribute to the village. When they do figure it out they give a youngling name that reflects it - Weaver, Scout, Wander, Eyes, Alert, Seeker, Guard, Fighter, Keeper and so on.

The only exeption to this tradition is the Cursed Ones, who are born only in warped colonies. They get one name - Cursed/Curse and go with it untill they earn their actuall name by not dying and being more useful at what they do than they are dangerous at what they are. Not many cursed ones live to get a chance to earn their name and even less convince their villages that they are worth their name. (which is fucked up. I just wanted to specify that this is designed to be a Fucked Up System created by ignorance and pressure from the dangerous environment)

Most of the funguswalkers are born with the ability to shape the mushrooms into something they want, but only about half of them are able to develop it to be significant and cover a lot of material at once. Fungi, for example, is only figuring it out, and Shroom doesn't bother.

Funguswalkers were once a single species, but after Something Weird happened some of them got exposed to different minerals and energy of the Overworld, which caused them to change. This is how Warped fungus happened. Since then they developed separately from Crimsons and now they have a lot of differences between them.

Warped funguswalkers Because of the jumble of energy the warped forests are... Funky, to say the least, to be in. Not many creatures are attuned to being there for long, which includes, aside from the walkers, endermen and humans, notorious for efortless dimencion-hopping. The energy of the Overworld and is so devastating to the hoglins that they try to keep away from anything warped as far as possible, especially the Cursed Ones who are like twice-warped at this point. Their poison, influenced by said energy, has a necrotic effect for the easily affected creatures (hoglins, piglins), which frees warped villagers from having to defend themselves from two of their worst natural enemies. Their scout parties often contain from one to three walkers, aimed at hiding, not attacking. Crimson walkers don't have that luxury. This caused Crimson funguswalkers to become more violent, as they had to protect themselves from the hoglins and piglins the whole time (who hunt them for food. The walker's flesh contains a lot less heavy minerals and metals than the static bodies of the mycelium so they are a good sourse of nutriens if cooked properly. Nether is brutal). On many instances crimson patrools pick up the lone warped scouts and keep them in their villages, with force if necessary, to ward off the hoglins. This is what happened to Fungi at one point, but unfortunately Crimson villages didn't know much about the Cursed Ones.

Aside from stated bloodshed, many villages, especially warped, are on friendly terms with endermen and often welcome them in, offering food and shelter for help and intems. Funguswalkers and endermen speak different languages, but many learn other language to communicate. Fungi and Shroom, for instance, both know some enderling, which allowed them to talk to Oak and Darkwood, even with the difference in dialects.

That's the most of what I have for now I think? I have some more nerdtalk about their place in the nether ecosystem, but let's save that for later. I would be glad to answer if you have some questions though .)

[messinwitheddie]

Hey Pur, what was it like living with mem? How did her sworm react to seeing a tallest for the first time?

Mem, did you ever talk about the empire to your kids? That and what the irkens do once they set out for conquest? Are you worried the armada might find your home, even after your death? What would you want your sworms to do? Leave to stay?

Purple "Excuse us, he hates the process but it needs to be done. His nails are lethal...

Mad mother Mem. She was savage. Great Glord I miss her so much.

My first year living under her ceiling was torture. She made it very clear the moment we met SHE ruled the hive and I had no power over her or her swarms.

When the comm officers stumbled upon this planet I led a surface recon mission to see if there were any valuable resources to gather from it. Yeet tried to warn me about a coup, but that sounded preposterous. My generals had surprise-pummeled me, stripped me of my hovor-mobile aids and left me for dead-- OH! AND Zim manually downgraded my PAK while I was knocked unconscious, so I was in no physical condition to defend myself.

She made it very clear to her swarms that I was not to be trusted or treated with dignity. I guess it was her form of payback for how late Miyuki had treated her in the past.

She ordered her swarms to keep their distance from me. Every so often Mem or one of her smeet-soldiers would throw food at my feet. Beyond that, most of the hive was forbidden to speak to me or directly interact with me at all until after the big resisty trial. That day changed EVERYTHING, but that's another long story. One at a time...

When I first arrived here Mem's youngest smeets were fascinated with me. I constantly noticed them scurrying around, watching me from behind corners, only to scatter and hide when I made eye contact. I was the tallest drone they had ever met in person, and Irken tallests have quite a reputation, so I get it. It did make me feel like a spectacle... a different kind of spectacle than how I'm used to. My smaller drones in the empire used to idolize me and cheer for me; or, you know, they pretended to.

The longer I go without being falsely idolized, the less I miss it. I'm practically a coddle drone now, nothing more and I'm much happier. As a tallest, I was a puppet. Here, the admiration I'm given is genuine. I matter to my smeets here and they matter to me even more. I coach them in sting ball, I give the winged ones flying lessons when Helkite and the other eyes in the sky go on aerial recon-- Zim graciously left my holo-wing feature when he downgraded my pak-- I supervise our hive's smeets on foraging trips, scare off predators. They NEED me and it feels good to be needed. If it wasn't for the smeets speaking on my behalf, I don't think Mem would have ever accepted me.

I won't lie, I HATED Mem at first. I wished for her to die a slow, painful death every time she spoke to me. She was a little shrill old service wench who treated me like scum and scratched me until I bled when I protested. She let me hobble around on the cold stone floors of the hive-tunnels for months; no furniture to lounge on, no back massages, no pipe amber, literally no basic comforts. She took delight in watching me suffer. She used to throw things at me, threaten me, insult me-- I mean, just name an indignity, she put me through it. To add insult to injury, I had to occupy the same hive as Zim... and under Mem's command Zim outranked me! It was the un-funniest cosmic joke ever told. I cursed life itself and everything in it.

But at the time, the joke went over my head.

I was a different Purple then; sheltered, spoiled, WEAK. I wasn't able or willing to look at my situation from another perspective. I needed to grow. You know, grow on the inside-- as a drone. I eventually did. I like to think my time spent here built me into a bigger, better person and I have Mem to thank for that...

Ok, we're finished. You're dismissed, Hitz."

Hitz "Thank you, Purple!"

Mem "I didn't tell my first swarm much about the empire or my past... Zim told them much more about the empire than I was comfortable with when he arrived. At first, I was furious with him. I didn't WANT my smeets to be burdened with the toxic culture of the empire. I never wanted to plant the idea in their heads that their height determined their worth as a drone...

BUT

Zim made me realize sheltering my smeets from ugly truths about our species and culture could potentially endanger them in the future.

The fear of our refugee planet being discovered by the armada is a VERY real fear we face. The Sage literally abandoned our hive because he feared working with the Resisty may attract attention from the empire thus destroying the sanctuary we built here...

We try to operate underground as much as possible because of this. We try to use as little tech as possible to make the surface of our refugee planet as unnoticeable as possible from space.

If our hive is ever discovered by the empire, I encourage everyone to do whatever it takes to survive, even if that means fleeing the planet. Currently we cannot fight the armada. They outnumber us and outgun us. If my smeets have to abandon the hive and hide out in space, so be it. Even if they have to scatter, they know to regroup when it's safe. Hope takes multiple forms. That is a lesson I have learned well over the centuries.

With any luck, by the time the Armada discovers us and our home, we will have built our defenses up strong enough to fight back or at least escape to a safe place.

Right now, we focus on day to day survival.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Eclipse: Chapter 16

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Adventure Characters: Apollo, Hades Now, I could make the gods' lives easy... or I could not. No prizes for guessing which way I went here. I have a discord server for all my fics, including this one!  If you wanna chat with me or with other readers about stuff I write (or just be social in general), hop on over and say hi! <<Chapter 15

APOLLO XVI

Tell a tale of woe Cross the lamenting river And then we get stuck

While he’d been preoccupied – Apollo hesitated to call it dreaming, because that implied he’d fallen asleep – his form had made considerable progress in pulling itself back together.  His healing abilities were superior to most, even down in the depths of Tartarus, it seemed, and when he pressed a hand to the knife wound in his gut where Orion had tried to disembowel him, he felt nothing but unmarked skin.

His throat, too, was intact once more, as were the other various smaller injuries he’d picked up from both their battle with the giant and the broader Tartarus experience, and part of Apollo wondered how long he’d been sat there.  Ichor still stained his armour and skin alike, a jagged slit in the abdomen of his armour showing where Orion’s hunting knife had passed through it as though it hadn’t existed, but it was a simple matter to will it away.

The action didn’t bother his essence in the slightest, adding credence to the suspicion that he had been… out… for some time, for whatever measure or worth time had in the Pit, and some self-evaluation put him at not quite a hundred percent, but recovered enough that he was confident in his abilities to handle most non-Orion levels of confrontation once more.

Cool metal, celestial bronze at its finest despite the haphazard nature of the creation, made itself known in his hand and he looked down at the Valdezinator – or rather, the remains of it.

The instrument was, for lack of a better word, ruined, and Apollo felt a not inconsiderable amount of regret at the sight.  For something he had more or less forced Leo to give up to keep up his own appearances, he had grown attached to the strange yet utterly unique instrument, and had been making great strides in mastering the art of playing it.

In fact, his performance against Orion could have argued that he had if not mastered, at least achieved a high level of proficiency in playing it – something Apollo had never fully expected himself to manage.  Not because it was outside of his realms of ability – it was a musical instrument, it was always within his abilities – but because of the requirements for playing it.

The Valdezinator fed on emotions.  It was ingenious – music and emotions were heavily intertwined, but never had Apollo before seen an instrument that required emotions to make sound in such a way as the Valdezinator.  When he considered that it was constructed with less than a thought from Leo, simply something his hands did while his mouth was busy, it seemed unbelievable – and yet, it fit so perfectly.  Something created on a whim, away from conscious thought, that required the intangible to play…  Apollo loved it, but the vulnerability it had forced from him had been something he had been unwilling to display.

It demanded honesty, not a performance, and Apollo had never thought he would be in a position where he would willingly shed his performance in front of an audience – at least, not until his trials, and Lester, and everything that had entailed.

Still, against Orion – in front of Hades – with the fear from the Helm swirling around him and Orion’s vicious face threatening him, threatening his sister and his children, Apollo had managed to harness the right emotions to stop the giant, to lasso the fear his uncle’s Helm emitted and channel it into a weapon against his bane.  He’d hoped that would have been enough, but he’d known that just the music wouldn’t have been.  More had been needed.

Apollo hoped Leo would understand.  His hands shook as he looked down at the mangled metal, before he pushed at it with his essence, picturing the nook he had placed it in for safe keeping on Delos.  Such a piece of mastery deserved far, far better than to be discarded in Tartarus for evermore.  Perhaps, if Leo forgave him its destruction, he would be willing and able to repair it.

Summoning it in the first place had been exhausting, not just because he’d lost so much ichor he’d been struggling to perform any truly godly feats at all but also because of the distance between Delos and Tartarus.  Sending it back, despite being well-rested, was just as difficult.  Having his ichor and strength restored helped, but Tartarus was automatically opposed to things leaving, and it took several long minutes before the instrument faded from his hands entirely.

He took one more moment to remember it, to mourn the instrument that had saved him at the cost of itself much like a certain ukulele, before casting his attention around the cave to find Hades.

His uncle was stood at the entrance, sword held loosely by his side.  It was the exact same position Apollo had seen him take up as he’d slumped against the wall of the cavern, and he wondered if Hades had moved at all since then.

All gods were capable of remaining still for long lengths of time – Apollo preferred not to, preferred to keep moving, keep seeing and doing and learning, but he could, if he had to – so it wasn’t entirely out of the question.  He decided against asking Hades if he had; with time so hard to track in Tartarus, he couldn’t even ask probing questions like how long was I out?

All he could do was pull himself to his feet, pass his hand over his quiver to make sure it was once again bristling with arrows – running out against Orion had not been fun, not when it had slowed him up and the damn giant had starting timing how long it took him to summon more arrows, ending with a perfectly-timed strike while Apollo was mid-summon and couldn’t do anything about it – and head for the entrance, where his uncle stood.

“Are you sufficiently recovered?” Hades asked as he approached.  Apollo caught sight of dark eyes flickering in his direction briefly before returning to look out upon the jagged plains of Tartarus.

“I am,” he said, offering him a slightly apologetic grin.  “Sorry about that.  And… thanks, for fighting him.”

That was another thing that had been playing on his mind, beyond the safety of Asclepius – Orion had not been Hades’ responsibility to fight.  He hadn’t needed to fight, Orion had given him the chance not to, but the older god had intervened regardless, once again taking on the role of melee combatant while Apollo stayed back as support, despite the fact it should, really, have been Apollo’s fight.  After the earlier encounter, barely getting away from his bane, he had simply been glad for the help.

“I do not need your gratitude,” Hades dismissed.  “I merely saw no reason to stand aside, and certainly not once he implied that I should.  Giants have no right to order me around.”

The reasoning, when he heard it, made sense; Hades’ pride had been insulted, so really, Orion had brought his wrath down upon him himself.  Still, Apollo couldn’t shake the feeling that, more importantly, Hades’ involvement had been the difference between defeat and victory.

“There is no more to be gained from sheltering here,” his uncle continued, sheathing his sword and turning to face Apollo fully for a moment.  “Come.  The prison is still far.”

Typically, he didn’t wait for a response before striding out, forcing Apollo to follow and take some extra strides to fall into step beside him.

