#picking them up resisting the urge to punt them out of there and then dropping them at Silas and Sarah’s door like pls control your children

[lovelyisadora]

Also in the other au marcia has a nightmare abt the assassination one time and ends up screaming in her sleep and waking up some of the kids 😔😔 and also making sarah+silas very concerned for her. There is eventually some kind of talk abt how everyone is doing mentally but it does not happen then it takes longer <3 bc marcia refuses to talk abt her feelings ever especially with a heap. But basically the heaps r doing fine bc they're used to living in a single room. Marcias apartment is Huge compared to what they're used to. But marcia is having a Bad Time even outside of it being the heaps specifically who r there she just. Doesnt do well spending that much time around ppl constantly 😔 she's snappy and mean by literally day 2 and it takes forever for silas+sarah to realise that is Not in fact marcias default state that is what she does under intense stress. Rip

the kids: hey so something is wrong with aunt marcia

sarah and silas: uh what are you talking about she’s always like this

[fluffysilver]

Flufftober Day 17 - Encouraging your SO to achieve a goal

“Okay…” Rika murmured to himself, fingers twisting in an elaborate pattern, newly learned and still awkward. It shouldn’t be that hard to do this - ninjitsu was just another means of manipulating aether, and he had been doing that since he had picked up his first wand as a boy. It just felt odd, even with the knowledge from his new soulstone. It still took time and practise to attune properly to it and tap into the knowledge contained there. 

The mudra flared and a giant spinning weapon of aether that his trainer had called a ‘shi-ra-ken’ appeared; he flipped it forward and it slammed into the training dummy, just like it was supposed to. Excellent. This was just a beginner skill, though - he had almost never seen his husband Davien use it, after all. And Davien was a skilled and deadly ninja. 

He practiced the mudra for a bit, until it felt a little more comfortable and less awkward, but then came the next step. He drew his knives and set himself in the wide-legged low stance that rogues used - ninja fighting wasn’t much different. “Hai!” he darted forward, slashing at the dummy a few times, spinning and stabbing, then he darted back and cast the mudra again. Or tried to; he yelped and swore as he fumbled the mudra AND dropped one of his knives nearly on his foot. A heavy weight dropped onto his head and he swore again, reaching up to shove it off. A grinning bunny in blue robes and a yellow hat hopped off, giggling. He stared at it… what the actual fuck? 

He’d have to ask Davien later what in the name of the Twelve was up with that. Shaking his head, he picked up his dagger and set himself to try again. 

Half an hour later, nearly a dozen of those stupid rabbits were hopping around the yard and Rika was about ready to give it up. He could NOT get himself to form the damned hand signs without dropping one or both daggers! And if he could get it to appear, he couldn’t get the weapon to fly true without losing his target, and he still usually dropped his knives. Davien made it look so damned easy. “AAArgh!” He sheathed his knives and paced around the grass to calm down, breathing and trying to focus, tail lashing behind him. 

“You’re thinking about it too hard.” 

Rika yelped and jumped, landing in a half crouch with his knives out before his brain managed to put name to the voice and sheathed them again. “Twelve, Davi, you scared the life out of me!” 

His husband just grinned at him, sauntering over with that graceful hip sway that drove Rika nuts in entirely different ways, tail high with good humor. “Decided to go full ninja, hmm?” He punted a rabbit and it popped in a burst of aether. 

“Yeah. I decided, why not?” He blushed and rubbed the back of his head, ears flicking. “I can’t get a handle on it though. I swear you need extra hands.” 

“It’s not that. You’re just thinking about it too hard.” He settled behind Rika and indicated for him to draw his knives. When he had, he settled his hands over his husband’s, adjusting his grip a little. “The trick is to hold on tightest with the small fingers. That leaves your front two to be able to make the signs without losing your grip on the knife. You don’t grip it like you do your staff.” He moved him through it slowly. “See? The blades actually become part of the sign if you do it this way.” 

“Hm.” Rika nodded, only marginally distracted by the warmth of Davien’s breath against his cheek and his body pressed against him from behind. “I think I get it. It’s about speed, right?”

“Perfection first, then speed. Speed comes with time and practice,” Davien nipped his ear. “Stop thinking so hard. Feel it.” 

“Hm.” Rika resisted an urge to purr. He was feeling something all right, but it had nothing to do with ninjutsu. “You’re distracting me.” 

“You’re all tense,” Davien nipped his ear again, then shifted against him with a purr of his own. “You clearly need to take a break and relax.” 

That was just playing dirty. It worked, though; Rika shifted back to lean against him and tilted his head, purring when he felt the other’s sharp teeth teasing his neck. “All right, but not outside this time. It took me forever to get the grass stains out of my armor.” 

“Fair,” Davien smirked against his skin, then twisted his hold and flipped Rika up over his shoulder to carry him inside. 

“Davi!” 

----

Much later, after a bout of ‘relaxation’ that left Rika a purring puddle, a nap and a bath, they were back outside, this time with Davien walking him through the steps of a ninja’s ‘rotation’, the pattern of attacks that Davien found the most effective. He couldn’t show him all of it, yet, but that would come with time. 

Rika was trying hard not to think too much, which proved difficult. He was primarily a mage, and if you didn’t keep your wits about you when you were casting magic, it could backlash. Eating a fireball because you lost concentration was something that only happened once. But he patiently repeated the motions, one step at a time, until he had them down by rote, though without Davien’s smooth ease. One, two, three, one two three, cast, one, two three… 

It was actually when he stopped counting that he fell into a kind of flowing rhythm, a kind of movement within flow that was unlike anything he’d experienced before. The patterns clicked into place as he found himself moving without thought. It was incredible. And as Davien had said, the flow lent itself to speed.

“Much better,” Davien purred as he watched Rika’s movements start to smooth. “I knew you’d get it. Now, we take it to the field.” 

“Right.” Rika took a deep breath to settle himself. “Thank you. I should have just asked you from the start.” 

“Yeah, you should have.” Davien winked, then grinned. “See you at Forgotten Springs.” He vanished in a flare of aether. 

Rika huffed, then smiled and shook his head, following him through the Lifestream to their goal.

[gohyuck]

hello! could I request Jisung with prompt 7 (and the colour blue) for your 4K celebration? 🥳

7: “Oh, girl, I love how you care. I’ll put your love on a pedestal.”

extra: blue

“no, ‘sung, what the fuck?” you crinkle your nose in disgust at your best friend, stepping away from him - and the sticky half-licked blue raspberry lollipop he’s brandishing - on instinct. he just shrugs, sticking the candy back in his mouth as if he hadn’t just offered to let you put it in yours, too.

“it’s my last day as a free man, (name). just wanted to share the joy,” jisung responds easily, one corner of his mouth upturning before he turns back to tv screen in front of you. “besides,” he continues, leaning forward and swiping a controller off of the coffee table he’s currently using as a footrest. “you aren’t usually this easily grossed out. are you just pissed because i keep kicking your ass in smash?”

“if you’d let me main ike even once-” you start grumbling, only to get cut off by jisung snorting at you. “whatever. fuck super smash bros. also, you’re just getting your wisdom teeth out, you big baby. your life isn’t ending.”

“my mom said i’ll have to avoid this,” he explains, pulling his lollipop out of his mouth again. you notice that his tongue has traces of blue, too, and roll your eyes. it’s as if he’s still a little kid sometimes.

you ignore the tiny part of your brain that wants to taste the artificial raspberry from his lips.

“so?” you scoff, sitting back down on the couch beside him. one of his arms rest over the back of the couch, and he flings this arm over your shoulders once you’re close enough.

“so it’ll be a while ‘til i get to enjoy candy, and that sucks. like, it completely blows. absolutely shakes me to my foundation-”

“i miss when you were shy around me. you spend too much time with hyuck now.” you grumble, cutting him off. jisung says nothing, only laughing as he hands you a controller that you begrudgingly take. it’s once you’ve both picked your characters that he speaks again, voice far softer this time as he forms his words around the candy in his mouth.

“hey, (name)?”

“yeah?”

“you’ll still go to my appointment with me, right?”

