#proper lore write-up… eventually

[aabluedragon]

Convergent evolution is realizing I wrote some flavor of agere way back in 2019 completely independent of others’ examples as one of the first things to break the BotW AU of my main OC out of continuously reliving his past 100 years of imprisonment.

Image circa. 2019

Say hello to Prince Sol Hyrule! Or rather, don’t. Whoever— whatever you’re looking for… it’s… not here. Nothing is here.

The highly abbreviated gist of it is that whatever magic was used for him to become Calamity Ganon’s seal did not seal Sol’s consciousness, leaving him to stare into and practically breathe Calamity for 100 straight years. Nothing but the sound of his own thoughts and memories, chewed and regurgitated until he can’t tell where memory ends and dreams begin. Can he prove that those things happened at all? Eventually, those stop too. In the absence of all things, Calamity’s heartbeat does not cease.

—————

The Beast has no need for comfort — not from the Hero that tore it from its home, much less the King that ordered its capture. The “outside” is vast, greater than anything it has ever experienced, closing around it, surrounding it. The… cabin. That is far more agreeable. Yet it is the den of the King. It wishes to be left alone.

The King returns with a sack heavy with goods — wooden, like the aged-timber smell of the cabin. It does not look. The floorboards underfoot bear the weight of each object — dense, with the mundane timbre of a drinking cup against a table. It does not move. The King murmurs something it does not understand and leaves it to its dreaming.

It does not recall if it had waited for the King’s footsteps to fade, or if the occasional rasp of paper against paper had been with it all along. In its view is a set of blocks. Building blocks, something reminds him. For children to model other objects by shape and structure. And next to them, a wooden creature that rolls towards him at the tug of a string affixed to its snout.

The texture is smooth, more like the slippery grain of the table than the floor. It weighs against the palm, and something possesses him to let go and grasp at another shape. There is no reason to its construction. He is… content to watch as wooden structures rise and fall, rounded edges biting into his skin when it dampens the fallout’s return to the floor.

The insistent grind of wood against wood aggravates, and his heart forces the breath from his lungs in a halting whine. He pauses in his winding of string around his finger. Reins, he supplies. Attached to the bit and bridle of a painted horse. It burns, yet his finger grows cold. The horse releases itself into a rattling canter, colliding noisily against a fallen archway. His throat is tight, another pitiful sound crawling up into his mouth.

—————

I imagine the order of processing his father bringing these toys to him goes something like this:

numbness —> offense(?) —> confusion —> curiosity —> okay FINE

There’s just enough stimulation to keep his mind from wandering towards Calamity, riding that wordless thought-language until he slowly stops bristling at everything that interrupts his dissociation. As for how little he drops, I’d say around 7-9? Somewhere with enough indignance to want to argue with you but without the emotional constitution to articulate it when he’s overwhelmed. I’m very new to all this and am reexamining the themes of my past work rather than writing something specifically for agere or otherwise. Please be patient with me. I’m happy to discuss the topic as well!

With his pronouns, it’s less so a matter of gender so much as how distant he wishes to be from the ordeal of free will. It probably isn’t surprising that the person who harps about costuming and vocal tone enjoys communicating state of mind via something like pronouns, haha… Can’t believe sealing Calamity Ganon seals your pronouns too.

[fadedsweater]

First Line Challenge

@mel-0n-earth tagged me in this a couple weeks ago (thank you for the tag! 😊💛)

Rules: post the first line of your wip, the first line you worked on today, or any other “first line!”

I'm cheating because this is more than one sentence, but it's technically one line of dialogue so 😤

Anyway, post-Veilguard solavellan be upon ye:

"Is that what we are?" Solas asked, with no trace of derision. He spoke softly, plainly, as if he were asking her opinion on the weather. "Married?"

Tagging @darethshirl, @broodwolf221, @luzial, and anyone else who wants to join in 💛

[flamingredanon]

I'll post some general fics sometime this weekend, but I finally got a decent amount done for my Vampire Trio AU fic.

This fic is basically written in the style of a journal by Lord Reginald Copperbottom, viewing the world from his eyes and how he meets and ends up with Henry and Right, alongside some other lore.

CW that this fic will contain occasional references to death and murder, vampires and vampire hunters, mentions of burning at the stake, mentions of a brotherly betrayal (if you know Right's story then it isn't a surprise) and note that this is a Copperrightmin fic

[vampmira]

in control – (that's how i like it and i'm never letting go)

huntrix looked up to their k/da seniors as role models – even believing they were hunters for some time ! when your new album comes out with song much darker than their usual sound, they're intrigued by the lyric credits.

pairing(s): huntrix x k/da!demon!reader

warnings(s): n/a

request | a/n: takes place a bit after the movie ! my lore knowledge of k/da isn't the greatest so this is more about you and huntrix 😭

k/da fans everywhere loved their girls equally, from their powerful queen to their badass maknae. one of the best things about stanning a multi-talented group was seeing one of the members consistently in the production and lyric credits. their one and only, the oldest member of k/da, the most talented writer ever – dae dahlia (대 달이아).

blades always complimented your stagename and how fitting it was! you were their amazing flower, blooming whenever you were up on stage. as mysterious yet beautiful as a flower, you acted as k/da's all-rounder member – mastering dance and rap like it was your second sense. however, you bloomed best when it came to your lyric writing and the meanings you had in each song.

but there was barely any information about you when POP/STARS came out – you were a new face to the industry! they knew your mbti and birthday from your member announcement post, of course, but they needed a fancall to learn your name – your REAL name! they wondered... who were you really?

you were always.. different than the other demons

for example, they'd complain about gwima's constant whispers and you just stare at them like .. "?? what whispers?"

you were always interested in human things – their cultures, food, friendship, music

it captivated you, even to the point where you started to stop taking souls as you grew empathy for their lives

eventually, you decided to escape and join the human world, enjoying life unlike any demon's ever experienced before !!

it's actually how you met k/da in the first place, through some auditions with ahri

she interviewed you personally, figuring out what you wanted out of this experience, until you admitted you just wanted to write music. she looked into the messy papers you scratched on since you had appeared on the surface. they were in korean, but a strange dialect of korean that seemed old – ancient. some lines were stale, copied from the radio or some songs her seniors had sang before until she got to the paper furthest in the back.

i'm alive, but i'm dead?

listen to my voice in your hear my voice crawling in your ear up in your head??? i regret it all now note: that's dumb

watch it fill you full of dread until you go (grrra pow!)

it caught her attention – your intelligible writings and mysterious margin drawings. combined with your question answers being fascinated with life as if you had never lived before, claiming a lack of proper training but being a natural dancer and singer, and your far away look as if you were thinking of another life that was centuries old, she couldn't put her finger on it but.. you intrigued her. enough to get a second interview. then a trainee card. and eventually, a debut date.

you were put together in the final lineup of k/da as their producer and sub rapper officially

but you did a little bit of everything – leading to your label as the all-rounder

even sharing your lyrics with them blew them away everytime, and you took incredible time recording demos behind the scenes

in fact, your stage name came from your past

it came from 달아나다 (dal-a-na-da), meaning to run away from something undesirable – like your life under gwima

but you had something solid now – this idol life, friends who loved you, and adorable fans !

but one late night in the studio, you had a thought plaguing you

why be free on the surface but secretive to your closest friends ? it broke your heart, keeping your secret from those you loved the most

so, you admitted your past to them, revealing your marks to them and everything

you feared it would change everything between you .. but you didn't want to hide anything from them any longer

but it had been so long since you met that they knew they could trust that you had changed

and they took it upon themselves to protect your image at all costs

and they always reassured you that they'd always love you – whenever you needed it

akali even came up with the idea to say that your markings were tattoos you got in celebration of your debut since they were similar to her jacket in POP/STARS – which made you giggle

and when you started to reveal them more to fans, a fellow girl group took a major notice

"RUMIIIII!!" a high pitched squeal came as hands blasted against rumi's door. when the purple haired leader opened her door, her fellow members pressed their phones into her face immediately. "did you see k/da's comeback photoshoot!?"