For some time, they journeyed in silence.  Hades was not the sort for idle conversation at the best of times, and Apollo could think of no topics to address that his uncle would deem worthwhile, especially while they traversed a terrain as unforgiving as Tartarus.  The idea of singing, or even quietly humming, was also dismissed before it fully formed – again, not in a terrain as unforgiving as Tartarus.  Apollo had no desire to attract the attention of the Primordial any more than was absolutely necessary; if he was honest, he was already worried at how much attention their fight with Orion had gained, and he suspected Hades was similarly displeased at the potential notice.

Surprisingly, it was Hades who broke the silence, as they started descending back down the jagged ground.  At this point, the constant slicing and healing of their feet was simply a background familiarity; neither of them left a trail behind them, healing too fast for the ichor to drip.

“You said that neither you nor Artemis have ever defeated Orion,” he observed.  “However, I am aware that he has been defeated in the past.  If you did not defeat him, who did?”

That was not a topic Apollo particularly wanted to discuss, but he could understand his uncle’s reasons for asking.  Gods didn’t like not knowing things, and Orion hadn’t kept his mouth shut while they’d fought.

Nor had he, although Apollo barely recalled letting the confession slip.

“Orion didn’t fight against us, the first time,” he said, unable to keep the venom out of his voice as he spat his enemy’s name and not particularly caring to try, either.  “He was the first male to join Artemis’ Hunt.  They were friends.”  Or so Artemis had thought; he remembered her delight at meeting such a talented, respectful male archer.  At the time, Apollo hadn’t noticed the danger he posed, either.  “He was… sly.  Artemis never likes me spending too much time with her Hunters, so I saw little of him.  By the time I realised who he was – what he was… He’d almost destroyed her.”

He felt himself flare up, the rage and fear when he’d discovered what Orion was truly doing in the Hunt, the way he was grooming Artemis, intent on taking away her maidenhood, of everything that made her the independent goddess she wished to be, writhing around within his essence.

“She didn’t listen to me,” he admitted, and the pain of that stung, too.  In the millennia since, they had talked about it, and Artemis had realised how ensnared, how blindfolded, she’d been, but at the time…

At the time, it had been the first true division between the two of them, a rift that for several centuries, Apollo had feared would never mend.

That was the first time he’d truly realised that he’d do anything to protect Artemis.  No matter what.

He still wasn’t certain if she’d realised that.

“I cursed Orion,” he continued, skipping over the years of arguments, of fighting, of fearing he was going to lose his twin, either physically or emotionally (or even both) because that was still raw, too raw to talk about.  “I couldn’t kill him, but I could drive him mad.”  Dionysus had helped, a secret between the two of them.  Not even Artemis knew he’d been forced to enlist the help of another god – Orion had always needed two gods to oppose him, after all.  “In the end, the Earth killed him.”

In terms of storytelling, it was probably the worst thing he’d ever told.  Too staccato, to abrupt, with no pacing and absolutely no embellishment at all.  Were the topic anything else, Apollo would have felt embarrassed to have even considering voicing something like that.

But it was Orion, and Orion didn’t deserve a proper story.  Nor did Apollo care enough to give him one.  Not after everything he’d done and almost done to those he loved.

“He was the first giant to come back,” he said after a moment.  “He hunted the Hunt for centuries; more of my sister’s Hunters have fallen to him than any other cause, but he never showed himself when Artemis or I were nearby.”

“I recall the deaths,” Hades told him, his voice quiet.  “He hunted Nico and his travelling companions in the recent war.”

Apollo remembered that.  “That day was a slaughter,” he said, fury and grief welling up.  “We- She lost so many Hunters that day.”

Hades looked at him sharply.  “We?”

He’d hoped that slip of the tongue would have gone unnoticed, but the black flames boring into him told him otherwise.  It wasn’t like it was a secret, that some of Apollo’s daughters joined the Hunt the same as any other demigods, but voicing it out loud still felt dangerous.

“One of your daughters entered Elysium that day,” Hades said after a moment, clearly realising that Apollo wasn’t going to say it.

Apollo hadn’t realised his uncle knew the parentages of the dead, let alone that he could keep track of where they had all ended up – there were so, so many of them, from across the millennia.  Even Apollo, despite his perfect memory, couldn’t fathom remembering every single one.

“Phoebe served Artemis for four thousand years,” he said, because talking about his dead children hurt but they always deserved to be remembered, and as time passed and the mortals that knew them passed, all too often he became the only one who cared to remember them.  Artemis would remember Phoebe, too, as would the surviving Hunters, but that still didn’t diminish his desire to remember her.  “She joined before Orion.”

Hades said nothing else, but he had started the conversation, and Apollo was grieving Phoebe’s death, still, like he was grieving Jason and Crest and so many others who had died in the past year and he hadn’t had the chance to process yet, so he kept talking, as they traversed Tartarus, slowly descending down in gradual increments.  He told Hades about when she was born, about the fate of her mother and the fate that had almost befallen her, about intervening, because the Laws hadn’t been strict on that, back then, and taking her to Artemis, who welcomed her with open arms.

Four thousand years was a long time, and Apollo had a lot of stories to tell about his sharp-tongued, vibrant daughter with her healing hands and strategic mind.  He didn’t know if Hades was paying any attention, or if he’d tuned him out as background noise, but his uncle made no indication that he wanted him to stop talking, so he didn’t.

It felt cathartic to talk about her, to share stories even if his audience was both captive and unresponsive, like a celebration of her life rather than a mourning of her death, so when his mood suddenly swung around to grief again, the weight of her death pressing back down on him and stifling his words, forcing him to swallow them down before they turned to sobs, he faltered.  Grief was a tricky thing, but never had it changed his feelings so rapidly.

“Apollo.”

Hades spoke for the first time since he’d begun telling the stories, his voice firm and a little sharp.  It didn’t overly surprise Apollo that perhaps his uncle had finally tired of hearing him, but the hand that gripped his bicep almost made him jump.

“Focus,” the older god told him.  “Cocytus lies ahead.”

The river of lamentation.

Now that Hades had mentioned it, Apollo could hear the whispering cries, the accusations of all those he’d failed to save, of those he’d killed in cold blood and later regretted.  They were on the edge of his hearing, words indistinct but intent crystal clear.

He’d briefly come across the river in his rare forays into the Underworld, but it had never troubled him there.  Here, in the depths of Tartarus, it was clearly far more dangerous.

Apollo was self-aware enough to know that he had too much raw, unprocessed, grief to be able to push through the river, but at the same time turning back was not an option.  The prison was the other side, and no matter what, they had to reach it.

Beside him, Hades’ jaw was unusually set, a stiffness to it the older god would never normally show.  His uncle had been unaffected by the Phlegethon, but it was immediately clear that the Cocytus would be a far greater challenge for both of them.

“How do we cross?” Apollo asked, feeling tears welling up, pushing and pushing and pushing until they finally spilled over, down his face.  His voice shook, completely out of his control.

Hades tightened his grip on his arm.

“Keep talking,” he said, through grit teeth.

“About what?” Apollo nearly sobbed.  They hadn’t stopped walking, and the wailing voices were louder; intellectually, he knew it was just the river, that nothing it was saying was real, but everything was accurate, down to the exact timbre of their voices.

“Your daughter.”  It sounded like an order, and it startled Apollo so much the tears halted for a moment.

“Phoebe?” he croaked.

“Yes,” Hades told him impatiently.  “Or another one, if you’ve somehow exhausted all your stories about her.”

Normally, Apollo needed no persuading to talk about one of his children – Olympus, he’d just spent the last however long talking about Phoebe – but with the Cocytus wailing his sorrows back at him, the timing felt somehow wrong.

“I-” he started.  “Why?”

His uncle’s grip tightened again, his nails digging in almost painfully.  “To cross,” he said firmly, “we need a distraction.  So: distract.”

Distract who, Apollo didn’t ask.  The river’s sole purpose was lamentation – it could not be distracted from its entire being.  It was them, the gods, who needed distracting away from the river’s cries, before they ended up in a lot of potential trouble.

Apollo could do one better than talking.

With the Valdezinator destroyed, and returned to Delos beside, and no other instruments with him, he had no accompaniment, but while Apollo liked to blend his voice with the beauty of music, he could carry a tune perfectly fine without.  His first instinct was to sing of grief, but he still had enough presence of mind to recognise the river’s influence, and that music, no matter how raw, could not hope to outmatch the river with its own genre.

So he sang of life, of his children – not just Phoebe, but all of them, and their accomplishments.  Of everything they did with their lives, the hearts they touched, the stories they made.  He celebrated all of them, feeling the ever-present demand of grief pressing against him, trying to smother everything he remembered with joy and override it with the dark bitterness of lamentation.

It was difficult.  Not to sing, nor to tell stories of his children, but to keep it away from the inevitable grief that ended each of their times in his life.  Cocytus wasn’t interested in the good things, in the light, in the love, in the kindness and laughter.  It wanted the tragedy, the heartbreak, to drown Apollo in the tears that he couldn’t keep from falling no matter how brightly the stories shone.

He felt Hades pulling him forwards, shaking him aggressively whenever a strain of grief trickled into his voice until he chased it out and replaced it with joy instead.  Part of him registered that it felt strange, to have such prolonged contact with another god – with Hades, the most notorious of all for keeping his distance.  It helped him to keep singing, the reminder that Hades wanted him to distract them from the river’s thrall, and followed his uncle as they reached the bank of the river, and waded in.

At the touch of the water, a deep chill that had Apollo’s voice shaking, he stumbled, grief pressing down on him more incessantly, insisting that he stop and let the river pull him so far under he’d never resurface again.

Hades kept him upright.

How his uncle was managing to keep going, one foot in front of the other as they waded through the Cocytus together, assailed by the river’s determination to break them, Apollo didn’t know.

But he kept singing, because it was keeping him something that could almost be deemed functional, and it had been Hades’ idea so perhaps it was what was keeping him going, too.  The water around them stopped getting deeper, and then started receding again, and still Apollo sang.

He didn’t stop until Hades pulled them to a halt, finally releasing his arm and taking a half step back, re-establishing his personal space.  They were some way past the river; Apollo could almost hear the words within the wails, could certainly still identify the voices.  But they were past.

“Clean yourself up,” Hades instructed, not for the first time since they’d arrived in Tartarus.  Apollo suspected it would not be the last, either.  It was the largest admission of unease his uncle was consistently showing – a need to look perfect, to look untouchable, to the monsters that watched them hungrily as they passed.  Apollo understood; appearance had been a large part of his life for a very long time.  Fake it ‘til you make it, mortals were fond of saying.

Apollo considered it to be a very important motto, too.

There was no ichor to clean up this time, simply tracks of tears that had cut down through his cheeks.  It made a nice change, as Apollo willed himself back into a presentable appearance.  He was not a fan of the puffy, gold-stained eyes that crying inflicted upon his face, either.

Hades barely waited for him to clean up before resuming his walk, leaving Apollo to take a couple of larger steps in order to fall back in line with him.  Conversation – even one-sided – now felt unwelcome, and while part of Apollo wanted to continue to play and sing his song, especially without grief trying to clog up his voice, the rest of him knew that he, too, had to process what they had just been through, so he kept it to himself.

He was also nervous about the next river; according to Hades, it was Styx, and Apollo could not imagine how that encounter – if, of course, the goddess decided to reveal herself – would pan out.  Her actions on the edge of Chaos remained an enigma, and Apollo did not know her well enough to predict what she would do.

When they reached the banks of the river, however long later, the goddess was waiting for them.

Arms crossed, she stood in the middle of the flowing water, her legs seeming to dissolve and merge with the flow of foggy river.

“Oath Keeper,” she greeted, confusing Apollo for a split second, before her black, cruel eyes landed on him and her voice changed to a guttural snarl.  “Oathbreaker.”

The look Hades gave him was indecipherable, and Apollo played it safe by not responding to either of them.  The last time he had seen the goddess, she had reminded him of the important lessons he had learned and then walked away, allowing him to go free despite her ability – and motive – to unfurl his desperately reaching fingers and cast him into Chaos, much the same way he had cast Python bare moments earlier.

“Styx,” Hades said after a moment’s silence.

“The Oathbreaker does not pass,” Styx said, her eyes still pinning Apollo in place.  “You, Hades, Oath Keeper, are free to cross my waters, but I will not allow Apollo the same luxury.”

It felt like Apollo should say something.  Not a defence – his oaths had been rash, but that had not made them any less binding, and breaking them no less of an offence – but something.

“We need to cross,” Hades told her, unwavering in the face of her glare.  Apollo did not know exactly how close their relationship was, but Styx guarded the Underworld, so clearly there was some degree of a working relationship, if nothing else.  “Let us pass.”

“No.”  The water swirled around her exposed torso aggressively.  “You, Oath Keeper, may cross.  Apollo, Oathbreaker, may not.”

“Styx-” Hades started, but the goddess seemingly held no fear for the god of the Underworld as she cut straight across him.

“If you cross my waters, I will take my owed dues.”

Her dark, dark eyes bored straight through into Apollo’s essence, uncomfortable in their intensity, but nothing compared to the painful twist of his insides as the threat registered.