“and miss video-taping you saying stupid shit? wouldn’t miss it for the world, sungie.”

“aw, i knew you loved me- shit! did you just punt me off? bro, what the fuck-” as you dissolve into giggles while jisung glares at the screen, smashing buttons furiously, you can’t help but let your gaze trail the side of his face. you’d met jisung when you were both 6, when his family had moved into the house next to yours. over the past 12 years, you’ve watched him grow alongside you from a quiet little boy with a penchant for dance into your handsome and gentle - albeit endearingly annoying - best friend.

even if you don’t say it out loud, he knows that you’ll always be by his side.

♕ ♕ ♕

“i want a smoothie.”

jisung leans over the back of your seat to stage-whisper this directly in your ear, letting out a whine of half-sadness, half-annoyance when you flinch and move away on impulse. his mother, who’s in the drivers’ seat right beside you, heaves a sigh before glancing back at her son.

even when - or maybe especially when - he’s positively loopy off of meds and his face is packed with cotton, he can’t seem to stay still. he fidgets with his for a moment before leaning in again, though he speaks at full volume this time. “i just think they’re good. smoothies are... such a concept. food but liquid. they make me so emotional...i’m going to cry over smoothies. (name), do you cry over smoothies?”

“no,” you start, unsure of whether you’re more amused or annoyed. “but i feel like i’m about to.”

“see,” jisung exclaims, turning to his mother. “(name) sees the vision! the vision is seen. you know what isn’t, though? my glasses. i dropped them and i can’t see anymore. can’t see my glasses either.” he giggles at the absurdity of his situation, registering how ironic it is even through the haze of medication. “wait, if i can’t see my glasses, how will i see my smoothie? oh no...”

“are we actually getting smoothies?” you mumble to his mother out of the corner of your mouth.

“don’t see what else i can do.” she says, smiling at you right before she takes an exit off of the highway. there’s a good smoothie place within a few miles, and you’re sure that’s where you’re all headed.

“if i can’t see it, how will i make sure it’s - oh no...” jisung moans again, evidently in great despair over not being able to see his hypothetical smoothie. he seems unaware of the fact that his glasses are on the seat right next to him.

“i’ll make sure that it’s blue raspberry, ‘sung,” you assure him, knowing what jisung means even if he hasn’t finished his thought. “i promise.”

“really?” jisung asks, eyes widening. you turn back to give him a reassuring smile, resisting the urge to giggle at how he’s acting. his face splits into a wide grin, though it’s followed immediately after by him groaning. you wince in sympathy.

“you know, (name),” jisung starts, speaking once he’s no longer in immediate pain. “i love how you care about me. if i- if i could put your love on a pedestal i would, because it’s like a trophy.”

now it’s your turn for your eyes to widen, and as you feel the amused gaze of jisung’s mom on your face, you can’t help but burn out of embarrassment and just the smallest bit of hope.

“i’m glad i have it because i give you all my love too. that, and i like trophies,” jisung continues thoughtfully, voice even more muffled than before. “i like trophies and winning. you should know since you never win at smash. you suck at smash, actually-”

“we’re here, jisung!” your best friend’s mom interrupts her son, much to your couples gratitude and mortification. jisung, confused but still eager, gets out of the car first, smoothie-ready in his entirety. just as you’re about to climb out of the passenger’s seat, his mom stops you with a gentle hand on your shoulder.

“talk to him about this when he’s cognizant,” she says, looking directly into your eyes. “he means what he’s saying, even if he’s a little out of it right now.”

your heart beats just a little louder in your chest, and it’s all you can do to blink at her and nod before pushing yourself out of the car. jisung... likes having your love? he actively gives you his own love? your mind is reeling as you step out of the car, but as jisung - your best friend, your partner-in-crime, your childhood crush who’s currently appraising the smoothie shop’s sign like it’s from an alien planet - sees you, his eyes light up. you hold out your hand, and he envelopes your palm in his huge one as if it’s second nature, which you suppose it is.

“ready to pick out what you want?” you ask.

“will you really check for me?” even though you notice that he’s finally wearing his glasses now, you don’t say anything about them. instead, you nod as you push open the doors to the shop.

“i’ll always check for you, ‘sung.”

[nintendotreehouse]

Dances with Bokoblins

I grew up on nature shows, starting with G-rated content like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom but quickly graduating to the hard stuff on the Discovery Channel. It’s bizarre to think that the absolute authority in the field back then hasn’t changed in 30+ years—for my dollar, it’s still Sir David Attenborough and always will be as long as he walks the earth. His cultured tones narrated so many moments of wonder in my younger days, to the point where I can practically hear him when I’m hiking.

I mention this mainly because I can almost hear him when I play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as well. For a nature lover, there are so many moments of quiet study in the game, whether you’re observing flora or fauna—and I include monsters in that fauna category. There’s a time and place for charging into an enemy camp on horseback and laying waste to all who inhabit it, but taking the time to study your enemies from concealment is always valuable no matter what your ultimate strategy may be. If nothing else, it’ll open your eyes to the way the creatures of this world live and breathe when Link isn’t around. 

Let me use your average Bokoblin as an example...

I actually love Bokoblins—and I think the dev team did too. They put a ton of work into the concept art for these little guys.

I’m not sure whether the following observed behaviors have offered me any tactical advantage, but off the top of my head, here are some things I’ve seen a Bokoblin do:

Wake up at dawn and throw an immediate dance party upon discovering its haunch of meat still cooking over the campfire

Regale its buddies with stories in Bokoblin language

This guy apparently told a hilarious joke to his Moblin companion on Tingel Island.

Pick up and throw anything at hand when threatened

Get picked up, against its will, to be used as a projectile by a Moblin

This Moblin near Hateno Tower had a perfectly good weapon—I guess he just likes throwing Bokoblins.

Chase a bird in the hopes of dropping it with an arrow, then sadly watch it escape into the air

Intentionally set a club on fire to boost its attack power

Flee screaming from bees and lightning strikes

Punt a bomb at me like a soccer ball

Push aside a stunned companion’s prone body in order to steal the weapon it just dropped

Stalk and pursue wildlife of all shapes and sizes—including shooting flaming arrows at a wild boar from horseback, accidentally setting fire to the field in the process

Lie flat on its belly behind rocks by roadways to ambush travelers

Scratch its butt, then its armpit, smell the result, and eat it

Something that will never get old to me is stealing weapons from these dudes. They often leave them propped up against logs in their camps, and if you sprint (or make use of an elixir that boosts your speed), you can steal their gear while they’re watching. When you do that, they point at you and shriek before scrabbling at the ground to search for a rock to throw, and the utter indignation on display never fails to put a smile on my face. I tend to do this instead of just sneaking in to steal their gear because I relish that pissed-off moment. Maybe that makes me a bad person.

As if life wasn’t crappy enough for this dude camped in the Breach of Demise, now I have his favorite club.

The amount of energy spent by the dev team animating and programming all of these behaviors shows how much thought they put into the actual life of a Bokoblin—if you’re interested in learning more about that, I’d recommend checking out the third installment of the “Making of” video series over here—and they did the same with every enemy genus in the game. The result is a world in which the fantastical species from the Legend of Zelda universe are a completely believable part of an ecosystem. 

And seriously, even back in the concept-art stage some of them carved out a pretty sweet life for themselves in Hyrule. Check out this guy. He’s got bones. He’s got a drawbridge. He’s set.

Or how about this guy? Open concept. Natural materials. Modular filth piles for freeform lounging. Quite the pad, really.

In a world filled with more familiar fauna like butterflies and lizards, it can be hard to resist the urge to see your enemies as anything more than just grist for materials. But try to remember that they’re fellow creatures in Hyrule, and well worth a nature documentary. (Even though, yeah, they seriously ARE grist for important materials.)

—Nate B.

[coc-lance]

The Beginning. (P#0001)

You are prepared for what is to come. Most of the last year has been spent honing your body and mind to prepare for the challenges ahead. You are the Champion of Ingnam. The one who will journey to the demon realm and guarantee the safety of your friends and family, even though you’ll never see them again. You wipe away a tear as you enter the courtyard and see Elder Nomur waiting for you. You are ready.