"no? i didn't know it was out already!" rumi was actually the biggest fan of k/da in huntrix. she'd always talk about you being her major influences when it came to seniors she looked up to. she would've pulled out her own phone to look, but the look in mira's face started to worry her. "you two don't.. look excited." they shared a look before showing her your photos – arms out and markings wrapping your arms like vines. it was the most skin you ever really showed, and now? they understood why. "she's.."

"a demon, too." mira spoke the quiet part aloud. rumi looked down at her own arms where her markings sparkled from the effects of the honmoon. lots of thoughts went through her head. you were her bias, after all. were.. you just like her? part demon and forced to hide it all this time? "do you guys think she's.. yknow.. like the sajas?"

"no!" rumi's voice came out more surprised than she meant it to. she cleared her throat. "no.. we.. we shouldn't get the wrong idea. what if.. she's like me? or.. like jinu?" there was a shared silence between the three at the mention of his name, before a notification came up on zoey's phone.

"guys? their new ep just dropped."

when villain came out , everyone was stunned by the darker lyrics

you went to ahri with the old lyrics that impressed her back in 2018

you dug into your memory – your history with the life you hid away and finally finished those lyrics

your members took a lot of care in following your demo exactly to carry out the story you wanted to carry out through "villain"

even in the music video, you were listed as one of the creative directors

there you go, k/da's all-rounder <3

much like the concept video, the mv was mostly shrouded by shadows – representing how you had put that past behind you

you were even surrounded by chains and were trying follow small flickers of light like you were trying to escape the dark, even though you sang like you were cocky and proud

until the very end when you preformed the final chorus in the sunrise, owning your past and acknowledging how you've changed like how the night changes into the day

at least .. that's what you've explained in interviews

huntrix were more in awe of you than before

the story you carried out was analyzed by fans everywhere and huntrix understood what you conveyed perfectly

to the point that they just HAD to know more from you specifically

in the building of the inkigayo music show, you sat on the iconic stairs, posing as your fellow member, evelynn, bent over to get your best angles before she was called for makeup. the second she waved to leave, the clicking of excited heels came up towards you. you bowed, the trio scrambling to do the same.

"um.. let us introduce ourselves!" the girls beside her lined up as they made a cross pattern with their 4-shaped fingers. "2, 3 – don't miss! hello, we are huntrix!"

"ah, huntrix! congratulations on your comeback." your acknowledgement made them giddy.

"thank you, 선배님 (sunbaenim/senior)!!" the purple haired one giggled. "um, i'm rumi! this is zoey and mira," the two waved with uncontained giddiness at their individual mentions, "and we're just.. huge fans! and we actually uh.. had a question for you.. about your tattoos." you cocked your head at them, hands instinctively going to touch your arms. rumi slid her jacket down off her arm, revealing rainbow shimmering marks – much like yours. your eyes met in a kind of ... soft acknowledgement. one full of vulnerability and empathy.

your staff called you back for makeup at the worst time

you two exchanged numbers immediately before having to go on stage and await your score reveal

it was strange meeting someone else like you up here

you felt seen, yet sympathetic for what rumi might have gone through

she didn't tell you her story, but you knew it was hard

but huntrix cheered extra loud when they announced that your comeback knocked SPF100 out of the park <3

you always knew your music touched listeners worldwide, but you never thought someone would get your true message until rumi

after the awards, you and huntrix decided to meet up as soon as possible

you were invited to their penthouse that weekend

they never told you how they scrambled to clean up for the entire 24 hours before you showed up though

you three talked for hours, sharing stories and feeling heard by someone else for the first time in a long time

especially rumi .. you noticed how she would always stare at your marks

when you described your escape from gwima, they told you how brave you are

and, affectionately, how awesome their senior is <33

"wow.. so you literally crawled out of hell. cool." mira stared at you from the other side of the couch, those normally dark eyes sparkling with awe.

"super cool!!" zoey piped up. "that must've been so scary!! have a lot of demons wanted to leave? or.. were you the first? did you have friends that wanted to come with? do demons have friends? was there–" the pillow that hit her arm cut her off, a glairing look and a nervous smile coming from her leader. you smiled reassuringly.

"sorry about all the questions. we've just never.. talked to someone about this before." she rubbed her hands across her arms. you leaned forward, your hands on hers as she looked up at you. your markings blended with hers. you smiled comfortingly.

"and you think i have?" you sighed. "my members barely know my old life because it was so hard to explain. you all know about demons and hunters, gwima and the honmoon – trying to explain it all to them makes me sound like i'm crazy. this is as healing for me as it is for you... i'm just glad i can be a resource for.. my younger sisters." you chuckled. rumi held your hands gently.

"...thank you for letting us talk with you, 선배님 (sunbaenim/senior)."

"please, call me 언니 (unnie/older sister). and.. my real name." you kept it secret from the public, in fear gwima would send your fellow demons after you to bring you back. your k/da sisters only ever called you by your name off camera to protect you, as well. dahlia was your stage now as much as it was your cover name. now? this trio was sitting around you comfortingly, your heart getting deja vu from when you met your own members. that feeling of a new home.

[ajaxsbeloved]

stygianoir asked:

"A part two of don’t give me that look with Dainsleif, Xiao and Scaramouche plz"

-: don't gimmie that look III :-

part 1 — part 2

feat. dainsleif, alhhaitham, and aether (xiao and scaramouche are in part 2!)

genre. suggestive

summary. the genshin men react to you giving them the “fuck me” eyes accidentally

warnings. dainsleif has fake lore since there's not much we know about him, dains reader uses she/her, dains section is kinda long my bad, khaenri'ahn body guard dain, reader is khaenri'ahn royality or something??, lore players pls don't kill me i'm just writing random shit, dains ending does NOT imply sex after i'm sorry y'all, reader is a scholar at the academiya with alhaitham, aether abyss prince au, more fake lore for aether because we don’t know anything abt the abyss yet

authors note. this series has short circuited my brain 😭😭😭 unfortunately i will NOT be doing a part 4 but please stick around my blog and thank you all for the amount of love you've given this series it means so much to me :( <3 // also this was reuploaded and tagged by @aventurinesweetheart bc i forgot to do it the first time

dainsleif

if dainsleif was anything it was good at his job. not to mention completely and utterly devoted to you...

of course the good part is that you Are his job

Khaenri'ah is a thriving nation, one built on technology and innovation. before the teyvat we knew, before the archons and before the heavenly principles

your father was a strict man, he was always stubborn and strongly believed in learning the right lesson at the right time

dain was a beloved member of the khaenri'ahn guard, having been a member of the guards history since before he was born. dainsleif's father and his father before him had all served the royal family, naturally dain would grow up to do the same thing

when he first became a knight he was proud, even if he wasn't yet protecting members of the royal family he was still happy doing regular guard duties and he was honored to even be a part of the group that would defend their nation

at the ripe age of 18 dainsleif was promoted, he wasn't scared though. no in fact he was extremely excited, he had been waiting for this his whole life and nothing could change the fact that he was proud to carry on his families legacy

he was assigned to protect the khaenri'ahn princess, the oldest of them at least who happened to be the same age as him. he had never actually met her though, sure he had seen her in public as she did royal things with her family like orientation of nobles and knighting new guards

but this was completely different, seeing royalty and befriending royalty were definitely not the same thing

when he first met you he wasn't surprised, you seemed like the typical royal princess. you were calm and put together, you were well articulated and held your head high as any proper royalty should do

it wasn't until a few months into being your specific guard that dainsleif noticed anything unique about you, the truth was that despite all your honorary behaviors and taught attitude, there was a kind and loving person behind it all

at first this was a little shocking to dain, he had no idea that royalty could be so... so human.