“And what would those be?” he asked, keeping his back straight even though there was a large part of him, god of knowledge or not, that did not want to know what Styx thought an appropriate recompense for his rash oaths.  He remembered her threatening him before, with deaths of loved ones, taking the credit for Jason and Crest even though Jason, at least, had been prophesised to die, but it had never completely felt like she had taken her price, not even on the edge of Chaos when she’d turned away instead of casting him down.

Now was a terrible time for her to take it, so of course now would be when she chose to.

Her answer came in the rapids of her water, not words.  In an instant, she burst her banks, water cascading down on Apollo.  It didn’t drive him to his knees – as a mortal, he would have never stood a chance against the onslaught, but he wasn’t mortal, not anymore, and being one of the twelve Olympians counted for a lot – but it hammered his form nonetheless.

It also showed him images.

Images that made him roar, blasting away the water and shattering the vision of Will, dragged down to Tartarus and tossed from river to river before Styx dragged him down into her depths and his body went slack, blue eyes glassy and lifeless.

“No,” he snarled, knowing that he had no right to dictate the terms of punishment, but refusing to let any of his children take the fall for him.

Styx seemed unconcerned at the way he’d scattered her waters, drawing it all back within the bank and letting the clouded rapids continue hurtling their way down the body of the Pit.

“Anything else,” Apollo continued, his hand tightening around his bow for wont of something to do, “but not my children.”

“You do not get to decide that,” Styx told him, her voice chilling.  Apollo trembled, whether with fear or rage, he didn’t want to determine.  “Oathbreaker.”

“This is a waste of time,” Hades interjected, catching Apollo’s attention as he began to walk away from the river.  “Come, Apollo.  There is another way.”

Apollo hesitated, the clear threat to his children making his instincts scream that he had to do something to get them off of Styx’s list of potential retributions.  The goddess smiled at him – not a nice smile, but a harsh, cold smile.

“Go,” she told him.  “Go, and suffer in the depths of Tartarus.  Or…”  Her teeth flashed, sharp, like a predator, and uncanny in her otherwise human face, “cross me.”

It was a test, but it was an easy one that Apollo didn’t even have to think about.

If he wasn’t willing to sacrifice everything to save his children, he would never have returned to Tartarus in the first place.  Whatever Tartarus – and Styx, it seemed – was willing to throw at him, Apollo would endure.  Anything but his children.

He turned his back on the goddess, and followed Hades as his uncle led them away from the river.

Chapter 17>>

[whatudottu]

It's been a bit since I've rambled about xenobiology headcanons, and this time because I've been thinking about Andreas I thought today's edition would be about talpaedans, seeing as how I made a list that I haven't put into a post yet-

Let's go!

Between all members of talpaedan youth and development, there is an innate basic understanding of construction, as comparable to human's ability to recognise patterns and facial language (give or take a few neurodivergencies). And specific construction comprehension is linked to whatever tool talpaedan youth are integrated in, which develops over time based on what materials are consumed (a diet of concrete may make cement mixers, or a diet that requires a lot of digging may develop jackhammers) as well of course the genes of the parent/s.

And on to that 'parent/s' thing, let's bring up haplodiplody again.

On Earth, haplodiplody is the system where one sex is developed from a fertilised egg (which tends to be the females) and thus are diploid with DNA of the mother and father, while the other sex is from an unfertilised egg (males would technically be the result of asexual reproduction) and thus is only haploid with only the mother providing DNA. Talpaedans are not an Earth species, but functionally that is the basis of their sex-determination, where females would be best translated as architects and males best translated as tradies, which in of itself is rather contextually slang in English.

And even with haplodiplody, talpaedans still have a bimodal sex distribution, though tradies are neither part of the equation. Instead, fertilised eggs though typically expected to produce architects also just as often produce workers, non-reproducing talpaedan youths that are born an raised to be the most common labourers of the colony they were born under and never leave the hive, as opposed to architects who work higher profile jobs and are in line to be promoted to site queens, and tradies who pre-war were lower rung workers who took to training younglings for work as well as in general raising them. Being bimodal it's not a perfect list of traits to be considered as either an architect or a worker, though there is a bias towards architects being able to reproduce as that would be the key factor needed in promotion. Tradies that are infertile or more characteristically architects would be considered workers and are more of a consequence of asexual reproduction and the lack of genetic diversity.

Talpaedan gender has been typically correlated with sex throughout most Poiana Lüncas colonies, with the architects being the talpaedan equivalent for women and tradies as the talpaedan equivalent for men, but workers have a more diverse gender identity even in more conservative colonies, either being a third gender or having men and women and in between identities being formally acknowledged as such in worker populations. There might be a few general issues about identity especially among architects and tradies, but colonies are less focused on the individual and most of their aggression is directed to other colonies rather than it's own population.

It is this tension towards other colonies that had eventually and near inevitably sent Poiana Lüncas into many wars, though the most recent one had been the worst and the last in many years, a war that fundamentally changed how intercolonial relationships worked. A very large colony had been expanding it's borders to accrue even more resources for it's ever growing population, in turn threatening the smaller colonies on it's outer borders, elevating tensions to an all time high. The whole shtick lasted for years until a few colonies realised that alone no one could stop this large megacolony from wiping out each of them one by one, but through an alliance they could stand together and beat the ever loving crap out of the aggressor.

And how their alliance worked was through the sharing of resources and ensuring the protection of youths especially, and so began the first war-era runs of arranged 'marriages' as tradies live up to their name in a more eh... dubious sense. By sending in tradies (who's lower rung work was mining for resources and food) from colonies not on the front line, the colonies along the border had assurances that their home had well fed and well protected populations - as well as a general diverting of power - to beat back the aggressor colony and in fact not only raze it to the ground, but dug it completely out and functionally turned it into a mass grave reeking of death; No Queen's Land it would later be named, for no surviving members of the colony were left alive to name it after themselves.

With a combination of a clearly war-created desert and the whole 'ant death smell' thing that exists in ants aka the big inspiration for my talpaedan headcanons, makes No Queen's Land an omen that trade routes never cross, instead creating what would be a ring road surrounding the outer reaches of the ex-colony that would direct trade routes through the border colonies one by one. Direct trade or travel between the colonies on complete opposite sides of the pock marked, crater desert is both impossible and otherwise detested by Queens and the architects responsible for trade routes, instead being a multicolonial multigenerational process that circles the border colonies until reaching the 'opposite side of the world'.

To this day (or at least to the day that exists universally in the moment that Andreas would consider a 'this day') the trade routes affect the lives of tradies post-war. Instead of being completely locked to the hive like workers and architects, tradies at a certain age are sent to travel in as both tradesmen and concubines to whatever colony they have been raised for, a fact that had been determined early on at the development of their tools and the needs of the recipient colony. The host colony would arrange their young to be raised by tradies that once came from their own host colony, determined by their last name of [birth colony-trade colony] (as opposed to architects and workers whose last names are simply [birth colony]) in order to be raised as bilingual to understand the majority language of their trade colony and to be an example of the future youth they would need to raise speaking their birth colony's language.

Andreas was on one such trade route when Aggregor snatched the talpaedan for materials in functionally a fusion experiment, being part of a group about to be married off to a queen, an architect or as a working tradie, technically 'divorcing' the deal when Andreas was stolen away. Considering that Poiana Lüncas isn't the most peaceful environmentally, the trade routes also serve as a double use, a sharing of resources and a preventative measure for overpopulation. I mean, a colony would be pissed if absolutely none of their trade gets to them - probably spark a conflict that may get hairy - but losing numbers is an expected consequence. Andreas doesn't expect anyone to particularly care that they're missing the one or few talpaedans that disappeared in the night, especially with the generally large number a trade route sends, and Aggregor isn't going to take out a whole line of talpaedans just to get to one; a simple 'cutting off from the group' works fine enough.

And one final thing to note, now more focused on Andreas as an individual rather than talpaedans as a species. I've mentioned death smell and thought to bring it up here since, if you've seen my stuff before or straight up follow me (for my rambling or long enough to see my rambling), I love stealing @kariachi's necromancer Argit and the whole idea of him killing, healing, and reviving Andreas in the titular episode Andreas' Fault. I looked up how ant death smell works and apparently it's a constant thing that's only combated by a constant flow of life smell, so with a brief touch of death even if Andreas doesn't REEK of death, a talpaedan would probably suspect Andreas stepped into No Queen's Land and got cursed by something. But for those of y'all buried deep enough in my rambling would be confused; 'if one can smell actual literal death and associate it as actual literal death why doesn't Andreas at least even slightly suspect the idea of being briefly dead when the castle crashed?'

Well babes, you know what's an easy simple solution for this? Andreas is anosmic :D! Of course Andreas would be the last to know, Andreas' would have no frame of reference for what a 'death smell' is. Could even be how Aggregor got Andreas separated, if everyone else can smell death smell they might notice the fact that No Queen's Land reeks of the stuff. Not a great way to find out that one is anosmic admittedly, but I mean if Ra'ad is finding out that among the many neurodivergencies he does have much of his overstimulated suffering is magic and mutation that he thought every other amperi had to deal with because you find out your husband died and now has a magical mind barrier well...

Okay okay, one more final note. Given that Andreas is a tradie, Andreas's full name would be [birth colony]-Andromeda after the name Andreas actually gets married into because Earth and especially English dominated areas of Earth like last names. And I guess if Andreas gets adopted into any Earth-based packs thanks to being attached to Argit like a puppy you can shove in another last name like [birth colony]-[pack]-Andromeda.

This has been in my notes since August woops-

[gothamslostboy]

Heartless Helper

SUMMARY: Zsasz finds an injured bird and tries to help it

!¡!¡NOT SHIPPING LEE&ZSASZ!¡!¡

CHARACTERS:

Victor Zsasz Lee Thompkins

Zsasz isn’t known to be a nurturing person. Infact he’s the exact opposite to every human he’s ever met, besides maybe his girls, but that’s only when they get hurt.

The general rule in Gotham is to avoid Zsasz, especially when injured, because he’d probably make it worse. But animals don’t follow rules set by mankind. Injured animals care about those rules even less.

Victor was on his biweekly dinner run: chicken tenders, fries, and a strawberry milkshake, and decided to take the scenic route back home. He strolled through the forest, taking his time to remise over the deaths of the people he buried in each shallow grave he passed.

He stopped to sit by a particularly fresh one, dug and filled just hours before, when he heard a soft caw. He turned his head and quickly found the source. A dark bird, by the size he guesses a crow, sitting on the forest floor. Though on second glance Zsasz discovered the creature had accidentally wrapped itself up in a piece of string. He was in a great mood today, already having his fill of torture, so he shrugged, why not free the stupid thing?

He moved even closer, freezing for a moment when its head swiftly turned. Instead of trying to escape like he expected, the crow limped toward him until she reached his feet, tilting her head up. A soft caw could be heard once again, eyes gazing up at Victor, and he swore he could almost feel it asking for help.

He picked the crow up gently, carefully inspecting it and trying to determine how bad she trapped herself. The string was tightly secure around the left wing, so much so even Zsasz felt bad for it, and went down to both legs. Now that he had the thing in his hands, it was obvious to see what really happened. The string was tied using knots that wouldn’t appear naturally: someone did this on purpose.

Poor bastard. While he spent his days gleefully torturing and killing humans, Victor Zsasz never once felt the urge to even hurt an animal, much less kill it. In fact, he found even more satisfied killing some one if he knew they preyed on a non human creature, no matter the species. He shook his head and breathed out a small “tsk” sound. The bird flinched away from his finger when it grazed the left leg.

He carried her back to his spot on the floor, careful not to touch the leg again. Okie dokie, how am I gonna free you? He looked the bird in the eyes again, for the first time in a while feeling pity for something. Hmm, ya know what Birdie? I think I might have to take you to someone else. You see, I’m not exactly great at helping injured things, actually I’m normally the one doing it. Chuckling to himself, Zsasz opens his to-go bag from the diner. He takes the last sip from his milkshake and pulls out the chicken and fries.

I don’t know when you last ate, but I’m starving. The bird watched him, comfortably seated in his lap as he tore one of the tenders into smaller pieces, adjusting her position approvingly as he placed it infront of her. The two ate in silence, and Victor figured by how fast she ate that it was the first meal the crow had in a long time. He finished his part, still racking his brain for a person he could get to free his new companion.

Ooh! The sudden exclamation startled her a bit, but a pat on the head calmed her back down. Sorry ‘bout that Birdie, but I just thought of a person. Lee Tompkins, she’s dating this loser Jim, but she’s a doctor too. Also seems like a real “every life has meaning blah blah blah” type, he scoffs and rolls his eyes, so I bet I won’t even have to threaten anyone to make her help.

Victor hopped on his feet, situating the crow, who he has definitively decided the name Birdie does suit, in his right hand while pulling his phone out of his pocket with the left. He still had her address in it, from a time penguin told him to scare Jim, and headed there, each stride with purpose now that he’d “gotten to know” his new buddy.

////////

Hello Lee, you’re home late. Victor smiled as the woman jumped, yelping in suprise. She put on a front of dismissal, but her shaking hands and voice betrayed her. What are you doing in my house? Did Penguin send you h-here? He stood from the couch, still holding Birdie securely in his arms. Nah, personal visit. You should really lock your windows, what if a murder crawled in? Lee stepped back towards the door, hand reaching out. First, I live on the fourth floor. Second it’s a little late for that isn’t it

If you leave this apartment I’ll have to kill you ya know. Besides I mean no harm, just need you to do your doctor stuff on Birdie. He smiled and lifted the crow up a bit, softly saying sorry when she flapped her free wing and struggled, moving the hand that just hit her leg again. Lee relaxes for a moment, confusion beating out her fear of the hitman in her living room now that she’s noticed the crow.