The walk to the tainted cave is long and silent. Elder Nomur does not speak. There is nothing left to say. The two of you journey in companionable silence. Slowly the black rock of Mount Ilgast looms closer and closer, and the temperature of the air drops. You shiver and glance at the Elder, noticing he doesn’t betray any sign of the cold. Despite his age of nearly 80, he maintains the vigor of a man half his age. You’re glad for his strength, as assisting him across this distance would be draining, and you must save your energy for the trials ahead.

The entrance of the cave gapes open, sharp stalactites hanging over the entrance, giving it the appearance of a monstrous mouth. Elder Nomur stops and nods to you, gesturing for you to proceed alone.

The cave is unusually warm and damp, and your body reacts with a sense of growing warmth focusing in your groin, your manhood hardening for no apparent reason. You were warned of this and press forward, ignoring your body’s growing needs. A glowing purple-pink portal swirls and flares with demonic light along the back wall. Cringing, you press forward, keenly aware that your body seems to be anticipating coming in contact with the tainted magical construct. Closing your eyes, you gather your resolve and leap forwards. Vertigo overwhelms you and you black out...

You wake with a splitting headache and a body full of burning desire. A shadow darkens your view momentarily and your training kicks in. You roll to the side across the bare ground and leap to your feet. A surprised looking imp stands a few feet away, holding an empty vial. He’s completely naked, an improbably sized pulsing red cock hanging between his spindly legs. You flush with desire as a wave of lust washes over you, your mind reeling as you fight the urge to ram your cock down his throat. The strangeness of the thought surprises you.

The imp says, “I’m amazed you aren’t already chasing down my cock, human. The last Champion was an eager whore for me by the time she woke up. This lust draft made sure of it.”

The imp shakes the empty vial to emphasize his point. You reel in shock at this revelation - you’ve just entered the demon realm and you’ve already been drugged! You tremble with the aching need in your groin, but resist, righteous anger lending you strength.

In desperation you leap towards the imp, watching with glee as his cocky smile changes to an expression of sheer terror. The smaller creature is no match for your brute strength as you pummel him mercilessly. You pick up the diminutive demon and punt him into the air, frowning grimly as he spreads his wings and begins speeding into the distance.

The imp says, “FOOL! You could have had pleasure unending... but should we ever cross paths again you will regret humiliating me! Remember the name Zetaz, as you’ll soon face the wrath of my master!”

Your pleasure at defeating the demon ebbs as you consider how you’ve already been defiled. You swear to yourself you will find the demon responsible for doing this to you and the other Champions, and destroy him AND his pet imp.

You look around, surveying the hellish landscape as you plot your next move. The portal is a few yards away, nestled between a formation of rocks. It does not seem to exude the arousing influence it had on the other side. The ground and sky are both tinted different shades of red, though the earth beneath your feet feels as normal as any other lifeless patch of dirt. You settle on the idea of making a camp here and fortifying this side of the portal. No demons will ravage your beloved hometown on your watch.

It does not take long to set up your tent and a few simple traps. You’ll need to explore and gather more supplies to fortify it any further. Perhaps you will even manage to track down the demons who have been abducting the other champions!

Your campsite is fairly simple at the moment. Your tent and bedroll are set in front of the rocks that lead to the portal. You have a small fire pit as well. You have a number of traps surrounding your makeshift home, but they are fairly simple and may not do much to deter a demon. The portal shimmers in the background as it always does, looking menacing and reminding you of why you came.

It’s light outside, a good time to explore and forage for supplies with which to fortify your camp.

You are a 5 foot 11 inch tall human, with a solid build that displays a decent amount of muscle. You are currently wearing comfortable clothes and using your fists as a weapon. Your face is human in shape and structure, with light skin. It has a well-defined jawline and a fairly masculine profile. Your short, blonde hair looks good on you, accentuating your features well.

You have a humanoid shape with the usual torso, arms, hands, and fingers. You have well-formed thighs, and your hand-filling backside fills out your clothing nicely. Two normal human legs grow down from your waist, ending in normal human feet.

You have two flat breasts, each supporting one 0.2-inch nipple.

Your shaft is 5.5 inches long and 1 inch thick. A beanbag with a pair of balls swings heavily beneath your ample cock. You estimate each of them to be about one inch across.

You have one anus, placed between your butt-cheeks where it belongs.

Your money-purse is devoid of any currency.

What will you do?

[saltineofswing]

EXISTENTIAL THREATS

“If you ask me the pre-eminent thought on a Warlock’s mind, at any given time, should be ‘Yes, but at what cost?’“- Andal Brask

7.2k words. Yarrow-15 and Aster belong to @sedimentarydearwatson, and nameless belongs to @eyeb0t.

-----°-----°-----

“This isn’t a retrieval mission,” Aster said into the dense silence and the rumble of the jumpship as it hurtled through NLS, “You know that, right?”

Yarrow’s jaw tightened slightly.

“I’m just saying,” the Ghost continued despite every indication she didn’t want it to, “That, hm, there’s no guarantee that- well, I’m just concerned that if we-“

“I’ll do what I have to do.” There was no respite from tension in her voice, no lighthearted attempt to hide the metaphorical stone sliding around in her metaphorical stomach. Seven bitter, pointed words- not necessarily directed at her Ghost, but straining against a certain cloying tightness across her chest and in the artificial tendons of her elbows. Aster let its eye dart self-consciously around the cockpit of the jumpship, and did not respond.

NLS space peeled back away from them like a gossamer moonflower, opening up and depositing them roughly in orbit over Venus; the sun was behind them, and the planet filled the viewport with a spill of colors that made Yarrow’s optics hurry to adjust. She keyed her communicator and nodded to Aster; it pulsed warmly and locked her into an orbital channel, connected to a terrestrial transceiver that she knew painfully well. 

“Euclid-319, this is Yarrow-15 inbound for the Ishtar Sink. How copy?” In any other circumstance the businesslike officiality of her tone would have been unusual. In any other circumstance the way her jaw adjusted and the way her fingers clenched the jumpship’s controls would have denoted an unusual amount of frustration.

In any other circumstance Euclid would have answered the call.

Euclid-319 had been missing for three months. And the Vanguard, keen under the Traveler’s nickel glint as they were, had sent Yarrow to investigate.

“I say again, Euclid-319, this is Yarrow-15, inbound for the Ishtar Sink. How copy?” She paused, hoping for a reply. “I’m coming down their either way, screwloose. Either hail me and give me my vector or I’ll come and shake it out of you.” Nothing. She keyed off the channel and pressed her mouth as shut as it could possibly go, angling her jumpship to dive towards Venus. Atmospheric turbulence rumbled across the engines as the nose of her ship parted clouds and cut through smog; the jumpship knifed out of the cloudbank over the volcano and lazily swooped across the side of the mountain. Yarrow had a sudden and angry urge to smash her ship into the tall rainswept statue that hung out over the Shattered Coast and destroy the stupid fucking thing. She didn’t- but the thought gave her a brief moment of satisfaction.

It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t have volunteered or demanded to go, or both. The Vanguard knew that she and Euclid had something of a bond; and it was that kind of bond that supposedly made her so valuable for this mission. This ‘mission’. Thrice-damned Warlocks and their wretched inscrutability. For a Hunter, ‘hasn’t been seen or heard from’ for three months meant they were doing their slagging job. Titans didn’t even have that problem; so far as Yarrow knew none had ever been out of contact with the Tower for longer than a day. She reckoned if one tried they’d just lose it and come sprinting back to make sure it was still standing.

Warlocks, though? Too many bad things had come from Warlocks going silent. Too many close calls. Too many crack teams of legendary Guardians thrown together to turn a half-mile stretch of old world into a smoking crater because a Warlock had started poking around in their Ghost’s insides with a prong of bent Darkness. And Yarrow would’ve been lying to claim she hadn’t seen it coming. Or, something like it at the very least.