you may have been what he expected at first but after knowing you? you were a whole new person to him, not just someone he was hired to protect but you grew to be someone he wanted to protect

eventually the two of you grew rather close, becoming sort of like best friends. dainsleif was never one to socialize much as he had to focus on his job and you were kind of isolated from the world since being put on a pedastal made it hard for you to make friends out of regular everyday people

so from then on the duo was practically inseparable, glued to each other and always running to each other whenever anything remotely interesting happens

until one day, one day dain goes to your bedroom. he was worried, you had missed breakfast and didn't attend your behavior classes. this worried your parents too of course but no one truly cared for you the way dainsleif did

when you didn't answer after he knocked he warned that he was coming in and pushed open the door with a little bit of force only to find that you weren't there, in fact the bed room was completely empty and one of the windows by your bedside was wide open

the worst situation came into dainsleif's mind, had you run away? did someone take you? how was he ever supposed to protect you if he doesn't know where you are?

he immediately sprints to tell your parents and siblings only to find them already in the meeting hall with concerned expressions on their faces and a note in their hands

the note reads as follows "I have your daughter, bring me 100,000 dollars or i will cut off her hands. you have until 12AM, send only 1 guard and the money to this location."

the letter then had a map attached to it with a meeting point, your family was freaking out and insisted that they go to the meeting point with a full guard squad and the money just in case; the money

but dainsleif knew this was a bad idea, he knew that if the royal family sent a whole team of guards that they would never get you back and that the kidnapper would do horrible unimaginable things to you

the thought alone infuriated dain and he somehow managed to convince your family that it was him who needed to go with the money and bring you home safely

so he went, he brought the money and the kidnapper was there with you next to him. there was tape over your mouth and your hands were bound in rope, the sight was hard to look at but dainsleif mustered up all his courage to get you out of this situation

he went to give the kidnapper money and as he did so he managed to knock him out cold, how you may ask? don't. i don't know how he did it LMAO

you quickly ran up to dain and he cut off the ropes that bound your wrists as well as took the tape off of your mouth, thankful to even be alive you engulfed him in the tighest hug you could manage with the strength you had left

dainsleif was shocked, though you were friends you had never seemed to share a hug or been in physical contact so he was taken by surprise at your eager show of affection

he looked down at you and felt his body flood with warmth when he saw you were looking back at him, your eyes glittering in admiration at your hero and the widest toothiest grin on your face

dainsleif felt energy rejuvenate throughout his body, as if looking at you had somehow made him bounce back from all the worry and concern he had at the situation

there you were, looking at him like he was the best man in the world, like he was your hero. he couldn't help but smile back at you, your joyous expression apparently contagious

"let's get you home (y/n)."

alhaitham

being a scholar in the nation of knowledge was no easy feat, there were many and many people who were immensely smart and experienced with researching

alhaitham was no exception, he was of course extremely intelligent not to mention observant and caring (though he would never admit to it)

you had met alhaitham when you first joined the academiya, being in similar fields of study you were able to bond over things like professors or assignments that you struggled with

however alhaitham never struggled, he always found each task easy to complete and he did every assignment well enough to earn perfect grades

you spent countless hours in the library studying til you collapsed over the tests and exams that you had nearly every week, you could spend days and days in the computer lab trying to find sources for your papers and articles about the topics you were assigned for research

alhaitham always came along with you, finding any excuse not to be at home just in case kaveh happened to be there. besides it’s not like he ever had much to do, he had plenty of free time and for whatever reason he preferred spending it with you

even if you were truly spending your time “together”, it was often found that you had your nose in notes and scribbled diagrams while alhaitham sat quietly across from you reading a thick book that had at least 250 pages

sometimes you’d fall asleep studying or you’d have to take a few bathroom breaks, you’d always come back to find alhaitham in the same spot with the same neutral expression as he flipped the pages of his books

sometimes you’d try to talk with him, asking him about how his studies were going or what kaveh was up to. he always got rather annoyed by the questions regarding kaveh, he would get defensive or start bad mouthing kaveh as he tried to make himself look better

“kaveh is a lazy baboon who can hardly get his work done and eat throughout the day while i have to do all the chores around the house and manage to do my duties as the scribe… pfft it’s almost pathetic.”

he’d role his eyes at the thought of kaveh and go on and on complaining about how he hates being at home because he can’t stand being around kaveh, he’d sometimes mentioned hanging out at your place to avoid going home

“after studying we should grab something to eat and head to your house, i’d rather study more with you then go home and deal with my actual roommate.”

despite the way alhaitham talked about kaveh you knew they were actually good friends, they just clashed heads and bickered more than most people….. yeah… more than most….

so one day you let alhaitham come over after studying, you had gotten take out and some alcohol to have at your place while you relaxed after exams

you ate and laughed, though alhaitham seems stoic he’s a rather funny guy. not that he tries to be funny but he just says things so bluntly and isn’t afraid to gossip with you about people in your lives

you were drunk and enjoying yourself from across the table, eventually the laughter died down and the conversation came to a halt

the silence filled the air and alhaitham (who wasn’t drunk because he can hold his alcohol extremely well) was looking around your apartment as opposed to you

you sat there looking at alhaitham and taking in everything about him, from the way he hair framed his face to his gorgeous eyes and toned chest, even the way he smelled like wood

without even realizing you started giggling at him, finding your own thoughts about how good looking his was amusing and unexpected

hearing your laughter alhaitham turn his eyes to you, he froze at the sight before him

there you were sitting across the table from him with a light blush on your face and adorable smile on your lips

you were so perfect, from your teeth to your eyebrows and the way your nose scrunched as you laughed at him made his stomach turn in on itself

truthfully he didn’t understand, what were you laughing about? why did he find you so attractive right now? and how could you laugh so carefree like that? was it because of him?

“what’re you laughing for?”

“you silly! you’re so funny y’know that?”

that was it, that was the straw that broke the camels back. alhaitham didn’t know what it was that made him do flips in his head but he knew if he didn’t do something about it soon it would leave him a wreck

he got up the table swiftly, surprising you as you let out a noise of confusion, he made his way over to your side of the table and grabbed your hand

pulling you up you let out a “wha-“ and before you knew it he was dragging you around the house, to a place you were well familiar with which was of course, your bedroom

he led you quietly and once you arrived he closed the door, pushing you against it and locking lips with you

you were surprised but certainly not disappointed, you leaned into the kiss and wrapped your arms around his neck would made him groan as you smiled against him

“i need to be more than just your study buddy.”

aether

the abyss was a rather strict organization, there weren’t many humans who were a part of it yet you find yourself aligning with their views and climbing up the ranks

today was an important day, today was a mission that the abyss took very seriously. you were chosen to retrieve information on the tsaritsa’s plan to steal the gnosis’ and bring the plans back to headquarters

everything was going just right, you were able to infiltrate a fatui agency successfully and managed to gain access to some information that most fatui weren’t even able to be aware of

you gathered the files you obtained and started to make your way out of the fatui agency when suddenly a man stopped you

“you. i don’t think i’ve seen you anyway around here before, who are you and what is your clearance?”

you were put on the spot, but not to worry because this was something you trained for, this was something you were expecting

“you haven’t seen me because i outrank you. don’t talk down to your captains, i have important business. now if you’ll excuse me i need to take these files to the knave, interrupt me again and i’ll make sure she hears about how you interfered with her collection of information.”

the man in front of you froze upon hearing the knaves name, he took a nervous gulp and apologized for intruding on your collection of data

you acted snarky, scoffing at this innocent lower level employee and giving him a dirty look to which he squealed at

you successfully exited the building and travelled back to abyssal headquarters to report your findings to the high council, hoping that perhaps you’d get promoted or at least a raise

you strutted into headquarters proudly, holding your head high and nodding at those who greeted you and welcomed you back

you may your way to the high council meeting room and presented the information you collected, spilling all the details of your mission and how the fatui managed to not suspect anything of you

the council was impressed and satisfied with your report, the most notable being the prince. aether was very pleased with your abilities and was prideful to have such an intelligent and skilled agent on his side of the war

“come here, i shall award you an honor not many have been able to accomplish.”

you walk closer to his throne and find yourself in front of the prince himself who was not only powerful and smart but also extremely handsome