Birdie? Yes, Lee meet Birdie, Birdie meet Lee. Found her on my way home today. A bastard tied her wing and feet together then left her to die. You’re gonna free her and fix ‘er up. Lee moves away from the door, motioning for Zsasz to follow her to the kitchen area.

And you care about it why? Full offense but you seem more like the tying type then the savior. His face curls into a scowl. Ok wow! Full offense taken, I deal in the torture of people, not animals. Now what do we need to do to help her, and I can see you dialing that phone. Give it here. Victor extends his hand, nodding as Lee reluctantly places it down.

Hmm, she takes a moment to look over Birdie, amazed at how calm the crow was. I think it’ll need to be sedated so I can cut the string. Otherwise it’s gonna end up hurting itself worse. You got stuff here? Lee looked up at Zsasz with an amused grin, it’s not everyday a person gets to see Victor Zsasz care about a living thing, much less actively seek help for it.

Why would I keep sedatives in my apartment? I’ll help her-

Her? How ya know it’s a she? How do you know it’s not? He shrugs. Fair point Tompkins.

I’ll help her, but I need to take her to my office, which I’m not sure how you’d get in.

Not a problem! I break into places all the time! He motions around the room, before picking up Birdie again and strolling towards the door. Oh! By the way Lee, you try anything and I’ll make you watch me kill Jimmy. He smiles as he opens the front door, waiting for her to walk past him.

I’m not going to, the bird needs help, but that’s an odd way to say thank you. Let’s go, I don’t want to be near you longer than I need to.

—— TAGS ——

@britany1997

[popculturebuffet]

Transformers More Than Meets The Eye Retrospective: Annual #1: Ultra Magnus, What A Joke (Patreon Review For Brotoman.EXE)

Hello all you happy autobots and after a long side trip for beetlemania, we're back on the lost light!

In full too as for the next few months at least, we're back to the main story. Kinda. This story takes place BEFORE Shadowplay, our last covered one, but was put here so it could be paired with avengers annual #10 patreon review wise, but other than Rung still being headless it's not so out of synch that it coudln't be moved around.

Thankfully after this it's a straight shot to the end of season 1 with just three arcs to go, which teneatively will be covered in novemeber and december, with another break for a specail halloween suprise in october. After that we have the big crossover Dark Cybertron, which while serving as the end of Season 1 of this era of transformers, feels more like a big finale movie. It still has ramificatoins for both.. but both sides also had a proper finale before this.

So before things get explosive we have a character piece here.. and like with Shadowplay my general view was

The art didn't help. . As I said in another review of a great comic's less than well done annual, I TRY to be positive and for the most part the art on this book is great, but the art for this annual is pretty bleh. It's this weird mix of very 90's faces and very bland coloring that just dosen't not work.

The story itself however is pure setup for the finale, setting up a mystery to be solved there, some character growth with dire consequences for Magnus, while also, as tends to be standard for Roberts, setting up a plot point for much later in the story. So let's take a close look at MTMTE Annual #1 under the cut and see some smiles, some beaurcary and a giant robot man.

We open with an action set piece that dosen't do a lot for me. The art just isn't fluid enough and it's especially a downgrade from the regular artists, making it even more noticeable. It dosen't help the microcons their fighting look more like live action transformers,

And you can see the dullness I mean too. Our heroes still have their designs.. but the colors try to make them more realistic. Concidentally this scene is set in ultra magnus' mouth as some nanocons a decpitcon shot him with long ago have awakened and threaten to combine and kill him and then the ship, so our heroes have been shrunk down to deal with it. The only way to stop this realistic scenario that happens to everyone all the time is for Magnus to smile, destroying the generators in the pistons he uses for that.

This opening is a great example of just.. how much fun James Roberts has with MTMTE. While at it's core MTMTE is the kind of high concept sci fi you'd find in say Star Trek or Fantastic Four, he also doesn't forget he's writing giant colorful merchandisable battle robots that can turn into those nitro burning funny cars, vroom vroom! Besides the various jokes on the toys, he's not afraid to just go balls out silly.. while still having lots of nice genuinely deep sci fi couched within. It's essentially what i've heard Star Trek Lower Decks is before that existed: taking the piss out of a stored decades long franchise.. while still staying UTTERLY loyal to that franchise and why people love it.

Magnus tries to do his normal grumbly telling people ot straighten their badges and such , but everyone mocks him, something he takes with grace dignity and plans to resign as soon as possible.

First we get some smaller character stuff as everyone prepares for Tailgate's cermony, but it's all good: Rewind worries about Chromedome who is having a flash of ptsd... someone else's ptsd from the memories he's absorbed, Tailgate tries to get Cyclonus to attend but he's still being a mopey puss about it and Swerve passes by shock and or ore.. only for them to speak.

We'll table that problem for now as Drift's forced to have an invtervention for Hot Rod. He's been wearing a giant foam cowboy hat for 8 months now. He can take it off any time he wants he just dosen't want to, so they instead pivot to another problem: He's been saying "Till All Are One" every five minutes. Rodimus deflects it.. and i've noticed as i've re-read season 1 that it's a pattern with him, and one that carries till the final arc of the series: Rodimus prefers to dance a little side step instead of face most of his problems. Just put it off to the side and let it sort itself out or let someone else handle it. And when he does tackle an issue, he usually handles it recklessly, impuslviely and half assedly

It's not that he's lacking any talent, his improvisations often work as seen with the very first issue, or that he's a terrible person: he loves his crew, as seen both with the red alert incident during shadow play and in this issue as when Magnus comes barging in demanding a new crew.. he explains that it's their way of showing affection. I mean granted i'm sure some of those are just jabs at his humilation, Magnus is a fun character but not exactly someone people like and he liked it that way, but his point is clear: it's okay for Magnus to be a person and not just the duly appointed enforcer of the tyrest accord. It's that humanity, for lack of a better term, that makes Rodimus likeable even when he's being a whinybabyasshatbot. He simply wants to be loved and respected, and this quest is more about personal validation by the universe than it is real enlightnment. He just wanted to do something big and showy to show he really earned having the matrix for a time and he really is worthy of being a prime. He just wants to be loved and can't accept that maybe.. he's just not the big sweeping hero go. A big sweeing hero guy sure, but he's not optimus and that's okay.

While Magnus stews on this advice, we also find out our heroes next stop: The Crystal City, home of the circle of light. Something that confused me as whlie this book is good at expositoin normally they kinda dropped the ball explaning these guys in a way that made sense if you hadn't read the drift mini.

The Circle of Light is a group of cybertroninan ninja monks who preach non violence and live in a walled off city, having largely skipped the war. They took in Drift at his lowest and the kind treatment and mentorship of their leader, Dai Atlas, convinced Drift to turn face and the circle in turn backed him when he needed their help.

This series recontecutlaizes them as having been avid followers of the knights of cybertron, a nice little addition, and thus seeing them, while also a homecoming of sorts for Drift, is important as if they can get them to join, they have all the help they'll need. The only problem is... Magnus can't raise them on coms and while Drift is assured given their badassery their fine.. as we'll soon see Magnus was right to be worried.

The ceremony itself goes off the rails: not only does Hot Rod fail to not use some form of till all are one, but Tailgate dosen't get to do his speech.. and his autobrand turns out as anceient cybertronian. Something is channeling through Hot Rod, and the bots who fell out of the airlock as we find out via an expesition dump during the ceremony.

Our heroes have even better concerns as the galactic council shows up.

While they explain it after this scene, i'll go ahead and filll any newcomers in, as Magnus does for Tailgate. It's a great part of having tailgate around: it allows Roberts to do worldbuilding without having to work too hard for it , as most of the cast would know this. Their essentially this universe's federation, a group of higher order plaents bound together to protect each other. They've recently taken on more policing, a red flag if their ever was one, and aren't fans of the cybertronians due to their war, having blacklisted them and being right dicks to Rodimus, having anxexed this territory as the Crystal City is abandoned. That itself.. is a dick move as they didn't bother informing cybertron, and the war's been long over enough, of any of this so they could investigate, instaed scavanging. It's some nice show don't tell: it shows that while these guys DO do some good and claim to be benevloent.. their really beucractic wankphesants who blame a whole race for the war.

Luckily the Lost Light has a secret weapon...

After Mags has finished hermes conradding this guy into a corner, in part because he's the only person here M Bison IN SPACE respects, we find out the deal: one hour to investigate for "religious reasons", which both sides know is basically bullshit but they need to look into this.

We get a brief interlude with Swerve, who has a heart to heart wtih Shock.. and also lies that he's pipe as like most people Swerve didn't make the best first impression. He confesses about the shooting of rung if from a third person and agrees with Shock's assetment he's a scumbag. It also explains WHY Swerve's so willing to help the next arc: he feels deep guilt for it and while it was on orders.. that makes it worse. Swerve admit she was more scared about loosing his bar than doing what's right. Later on drift further muses about feeling... a lack of purpose. That the war ending was supposed to be awesome and everything resolved.. but it really isn't. There's no real ending to life after all and as Shock puts it he's lucky to be alive if nothing else.

On the surface we get an away team consisting of most of our main cast but notably lacking Magnus, who we'll get to in a moment. They find the crystal city but..

Drift naturally mentally wigs out a bit: his people are missing, the city is ransacked and their biggest lead is now a massive dead end. It's only Rewind suggesting that he uses his sword to try and commune with the city that snaps him out of it... and only punching a mocking Whirl that fully gets him on mission. Instead of getting any graet message stabbing his sword into the city instead makes autobots go down the holeeeeeeee

We then find out where Magnus is: turns out the Council abducted him.. so they could ask thim to join him, having found him just over these decades of wars and never wavering. Essentially it's everything UM could ask for: defined rules, structure, order and respect. and metro titans are their ancient cousins, apparently created by the knights of cybertron, they can touch into other realms and such. So they decide to learn more about this thing to go on a BRAIN QUEST!

Six minutes later the brainquest is over and they found it. Great joke. And at the center... Cyclonus is in reverent awe as he used to worship at th efeet of metrotitans and gives his own version of the cybertronian creation myth, with Rewind naturally recording it since he dosen't have this version in his archives.

So once upon a time there was primus

Who found cybertron and some sparks and wanting to give it life, split himself into five gods

But like most media portrays mythical death gods, Mortilus eventually rebelled, wanting to conquer and war were declared. While our heroes won they were left in bad straights, each dying but becoming part of cybertron itself: Primus became Vector Sigma, the computer at the heart of cybertron and the source of sparks, Solmus became the Matrix of Leadership, and Epistemus and Adaptus the model for brain moduels and transformation cogs. And out of them came a new generation of Cybertronians to spread peace: The Knights of Cybertron. All of this will naturally be very important later.

For now though Ratchet is doing his usual over the top athetist schtick and Drift calls him out for being a dick: Being an Athiest? Fine. Mocking someone else's beliefs simply because he doesn't think their true. Not okay. Ratchet further digs himself deeper by outright stating Drift is so religious because he wants absolution for everyone he killed as a decpticon.. and nearly gets a sword in him for it. Not the best way of showing your not a murderer anymore, but well warranted. It's okay not to be religious, especially given how much harm some religions do. But it's not okay to mock someone when their beliefs aren't harming anyone.

So naturally Rodimus' next move .. is to have Chromedome try to braintap the giant... and it goes as well as you'd expect.. heavy feedback.. and the titan waking up screaming, rumbling the planet and leading M. Bison IN SPACE to assume this was all a trap.

So he plans to burn the lost light and EVERYONE on board in retaliation, and is leeching off their warp drive so they can't escape

Magnus has rejoined them, having turned down the offer , we'll find out why later and giving Rodimus a fond farewell, telling him to say hi to the knights of cybertron for him while Rodimus ORDERS him not to die, begging him. Their one hope is activating the drive.. but that involves swerve telling Shock the truth.. and he simply.. can't. And while this could come off as dickish.. the why is as heartbreaking as it is glorious

It's a hard choice.. but it was his. And inspired by this... Rodimus chooses to set the titan free instead of having him shrunk for his knoweldge. And it calls back to something Drift said earlier I glossed over: that when the right time came, Rodimus would save them all. And.. he does. By doing the right thing, the Titan warped everyone out of there and since he was linked up to Ore, it also freed the lost light.. and Ore is gone. Why? No one knows. But our heroes are safe and for once Rodimus has an actual plan, having relalized from this experince his winging it... has consequences.

So with our course for the next arc set, we end on the Council.. and just WHY Mags turned down his dream job

Naturally for this comic, M. Bison IN SPACE will be back. For now though it's the last part that's important: that despite not wanting to change, despite his inflexiblity.. magnus sees that .. maybe inflexiblity isn't a strength. That not accepting any change, not changing will only make him tyrants like the council. It's being faced with everything he could want and everything he could become.. that gets him to evolve past what he's been... and smile.

This issue, as you can probably wager is excellent. The art is.. not good and I won't slag it further, and it does drag the issue down slightly.. but the character work, from Swerve's chats with Shock and or ore, to Rodimus' desperation at the end, to Magnus growth is phenominal and this one issue spotlights the series at it's best: introspective, engaging and reallyf ucking weird

Next time: Tick tick tick....