Euclid had been… odd for a few months. A series of events in succession that had rattled him in one way or another, one happening too soon after the other for the admittedly unstable Exo to properly compensate. The arrival of Oryx in-system had been a nasty time for all of them, but Euclid had completely overloaded when all those Warlock minds touched. Then the encounter with Toland in the Dreadnought. Then a mission in the Ishtar Sink a while back… well. She knew that Euclid and ‘death’ were hardly on the best of terms, but she’d never seen a Warlock strain their powers so much that their head popped. And when he’d woken up, three whole days of memory just gone… it was a brutal thing to lose. And his memory had taken a longer time than usual to recover after that.

He’d even forgotten her name for a moment, one rainy day in the Tower. Only for a second, but a second was all it took. That had been the thing that did it; she’d caught him thinking a little too hard, quiet a little too long, just barely too slow to respond when asked a question. Formulating some sort of idea. She wished she’d told him to drop whatever stupid thing had nettled his head.

Her boots splashed into the Venusian muck slurry and she whipped her cloak over her shoulder. She wished she’d told off the Vanguard when they approached her on this mission in the first place. They didn’t need it. He was fine. But she hadn’t, because she knew better than to blindly assume. And they’d sent her out. A scouting run.

And if need be, a preemptive, decisive, remorseless strike.

“You left your rifle in the ship.”

“Not gonna need it.” She patted her sidearm, faithfully clipped into its holster.

“Um,” Aster said in that way it said ‘um’ when it was wobbling on the razor’s edge of snoot and deference. “You’re not going to need it?” It flitted around in front of her helmet as she strode towards the Academy. Might as well check the old haunts first. “You and I have seen Euclid rip a Hydra in half with his mind. Remember that time he threw that Fallen Captain into that Skiff turbine? Crashed the entire thing into the mountainside? I remember that. And let’s not forget the time you died in front of him and he forgot that I could resurrect you, and he went crazy and blew up about two dozen Vex and an entire cliff.”

“I like to think that last one was one of the defining moments in our friendship. What’s your point?”

“I just think that- well, if this turns into a fight, I’m thinking I don’t want to have to pick you molecule by molecule out of the volcano.” She reached up and grabbed Aster sharply, making the Ghost buzz in surprise and indignation; she stopped walking for a moment.

“There might not be a fight,” she said evenly, albeit through a clenched jaw. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Aster was silent for a few seconds as it eyed her, and she resisted punting the thing. “You’ve thought about it already, haven’t you?”

Her mouthlights finally flickered, an uneasy twitch, half a proper grimace- invisible behind her helmet. “Pulse rifle is too slow,” she started stonily. “The key to the whole thing is speed. I’ve the advantage on him there. His skullcase isn’t the sturdiest thing in the world, and he never wears a helmet. Sidearm’s quick enough to get up in a split second.” She patted the gun again, a little forced. “I know which side of his head is the one with the rupture problems. I can get four or five shots off before he gets his hand up.”

It was difficult to read a Ghost’s expression before it spoke, even when the Ghost was your own; the fact that part of it was obscured by her fingers probably didn’t help. It seemed stunned. “… And… what if that doesn’t work?”

“Then I’ll grab him by a horn and blow his head up,” she snapped. “Happy?”

“No,” it said, somewhat cowed. She released it, and it vanished as her boots clunked onto tile and sidewalk.

The Academy was empty; even the tangle of damp server rooms beneath were unusually devoid of any traces of Euclid. She managed to slip into the private, well-hidden den of personal things Euclid had once called ‘home’. It was painfully familiar. Perfectly the same as he’d left it. She could remember how difficult it had been to get him to finally leave, the day she’d volunteered to help him move into the Tower. “I need to be here,” he’d said. “This is where I belong.”

She picked up a dust-covered book and realized that he hadn’t been back here since then. She turned to Aster and pulled her hood down. “Can you get a lock on Constant?”

“Been trying since we reached the Sink,” Aster assured her. “If it’s even still, you know… around, I haven’t gotten a lock on it yet.”

“Keep trying,” she said. “I’m going to check the garden. Don’t poke anything. You remember what happened last time.” She wandered through the den and into the back passages of Euclid’s bunker; it didn’t take her long to reach the garden. The flowers had all thrived and grown wildly in the absence of Euclid’s careful tending- the roof seemed to have shifted enough for rainwater to drip in. Or, something had shifted it. There was no sign of Euclid anywhere in the Academy. Was it possible he wasn’t even on Venus?

“There’s some… interesting data at the forefront of the recently accessed files on Euclid’s personal Academy mainframes,” Aster buzzed in her ear. “Recently accessed meaning, right around the time Ikora estimates he went off the grid.”

“Great,” Yarrow muttered. “Let’s have it then.”

“Transcripts of Dr. Shim’s work with Vex simulation loops,” Aster mused; she could tell that Aster was interested in the data, but they didn’t have time to dig into it at the moment- Aster knew it, too. “That stuff we picked up when you and Euclid scouted out the Archive. Some, er, concerning notations from an outside source- Euclid I’m sure- regarding potential conclusions to be drawn from such a widespread network of simultaneously active simulations with such a precise degree of accuracy.”

“Hmm…” She sat down on one of the larger rocks; the sand crunched softly as her weight depressed the stone. Simulations. The Archive. If that was the most recent thing Euclid had been digging into, then maybe-

“Wait,” Aster said, perking up; the alarm in its voice made Yarrow lift her head, and Aster spun sharply in the direction of the Academy. “I just got a reading on Constant. Not a big one. But-“

“The Hall of Whispers?” Yarrow asked. She was on her feet. Aster dipped a foresegment in a curt nod and she started walking; Aster zipped out of her view and she heard the Ghost speaking in her helmet.

“You don’t think he’s meddling with Vex technology, do you?” Aster queried. “Well. Any more than he usually does? I know he’s, err, an authority on the Vex, but there’s a lot to go wrong… maybe you were right. Maybe we’re not going to get a fight.”

Yarrow snorted; it almost felt like she’d cleared Euclid’s secret hideout in two strides (And maybe she had- Hunters had their own peculiarities) and was on her way down through the Archives the Commons a dozen empty places the crashed Skiff she knew so well Vex incursion field too little too late to catch her the Citadel loomed menacingly overhead through the gap in the buildings but suddenlyshewas pastthedoorsasuddenrushtheFallenpatroldidn’tevenseehershe found herself standing stock-still, amidst the empty corridor that made up the Hall of Whispers.

“Four steps,” she mumbled to herself, almost absently, as the world seemed to resolve into clarity around her after the ten-league-strides she’d been taking; the door to the Archive at the back of the Hall of Whispers was cloaked in ivy, but she knew it well enough not to be fooled- this was no dead end. “Aster,” she said, feeling tingles of nervous anticipation hot in the small of her back. “Crack it open. We’re burning daylight.”

The clunking rumble of mechanisms somewhere inside the wall did not disguise the sharp hiss of pressurized air that ushered forth from the Archive as the doors parted in the middle, rippling across the ivy vines and making the leaves shake- for a moment Yarrow fancied she heard the ‘whispers’ for which this area had been named. A ghost of clipboards and papers rustling. The phantom murmur of scientists working overtime to understand a class of being far beyond human comprehension. A trap into which many good Guardians had fallen before, and- if her mission today was any indication- a trap many good Guardians would continue to fall into until time unending.

The Archive was dull, dark, and dusty- none of which terribly reassured Yarrow. “No signs of movement,” Aster murmured in her ear, “For quite some time.” There was a pensive pause, but Yarrow didn’t halt her forward movement. “Er. I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t have gotten somebody else to come on this mission. Every new empty room we walk into makes me, well, a little more worried. Maybe-“

“Aster, shut up for a second,” Yarrow interjected; it wasn’t so much out of frustration as intrigue. “This console has a data drive on it.”

The Ghost indignantly emerged into the air beside her head, aftsegments jittering in irritation. “Yes, and?”

“Oh, think about it you cube. Euclid’s been in and out of this place so many times his name may as well be on the ceiling.” She gestured emphatically in the air to accentuate her point, then jabbed a finger accusatorily at the data drive, as if she’d uncovered some latchkey clue that undoubtedly put the answer to this little mystery in their hands. “He’s stripped this place of every useful piece of external data. What’s a data drive doing sitting on a computer console?”