“on your knees.”

you knelt carefully, placing your hand on your chest and closing your eyes to listen to your prince

aether took out his sword from its sheath and you shivered hearing the blade scrape against the metal cover, more gently than expected, the prince brought his sword to your shoulders and announced you a knight, one of the highest honors among the abyssal kingdom

“congratulations, you have become a knight and you will fight by my side, do not disappoint me. i trust in your abilities.”

you open your eyes and lift your head to look aether in the eyes, meeting him as he looked down at your kneeling figure

aether felt his heart pang at the sight, you who looked up at him as if he was the world, like you would do anything for him

your eyes glossed and your steady breathing causing your chest to rise up and down, the image was practically burned into his mind as he felt himself warm up within a matter of seconds

you were breathtaking, it was something he always knew but seeing you before him so willingly and effortlessly he found himself enamored with your beauty

“stand” he said firmly

despite his firm tone and professionalism, aether was dying on the inside fighting an army of nerves and trying to ignore the way his cheeks melted like ice cream

you slowly stood, keeping your hand to your chest and eyes in his. though you had no idea what he was going to say next you didn’t seem to care when looking at him, as if he had put you in a trance and made it impossible to look away

“let’s discuss your promotion in private quarters shall we?”

tagged: @aventurinesweetheart @z3nitsusgf @stygianoir

[satoruhour]

HIHII hope you are doing well!!!

I have a request but if you're not comfortable writing it's completely fine too!!

Anyways~ can you write something with University professor geto x top student reader??? They have a lot of sexual tension and geto continuously targets the reader in his lectures only for her to storm into his office after a test in which he didn't give her the marks she deserved just so he could piss her off and eventually leading them to blow off some steam together hehe-

HEJSJSH ANYWAYS I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT REST OF THE DAY💗💗

-🍒

I GOT THAT DUMB D*CK !

a/n: hi cherry 2! saying 2 because i already have another cherry anon, thank u for waiting for this btw sorry this took so long omggg!!! i wanna make it similar to the short blurb i did here, but ill leave out reader being a camgirl! a lot of lore talk, just a warning

wc: 8k (sigh ....)

warnings: so much lore lol sorry, no beta we die like men, age gap (32 / 24), professor!geto, fem!reader, geto is also a cam worker, masturbation (both f and m), toy use during f! masturbation (vibrator), fantasising, pet names, praise, degradation, use of ‘slut’ and ‘whore’, oral (m receiving, f receives briefly at the end), dumbification (ig?) face-fucking, deep-throating, spitting in mouth, unprotected sex, creampie / breeding kink, cum eating, implied multiple rounds, n*sfw under the cut

no one could really pinpoint the reason why professor geto had picked on you, called you out so much, and why you entertained the incessant questions. it was unbecoming of a prof., he knew, it was never smart to favour one person (negatively, in this case) in a room of bright students who could read between the lines. but he just feels himself so drawn to your furrowed eyebrows and words laced with venom, because at the end of the day, he can see that you aren’t all talk.

you challenge his views and you do it in a way that catches him off-guard. you propose insane arguments that you willingly would die at the grave just to find evidence for; or it could just be because he was staring too much at the way your mouth moved and your eyes expressed everything to pay attention to your words, finding that you were just too beautiful to be chasing a linguistics degree.

this was another thing: geto suguru could possibly have anyone he wanted. he was fine. shoulders pulled back in proper posture, hair either tied up fully or just halfway, and always, always wearing shirts with sleeves that reach his wrist. to that, everyone could see just how bulked the man was, top looking too tight all the time.

geto knew he was fine, too, because on top of (and before) being a professor, he found that he could get a good amount of money by just streaming — camera propped below his neck and obviously tight button-up shirt discarded to reveal his tattooed body, while he has his legs spread and the thirsty, horny comments flooding in on the platform. it’s been a norm by now, started from his uni days where he needed some extra money to support his fees and living necessities.

one year turned into two, two years turned into stagnancy during his third and fourth years (save for a few occasional streams), and up came a little funny graduation stream suggested by his best friend. geto had spent a good half ’n hour talking about his time in university and thanking his viewers, changing up the setting almost immediately by showing hard he was.

[uzum4kisl0ver]: YEAAAH we’re getting to the good stuff, thank u for feeding us so well these few years uzumaki-san!!

[minstash96]: Congrats on graduating Uzumaki-san!! I rmb joining during your third year and found out from everyone u were getting busier </3 but Im glad youre back again!!!

[g_bigdick_s]: fellas is it gay to support your best friend’s graduation jerking off stream

the flood of “yes”’s replying to gojo made the streamer laugh, thankful that his best friend had listened a little and at least changed gojobigdicksatoru to just his “G.S.” initials to avoid people finding his LinkedIn. from there, geto had gotten into the true nature of his stream easily, fishing out his cock to stroke and loving the sounds of tips coming in, the name of his alias Uzumaki continually commented. since then, it’s become a side hustle — finishing his masters, training to become a professor, it’s all natural to him, taking even further steps to make sure he isn’t found out.

exactly, he could have anyone he wanted — a fan from his streaming account, or one of satoru’s regular fwb’s but instead he finds himself drawn to someone else, you, the second year student in his bilingualism and multilingualism module that he has no trouble teaching despite his freshly employed status.

at the start of the week, the gods decided thought it would be funny to delay the campus bus that would take you to the english department for a consultation session with your professor. you couldn’t focus in lectures due to bad cramps, you were behind on your non-major related courses, the bad luck just seemed to seep into one day after another. you had woken up late, putting on a terrible outfit that no one really cared about, except your professor who just had a smirk on his face.

“if you notice, runes were created as they were spoken — spelt as they are said which almost look like ‘pictographs’,” prof. geto switches to the next slide with the runes and their meanings alongside a jumble of symbols that send the whole class into hysterics, “can anyone sound out the phonetics of these runes to me? hint: even though i said they look like pictographs, the first rune is definitely not an E.”

he was known for asking questions during lectures, pleased with anyone that would even try because he knew how quiet lecture theatres could get. he was exactly like that in university, too, letting satoru take all the attention due to the many unknown people in the same room. now, he found that asking the questions was a little entertaining, seeing the way students look back down at their laptops and avoid eye contact. but he doesn’t need to do anything and his body is already turnt towards you. he’s not even pointing physically, which he thinks he’s done a good job of restraining himself.

ᛊᛃᚨᚾᛖᛚ

“the words and names should be as they sound — so ‘s’ or ᛊ should translate into a ‘c’ since they didn’t have a C back then and it’s the closest sound to C. ᛃ can’t be ‘h’ because of the usage of H in hagl . . its pronunciation is different and plus, we’ll spell it how we say it, so maybe it’s ‘j’?” you mutter to yourself, an urge to answer the quickest, always. you aren’t sure where this streak came from, but you’ve been smart always, “sja . . it either can be chanel or channel since there’s a rule you can’t use the same rune twice in succession . .”

professor geto already knows you’d be the first to answer, raising your hand even without looking since you were still calculating the other four letters which you put together fairly quickly.

you take the safest route, “chanel, with one N.”

geto clicks his tongue and sucks in a breathe, “so close, miss (y/n), but it’s because i cheated a little on my part.” you can feel your blood boil and the grimaces of other students when he switches to the next slide and there’s a little grin on his face. it says — ‘there is no distinction between capital and small runes, nor can you use the same rune twice continually.’

“you are right, partially, but i did want to drive home the point,” which he’s sure you already know. “that words with two N’s or L’s or whatever, would only show up in the runic language as only one character.” your face morphs into something of annoyance and the grin on professor geto’s face only widens — that defiant, headstrong nature is something he loved, but the grin drops a little when he imagines something . . out of the classroom. his pants tighten.

you mirror him, clicking your tongue and reluctantly taking down the note in your documents before sinking into your chair — not even chō, you friend, could find the proper words to comfort you. you spend the rest of the lecture, sulking, unwillingly answering his incessant questions with a scowl on your face and a headache forming.

this never stops—

“miss (y/n)?” one-on-one meetings were the bane of your existence, but it was the only way to connect with your professors properly — here, geto calls you to talk about your latest essay where you were the last on the roster. by then, everyone has filed out with nobara waiting for you just outside the classroom.