[storytime-reviews]

The Dry Book Review

It hasn't rained in Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the farming community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are discovered shot to death on their property. Everyone assumes Luke Hadler committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son. Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to his hometown for the funerals and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Because Falk and his childhood friend Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke's death threatens to unearth...

Rating: ★★★

I read The Dry shortly after watching the film based on it. I must admit that there were aspects of the film that I preferred, and some I liked better in the book. Generally speaking, I felt much more connected to the characters in the film. The actors did a phenomenal job with their portrayals and providing depth to their roles, especially given the film has less time than the book to further the narrative. However, I felt that the present day storyline regarding the crime itself made more sense in the book.

Some of the details of the case changed from book to film, and for the most part, whilst I think I preferred the presentation of the narrative in the visual format, the smaller details were handled better in the book. Some of these changes just did not make sense at the end of the film, whereas they were much more readily understandable in this book. I felt that this narrative was more better connected, whereas the film tried to simplify things too much. I also wasn’t frustrated by the end of the story this time around. The end result was also pretty obvious from the beginning in the film, but handled much more subtly in the book.

The Dry was an ok book to read, but nothing special. I enjoy a good crime thriller, but this one just didn’t to it for me. This is based on the plot, characters and the writing itself. A major driving force for reading this was wanting to compare the book and film, and it’s not a book I would bother re-reading. I also felt that some parts of the book dragged on a bit, and other aspects weren’t especially clear. The very basic elements of the story I felt were strong, and could have potentially created a more compelling story with a more engaging writing style and attention to detail, particularly characterisation.

On the whole, The Dry was pretty average, and it certainly took longer for me to finish because of this. It’s a shame because I definitely felt it could have been a stronger novel. It was just a bit bland for me, too slow paced and the tension was much more present in the film.

Warnings: murder/suicide, alcoholism, violence, child abuse

[monday4econlive]

The Lipstick Effect During Pandemic

When I cleaned my room, I realized I had bought a lot of unnecessary makeup, especially lipstick, during the pandemic. They are stocked in the corner of my room, and I never really used them. This makes me ponder my behavior: does it just happen to me or everyone else? After reading the statistics report, I realized this is a general trend in the whole market. And here comes our topic: the Lipstick Effect.

The Lipstick Effect refers to the phenomenon where people tend to spend money on small luxuries, such as cosmetics, during times of economic crisis. During these periods, people may not be able to afford larger purchases, but they still want to indulge in small pleasures to make themselves feel better. This term was first proposed by economics and sociology Professor Juliet Schor in her 1998 book The Overspent American. Leonard Lauder, the Estee Lauder chairman, stated in 2001 that his company encountered a surge in lipstick sales following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and he reiterated this message during the 2008 recession.

Throughout history, lipstick sales have performed better during economic slowdowns (whether due to coincidental correlations or substantial underlying psychological and economic factors). For instance, over the last decade, lipstick sales had generally lagged behind the beauty and personal care industry, except during the 2000 slowdown when they experienced a surge. The reason behind this trend is the income effect: for inferior goods, such as lipsticks, rising consumer income decreases demand and vice versa. Specifically, when consumers experience a decline in their earnings, they are likely to abandon purchasing expensive luxury goods that are no longer affordable and instead allocate their income to buy smaller, less costly luxury items.

Similarly, the Lipstick Effect also happened during the coronavirus pandemic. According to recent data from the NPD Group— a global market tracking firm— lipsticks and other lip makeup sales increased by 48% in the first quarter compared to the previous year. This growth rate is more than double that of other products in the beauty category.

The theory behind the lipstick effect emphasizes the importance of affordability as defined by the consumer, creating lucrative opportunities for manufacturers and distributors. Moreover, the concept itself is relevant to other aspects of life, as it taps into consumers' desire to indulge in small luxuries that make life more enjoyable. Rather than solely focusing on offering the cheapest possible products to drive sales, the key to succeeding in developed markets during a recession is determining what consumers can afford and offering comprehensive products that meet those needs.

Reference:

With Recession Threatening, The Lipstick Effect Kicks In And Lipstick Sales Rise

Redefining the “Lipstick Effect”– Examples of Recession-Proof Categories

Beauty and the inflation beast: 'Lipstick effect' to shield Estee Lauder, Coty

Name: Lizhuo Zhang

Student ID: 35432087

[mishafletcher]

Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

So I got this ask a while ago, and I've been lowkey thinking about it ever since.

First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping. 

Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don't even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you're somehow owed information about my sexual history. You're not! No one—and I can't reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don't feel like sharing with you.

The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you're traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can't sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can't talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.

This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that's good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don't have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but— 

You don't owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They're yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they're probably not someone you should trust.

Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.

There's a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren't failed lesbians. They're not somehow less good or less valid because they're attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I've checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?

Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who've had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I'm sorry to report that "I'm disgusted by a standard-issue human body part" is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I'm a dyke and I don't especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don't have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn't make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.

There's so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven't noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there's a whole pandemic thing that's been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you're worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people's genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something. 

Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it's always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.

Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.

Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to "solicit homosexual or lesbian activity", which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.

I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.

In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn't have to recognize them if they didn't want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Every queer person who's older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers. 

Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn't be allowed to marry someone you loved.

Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.

Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.

This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that's worth literally everything.

Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You've capitalized it, like it's Weighty and Important, but it's not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don't have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.

The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too. 

[adobe-outdesign]

Pokemon Worldbuilding Headcanons

Exactly what it says in the title. Some are based on the game, some on the anime, and some directly contradict both because the Pokemon lore is made up and your feelings don’t matter.

Biology

Pokemon heal faster when unconscious or asleep--thus, they faint easily from pain or exhaustion in order to recuperate.

During evolution, a Pokemon converts itself into energy and reforms itself. Evolution is optional, and a Pokemon can choose if and when it evolves. Evolution is triggered by both an environmental circumstance (ex: winning a battle), and by the Pokemon storing up energy over time until it has enough to transform.

Stress evolutions are when a Pokemon evolves prematurally in order to win a battle or when they’re in a life-or-death situation. This can result in the evolution being smaller than normal and possibly weaker as well.

“Trade evolutions” are a loose grouping of Pokemon that typically evolve when they start working with a new trainer. The exact reasons for the evolution varies by individual, and therefore can have multiple causes.

Ex: a Pokemon may evolve after it learns something from someone else. While the easiest way to achieve this is through trade, they may also evolve by training under a wiser, older Pokemon.

Trade evolutions are somewhat rare in the wild, but not unheard of.

Pokemon that evolve via stones cannot store enough energy to evolve naturally. The stones contain extra energy that they can tap into in order to aid in evolution.

Everstones work similar to sponges; they absorb the extra energy a Pokemon would normally store up to evolve, thus preventing them from doing so. They’re mostly used for medical purposes (as a Pokemon evolving when badly injured could worsen its injuries) and to help prevent stress evolutions in Pokemon that don’t want to evolve.

Pokemon types are based on the type of energy they utilize, rather than moves or appearance. Ex: Charizard is not dragon-type despite looking like a dragon because it doesn’t use dragon-type energy. New energies are discovered all the time and Pokemon are reclassified as needed.

Pokemon typing also changes as they (Darwinian) evolve. A Pokemon that’s normal/grass used to be normal-type, has started to gain grass-typing, and will eventually be only grass-type.

Humans are descended from Pokemon. They used to be psychic-type before becoming normal-type and then losing their typing all together. At this point they no longer are energy-based nor do they lay eggs, so they’re considered a separate-but-related family.

This is why some people still show psychic powers; those abilities never completely went away in some bloodlines.

Pokemon have been domesticated for so long that there’s actually no such thing as a “wild” Pokemon anymore (with the exception of legendaries). Wild Pokemon are technically feral, and any given Pokemon will quickly adapt to living with humans if caught.

Pokemon used to look different hundreds of years ago, and have slowly undergone Darwinian evolution over time as they were domesticated.

“Most trainers will legendaries shortly after their journey starts” statistic false. Most trainers will see no legendaries in their lifetimes. Ash Ketchum, who’s seen every single legendary in existence, is an outlier and should not be counted

However, areas where legendaries are known to live are oftentimes marked as no-catch conservation areas. People will oftentime travel to these parks to admire “common” legendaries (such as the bird trio) in their natural habitats.

Battles

Not knocking out a Pokemon you’re trying to capture is more of a honored rule than a law. The reason it’s done is to give the Pokemon ample time to flee--otherwise, someone may one-shot a Pokemon that doesn’t want a trainer, resulting in the Pokemon being unfairly knocked out and the trainer wasting their time.

If you give the Pokemon time to flee and it chooses to stay and fight, it’s potentially interested in accepting you as a trainer and you just have to prove yourself. If it flees, you should leave it alone.

Pokemon used for battles are specifically trained to not cause permanent harm or injury to their opponents (ex: that fire blast isn’t as hot as it could be, so it’ll only cause minor burns instead of third-degree ones). While the attacks used might look violent and cause some pain, serious injuries are very rare.

Wild Pokemon are also pretty good at restraining themselves if they’re just battling for fun or to test a trainer. They will not, however, restrain themselves if they feel threatened or are hunting. Trainers are advised to use caution when fighting wild Pokemon and return their Pokemon to their balls if necessary.

Psychic-types (Mr. Mime especially) are used to create protective barriers around arenas/trainers to protect people from flying debris and stray attacks.

Refs always have a few Pokemon on hand that know moves like stun spore or sleep powder in order to stop any fights that get out of hand.

Pokeballs

While some trainers different Pokemon by using different types of Pokeballs, decorating them is also a popular way to do it. Some people draw symbols or initials on the buttons, some add stickers, some paint them, ect.

Stores also sell semi-transparent hard shells that snap over the balls. These come in different colors and designs, so you can have a Pokeball that has a galaxy design on top instead of plain red if you want.

Most trainers keep about 40 some Pokemon or less, which they rotate between their party, the PC, and daycares/Pokemon sitters to keep them enriched and active. Some people keep more, but they generally spend all of their time caring for them and therefore aren’t trainers.

The general rule of thumb is to not leave a Pokemon in the PC for more than two weeks. If you fail to take them out after a month, they will be automatically removed and released back into the wild.

Pokeballs create little miniature simulations of nature, making them feel bigger on the inside. Different types of pokeballs have different or more advanced simulations, which may increase how much a Pokemon likes being in it.

Pokeballs create an invisible “tag” for the Pokemon by altering their energy when they’re first caught. These tags affect nothing, but Pokeballs are programmed to automatically check for one before they’ll activate.

Many poachers and other illegal groups produce their own illegal Pokeballs that do not check for tags before capture.

If a Pokeball breaks, it automatically releases the Pokemon inside and removes their tag.

Tags fade after about a month to allow for other trainers to capture a Pokemon after it’s been permanently released. The tag is automatically refreshed every time a Pokemon is brought back into its ball.

The standard Pokeball pattern is based off of the patterns of the Foongus line. Pokemon are very attracted to their markings, so the balls are painted the same to make the Pokemon like them more.

Eggs

Rather than combining genetics, Pokemon reproduce by combining their energy together (this looks a bit like two Pokemon evolving at the same time). Because of this, they lack reproductive organs and chromosomes.

Gender is a loosely defined concept for them. Pokemon can change their sex upon evolution if they want to, and some will change their sex over time (ex: legendaries are usually genderless, but will gain a sex to breed and then lose it again afterward).

If a Pokemon doesn’t display sexual dimorphism, the only way to determine their sex is to have a Pokemon Center do a blood test.

Eggs aren’t laid, but created. The pregnant Pokemon fosters energy in their body. When ready they separate the extra energy from themselves (once again, looks a bit like evolution), which forms into the egg. This causes them no pain, and means they have short gestation periods.

This also means Pokemon never look pregnant. The only way to tell is by getting them tested or paying attention to changes in behavior. Many trainers end up with eggs out of nowhere because they had no idea one of their Pokemon was pregnant to begin with.

In the wild, some species of Pokemon will lay hundreds of eggs (such as fish and bug Pokemon) to ensure their survival. In captivity, Pokemon rarely create more than 1 or 2 eggs at a time, likely because they understand their young are safe with their trainers.

Pokemon develop more quickly in their eggs than IRL animals. They can technically hatch shortly after the egg is made, but they usually spend extra time inside maturing. By the time the egg hatches, the baby already has fur/feathers/whatever, and can walk and eat solid food. This helps ensure their survival against predators.

Young Pokemon are differentiated by being “mature” or “immature”; an immature Pokemon will still gradually grow and change appearance, while a mature one is fully grown until it evolves. A Pokemon cannot evolve until it’s considered mature (excluding mega evolution for single-stagers).

To use Vulpix as a canon example: a newly hatched immature Vulpix is about 8 in tall and has one white tail. A mature Vulpix is about 2 ft tall and has six red tails.

In the wild, Pokemon mostly breed amongst their own species. The exception are Pokemon with uneven gender ratios (so if a Pokemon is 7:1 male vs female, the males will actively breed with anything in their egg group). Inter-species breeding among captive Pokemon is much more common, and usually based on the Pokemon’s personal preferences.

Hybridization in Pokemon born from two different parents is very rare, but it does happen from time to time. It’s more common in Pokemon that look similar or are distantly related.