“Maybe he…” Aster trailed off at the flat stare it received from its Guardian, the thick plate that rested above Yarrow’s eyes doing a marvelous job of accentuating the piercing exasperation she was experiencing at the suggestion that Euclid could /possibly/ have overlooked something. Yarrow stepped up to the console and quickly cast an eye across the Archive, keenly searching for any signs of life that may have spoken to an ambush as she plugged the drive into the console; a tasty-looking morsel of data would make perfect bait for a brainsy, head-in-his-books Warlock like Euclid-

The console fuzzed to life with a sharp screech of poorly compressed data, making Aster let out a peculiar hiccupping yelp and dematerialize mid-motion of diving into cover behind Yarrow’s shoulder. Yarrow rolled her optics, but the console only took a moment to process everything on the drive, and then it was playing video. But not just any video- Yarrow’s mouthlights dimmed conspiratorily, and her eyelights thinned to slits out of habit as she examined the familiar footage. A fireteam of three trekked through the swamp outside the Ishtar Sink, near one of the entrances to the Vault of Glass that had spontaneously sprang up around the Waking Ruins.

“Is this from… that mission you went on a couple months ago?” Aster said. The Ghost, seemingly deciding the threat of a glitchy computer screen was negligible, had emerged from demat on the other side of her head, and was watching the screen as intently as Yarrow. “The one you went on with Euclid and nameless? And that team of- oh, what did they call themselves- ‘Wolfslayers’ from House Exile?”

“Cloriks and his Wolfslayers,” Yarrow confirmed. “Good bunch. Fond of collecting people-parts. Volos calls ‘em the ‘Repo Squad’, but I don’t get the reference. Euclid really pulled their fat outta the fire on this mission.”

“He also died on this mission,” Aster reminded her. Unnecessarily. “What’s footage of this mission doing on an external disc in the Archive?”

Lacking an answer for her companion, she fell quiet. This particular strain of footage was culled from the very end of their outing- Yarrow and nameless had been sent out looking for evidence of renewed Vex activity in the Vault and Yarrow had contracted Euclid to joint them on the jaunt. Partially because of his knowledge of the area, and his fluency in the Exile dialect�� partially because it had (at first) been a fun excuse to get two of her very good friends in the same place for an extended period of time. The mission had ended in an absolute mad dash back through the tangled half-real geometries of the Vault, racing time itself in a nigh-literal capacity. Under ordinary circumstances it would’ve been the kind of thing Yarrow bragged about during downtime. But the end of their sprint still left a sour taste in her mouth.

The video footage from the Ishtar camera showed them all (nameless and Euclid in front, Yarrow just behind, three of the original twelve Fallen straggling on her heels) exiting the Vault at top speed- the stone doors began to slide shut, and Yarrow saw Euclid pivot and dig his heels into the ground; the audio feed burst into static and the video quality dipped slightly. The doors slowed, but the last of the Fallen were barely reaching the threshold, and Yarrow saw his arms raise, saw the doors grinding against the force of his powers. She saw herself stop and turn to him; her voice was barely audible through the static-ridden audio feed, but she remembered yelling at him- no time, no time, let’s go!

Her fingers tightened at her side as she watched the recording of him twitch and flinch, and knew that was when his cameras and hearing had gone. The grinding of the ancient mechanisms in the doors as they slunk inexorably closer to one another, combined with the static buzz, was still not enough that Yarrow couldn’t faintly hear the strained scream he’d let out, saw nameless whip around in alarm, saw two of the Vandals stop and turn with their shrapnel launchers raised.

She saw his arms visibly trembling, shaking as if he were seizing, saw his shoulders hunch and his form crumple; the moment he saw Cloriks bound out of the Vault the doors slammed loudly shut and a series of small, bright bursts ran up his spine with an audible POP-POP-POP-POP as his primary neural relays blew out under the immense strain- and there was a sudden and much more substantial detonation as his head burst open on one side like a grapefruit struck by a shotgun shell. One of his horns went spinning away into the muck. In the dark of the Archive, Yarrow couldn’t help but flinch in sympathetic pain.

On the screen his body slumped like a marionette whose strings had been cut; the sudden absence of audio-video distortion made it easy for Yarrow to hear herself shout, and she saw nameless’s hand reach out with an open palm. Euclid’s body slid backwards along the ground as if someone had yanked him away with a rope tied around his waist. His boots bounced slightly as he was dragged along the uneven earth, and Cloriks sprinted past Yarrow, barking orders in Exile-dialect to his fellows as an incursion field clouded the video; the crackling black cloud’s energy discharge knocked the camera’s power source out and the feed died, leaving Yarrow staring grimly at a dark monitor that was still buzzing softly now that there was no longer any power coursing through it.

The silence stretched.

“He was really busted up about that,” Aster murmured, slightly more sympathetic after having just watched Euclid die bloody (Well, sort of) on a camera. Seeing it from such a detached angle was different than existing in the moment. The odd detail of Euclid’s left horn twirling almost lazily away from his head had stuck in her mind, at the time; watching it again she realized she hadn’t noticed the way his skullcase had jerked savagely to the right in response to his head bursting. She glanced up at her Ghost as it began to speak again, shaking the memories out of her head. “I remember he didn’t even pretend to eat that loaf of plantain-bread that nameless baked him.”

“That was weird,” she agreed. “He loves ingesting organic matter and burning it for fuel. One of those little peculiarities I always thought made him… I don’t know.”

“Less likely to vanish into the swamps of Venus with his Ghost and a vid of his own death?” Aster retorted dryly, flitting around her head to scan some of the surrounding consoles. It seemed to have remembered why they were actually there. “Well you get no engrams for assumption today, I’m afraid.” It paused a moment as it computed; the Ghost’s eye blinked once and when it opened, it cast a wide beam of light across the dark rafters of the bunker, trailing it across the outer walkways and down the central mainframe column, lit in its own circle of natural light from above. “Still getting faint residuals of Constant down here. All over the place, actually. It’s tuned to a somewhat… peculiar frequency. I’m not sure it’s one that’s been utilized since the Golden Age. Maybe they were trying to disappear? For a little while, at least.”

Yarrow followed the path of Aster’s flashlight across the room, lazily leaning against the console- but as it traced the central mainframe column she stood bolt-upright, tense and leaning forward as she tried to verify what she’d seen. “Aster.”

“I mean, I guess it wouldn’t be too far of a reach. He’s had secret projects before.”

“Aster.”

“What?! You know, I’m not terribly fond of you interrupting me every five minutes today-“

Yarrow snatched the Ghost out of the air and pointed its eye at the ball huddled at the base of the Archive’s mainframe; a bundle of curled-up limbs, magenta gauntlets poking out from underneath distinctive saffron robes… a pair of crimson horns poking up over his forearms. She hadn’t seen him at first because of how motionless he was, how still, almost like a corpse- silent and immobile.

She released her Ghost much more quickly this time, letting Aster’s foresegments spin curiously as it drifted into the air. “Oh,” it said quietly; Yarrow stepped forward, cautious but firm, closing the distance between herself and Euclid.

“Shut off that light,” she said to Aster, waving her hand over her shoulder at the little ball of segments. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She’d settled into grim resolution, now, pulling her helmet off of her head and letting it rest on the ground by the ramp up to the mainframe. As she drew closer to her friend, motes of disturbed particles drifting across the shaft of light he was caught in, she realized that he was absolutely covered in dust. A thick layer of it, at that. Some sort of cable ran between Euclid and the mainframe’s console, a cobweb stretching along the underside, and Yarrow’s jaw tightened. What had he done? Ever so faintly she could see the flickers of light on the mainframe’s monitor, dimmed almost to the point of darkness- but a sign of life, at the very least.