“don’t have to call my name, i’m the only one here.” you mutter under your breath, and geto feels a little annoying today.

“what was that?”

“nothing—”

he hums, scooting his chair closer once you sit, and while you find the gesture a little weird, you’re overcome with just how good he smells and it only fuels your hatred more. it’s no fair that he’s so . .

“miss (y/n).” you sigh with an apology, frankly not ready to hear how he’d be attacking your essay. it was written on a rushed timeline, you didn’t cite your sources properly, you knew some criticism was warranted as much as you didn’t like to hear it from your professor’s mouth.

“. . you do know you can’t just rely on your brain, right?” geto speaks softly and you feel your heart flutter at his tone. he points to the places where you forget your in-text citations.

“but professor, information about syntax and phonetics just comes like second nature . .” you mumble, ignoring how he closes his eyes and hisses, “and all the sources on the internet say different things.”

“then just find a reliable one.”

you tsk, taking the paper from him and flipping to the next page, “well, i did one here.” the paper makes a sound when you press your finger into it, aware of how close you are. from here you can feel the heat radiating off his body, unconsciously rubbing your thighs together.

“too long ago, needs to be within five years.” geto’s lying through his teeth.

“no, it does not!” you pull back and look at him incredulously. ah, the feeling’s gone, “not in language related papers, at least!”

“but that claim was from the 2000’s, miss (y/n), for all we know it could’ve been resolved by then.”

“then why didn’t you say anything about chō’s scholar article from the 1990’s?” you’re standing up, now, furrowed eyebrows depicting the very thing you feel: confusion, agitation at being treated like this. given you weren’t in the best condition when you wrote this essay, but you still gave it your all.

“her argument was about the interconnectedness between the romance languages — yours,” he punctuates while leaning back in his chair. you don’t like how your eyes flit down to his lap, but you’re forced to look up when he stands up too, “is about the use of ciphers in comparison to an immature language developed on the internet that created in the 2019s. any scholar claim before that would be void.”

your blood boils just like that day. alas, he had a good point, but like always, the gentle slit of his eyes and the all-knowing smile didn’t match the bullying he was laying on you and you despise it.

even! even, as you notice how there’s probably less than a inch between your faces as you puff out your chest to look more intimidating and yet geto suguru towers over you. and even when your heart beats loudly in your ears, feeling his hot breath fan over your own face while you don’t miss how he licks his lips and glances down to yours not-so-secretly.

you swallow at the silence, until there’s the annoying notification of his Outlook cutting the tension and soon you’re snatching the essay from him, walking to where your bag is. although you want to let your anger overflow, all you say is a tame, “noted. thanks, prof” with a glare, eye twitching.

you made sure to slam the classroom door with shaky hands . .

. . but you’re not very good at capping your rage. “i swear to god! he better fucking check his mirror and admire himself because soon i’m going to beat him up so bad that everyone can’t recognise him.” geto’s lips turn up in a small smirk at your flared expression he just witnessed — he just loves your dirty mouth and he finds himself thinking of it more and more often.

chō only can tut, “so you find him attractive?”

“what? how the hell did you infer that from my rant?” you scoff, shoving her to the side, not aware that your whispered outburst is heard as he’s packing up. he simply enjoys looking at you walk away through the glass slit of the door, hips swaying unknowingly.

“bad news, guys,” geto, or rather Uzumaki, sighs on screen, adjusting so the lens of the camera rested just below his collarbones. easily, his chat fills up with a mixture of horny comments and genuine questions, chuckling to himself as he unbuttons his shirt. he feels more like a sinner at this point, suddenly flustered with the confession he’s about to make.

“i think i’ve taken quite a liking to someone,” geto hums, hands going to his trousers to palm his bulge. he had to get home immediately after that, cancelling his meetings for the day. with a single text to gojo, the white-haired man was excited to hear everything about this new person, thankful that his best friend will finally not be alone.

[g_bigdick_s]: TELL US! TELL US!!!! TELL US!

but professor geto is lost instantly, imagining you as he massages his erection. thinking about your anger transforming into pleasure, into obedience for him as he forces your mouth down on his cock. oh . . how’d your mouth and hands feel, how’d your pussy feel.

geto groans, already removing his dick from the constraints, and pumping it to full length. he doesn’t even talk much, only the endless comments and tips reminding him he was still on live. spitting on his hand, he wraps his hand around himself again, thumbing the tip and hoping it’d be your tongue swirling around it.

what would you look like on your knees, taking each inch of his cock down your throat? would he be able to wipe the defiance off your face? would he be able to fuck his smart student, dumb?

“you need a good destress, woman,” chō suggests over the phone, voice a bit uneven due to it being stuck in between her shoulder and ear, “go on camstar or something, i’m sure you’ll find something hot there.”

“chō, i am not going on a porn streaming website! i’ll very much settle for my smut fics, thank you.”

“boo, don’t you get bored? i get that normal adult industry videos are super inaccurate but . . when was the last time you’ve watched an unfiltered, unedited jerk off vid? that’s the hottest.”

you scoff, “yeah, like you would know, miss complain-whenever-you-get-dick-pics.”

“that’s because it’s unsolicited! plus all the men who send me pics have ugly dicks. if anything i’m more open to get unsolicited pussy pics rather than consensual dick pics at this point.” your friend nonchalantly says, spreading her fingers to look at her manicured nails, “but anyway, prof geto is on your ass too much lately. maybe he wants to get in your pants?”

you don’t recoil at the suggestion as much as you expect to and you’re puzzled at that — “please never say that again.” just as you’re saying this, you’re typing in camstar.org even though you told yourself not to but deep down, you know that you’ve been craving more than just twitter links and porn with plot stories. on the front page, you’re seeing a video thumbnail of a guy with a fairly big . . feature, countless tattoos lining his body while you can catch a faint glimpse of his long hair in the dark room — it’s the only one that draws you in, other streams merging into a blur.

chō’s voice fades off when you notice just how popular the stream is, cursor hovering over the title (“just a ramblefap, need to release some tension”) almost tempting you to click.

“okay, will get back to you,” succumbing to your needs, you shamelessly grab your vibrator just as she cheers into the phone. you can hear that’s my girl! on the other side as you stifle a smile, bidding a goodbye before you settle into bed. from there, you do what you always do: relax for a few, slow your breathing, get yourself wet a little—

click.

The stream you have attempted to view has ended a minute ago. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. View more livestreams below:

you shove the vibrator under your pillow and bury your head into it, screaming.

“i mentioned in yesterday’s lecture that Latin evolved from the dialects of the Italic peoples of ancient Italy, or Latium, a region in central western Italy. over time, Latin absorbed elements from other languages, such as Etruscan and Greek, and it became the main language of the western Mediterranean.” professor geto rambled on in classic geto fashion — it was his passion that made him so easy to listen to, as with the many enamoured girls with googly eyes and the guys who wish they could carry themselves the way geto did.

you’d say the same thing: his love for his subject of study made him attractive — charming even — as much as you didn’t want to admit to your friend, but you’d be more open with your attraction like everyone is if he wasn’t—

[9:52am, (y/n) -> chō 💟] so fucking annoying and cocky and picking on me all the time!!!!!! im soooo sick of him im so serious omfg ....

but today, he’s looking less at you and more at other students, or even marvelling at the terrible paint job of the classroom as he goes from slide to slide. he talks about the derivation in which French separates from Latin, borrowing similar spellings and meanings from the old language while separating the way they are spoken.

“French is the most divergent of the romance languages because of strong Gallic and Frankish influences. The Celtic Gauls spoke a language similar to Old Dutch but adopted Latin as the Romans invaded Gaul.” you don’t even have to look at him to get him thinking of lewd things, spiralling into his fantasies ever since last night. geto is a little fatigued, too, having lost sleep over his fucking student which he just can’t help bothering. excitement at having you in class before is now turning into dread with every week that passes, and this week is just one instance.