“Perfect” hybrids, Pokemon that have equal amounts of traits from both parents as well as typing and abilities, are more sought after than shinies. They usually can’t breed due to their mix of energies.

[wafflebloggies]

7. the amber of the moment

back - next There was a little more dust heaped up in the narrow cell, a little less play in the stiff and heavy door as Antonio dragged it open. Generally speaking, Antonio had a very easygoing relationship with oxygen and no actual need to breathe it, which was just as well. A thin grey haze hung in the air, a dry smothery stuffiness that felt like it was trying to creep its way into his nose and mouth.

“Hi, Mark! How’re you doing? Brought’cha a little something-something...”

He knelt, grinning, bouncing a little on his heels. The trip had seemed unreasonably long, unusually tedious, but so worth it. He had a lot he’d worked out to say, he’d run through it all and laid it out carefully in his head, except...

Except it didn’t look like Mark had moved much, since Antonio’s last visit. He was still curled up against the wall like something that had been pinned to a corkboard shortly before it died, arms folded maybe a little bit tighter around his knees than they’d been before, and he didn’t make any sign that showed he knew Antonio had arrived, or that anybody had stepped into the close little space with him, or that he was capable of knowing anything at all.

Which was a little weird, because the pale, fizzling scrap of light that was Mark was still there, at the heart of him, weak and atrophied but clear as daylight to Antonio’s real eyes when he squinted, and not any much smaller than it had been before. Antonio set down Mark’s backpack and waved a careful, experimental hand, and still there was no reaction, no movement other than a slight rise and fall of the grimy knit sweater, and when he untangled one of the limp arms and pressed two fingers against the magic zone right at the wrist, a slow faint hiccup of a pulse.

Puzzled, starting to be worried now, Antonio sat back.

“Mark? Uh… anyone in there, buddy?”

Nothing. Antonio pushed Mark’s head back against the wall, thumbed an eyelid, looked thoughtfully into the glazed eye and the minute expansions and contractions of the pupil. It didn’t really help. As far as he could tell, Mark might as well be awake, or stuck in some kind of intense, half-waking REM cycle, and as soon as he let go, Mark’s head slipped forwards like a rag-doll’s, his hair flopping over his brow in a stringy curtain.

Antonio bit his lip. In the front of his head, he knew perfectly well that the thing he had done last time, the thing that had brought Mark back so that he could move and speak, had been A Bad Thing. He’d messed with how things were supposed to be, the way they were meant to go, when his entire point and purpose was… the exact opposite. Mark resisting infection, trying to escape, these had been Bad Things which Antonio had been there to prevent. Mark not planting the spore, threatening to destroy it, had been Very Bad Things. And although it had all worked out okay in the end, Mark was a host, who couldn’t be expected to understand. Antonio, however, could hardly claim the defence of ignorance, when the fact that he was doing A Very, Very Bad Thing was flashing in perpetual screaming neon in his mind.

Having said that, he could hardly explain about the cookies when Mark was displaying as much sentience and ability to understand complex ideas as a dead fern. When he looked at it that way, it seemed very simple.

He took Mark’s arm, set his other hand gently over the flat dark bruise on his forehead, and concentrated.

It was easier this time, the glow of Mother’s light creeping from Mark into Antonio’s hands like a current earthing itself in familiar ground. Perhaps a little too easy, harder to stop, and when he let go, his hands were crossed and recrossed with a forest of sharp deep inky lines that only faded when he shook them out and squeezed them into fists several times. He sniffed uneasily and touched his face, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and shuddered from top to toe, working out an all-over fit of bristly nerves that had its roots half in the bright burning golden energy drawn from Mark’s body, half in his own fidgety fear.

He collected himself, swiped his hands on his pants, and leaned forwards, waiting. He was watching so hard and waiting with such fixed focus that he almost imagined he saw changes when there were none, when minutes passed and Mark stayed still and silent and failed to raise his head, when the slow light flutter of his breath failed to pick up or even alter its rhythm.

“Mark?”

Uncertainly, he reached out and shook Mark’s shoulder, gently at first and then harder, disturbing a small cloud of dust but gaining absolutely nothing in the way of a reaction. He might as well have been shaking a store mannequin. Mark swayed lifelessly and stopped moving as soon as Antonio stopped shaking him, and when he let him go, the slumped boneless curve of his body lost balance and started to slide down the wall sideways, heading face-first towards the floor. Antonio caught him, set him upright again against the water-stained concrete, and for the first time it occurred to him that, even with his help, Mark might just simply not wake up.

He sat back, hands parked uncertainly on top of Mark’s backpack. The thought that Mark might be too far gone this time circled in his head, quite small at first, like devastating ideas sometimes are, getting bigger and bigger the more he turned it over.

Some kind of subtle shift had happened in him, without his knowledge or understanding, and even though he’d known all along that Mark was supposed to end up here, and what that meant, and what would inevitably happen to him, it was as if he’d never fully felt it, never really thought it all through until now. Somehow, it was an easy enough matter to know how things were meant to be, but a signally different feeling altogether to see Mark sitting here in front of him, empty behind his eyes, gone somewhere Antonio didn’t know how to- couldn’t- couldn’t reach.

Maybe gone for good.

Antonio had never felt truly useless before. He didn’t recognize the feeling at all, but it was ghastly, not so much like the bug in his guts was attacking him than as if it had been badly wounded and was thrashing, chilling him to death as it writhed. He backed up and got to his feet, stumbling a little in the cramped space, snatching Mark’s backpack up with him, not reacting to any particular coherent idea other than a frightened instinctive need to get out, away from this sinking, incomprehensible, brand-new kind of terror. He fumbled for the door and pushed through it, ignoring the resistance of the heavy steel slab as it scraped against the gritty floor, pushing hard enough to thump it against the limits of its weighty hinges.

–

He didn’t start to think clearly again until the echo of his feet on the floor turned into murky splashing, and he realised from the dank pondweedy smell and the wet in his socks that he was ankle-deep in greenish water. He wasn’t sure how long or how far he’d walked in the dark, blind to the world with all of his senses screaming, but his jeans were soaked up to the knees and the churning ripples caused by his steps faded a long way back into the gloom.

Antonio picked his way a little further, slowly, from the flooded hallway into a slightly drier side-room like a stripped-down operating theatre, dark and empty with the walls washed a ghostly, peeling white and rank water collecting in a shallow depression at the centre, below a fusty grey-glass skylight that let in a grudging, colourless illumination from some faint artificial source above. Sploshing to a halt in the unnatural pool of light, he stopped, and tried to gather his thoughts. What he really needed was time, just some time to think about this, all of this, with no interruptions or distractions, and-

“Hey, Antoni-oni. You wanna see something neat?”

“Not… so much, Jared,” sighed Antonio. He looked up, into the pitch-black vault of the broken ceiling beyond the faint ring of light, where three bright scarlet circles blinked back at him, tucked cosily into the rounded angle of the wall.

“I’m kind of having a day.”

The circles blink-blinked, slid back towards the dark doorway. “Right-right-right, but you’re totally gonna want to see this. C’mon, we’re super-close, just down the hall.”

Antonio shook his head. “I really should get going-”

The eyes flicked away, leaving Jared’s voice trailing off into the shadows. “Yeah? You gotta go squeeze in some more freelance optometry?” A chuckle, somewhat tinny, like marbles rattling in a steel hose. “Guess duct tape really can fix anything...”

“I don’t-” Antonio stopped. “Wait. What did you say?”

The only answer was Jared’s echoey humming, receding gently away down the hall. After a moment’s paralysis, Antonio shifted uneasily and stepped forwards, following it into the darkness.

–

The IT Department was a wide, high room, through the twist and turn of the soundproof steel entrance and the double set of freezer doors, noisy with the constant whine of the air-conditioning and the low frying hum of a hundred screens. It was bitterly cold, and the air smelled of ozone and strange carbons, byproducts of the hefty cooling system that kept the screens alive. Thronged on the battered metal desks, bolted to the walls, lining every flat vertical surface; dozens upon dozens of silent little worlds. They were the only light, filling the room with a hazy, ever-flickering glow. Their bunched and cluttered clusters seemed to speak of a vast IT staff that had just stepped out, and they showed… everywhere.

Kitchens, bedrooms, offices, stores. An empty kindergarten, oversized animal toys standing like abandoned giants. The inside of a fridge or two. Empty parks and busy roads. Places as chaotic and barren as the rooms around them, places as benign as an ordinary home. Other screens showed a different kind of picture- scrolling statistics, graphs, lines of data zig-zagging up and down, tracking in real-time. Still more screens showed things that had no apparent function, at least not one that Antonio could easily divine. One seemed to be trained on a black-and-white aviary of little birds in a darkened PetsMart. Another few were spooling 24-7 news stations, local, statewide, international.

Antonio followed Jared’s humming down the pale-lit aisle, picking his way over a floor tangled with heap upon heap of plugboards and cables. If anything could have been calculated to make him feel less secure than he did already, it was the sight of this vast wealth of visual information on display, ticking away quietly, recording everything.

Everything.

He coughed. “Uh, Jared, listen, about the whole, uh, ‘optometry’ thing, I’d really appreciate-”

“Shh-shh, look, this is the one, check it out.” The bright red rings stopped by a screen, dropping a quick wink as they did so. Antonio stopped too, confused by what he saw.

The date and timestamp at the top of the screen denoted that it was a security camera, a live feed. In a near-empty parking lot, bordered by a quiet leafy street Antonio had never seen before, the new Mark stood like a statue. The picture was only just sharp enough for him to be recognizable, the dark lines of Mark’s old glasses harsh against his pale, pixelated smudge of a face, his still, slight black shape almost lost in the deeper pool of shadow cast by a shuttered ticket booth.

“He’s been there, uh... two hours and change.” observed Jared, somewhere behind Antonio’s ear. “One time he had to mosey like three steps left, ‘cause he was gonna get hit by a Kia, but apart from that, our boy’s just been chillin’.”

Antonio took a step closer, squinting, as if any amount of looking harder would magically resolve the picture into better detail. Even at this garbage resolution, from a cheap camera looking down crookedly from high on some wall or light-pole, he recognized the new Mark’s body language very well. Calm, focused, even as a flatline. Waiting for his cue.

“What is he doing?” muttered Antonio. Jared’s eyes craned up over the back of the monitor, took a quick peek, then dipped in a shrug.

“Who knows, dude? It’s like that one Dominos advert- ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die, something something delivery in thirty minutes or your order’s on us.’ Besides, I kinda thought maybe you’d know? He’s your bestie, right?”

Antonio looked up sharply, away from the screen. He touched his face, a quick instinctive swipe, and hesitated.

“Jared, do you ever… think things, that aren’t… uh...” He swallowed. “That can’t be true?”

The lights angled thoughtfully sideways, then slid away behind him, out of view. “Oh, man, all the time. Like, get this, okay? Sometimes I get this super goofy dumb idea that everyone’s, like, avoiding me for no reason? Super-dumb, right, I know, but that’s brains for ya.”

“Uh…”

“But then I’m like, hey! J-man. Stop clowning on yourself, dude. You’re fine, people just got their own stuff going on, you know?”

“Mmhm,” hummed Antonio, as convincingly as he could, which wasn’t very. He was struggling with a number of large, inconvenient facts, and he really wasn’t in the right state of mind to handle such clear and inarguable proof that there were things that he, Antonio, was not being told, was not being allowed to help with, was being left out of entirely.

“So I don’t worry about it. Oh, hey, look- it’s your little buddy!”

Antonio’s head snapped round so fast he nearly saw double. On a smaller screen across the aisle, with Jared’s eyes blinking casually overhead, he saw something that drove everything else straight out of his mind, that turned him freezing cold and searing hot in a second flat, from the soles of his waterlogged sneakers to the tips of his hair.

This feed showed another long, cluttered hallway, and if Antonio had been at all confused about where it was, the long spiralling strips of paint hanging from the walls and the cracked tiles scattering the floor would have cleared it up for him almost at once. Mark- the real Mark- was a grainy grey shape, recognizable only by his dark hair and the stumbling, human frailty in his movements. He was feeling his way bit by bit along the wall away from the camera, painfully slow, hands spidered blindly out against the decayed surface.

“Oh, Mark,” whispered Antonio. Although he was honestly horrified- and sounded it- as he backed away his voice still betrayed a kind of exasperated, heartfelt admiration.

“You sneaky little biscuit.”

“I get the vibe he doesn’t know where he’s going,” observed Jared, his eye-lights tilted curiously as he watched. “You think we should like... tell someone?”

His only reply was the endless hum of power in the walls, the thick background buzz of the screens. Antonio was already gone.