“Euclid?” She prompted, hesitantly stepping forward again. Aster’s segments twitched in concern, and after a moment she signaled for it to dematerialize; the quiet rustle of its molecules vanishing was the only noise now, as Yarrow’s stance changed slightly in her approach, ready for anything. “Hey hornhead, you in there? This is, uh, very… concerning.” She paused, waiting any kind of indication he was listening. She received none. Had he burned himself out? Done something stupid, gotten his processors fried way out here where nobody would think to look? She approached another step. “Can you hear me? Euclid?” She reached out for him, slowly, fingers uncurling slowly as she reached for his shoulder, almost afraid she’d get zapped at the point of contact, and something in her chest clenched at the layers of dust and rust that saturated the form of her friend-

A split-second’s blink would have missed the movements, nigh-simultaneous; Calm silence broken by the noise of her cloak fluttering after her with the suddenness of her change in stance, an imperceptibly slower response to Euclid’s hand shooting up to grab her wrist, her hand centimeters from his dusty shoulder. Tension shot lightning bolts down her spine and the backs of her knees, rooting her heels to the floor as her cloak settled.

It took a surprising amount of willpower to take her hand off of her sidearm, but it didn’t stray far. Euclid creaked audibly at several joints, cobwebs pulling away as he uncurled for the first time in what Yarrow could only assume was literal months. “Yarrow,” he started, and his audio was fuzzed and crackling with disuse.

Her mouthlights blared in abject alarm as Euclid came back to life right before her eyes; she unplugged him from the mainframe and helped him carefully back up onto his feet, noting the way his internal mechanisms whined and strained. He hadn’t moved at all, obviously, not since at least his reported disappearance.

He seemed to be able to stand, at the very least, and he started working the kinks out of his body with odd, jerky movements- his own mouthlights signaling disoriented and confused as his head, arms, and torso moved on jagged, jumpy swivels like some ancient, crappy animatronic. Constant appeared from behind his left arm and gave Yarrow and Aster’s looks of shock a sage nod before it went about checking the mainframe.

“… Yarrow,” he said again, voice still slightly fuzzy, once he seemed to have gotten his hydraulics flushed and his core batteries were fully functional again. “It’s, er, good to see you. Well, the real you. Well-“ he mumbled a bit, hands darting in their usual birdlike way as he half-reached out to pat her and half waved emphatically. The mannerisms were shockingly normal after all of the bizarre shit she’d slogged through to get here. “The real, um, in the real world you.” Constant flitted around him, performing what Yarrow could only imagine were some cursory check-up scans. 

“You okay?” She asked him carefully as he clapped his hands up and down his robes to dislodge the dust that had gathered. He looked back up to her and nodded, mouthlights strobing a pale smile.

“Running at one-hundred-percent functionality,” he assured her.

Yarrow promptly cracked her fist across his face. The strike knocked Euclid back against the mainframe column and then- when he tripped over his own feet- to the ground.

“You ABSOLUTE FUCKING BASTARD!” She bellowed, hurling her clenched fists about in some poorly mixed swirl of anger, anxiety, and relieved exasperation.

“So much for avoiding the fight,” Aster remarked dryly, ducking underneath one of Yarrow’s flailing appendages.

“Do you have ANY IDEA how much GRIEF you have given me over the last week!?” Euclid was getting back to his feet, dusting himself off again; her punch had cracked the small lens on one of his forecameras, and he reached up to gingerly dab a finger across the crack as if swabbing a bloodied nose. “No warning! You left with ZERO warning! You didn’t think to swing by the Vanguard before you went off on your thrice-Hivescrewing jungle pilgrimage to jam your brain into the shittiest, oldest computer you could find!? Not even a damned note!?” She grabbed Euclid by his collar, shaking him back and forth, his apparent willingness to just sit there and take her tongue-lashing only egging her on. “I could’ve SHOT you just then! Maybe I bloody well should have too, save myself a whole world of trouble! I could still beat your horns off your skull for this, you- you-“

She held him at arm’s length for a moment, seemingly at a loss for words; her optics darted across his face. His mouthlights patterned out a rapid-fire series of emotions worn on his sleeve- fondness, regret, that same disorientation, and… something deeper. Something fathomless and indecipherable, like a micro-expression that gave her impressions of… she didn’t know what. Nostalgia, maybe, or déjà vu.

After a tense silence, she pulled him in close and threw her arms around him, giving him a tight and earnest hug. His hesitation lasted only a moment before he brought his arms up in return, grabbing a handful of her cloak and letting out a small sigh.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured to her, tightening his hold on her ever so slightly. “I should’ve said something. I didn’t want anyone to stop me. I needed to try.”

“Try what?” She said, pulling away from him. Her tone edged towards desperation, long past eager to know what his motivations for this peculiar sojourn were. “What did you come here to do, Euclid? You covered your tracks… well, unusually well if I may be so bold. What were you doing for so long?”

Her friend turned slowly to glance over the Archive’s mainframe before he returned his gaze to her. “A little self-maintenance,” he started evenly, folding his hands in front of his midsection and shifting his head to let Constant fix up the damage Yarrow had done to his camera. “And… I suppose, to put it bluntly, I’ve been running simulations.”

“I knew it!” Aster chirped from Yarrow’s shoulder; now that its Guardian was no longer throwing her arms about it seemed to have taken up its usual residential place. “We found those files you accessed in the server room. Entries related to the experiments with Vex technology the scientists were running down here.”

Constant turned to fix Aster with an unreadable look. “I closed those,” it said. “Did you dig the locale out of the server’s root directory?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting… I thought I’d managed to implement a redirect.” It turned to glance at Euclid, who feigned unconvincing ignorance in his twiddling thumbs; it was endearing enough to make Yarrow snort, although she hadn’t quite let go of her tepid unease over the whole situation.

“So, you were experimenting with Vex tech again,” she said, folding her arms. He canted his head slightly, but he didn’t shy away from her disappointment.

“Yes,” he said. “Actually, I rebuilt the Vex algorithmic predictors from the ground up and constructed a unique replicator engine. It wasn’t culled from Vex technology, per se. I didn’t plug Vex tech into myself, since I know you’re going to ask about that. And before you ask, Aster, I didn’t use any Vex shortcuts- it was one hundred percent Guardian-endeavored programming.”

“Well, I’m suitably creeped out,” Aster said bouncily. “Shall we all have a nice sit and lose ourselves to fathomless simulacra for a few months?”

“You said ‘was’,” Yarrow cut in, tone sharp. This was important. His answer was important. “You got rid of it? Just now?”

Euclid was silent for a few moments before his reply. When he finally spoke up again he seemed somewhat distant, as if he was thinking about something else entirely. “Yes,” he started; he examined his hand for a moment as if intently critiquing each movement of his fingers for delays or function issues due to his long bout of inactivity. “Just now. I ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.015 million simulations while I was away. The most recent was sufficient enough to push me to the conclusion that the… risks of this experiment significantly outweighed the rewards.”

Yarrow took a moment to absorb this information. If Euclid was being honest, something serious must have happened while he was lost in his own mind. “The very last one, huh?” She queried flatly. “Seems convenient. But not bad, I guess, if it convinced you to shut down whatever this was.”

His response was a noncommittal shrug, which didn’t put Yarrow any more at ease. “Sometimes a dream ends just in time for you to wake up,” he pointed out with a voice that was far away, “And that is, more or less, all it was. Just a series of… dreams.” He turned to stare back at the central column, still lit in a shaft of light from above; Yarrow saw the tension in his shoulders and his spine. It was almost temptation, she figured- almost an urge to go sit back down, plug back in. Experience the simulations. Maybe go back to the one she’d pulled him out of. What had he learned in there, she wondered? Something quite tempting, that was for sure.

“Come on,” she finally said, reaching out and taking one of his hands. “Let’s get you out of this dusty basement. Tell Ikora that you’re not dead or gone mad- bet she’ll be happier to hear it than angry.”

“Careful with that bet. Some of us have spent the last four months diving through a simulation-based probability engine.” The joke made her mouthlights flutter in amusement, and she tugged him along until they were both headed for the entrance. She felt… relieved? No, that wasn’t a nuanced enough sentiment for what she was feeling. Tense. Uncomfortable. Getting Euclid back up on his feet and functioning hadn’t changed that. She’d been so close to killing him moments ago, but the revelation that she wasn’t going to have to didn’t settle her unease. Euclid’s quiet as she pulled him through the Archive didn’t do much to help with that, either; being in the chatterbox’s presence and having him oddly quiet but not outright laconic was a couple steps to the left of unsettling and several back of normal, and she approved of neither. She couldn’t shake a feeling in the back of her skull, something foreboding, an empty gap in her information that was chewing at her uncomfortably- because if she let it go without making doubly sure, she knew that (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow) something bad could happen.