“uh— i-i know you guys aren’t well-versed in either, but with your knowledge of both languages,” geto pulls at his tie. he feels hot, “discuss with your tutorial groups, the differences between the two and list down examples. just come up with one difference, but preferably name a few instances.”

[10:01am, (y/n) -> chō 💟] wish u were here im so bored 😭😭 profs acting so weird today tho

[10:01am, chō 💟 -> (y/n)] is he looking hot and bothered, nervous ??? like he wants to cry? im tellin you he wants you fr

of course she’d come out of her sickness-induced sleep just to bother you about him having the hots for you.

[10:02am, (y/n) -> chō 💟] you’re so ... i swear pls shut up he may want me but i do NOT want him

[10:03am, chō 💟 -> (y/n)] not even while you were just ranting about how his side profile looked a little too good in lecture yesterday?? anyway i hope you’ll be able to get that nut tn 🙏🏼 that guy on camstar sounded hot asf

[10:04am, (y/n) -> chō 💟] ikr i cant believe i got cockblocked by a fuckin livestream ending 💀 thank you fr i need it atp

“any progress here?” he comes out behind you and you slam the phone so hard you give the both of you a scare while your other friends exchange giggles with each other. what you don’t know, is how his arm is positioned upon the back of your chair and his whole body hovers just beside yours. you’re threatened to look, but you know if you do, you’d be falling deeper into the pit that you promised yourself not to fall into.

“yup, we’re just discussing things about how in terms of grammar, French has conjugation but almost no declension. but— uh, it rather uses word order to express some of the intricacies that Latin expresses through word endings.”

you can see geto nod from your peripheral, “good. good answer, any examples to show me?”

your friends nod towards you since you’re usually the one with all the information about different languages. they aren’t foreign to the way geto keeps calling on you to answer him, too, so you shouldn’t have any problem with this, right?

wrong. you’re stuttering through your answer, turning your head finally and being met with the sight of prof geto looking down on you like a deer caught in headlights. you think that being in lecture theatres, sitting near to the back and your hatred in general has desensitised you to the beauty of your professor, because being under him like this makes your core pulse uncomfortably and your voice shaky.

“. . hm? what was that?”

“i was uhm— saying how— uh,” the way geto nods at you makes you more nervous, painting you as someone who someone who had all bark and no bite, but the other knows very well that you had a nasty bite. you’re smart and witty, pretty, hot as fuck, and if anything, it’s taking everything in geto not to bend you over and show you your place in this very classroom in front of everyone, too.

“little lady got nothin’ for me today?” geto purses his lips and lets his teasing side take over, an easy-going smile taking over his features that you just want to kiss and slap off at the same time. wait.

“i didn’t get enough sleep because i was too busy trying to rewrite the damn essay you said i had outdated and missing sources for,” you speak through gritted teeth, feeling a mixture of arousal and pure rage for the man hovering over you.

geto juts his lip out in a pout, face getting dangerously close to yours and challenging you. he just hopes your two friends won’t say anything, “well, darling, if you picked an easier topic to argue about, you wouldn’t be doing that, would you?”

“well, sorry i’m always trying to outdo myself. are you, professor geto? what with your boring suits and black and white slide designs?”

you click your tongue and turn back to your phone to pull up your chat with chō while geto takes a deep breath, desperately hoping the hard-on wouldn’t show through his slacks. your other two friends only giggle even more at the exchange, because for the rest of the class, professor geto is on edge, unable to teach coherently.

[11:17pm, chō 💟 -> (y/n)] YOU DID WHAAAAATTTTT...???? GIRL YOU SAID THAT???!!!!!!

[11:18pm, (y/n) -> chō 💟] bro what if i get expelled.. i shouldnt have but he was pissing me off so much... i did put an apology in the end tho

by then, you’ve already submitted your rewritten essay, putting in a short note at the end for your behaviour in class. although you don’t take it back, you’re still trying to play it safe especially with how much you paid to get into university. you scroll along camstar, bored out of your mind and hoping to find something as compelling as the inked guy from last week, but nothing really draws you in. until you’re refreshing the page, and just like the previous time, the popularity of that same bulking guy seems to push his video to the top.

and finally, before you’re clicking into the video, you check out his profile: in his early thirties, started this account when he was 24 and in university. you smack your lips at that — he’s been doing this for almost ten years? that’s dedication. in curiosity, you scroll down his account, seeing the progression of which this guy built up his figure and tattoos that litter his body. he’s kept the same format, camera showing his body chest down until you’re lazy to scroll more, a little disappointed in not being able to find any indication of his face.

you think that maybe you saw a glimpse of that wrist tattoo that matched the tattoo on your professor’s wrist, but you could just be imagining things.

“alright guys . .” the man on the screen huffs, clothes already discarded to get straight to the point, and you’re recording a small snippet of the same guy you told chō about. “had a rough day today.”

the onslaught of comments going i can make u feel better!!! Take ur anger out on me Uzumaki-san makes you sputter and laugh, sending that video first before you’re taking another. your attention is stolen for a moment, seeing chō react with emojis to your video message (“let’s see what emails i got today, huh?”), but the structure of sentences that the man speaks soon brings you out of jollity and into shock.

“how cute, an essay sent straight to my email.” geto wants to do anything but look at emails right now, but ever since he’s gotten your rewritten assignment, it’s all he’s wanted to check out if it wasn’t for the many meetings and errands he had to run today. “yadda yadda . . oh?”

“i’m sorry for today’s lesson,” purposely pausing to leave out his name, geto continues on, “i shouldn’t have reacted in that way no matter the situation.” a smirk forms on his face while your body fills with dread. in your panic, you pull up your own document whilst catching all of this on camera, tracking each word as the man on camstar.org continues to say out your apology word by word.

and then bit by bit, you’re making out how the man behind the camera might, just might be your linguistics professor. the broad shoulders, the jawline, the long hair, the manspread . .

but even with your heightened combination of excitement and revelation, you don’t click away, blindly sending the video to your friend and then shamefully digging under your pillow to grab your vibrator.

“teaching people is so difficult sometimes, guys,” he grunts, pulling down his underwear and revealing his already hard cock. he lets out a shaky sigh as he wraps a hand around his shaft, “you usually get the people who won’t do any work, the ones who are absent half the time — usually they go hand in hand.”

professor geto laughs and you twitch at the lovely sound. “but . . there’s this one girl . . in my classes— f-fuck.”

you’re entranced, watching your professor masturbate in front of thousands of people who possibly didn’t know a thing about this man while you try to get your jaw off the floor, “who is entirely different from these categories.”

“she’s smart,” geto groans out and you watch transfixed as he starts to pump himself, hips grinding up into his palm, “she’s so smart that i’d want to get to know her one day and just talk about anything.”

“s-she’s so fucking attractive, too, you guys won’t even— oh goddd . .” you feel like you’re being watched, so you’re careful with how you’re putting your vibrator to your core and once you start it, the moan that leaves you lines up with geto’s deeper groans. it turns you on so damn much.

with his head tilted back, he’s long gone as he moves his hands faster and faster, the slick noises of his pre-cum and spit mixing in together — geto only wishes he could act on his desires once the course was over, but knows you’ll probably be mortified at the prospect. at least here, he can imagine that it’s your mouth or cunt doing all the work.

“s-shitttt . .” the professor sounds out, hissing when he thumbs his tip and even more pre comes spilling out and while you watch, you’re hypnotised by the beautiful moans in its perfect cadence and the thickness of his cock. by now his chest is heaving and he’s holding onto his bedsheets so tight you wish it was your thighs.