[kiss4kazu]

general relationship hcs with diluc? fluff and spice if thats okay!

diluc ✰ relationship hcs!

gn reader. slight nsfw under the cut!

despite his cold demeanor and hard exterior diluc is actually the softest genshin boy i said it okay

maybe not in the most conventional ways though, like i don’t see diluc as someone too comfy with pda

but he expresses his love for you in other ways

like how every time he enters a room he’s immediately looking for you

and when his eyes do land on you his face instantaneously lights up

it wouldn’t go unnoticed by others either, klee shouting “the big scary man is smiling i didn’t know he could do that!”

jean would have to slap a hand over her mouth, whispering to the small girl that master diluc is not to be referred to as big scary man and you would just stifle your laugh at the sight of diluc’s slightly hurt expression

his face would soften only after you stand before him, greeting him and it’s the small things like the slight tilt of your head and your sweet smile when you tell him “good morning, diluc” that reminds him how much he loves you.

he really likes the way his name sounds on your lips

if it wasn’t for the presence of others he’d kiss you breathless with every greeting and parting

although only part of his life for a short period you’ve impacted him in countless ways

slumber can never really take over him anymore unless your tucked into his chest, snoring softly. he wont admit it but he really likes being the smaller spoon

when you take off his gloves and kiss the tips of his calloused fingers one by one, his chest floods with warmth every time

his hands always feel miserably cold when they’re not intertwined with yours, despite the literal pyro adorning his claymore

smiling has become a lot less rare of an occurence, his lips are always curled upwards while in your presence

he’s slightly clingy, but not in an overbearing way, he knows you’re independent and strong enough to take care of yourself, but that doesn’t stop him from worrying about your wellbeing 24/7

he has to know where you are at all times, if you were to ever go missing he would literally search every inch of teyvat without a wink of sleep, partially because he’s worried sick but also because he can’t sleep without you beside him

he’s easily jealous, definitely gets irked more times than he’d like to admit whenever he sees you and kaeya getting a little too cozy, but then again he knows his brother does it just to get under his skin

he’s very possessive but in subtle ways, he won’t make a big scene and threaten a person’s life for courting you

but he will make sure to leave a nice reminder on your neck, visible to everyone that you are in fact taken

diluc’s a busy man, so realistically he can’t be with you as often as he likes, so the times he does have you to himself he’s a bit overbearing

diluc’s kisses are really passionate, he’s not great with words so he tries his best to translate what he feels into the way he moves his lips and body against you

time alone with him in his arms is just body worship time really

not even in a sexual way but i mean if you wanna get spicy then yes

he kisses you. everywhere.

his favorite place to kiss is beneath your ear, right along your jaw, you can always feel his breath against your ear when he kisses you there

he knows the effect it has on you, so of course he’d whisper reminders of just how beautiful you are, right on your most sensitive skin, an amused smirk on his face at the sound of you whimpering his name

diluc doesn’t fuck okay, he makes love. unless he had a bad day i mean if he had a bad day by all means blow my back out sir.

but usually he just focuses on making you feel good, making sure you’re reaching that place first before he thinks about himself

missionary so he can see your face, rest his forehead against yours and breathe in your moans of his name. keeping you as close as possible until you can’t tell where you begin and he ends.

his stamina is a1 so expect mutiple rounds, even when you’re done he’s not pulling out sorry i dont make the rules

cockwarming time!

he sleeps best when the two of you are connected like this, when you hold him against your chest, playing with his hair, twirling your fingers in between his crimson locks, kissing his forehead gently

diluc is a big cuddle bear really but only behind closed doors. you’re the only person that would ever get to see him for who he truly is, and that in itself is a declaration of love really.

thank you so much for your request! <3

[atsuminthe]

brewing storm

★ synopsis: the sun will shine on your street again. maybe not now, but sometime.

★ character(s): nicolas romero

★ genre: angst to fluff

★ warnings: female reader; mentions of divorce and verbal fights, general hurt

★ minty’s notes: how it started—minty at 5 am, barely awake, knowing damn well she’s a divorce kid: but what if divorce. also i almost cried, pls excuse me while i go bawl for a hot second

part of the “home is where your heart is” series

    rubens slightly peeks his head from behind the door frame, clutching his adloo plushie as he listens to your discussion, just enough so he can see your faces. it’s late at night, way past his bedtime, and definitely not the first time he’s heard you two argue over the pettiest of things—he wishes he could do something to help, but what can a 10 year old do in a dispute between adults? both you and nicolas tried to keep him out of the arguments because, frankly, they neither involve nor concern him—he’s a child. he doesn’t need to know why you’re having screaming matches every night after you think he’s asleep.

    rubens was little, maybe 5 when it occurred, and he can’t recall all the details—what he does remember is that this has happened before and it resulted in his biological mother leaving him and his father, presumably for another man (it’s what he heard from neighbors and what his grandma told him). but he likes you. you’re different—you actually want to spend time with him not just because it’s your job as his mama, but because you enjoy it too, and you make his papai happy—he doesn’t want the thing from five years ago to repeat itself.

    suddenly, he remembers there’s nothing he can do. he’s a child, you’re adults. his opinion doesn’t matter.

    but the voices raise again, sharp edges and poison lace the words that leave both of your lips and he flinches, pressing his back on the wall and retreating slowly. he won’t solve anything standing and watching from the shadows, just like he won’t solve anything either way. deciding to go to sleep, he makes his way to his room on the second floor when he hears the words he’s dreaded the most coming from your wobbly, breaking voice.

    “you know what? if you really can’t stand me, maybe we should get a divorce!”

    his feet start working against his better judgement and in less than 5 seconds, he’s in the kitchen doorway, his grip on adloo impossibly tight—his knuckles have turned white and he’s biting his lower lip so hard he thinks he might break it—as he watches nicolas and you stop from whatever stupid argument you had when his ragged breath echoes in the room. his blue eyes are wide and watery, tears threatening to spill at any given moment, and his voice cracks just as yours had a few moments prior.

    “mama, please don’t leave,” he whispers and his lower lip starts trembling. he’s crying, he realizes, but who cares? “please don’t leave us—don’t leave me,” it resembles a cry for help more than a plea, but it makes your breath hitch and the lump in your throat tightens nonetheless. you mindlessly get up from the chair you’re seated on, hands reaching for his smaller body as you fall to your knees on the tiled kitchen floor. he lets you embrace him, his plushie hitting the ground as he throws his little arms around your neck, burying his face in your shoulder. your warm hand cups the back of his head and you cradle him in your arms, rocking him back and forth as your own tears roll down your cheeks—your heart feels like it might as well split in two with how bad it hurts.

    “mama, please—don’t- don’t leave, please,” rubens’ lips keep praying to you, begging to stay, “papai will be so sad if you do, and- and i don’t like seeing him sad,” he hiccups, clutching your sleeping shirt in his tiny fists.

    your husband’s heart is already broken.

    he kneels next to you, towering over your figures, and wraps his arms around your bodies as he presses a kiss to the crown of your head. you sniffle, leaning into his warmth—argument be damned. you can solve this some other day. he maneuvers you and rubens so he sits with his back pressed to one of the walls—you’re resting against his chest, your son burying his face in yours as he continues sobbing.

    “shh, meu anjo, it’s alright,” you shush him, running your fingers through his hair and rubbing his back to soothe him. “mama isn’t going anywhere. i won’t leave you, coração, i could never leave you.” it’s a whispered promise that you intend to keep—nicolas can sense your determination as you nuzzle your head under his chin. soon enough, rubens falls asleep from the exhaustion taking over his body and you close your eyes, letting out a soft sigh. the kitchen is silent, except for your even breaths.

    “i’m sorry.”

    nicolas breaks the ice. it’s a simple apology—but it’s sincere and it makes one corner of your lips curl up in a small smile. your free hand comes to rest on his chest, over his heart, and he places his bigger one on top of yours.

    “i’m sorry too.”

    “no, i really am sorry. i—i know i wasn’t the best husband.”

    “i know. i appreciate you trying, nico.”

    nicolas exhales, burying his nose in your hair as his hand rubs gentle circles on your back. “i’ll try harder,” he continues, then pauses as he chooses his next words. “about the… the divorce… you don’t- you don’t really want one… do you?” it’s careful, his voice shaky and uncertain. you nuzzle further under his chin and he chuckles lowly making you giggle yourself.

    “no, i don’t. i was just—angry.” your anger has since subsided, leaving behind a bitter aftertaste on your tongue. “i shouldn’t have mentioned it. i know how hard it was for the both of you when…” you stop yourself, sighing again. “i’m really sorry, amor.”

    another kiss to your head makes you melt, body relaxing in your husband’s grasp as he starts humming a gentle tune. rubens shifts in his sleep and you grab adloo from next to you, putting it in his arms—the adlers’ mascot is his favorite plushie (jackasuke comes in second place—sorry, hinata), and he can’t sleep well without it. you brush a few strands of hair from his face and wipe his cheeks, just as his father does the same to you.

    “te amo, coração,” nicolas whispers against your temple, placing a sweet kiss there. you smile a little, tightening your hold on rubens and letting yourself drift off to sleep as well.

    “eu também,” you murmur. you can feel him shift a little as he gets up with you two in his arms, carrying you to bed.

    you don’t know if the storm has passed, but you can see the lighthouse—and that means everything will be fine.

taglist (send an ask/dm to be added/removed): @nakizumie; @lovelytarou; @risjime; @izhyperfixates; @kirakirasaku; @tsumooo;

[hypmicdaydreams]

"A kiss that is really a bet on a few yen"

-pairing: dice arisugawa x gn!reader

-genre: fluff 

-summary: a game of pocky between you and dice becomes way too intense for its own good

-word count: ~4.2k

a bet, for nothing more than the couple of yen you had left, lying around in the empty depths of your pocket. 

to anyone else, this was a downright ridiculous bet, one not even worth betting on in the first place. it was only a few yen, after all, not much to buy things from even the cheapest stores around. what could one even do with the three coins or so you had forgotten that you carried in the left pocket of your hoodie, all of varying monetary value? it wasn’t worth much if anything. 

and yet, to dice, this seemed like just the opportunity he was waiting for. he was eager, a bit too eager for what was nothing more than money one spent on a singular yet small piece of candy from the nearest drug store, to get those coins from you. they were practically calling him. hell, it’d be worth more than what he currently had to his name, which honestly says more about him than you who had taken him up on the offer or even suggested the idea in the first place. 

“let’s play,” you announced, placing the three or so coins in the center, right between where you and dice had been sitting and taking out a small box of pocky in the process. he only looked at you with curious eyes, a sort of glint in his gaze. 

usually, dice never was one to play for cheap pocket change, which was a generous way of putting it given the amount you guys were betting on. such games were much too boring. there wasn’t enough excitement, no threat of losing everything in mere seconds looming over your head. dice didn’t care for losing or winning such small amounts of money here and there (well, most times when he wasn’t dead on broke that is) since they never did make or break his lifestyle. it was whatever, and winning it never did give him that same sort of thrill he got each time he hit a jackpot in the casino or won big. yeah, he may have won like...a few hundred yen? but what would that even do? such bets were of no interest to dice who sought out that specific sort of adrenaline, the life or death situation. there really was no better feeling than winning big after months of tireless effort and tries coupled with the fact that he may have even lost everything in an instant. betting on such small amounts could even be seen as some kind of an insult to dice who took his gambling quite seriously. 

but this time around, whether it was due to his pure, undefeated boredom of being cooped in the house as of late or simply because he was betting against you specifically, dice felt compelled to play along and accept your offer. if he won whatever challenge you’d suggest, then he’d get those glorious one hundred yen coins with a few lint and loose yarn strands thrown in as a gratuitous gesture. truly a one of a kind prize. besides, dice couldn’t quite recall the last time he had made a bet with you, so even if this was so small and worth practically nothing, he was, nonetheless, excited at the prospect. see, betting and winning against someone he was close to was more fun than doing so in a casino, in a room full of strangers he’d probably never see again. he got to victoriously gloat over you, and seeing your crushed face of defeat would surely be worth it (this was all in a loving sense, of course). 

“soo,” dice rubbed his hands together, a smirk much too mischievous for its own good playing on his lips. he really couldn’t wait to start. “how do ya’ play?” 

“it’s simple, really,” you smirked back in retaliation, almost as if tempting him, able to read his thoughts and begging him to just try and win against you. honestly, this game was already getting too serious for its own good. it wasn’t a life or death situation. you were simply two dumbasses betting on three hundred yen for nothing more than entertainment. 

you opened the box of pocky and took one out. “the name of the game is that two people hold on to the stick, one at each end, and they slowly inch forward. whoever breaks the stick first or lets go loses.” then you placed one end, the chocolate dipped one, between your lips, motioning for dice to do the same on the other end, well, unless he didn’t want to. all that meant is that he’d forfeit and you’d win back your yen, but more importantly, it also meant that you got to be the one to gloat about winning against the self-proclaimed gambler, the one who knew all the rules of the game, both inside and out. and that truly would feel glorious. 

it was done purposefully, the fact that you left out the most crucial element to the pocky game, what made the pocky game the pocky game, rather notorious. you never did mention the fact that it’d surely end in a kiss if neither one of you wanted to let go, too stubborn to accept a loss, not that it’d take a genius to figure it out. you, however, had only wanted to fluster dice, which really wasn’t an easy task. you bet red would look so good on him, but alas, you’d never know. besides, it’d be quite funny to see his mind racing in real-time, words jumbled and sentences incoherent. that’d be a win in and of itself. 

dice, however, quickly caught on to the memo. yes, he certainly was a dumbass at times, but not always. that was only a part-time job of his, next to being a full-time rapper and gambler. it didn’t take long for him to figure out your true intention. certainly you just wanted to kiss him, which you simply could’ve told him straight up. there was no need for this roundabout way (i told you, being a dumbass wasn’t his full-time job, but he still was one). jokes aside, he knew exactly what you had intended on given by that devilish smirk on your face. besides, the thought of a kiss with you wasn’t really the first thing that could fluster him, nor was it the last on that note. he simply didn’t think much of it. 

and so, he gave a smirk back of his own, placing the biscuit end between his own lips and staring you in the eyes rather intensely, if only to intimidate you. and it certainly did work to some extent, not that you’d ever let dice know that. it was too late, however, as dice already saw the way your cocky smile faltered for less than a second, which surely only gave him an ego boost. 

you began first as a sort of retaliation against the man you loved, irritated at the fact that he had the audacity to think he could win against you. so you took your first nibble forward, savoring the sweet chocolate taste between your taste buds. it tasted just as good as you remembered, but it’d taste even better with victory on the side. 

then it was dice’s turn, who moved forward twice the amount you did, which surprised you and caused you to unconsciously break the stick, though it certainly wasn’t your fault, not at all! the sticks were honestly quite fragile, a bit too much in a way, and it was definitely unfair on dice’s end for him to move so quickly. if he did that, then the game would end right before it could even begin! and then where was the fun in that? sure, you’d get that kiss, but at what cost? at the cost of getting flustered and giving dice a reason to tease you? well, that wasn’t worth it at all then. it didn’t sound too pleasant, especially not for your ego. 