She stopped him at the top of the stairs with an outstretched arm, an upraised palm. He paused mid-motion, almost too quickly, as if he’d been expecting her to do this. Duty wrestled bitter with loyalty.

“What did you see?” She demanded.

“Yarrow, I-“

She set her free hand back on her sidearm, and no further words needed to be said. Some could’ve said it was a powerful image- a Hunter, two steps up the staircase, left hand held out in barrier against a Warlock, right hand on the sidearm at her other side. Having to be the Hunter in that image made Yarrow’s insides feel slick with discomfort.

For his part, Euclid seemed to understand the necessity of her behavior, because he didn’t seem upset by the threat of his best friend drawing a gun on him. Or, she thought suddenly, maybe he’d just seen it enough to have gotten over it.

The silence stretched for a tense moment. Euclid broke the stare-down by glancing down, away, and then over his shoulder. “I knew Andal Brask.” He turned to look back at her. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.” Every so often Yarrow faced harsh reminders that Euclid was actually considerably older than she was. This was one of them.

“When I was newly minted as a Guardian, Andal was the Hunter’s Vanguard.” He chuckled wistfully and took the two steps separating them to walk at her side, taking her outstretched hand and pulling her along until they reached the threshold to the Archive, where he paused. “I didn’t have, hmm, an abundant amount of contact with him, you can imagine. Passing conversations. I was a great deal more nervous and, I suppose, unstable. I didn’t do well with people.” He paused. “Well, I still don’t.”

“You’re doing a fine job of proving that right now,” Yarrow replied flatly, impatiently folding her arms. “Get to the point.”

“I saw him not long before he was killed. I’ll tell you what he said to me.” He sat back slightly; Yarrow saw his body language shift as he called up the relevant data, tightened his hands behind his back in the way they did when he was giving a direct quote, and Yarrow was pricklingly surprised he could remember it at all. “He said, ‘Kiddo, sometimes there’s jes’ a plan fer the way things’re meant to be’.” Hearing Euclid speaking with the lackadaisical drawl she sometimes caught Cayde lapsing into was peculiar. “That’s not entirely a true statement. There are actually several plans.” He glanced back down the gently turning stairway, and Yarrow followed his gaze. “I’ve been playing them out. The plans.”

“Ominous,” Aster remarked.

“I suppose.”

Yarrow let her hands fall to her side, but she had to fight the urge to ball them into frustrated fists. “Nobody knows that much about the universe, Euclid. What was the end goal, here? Did you want to be, I dunno, what’s the word-“

“Precognicient.”

“If that means ‘able to predict the future’.”

“It does.”

“Then yeah, ‘precognicient’. Nobody is supposed to be able to do that. You notice that’s an ability noticeably absent from our little suite of special talents? There’s a reason for that.”

Euclid tilted his head to the side. “You’ve professed yourself to sometimes being able to tell where a target is going to be, before it gets there.”

“That’s different and you know it,” Yarrow shot back, jabbing an accusatory finger in his direction. “Don’t handle me, Euclid. I hate it when you do that.” 

“I’m not,” he protested evenly; she detected a hint of, she supposed, exasperation in the earnest flicker of his mouthlights, and she finally pinned down what was bothering her; The calm serenity of Euclid’s demeanor reminded her uncomfortably of the way he acted when he shut down his emotions. Cold logic levied in place of loyalty or emotional bonds. What exactly had he meant by ‘self-maintenance’? “The Vex can do it, within a limited scope predicated on certain predetermined variables. Hunters can do it, with much less math and much more emotional intuitivity. It’s a logical extension of the software in your rocket launcher that lets you blind-fire it from cover based on the last known positions of your enemies.”

“My rocket launcher can’t reduce a Hydra to its individual mechanical parts with a thought!” Yarrow snapped, volume rising slightly. “It’s different, Euclid, because you are one of the most powerful Warlocks I’ve ever seen, and if you wanted you could pull me to pieces with a flick of your wrist!” 

���I wouldn’t!” Euclid responded, indignant and clearly agitated by the implications. “You think I don’t know that I need to be careful? You think I don’t know that the Tower didn’t send you on a retrieval mission?” He stabbed a finger at her sidearm. “They sent you to make sure I wasn’t another Osiris in the making, I know that! I know! I’m not! This entire conversation is moot because I scrapped the program already!”

“Then you shouldn’t have much of a problem with explaining to me what you saw!” She shouted at him, taking a step forward- but he was nearly as tall as she was, and he wasn’t hunched over or receding the way he usually was and all it did was make her feel more frustrated. “We’re not leaving until you tell me, in plain terms, because Light be damned I am not bringing a ticking time bomb into the City!”

“Something horrible!” He shouted back, upset ripples pinging through his mouth and throatlights. The rawness of his voice took Yarrow aback- he’d never shouted at her before. “I saw a hundred thousand different ways this day plays out, Yarrow, let alone the following! The average simulation was approximately 121 days, and seven percent of them ended early with you shooting me in the head before I could explain what was going on!” Yarrow’s jaw clacked noisily shut at that- seven percent didn’t sound like much until you gave it the consideration to know that seven percent of 2.6 million was something like 37 hundred thousand times watching Yarrow put her sidearm’s entire clip into Euclid’s head.

“Do you know how many things happen in 121 days? I c-can assure you, the answer is a very understated ‘quite a few���! And- and it was, I don’t know, liberating? Terrifying? Interesting? Humbling? Rejuvenating? To experience it all, over and over again, sometimes exactly the same, sometimes unrecountably different. And then the last one- the last one!- twelve years, Yarrow. Twelve years! To live in there, for twelve years, you know- you know I almost forgot it was a simulation! Four days, real Venus time, and approximately four point six thousand days inside. And then here you are.” His hand shot out and locked around her wrist and she let out a very sudden noise of warning, but he only held her hand up to look at. “And this is… real.” He let go of her hand and almost recoiled, folding one of his hands under the other in front of his chest in an achingly familiar way. “Do you want to know what I saw?” He said, the words small and meek but also a tacit threat that Yarrow suddenly found herself unwilling to challenge.

The silence stretched.

“No,” she finally said. “Let’s just go home.”

She turned and began to walk away so that she wouldn’t have to see him pause and stare back down the hallway to the Archive and remind himself that Venus was not home anymore, but she felt it happen anyway. The Hall of Whispers said four point six thousand things she did not want to hear, but Euclid was at her side by the time she escaped it. For now, that was the important thing.

But later, as she worked on her report for the Vanguard to fill time until Ikora got done chewing Euclid out, she realized that those four days of missing time, those twelve years, those 4,655 days, weighed heavily on her mind. What had he seen? She supposed it didn’t matter, largely. He was still Euclid, her friend, and if anything the new measures of stability he’d managed to obtain via those months sat in dusty silence in the Archive was a good thing.

Besides, she told herself, how bad could it possibly have been?

-----°-----°-----

Simulation: K220//1.0.5//GUNGNIR has been running for 4,655 days, 10 hours, and 35 minutes.

This is approximately 1,551.66 repeating times the average runtime. In real Venus time, this equivocates to approximately four days. You are not sure why you have allowed it to remain running for so long, but it is certainly different from the others.

You are Euclid. Over the course of the past twelve years, You have been busy.

All of You have been busy. All three thousand, eight hundred and twenty nine of You have been busy working towards your goal. You have toiled ceaselessly. You have worked through the day, the night, and everything in between. Across the inhabited system, You carry out countless simultaneous command directives; some simple minutiae, some vital operations.