“i want to fuck her silly, fuck all of those stupid facts out of her head and get her dumb on my cock,” geto whines, hips fully bucking up now while you press your vibrator deeper into your clit. you’re left wondering how his mouth would feel, to shut him up by pressing him into your cunt until he can’t breathe, soak his stupid fucking suits, “want to hear her moan my name.”

you whimper at all the things professor geto swears he wants to do to you, grinding into your hand while he speeds up as well. he doesn’t speak, simply stroking himself as he thighs tense up and he squeezes his shaft with head full of visions of you in terribly lewd positions, making disgusting sounds, and all for him. it isn’t long before geto cums with a loud drawn out moan, shooting his cum onto his torso with a sigh before taking a sticky hand to his lips, licking it off — “i’d want to see my cum dripping out of her one day.”

that sends a chill down to your core, biting your pillow before you release softly all over your hand and vibrator; you spend the rest of the night watching professor geto’s other videos.

[12:32am, chō 💟 -> (y/n)] oh. OH..........

“i should’ve just taken an off-day today, i do not want to get back our results.” chō rubs at her eyes and temples, wanting anything to do with the return of test marks, but unfortunately it was the week after midterms and it was inevitable, “don’t need to ask you though, you’re probably not worried at all.”

“trust me, i am,” you bite the inside of your cheek. it’s been at least . . two weeks after that whole debacle, and despite your intense vents with your friend and the continuous picking on by prof. geto, nothing out of the blue was happening. except, maybe, your growing physical need for your professor and your simultaneous, increasing hatred for him.

“it’s only midterms — you don’t need to worry too much since it doesn’t contain a high percentage. what you should be focusing on are your finals. we’ll work on your shortcomings and mistakes here so you guys will do the best when the time comes.”

and when professor geto comes around to hand you your test, all you do is glare up through your lids, taking it from him before feeling your whole world crumble.

“a B+?!” your mouth gapes open at the blatant 65/100 mark that glares back at you. you know that you would’ve gotten anything but a 65, willing yourself to study harder and harder just to rub it in his pretty little face that you weren’t falling behind in his class. at this point it’s got to be personal, so soon, you’re packing up your things angrily with the intent to storm his office after your other classes.

it’s late in the afternoon when you finally finish your other tutorials on a short fuse, him clearly getting ready to head home by the darkness of his office when you shove your way through the door.

professor geto is sat in a laid-back position, tie hung on the hooks installed in the office and a few buttons are unbuttoned, revealing the very familiar tattoos you’ve become acquainted with.

“to who do i owe the pleasure?”

“cut the crap, prof.,” you scowl, using your foot to slam the office door close. despite the late nights being buried in your sheets, you won’t let yourself be treated like this, “i deserved anything but a 65 on midterms.”

geto tilts his head, sitting up and gesturing out to you; you realise he wants to see your test paper.

“ah!” with a finger, he makes a show of finding for your obvious mistakes which was minimal — but the way he marks obnoxiously tells you everything you need to know, “here. your comprehension of the similarities between Latin and Ancient Greek was too surface level, you didn’t explain why—”

“i. did!” you press down into the paper like the first time, leaning over his table and reading out the exact answer you wrote just a few days ago, “here, since your blind ass wants to act like i wasn’t answering the question.” you push yourself into his desk more, eyes levelled with his. you dare him to say something smart.

“well, your explanation of the six cases in Latin left out the locative, the last one, and there were some problems in the conjugation that the test asked of you.”

“bullshit. show me, if you’re so confident.”

professor geto knows he’s hit a dead-end. he was telling lies, full of it, but he’s enjoying every second of the anger that translates into your features, of the growl in your voice. he leans back further the more you close in on him.

“nothing, right? so tell me, do you hate me that much?”

geto simply laughs, crossing his arms and reminiscing on the many nights he’s spent doing anything but.

“quite the opposite, sweetheart.” the name catches you off-guard for a moment, but your sour face returns soon enough.

“then what the fuck do you think you’re doing, picking endlessly on a student?”

your professor sits forward, prompting you to cower back. you think it’d be good to bring up whatever he’s got going on on camstar.org but you’ll wait to a good moment before you say anything about your trump card, until geto snaps you out of your stupor by towering over you. the sheer difference makes you swallow.

“because i like seeing you flared up and angry and mad.” professor geto surprises you with each second, the nonchalance in which he said it, the stupid, attractive smirk on his face. now’s the time.

you compose yourself, thinking of the best way to phrase this, “you know you’re not entirely safe, either, you know. i could report you with the frequency in which you’re picking on me.”

you point a finger to his chest, thinking you could get him to lay off immediately with this as much as you were hoping he wouldn’t. the attention was unwarranted but not entirely . . terrible, “that wouldn’t look so good on your record, right, Uzumaki-san?”

you relish in the surprise that seeps into geto’s pretty features but it’s a short-lived victory when he goes back into a relaxed state, expression neutral — “so you know.”

“know . . what?” your professor pulls away and walks around his desk, finally in close proximity to you like he’s always wished.

“how badly i want you.” he whispers, but doesn’t go past that, rather letting you figure everything out for yourself.

“‘. . fuck her silly, fuck all of those stupid facts out of her head’, right?” you mumble softly, not admitting to even chō that you had watched that livestream over and over enough to memorise the few sentences. geto wraps an arm around your waist to tug you closer, faces so close that you could just shut him up.

“go on.”

“you want me to go dumb on your cock,” professor geto mutters a correct which undeniably sends a thrill to your core.

“you want to hear me to moan your name.” “—want to hear her moan my name.”

a small smile spreads across his face (even if you left out the most important thing) as he finishes his own sentence with you, eyes clouded over with lust and your scent and he’s positive he can smell your soaked panties from here if he tries hard enough.

“that’s right.”

“sooo . .” by god, you fucking hated the man, but seeing someone stroke their cock to just the thought of you — how could you pass off such a good opportunity? “do you prefer professor geto, or suguru?”

geto groans at his first name usage, setting you on his desk and presses himself into you at the sound of papers flying to the floor, stationary falling to the ground. he can only hope no one walks in. he’s fully hard, loving how your legs naturally spread for him.

“whatever you want, baby.” and after, it’s all history with the way geto crashes his lips into yours, letting you pull at his jacket and shirt, practically ripping open the buttons to see his tattoos that you’re begging to see. slowly, he lets you trace them while he kisses down your neck, roughly pulling your sweater off of you. you have the cutest tits, packaged nicely in your bra which he has no trouble taking off. there’s a small sound that escapes his mouth when he unclasps your bra and your breasts come falling out.

“didn’t tell me you had such a nice pair . .” you giggle.

“yeah, like i would straight up tell my professor that.” with a hand, your hand follows the ink of his dragon that wraps around his body and torso, right down to his happy trail, “but i mean, you get the honour of seeing it now.”

with a squeeze to his bulge, you whisper, “maybe i’ll let you fuck them next time.”

geto lets out a little moan, “fucking minx,” before he latches his mouth onto your nipple, kneading the other greedily. a soft moan leaves your mouth as you knead his erection, a culmination of your combined groans in the quiet office. soon he’s giving attention to the other, a hand trailing down into your panties where he rubs your clit to test the waters, and he smiles into your skin at the way your hand falters and your head hangs forward.

“p-professor . .” it’s clear geto can’t wait, because he pushes a finger into you easily with how dripping wet you are, panties showing a dark patch of your juices. “s— so thick—”

“i know, baby, gotta stretch you out,” a soft pop! is heard as he comes off your nipple before he meets your lips in a sloppy kiss. he shoves his tongue into your mouth the moment he pushes a second finger in and he swallows your moans, letting you feel around his body to dig your nails in — it was just too damn much.

“so— suguru, your f-fingers, they’re so—” even with your protests, your hips grind up against his thick fingers that are pumping in and out of you, taking every last piece of fire in you as you succumb completely.

“what, miss (y/n)?” geto memorises the exact way all your previous blazing words are reduced to mere mewls and whimpers, alongside your pleas for more, more, more.