“heh, that was too easy!” dice grinned, already beginning to gloat at his perceived victory, though he didn’t seem to eat the remainder of the stick. 

“this time didn’t count,” you proclaimed, starting to feel the heat rush to your cheeks, whether it was from bewilderment or irritation, that you didn’t know. and it only worsened once dice shot you another cocky smirk, presumably one calling you a sore loser. 

“you win some, you lose some.”

“i shouldn’t be hearing that from you of all people.” you could only roll his eyes at his continued teasing. ugh, such a child, not that you’d act any better if you were in his place. well, this wasn’t going according to plan at all. “you’re not even supposed to take big bites. that’s unfair! and against the rules actually.”

at this, dice certainly did look a bit confused and perhaps even somewhat spooked. against the rules? he had never heard of that, though then again, he never did hear about the pocky game until you brought it up a few moments ago. this was all your own doing, however, grinning as you finally got dice where you wanted him, confused and at your mercy. in fact, you didn’t know if it actually was against the rules or not, or if there even were official rules in the first place. you simply didn’t want it to end this fast, to lose your couple hundred yen, but more importantly, to lose to dice of all people. if that made you a sore loser, then so be it. your pride was on the line (a bit much, eh?). 

“yep, so we gotta play again, and this time,” you pointed the stick at him, almost in a threatening-like manner, only furthered by the fact that he had an all too guilty look on his face, “you better play fair and not take big bites.” 

“y-yea’”

you grinned, “good.”

and so, you took the stick, placing the chocolate end once more between your lips; it was the more delectable part after all. dice quickly did the same to the other end, and the game began once more, this time the two of you concentrating a lot more than before for whatever reason. those coins of yen were looking really nice right about now. 

almost like déjà vu, you took the initiative once more and got the first nibble, inching in closer to dice who seemed to pay no mind to you but rather focusing on the stick that was the only thing separating you two. hm, was this a sign that he was growing flustered? that’d surely be a welcome surprise, a delight if you will. i mean, he wouldn’t even look you in the eye right now, so that must be the reason. alas, you knew that that most likely wasn’t the reason, though it certainly was tempting to imagine. 

dice responded by inching closer as well, this time actually taking smaller bites than before, ones almost the same size as yours. this particular game was turning out to be a delight already, even if you could feel the heat rush to your face once more for whatever reason. you had been the one to suggest the pocky game to dice in the first place, so why were you the one getting all flustered now that his face was slightly closer to yours while he wasn’t? in fact, he didn’t seem to be showing any emotion, well, other than the typical aloof grin he had on and that oh so adoring gaze. ugh, why did he have to be kinda cute this up close? that was an understatement, however. 

trying your best to brush those thoughts away, you nibbled the next bite, trying to calm your beating heart so that dice wouldn’t be able to hear it, if that was even possible. perhaps it would be considering how loud it sounded to you right at this moment. and it only increased in intensity as dice also took the next bite forward. 

you felt as if you were reaching your limit, as if you were going to break away from the stick and end the game, losing not only your money but your pride as well after having boasted to dice about how you’d most definitely win against him. you hated, absolutely despised, the very thought of that happening, but you also didn’t know if you could keep this up. at this rate, even if you won, dice would almost certainly tease you about how embarrassed you got and how loud that heartbeat of yours was, so loud one could hear it from space even. so who would be the true winner of this? 

thankfully and fortunately on your end, before you could break away, dice did so first, eating up the rest of the stick with that same grin on his face that you had undoubtedly fallen for after being exposed to it for the hundredth time. it only seemed to grow cuter with each passing moment. 

“h-hey!” 

you didn’t even know why you had said that in the first place, sounding somewhat disappointed that the game had ended so soon. you had won. now the yen was all yours and the permission to rub it in dice’s face, and yet, you somehow found yourself hoping that it’d drag on for just a bit longer. did you possibly want to kiss dice? to have dice kiss you, to feel his lips against yours? even if this wasn’t your first kiss with dice, you still found yourself longing for his touch much more than usual right now. it was an unexplained phenomenon, one that you couldn’t even begin to explain. all that you knew was that you wanted to kiss dice, and badly at that. 

however, you, of course, didn’t want to accept that, especially not in the middle of such an intense gambling match. so you tried your best to hide these feelings, this sensation of being too touch starved for your own good, by staring at dice in a rather angry manner, or at least, the angriest you could muster. in all honesty, it was more of a teasing and fun glare, but a glare nonetheless. 

“ah, sorry.” dice sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck, an action that you found too cute for words, one that was as such that your heart couldn’t help but skip a beat, all the blood and heat rushing to your cheeks, the sensation you had in your arms and legs leaving. now really wasn’t the best time for your love for the man to flare up yet again. but...perhaps you’d consider hearing this apology out. “i wondered what they tasted like, so i wanted to try one.” 

hngg...fine, you’ll accept his reasoning.

but just this once!! of course. you’d never want to give him the benefit of the doubt, to give him second chances just because you were fond of him. pfft, that was such an utterly ridiculous thought. that’d never be the reason. it was only because you didn’t want the game to end right then and there, to win your yen back so easily. besides, if one thought about it more, it was technically a tie. you had broken the stick on the first run-through of the game, and now on the second, it was dice. technically speaking, neither one of you won or lost. only a third and final game would determine that. 

“fine.” it was nothing more than a mutter, a soft one at that. you didn’t know where all that confidence and charisma you had at the beginning had gone. it must’ve vanished somewhere after all. things simply can’t disappear out of thin air, at least, without turning into something at first. first law of thermodynamics after all. “but if either one of us breaks away, then i win by default.”

“oi! that’s not fair!!-”

you suddenly cut him off by shoving the biscuit end of yet another pocky stick in his mouth, which prompted him to shut up completely. much better.  

“oh hush you.”

smirking once more (something you guys seemed to be doing a lot of in this game) at the sight of his pout, you took the chocolate end between your lips once more, this time even more determined to get your kiss from dice um uh i mean to win the bet. yeah, that’s totally the end goal here, not some measly kiss. where did that idea even come from? there was no way you possibly could want to feel dice’s lips on yours, not how they seemed to fit perfectly, how soft they felt, how...surprisingly good he was at kissing. he was quite good, even if he did use his tongue a bit too often, but it still felt nice, especially when he licked your lips, a sensation that you couldn’t even describe, simply reminiscing in that electrical-like feeling. 

wait, no!! that was beside the point. don’t lose focus. the main thing here was to win against dice and prove to him that you were a much better gambler than he was. forget the fact that this was some dumb betting idea you had come up with, you only wanted to show off to him. that was what you planned on from the start anyway. kissing dice was only in place for you to win. that was the objective of the pocky game after all. it did end up in sweet, chocolate-filled kisses, but that was the fun of it. really, all that mattered was winning, or at least, that’s what you tried to tell yourself. 

shaking your head free from any of those...intrusive thoughts, you focused on the fragile little edible stick in front of you, trying your hardest to ignore the attractive man named dice who so happened to also be in front of you. 

what a complete coincidence, i know. 

for one final time, you took the initiative once more, moving forward just a bit but nonetheless noticeable. the chocolate on your tongue no longer tasted that good; rather, it felt nothing more than something that you were tasting. it was alright at best right now, though perhaps that was because you were craving something a bit sweeter this instant. 

dice moved in closer as well, still seeming as nonchalant as ever, well, as nonchalant as dice could get in the first place. 

the two of you continued on like this, worming in closer, able to feel your breaths against each other, but also concentrating on not breaking the stick that was undeniably shrinking by the second. this was the farthest you’d actually ever gone in a game of pocky, so of course, you were starting to feel the heat, in more ways than one might i add. 

you were so close, so close to victory. you could practically taste it, and no, that wasn’t the melted chocolate on your tongue. yet, you couldn’t find it in yourself to continue. the only thing on your mind right now was the thought of kissing dice, of connecting your lips and capturing his own in a sweet and passionate kiss. gosh, you just wanted to kiss him already, to feel him underneath you, to simply feel his touch and warmth. you couldn’t wait any longer honestly; you were growing more and more impatient. 

yet, you couldn’t find it in yourself to close the gap, to seal the deal and win once and for all. taking the initiative at the end and kissing dice on your own terms? now that was much too embarrassing. it was difficult to think straight right now, to think of anything that wasn’t how good it’d feel to kiss dice. your heartbeat could be heard all the way in your ears, and it was getting much too hot in here, almost suffocating to a degree. you didn’t know if you could handle this warmth anymore, or if you could handle the growing uneasiness and antsy feeling that you were experiencing right now. geez, being this close to dice, seeing him all serious and the like, in the element as when he is while gambling, it was all too flustering. 

but just as you were about to break away, to give in and throw in the towel, deciding that gaining bragging rights simply wasn’t worth it in comparison to being flustered when the two of you eventually kissed, dice did what you least expected him to do despite you knowing full well the extent of his spontaneity. 

dice closed the gap between you guys, kissing you deeply and finishing the remainder of the pocky that was left hanging in your mouth. 

it was a sloppy and wet kiss, rather characteristic of dice as a person as well. his kisses seemed to always encapsulate this sorta feeling, not that you minded all that much, however. it was also a bit rough, though not a lot, only a bit to give it some excitement, not that this scenario could be any more exciting than it already was. and mixed in with the sweetness of the now melted stick and chocolate, the kiss only felt and tasted even better. gosh, this was beyond your expectations. this was way better than what you had imagined in the first place. and right at this moment, you forgot all about the bet, if only for a few seconds, and relished in this kiss. it truly did feel a lot like dice, even if the only reason he kissed you was for a bet for a couple hundred yen. right now, you didn’t care, though when he pulled back, you’d certainly have a much different expression. 

“damn,” he muttered, wiping the remaining chocolate around his lips (the one that came from your very own mouth given that deep kiss he just gave you) with his finger and then proceeding to lick it, a rather attractive and hot action mind you, though perhaps you only felt that way because you too felt quite hot right now. “that is good.” 

you didn’t even have the guts or the correct mindset to fire back at him, to come up with a good comeback. you could only sit there, a flustered and bewildered expression as you try to come to terms with what had just happened. you wiped your now wet mouth with the back of your sleeve, only feeling the butterflies once more as you saw a few light chocolate stains on it once you pulled away. what...just happened?

“heh, don’t mind if i do.” 

dice paid no mind to you as he scooped up your yen from the floor, tossing them in the air a couple of times simply to hear that beautiful clash of metal that he oh so dearly loved. it was one of his favorite sounds after all. but how could he be so nonchalant about this? how could he turn away and look at the coins, sparkle in his eye, right after he gave you a deep kiss out of the blue, as if it required almost no thought out of him? gah, this was particularly frustrating. all this time, the thought of kissing dice was the only thing clouding your mind, the only thing that you could think of that wouldn’t dare leave your head. hell, you even began doubting if you were strong enough to carry out the bet you suggested in the first place! yet, here was dice, thinking nothing of the kiss you had longed for, for so long too (at least, it felt like it). it was only natural to get annoyed. 

“hey-”

“oh no,” he cut off, assuming what you were going to say already, even though it was far from correct. “i won this fair and square. i played by your rules too.” 

it was a small giggle that erupted from you, one that you couldn’t suppress given how cute it seemed that dice got all defensive over some yen you could find lying on the floor of some convenience store or parking lot. he really was a dumbass, but so were you to an extent. dice really was too cute, and you couldn’t stay mad at him for too long, not like this anyway. he could be a bit airheaded at times after all, and you knew that that kiss really wasn’t supposed to mean much, especially not when it was only because of a bet. really, you were feeling too many emotions at that moment, and perhaps it’d be best for you to rest as of now. this had been quite the rollercoaster, from start to finish. 

you took out another pocky stick and began snacking on it, staring at dice rather adoringly as he, just as promised, began boasting about how awesome he was to have won, not that it required much effort in the first place. he was dice, after all, the most notorious of gamblers here in shibuya. every casino must’ve known of him by now, and not because of the fact that he was sort of a popular figure around here. honestly, right now, you didn’t even care that he was bragging, simply content, albeit embarrassed, at the outcome of the game that you had suggested in the first place. 

pocky did taste a bit sweeter now with this memory fresh in your mind.