On Mars, Euclids 1240 through 1299 work preparing an interplanetary neural relay that you fired from the orbital platforms around Venus five weeks ago. On Mercury, Euclids 3205 through 3814- through 3813- through 3812 reclaim another Vex stronghold, marking exactly 30% of the planet now open to Guardian patrol forces. You send an encoded message to the Vanguard informing them of this success, and no longer expect them to reply. On the Moon, Euclids 550 and 1673 beam data on Hive Abominations being nurtured in the Hellmouth to you with a list of suggested specialized units and Guardians to be tasked with their extermination. In The Reef, Euclid-88 and Euclid-333 negotiate and barter with Petra and the Awoken.

On Earth, Euclid-1 (The body that was once known simply as Euclid-319) sits down to lunch with an old friend who no longer enjoys your company, but fears your response should she turn you down. Simultaneously, Euclid-2 sits down to a similar ‘lunch’ with a different friend. You rerouted your two oldest and most familiar bodies from highly vital tasks to sit down with them, for their comfort; you wish they would at least be honest about their feelings. They’re the only two Light-sensitive Euclids (Barring Yourself) currently in operation, and there are certainly better things they could be doing.

On Venus, Euclid-22 and Euclid-34 return with their cargo of recovered Exo bodies and Frames, and load them into the assembly pods for processing, repairs, and the necessary upgrades required to render them suitable vessels. After all, You need all the bodies You can get until You can get the production factories up and running again. You wouldn’t be much good to anybody if you were simply trapped in the Mainframe of sprawling CPUs in the hard drive catacombs under Ishtar. If there’s one thing you learned from Rasputin, it’s that you need to do everything yourself- but if there’s one thing you learned from the Vex, it’s that there’s really no reason ‘yourself’ needs to be one singular entity. You find that several thousand Yourselves each operating independently (With oversight, of course) has proven to be the most effective solution.

Some have called your motives inscrutable; you have been, at times, accused of becoming that which you fought and studied for so long. You have learned to stop relying on the understanding of the Guardians, and the people of Earth.

Your motives are not inscrutable. They are simply complex. At first- after you’d done away with the threat Rasputin’s presence held- when the City began sending Guardians to interfere with your machinations, you feared that perhaps you’d never bring them to see that you weren’t a threat.

(Your literal machinations- orbital platforms, functional transorbital satellites, the complete revitalization and renovation of the Ishtar Sink’s civilian commons; none of that had come without some serious re-investment in the factories and infrastructure of Venus. Startling, you suppose, to see the world suddenly spring back to life.)

But after Guardians began to enter and leave Venus’s jungles with a 100% survival rating, the City began to grudgingly let you do your work. You are still fighting for them. You are still allied with the Vanguard. You still want to see humanity flourish and regain its former splendor. You still feel, after all, it’s not like You suddenly underwent some ruinous transformation and became a Vex mind. Of course not. You set several hundred thousand safeguards in place precisely to prevent that.

You do, however, have a few new goals. And right now, in the thirty-sixth minute of the tenth hour of the four thousand, six hundred and fifty-fifth day, You are currently hurtling through space on an outbound trajectory, five Emissary-class satellites and a Tribute-class computer core accompanied by Euclids 2000 through 2999 aligned for the Reef, where a mere layover is the only thing that stands between You and a universe of knowledge and everything to learn and know that you could ever possibly dream of. Who knows? With enough time, enough luck, and a planet with the proper specifications... You could encourage so much.

You are pleased. Your eyes are manifold. Your arms are endless. Your reach extends indefinitely outward, and You have all the time in any conceivable world. You will know everything, and everything will know You.

You are Euclid-Prime. And in a glorious, terrifying moment, you realize that You must never come to be.

[ds4design]

[Insight] Inside the leadership process of an NFL coach

In the first quarter of a scoreless 2016 AFC Championship game against the New England Patriots, Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos faced third-and-6 from their own 44-yard line. Wide receiver Demaryius Thomas ran a 15-yard out, breaking toward the Broncos’ sideline. He did not catch Manning’s wobbly throw, but there was contact on the play, and Denver’s players and coaching staff appealed to the official for a pass interference call on Patriots cornerback Logan Ryan. They got one, and the Broncos got a first down, scoring the game’s opening touchdown four plays later.

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On the ensuing drive, the Patriots faced third-and-3 at their own 27-yard line. Rob Gronkowski ran a wheel route up the Broncos’ sideline with T.J. Ward in coverage. As the Patriots tight end turned to look back for the ball, the defender made contact and shoved him, preventing a catch. Both Gronk and Tom Brady yelled for a penalty. The flag did not come, and the Patriots were forced to punt.

Similar plays led to different outcomes that benefited the team on the sideline closest to the on-field action. Most NFL refs would likely say they are immune any sideline bias. “If I make a call because a coach is screaming at me on one side of the field and it’s wrong, that’s a bad day for me,” former NFL official Scott Green told us. (The NFL declined to comment.)

But as it turns out, a sideline bias in the NFL is real, and it’s spectacular. To prove it, we looked at the rates at which refs call the NFL’s most severe penalties, including defensive pass interference, aggressive infractions like personal fouls and unnecessary roughness, and offensive holding calls, based on where the offensive team ran its play.1

For three common penalties, the direction of the play — that is, whether it’s run toward the offensive or defensive team’s sideline — makes a significant difference. In other words, refs make more defensive pass interference calls on the offensive team’s sideline but more offensive holding calls on the defensive team’s sideline. What’s more, these differences aren’t uniform across the field — the effect only shows up on plays run, roughly, between the 32-yard lines, the same space where coaches and players are allowed to stand during play.

The following graphs show the penalty rates per 1,000 plays for defensive pass interference and aggressive defensive penalties, which include unnecessary roughness, personal fouls, unsportsmanlike conduct, and horse-collar tackles.2

Refs throw flags for defensive infractions at significantly higher rates when plays are run in the direction of the offensive team’s sideline; near midfield, defensive penalties are called about 50 percent more often on the offensive team’s sideline than the defensive team’s. Close to the end zone, where the sidelines are supposed to be free of coaches and players, these differences are negligible.

For offensive flags, that association is reversed, at least on holding penalties.3 Here’s the rate of holding calls made on outside run plays, which shows how the defensive team’s sideline can help draw flags on the offense. Around midfield, offensive holding gets called about 35 percent more often on plays run at the defensive team’s sideline.

So what could be causing this phenomenon?

Refs are faced with a near-impossible task. They make judgment calls in real time, relying on just their eyes and their experience. Deprived of the advantages, like instant replay, that we enjoy from the couch, refs have less information to help them resist the normal subconscious urge to draw on external cues for assistance in making borderline calls. In psychology terms, this process is called cue learning. It’s why we laugh longer in the presence of other humans laughing,4 why we eat more in the presence of overweight company, and why our judgment of persuasive speeches is influenced by the audience’s reaction.

The most common cue in sports is crowd noise, and because crowd noise almost always supports the home team, the way the fans sway the referees is the No. 1 driver of home-field advantage in sports. And one notable experiment suggests that how loud a crowd is helps refs decide whether an interaction should be penalized. A pair of German researchers showed actual referees old video clips of possible soccer infractions, with crowd noise played at high or low volume. Refs looking at the exact same interactions were more likely to hand out a yellow card when they heard a lot of crowd noise than when the volume was low.

It follows, then, that screaming and hat-throwing football personnel may also have an effect on referee choices. In football, this sideline bias even seems to supersede refs’ tendency to support the home team: The differences in the penalty rates from sideline to sideline are several times larger than the differences in penalty rates between the home and away teams.

That bias can affect the outcome even when officials have time to confer. In a 2015 playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, Matthew Stafford threw a third-and-1 pass to Brandon Pettigrew. Officials initially called defensive pass interference on the Cowboys’ Anthony Hitchens.

But the flag occurred right in front of the Cowboys sideline. This led to some confusion. It also led to a helmetless Dez Bryant yelling at the official.

After conferring with each other, the officials picked up the flag, a decision that Mike Pereira, Fox Sports’ rules analyst and the NFL’s former vice president of officiating, said was incorrect. Brian Burke of Advanced Football Analytics calculates that when the official picked up the flag, the Lions’ chances of winning that game dropped by 12 percentage points.

Dallas won 24-20.

Check out our latest NFL playoff predictions.