“i need something—” you whine when he pushes all the way inside, stretching your cunt so well as you clench around him like a vice and sucking him in, “i wanna make you feel good—”

you get at least a little resolve in the time it took you to say that, drunkenly unbuckling his belt before pulling his cock out. his tip is positively leaking, fingers curling instinctively in your pussy and your moans mingle together again.

“c’mon, prof, please?” geto tuts, reluctantly removing his fingers from your cunt which he wish he could spend more of his time in, but gives in to you as you switch positions, pushing him against his own desk. from there you’re going to your knees, marvelling at the cock you’ve watched on your very own screen.

“better than you imagined?”

you roll your eyes, “shut up or i’m blue-balling you.”

geto exhales forcefully, cut off when you put your mouth gently over his tip. you suckle on it like a pacifier, swirling your tongue around the mushroom head and looking up at him through your lashes; the sight is heavenly. the hair from his bun had fallen out, framing his pleasure-filled face, and the veins on his arms pop out so much from how harshly he’s grabbing the wood.

“f-fuck, baby . .” his words are lost once you start bobbing your head, encasing his shaft deep in your mouth as you suck and lick and slobber over his thick cock, using your hands to stroke the places you can’t reach. a choked moan weasels itself out of geto when one of your hands deviate to play with his balls, squeezing lightly at the sack while you continue to lick the underside of his length.

“take me like a slut, don’t you?” geto says breathlessly, fingers going through your hair to gather the strands into a makeshift ponytail, cradling your head to guide your mouth, but he soon starts to thrust into your waiting mouth.

“want me to fuck your dirty whore mouth?” your professor asks and you hate how much it turns you on as he brings you off to let you breathe for a moment. you stick out your tongue, big doe eyes just pleading to be used as your hands anchor themselves down to his belt loops.

“y—yes, prof., give me everything you got,” geto hums, seemingly satisfied with your answer as he taps your tongue with his tip, cock so heavy and thick it makes you whine a little before he shoves it in without warning. the moan that rumbles deep in your throat sends vibrations up his body and he starts a pace immediately.

“that’s it, that’s it—” you breathe through your nose as geto face fucks you, two hands covering the back of your head as he thrusts into your throat. your mouth’s just so damn warm and tight it has geto groaning non-stop while your eyes start to well up with tears. he uses you like a cocksleeve, abusing your throat each time his tip meets with it.

“fuuuckk— yes, yes, your throat’s so—” geto tilts his head back when he buries his cock in you, the deepest he’s ever been and your nose meets with his pubes, the smell of his musk and sweat making your eyes roll back in pleasure. suguru is all grunts before moving again, the gagging, gawking noises filling the small space.

“mmhm— mmf!” you moan around his length, trying your best to move your tongue along the underside of his cock. a hand goes down to quell the growing need of your cunt, slipping a finger or two in.

“dirty girl just can’t think straight when she has a— s-shit— cock in her, huh?”

you hum in agreement, eyes fluttering when you feel his tip twitch in your mouth and geto spills right into your throat with a long moan. your lids flutter close, taking as much cum as you can before coming off with a deep breath. strings of his cum and your saliva connect you to his cock, the lewdness of it all showing clearly in how sloppily you sucked your professor off.

“open.” and you show your tongue still full of his cum, taking the opportunity to lean down to let a ball of spit fall from his mouth. it drops painfully slow to your tongue, closing it only when you hear the rasp of swallow, “good girl.”

“think i’ve kept you waiting for too long, need to be in you,” geto brings you up by your upper arms, propping you up nicely onto his desk where you already start to leak into the wood, “do you want me to be in you?”

“only if you promise to stop picking on me, prof.,” you pout. really, a changed girl once you get some cock, huh?

“but you’re too cute not to bother, baby.” your pout deepens and geto feels a tug on his heart. oh, you were too adorable, knowing you’d kill him the next time he mentions this. he hopes they’ll be a next time.

“i mean it, suguru,” you murmur as he uses his tip to play with your juices, smearing it around your cunt. “treat me like a proper person.”

“can i at least treat you like a slut behind closed doors?”

you bit your lip, he’s asking for a next time, and who are you to reject him?

“whatever you want, professor,” you wiggle your hips along his cock, hoping for some friction which he grants to you with no problem, “use me. treat me like your cum dump.”

geto hisses at your tightness and your words as he bottoms out in you. he’s had your pussy once and already cannot get enough of you, moaning each time he moves in and out of your cunt. your walls hug him so snugly, sucking his cock in endlessly.

“baby, baby, baaaby . . your pussy’s so fuckin’— good—” he grunts into your ears, hips starting to thrust slowly into you. he swears he can see you in your tummy, asking you to look down, “look at how deep i am in you, sweetheart.”

you moan at just how big he was as you glance down, but you’re more focused on the way your pussy spreads for him, the cute veins on his length as he moves in you. you’re leaking so much that it’s effortlessly, the way he rams into you.

“sugu— suguru . . mmfuck—” geto groans upon feeling you rub your clit, your own hips bucking needily into his own as your juices start to drip down his balls. this was everything that he hoped would happen; your features morphed into pleasure, you descending into stupidity just from some dick, feeling your pussy, finally.

“hear yourself?” your professor proposes the question and you’re confused for a moment until he slows down and you whine at the sudden change, brought to attention just how soaking you were. the soft shlick, shlick, shlick sounds take your breath away, as with the translucent sheen of your juices coating his cock.

there, your professor resumes his pace, “hear how fuckin’ sloppy this pussy is for me. listen to her,” your senses are all overwhelmed: by how he hits all your sweet spots, the sweat on your back, your fast-beating heart and you let out a mangled whimper, “yesss . . that’s what i like to hear.”

geto smirks at how you can’t even answer, picking up his pace into a regular one. with his cock buried deep in you, you have no choice but to let your body move with his thrusts, jerking each time his balls meet your ass noisily.

“is this what the little lady needed? just some professor cock to get her to not be so damn uptight!”

“y—yessss . .” you’re delirious, “yesyesyes, suguru!” you squeal when he holds your legs up and pushes your legs into your chest, tongue lolling out at the deepness that he was in you.

“fucking slut,” geto mumbled, hips turning sloppy with fatigue taking over, but your cunt was just too good to stop, “where d’you want me to cum, baby?” he knows you’ll answer how he wants you to, especially after watching his livestream—

“i-inside— inside, pleaseplease,” the circles on your clit are messy, now, chasing your high more than ever, but your pussy is grasping onto him like a vice, prompting groans deep from his throat. “want your cum dripping out of me, prof—”

those words alone has geto shooting his load with a strangled grunt, switching to shallow, quick thrusts to pump you full of his cum. it comes out in hot, thick spurts, filling your insides more and more until it spills out the sides and you follow soon after, whole body convulsing from the intense orgasm you can’t stop shaking violently.

“take it— that’s it, attagirl,” he whines out, stroking his length to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of him, “take all my cum . .”

geto is sure he’s getting old by the way he feels lightheaded, having had to hold onto the edge of the table for a minute — but in that 60 seconds you’ve stumbled off the table and laid your chest over it, perking your ass up where your pussy continues to leak hot, white cum.

your professor takes one good look at your ass, hands going up to knead at them and spreads your cheeks. with his tongue, he eats his cum out of you, making your jerk at the sensitivity.

“oops, i’ve cleaned you up of my cum — guess i gotta give you a couple more loads,” geto props a leg up, eating you out, “it’s only right since my brightest student has suffered so much at my hands . .”

tagging @arminsumi @shidouryusm @suguruplsr @crysugu @slttygeto @suget @sonarspace @marimogf @hannzai &lt;3 ok gn

[chimcess]

⮞ Chapter Five: Captain Disco's Last Stand Pairing: Jungkook x Reader Other Tags: Convict!Jungkook, Escaped Prisoner!Jungkook, Piolet!Reader, Captain!Reader, Holyman!Namjoon, Boss!Yoongi, Commander!Jimin, Astronaut!Jimin, Doctor!Hoseok, Astronaut!Hoseok Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Suspense, Strangers to Enemies to ???, Slow Burn, LOTS of Angst, Light Fluff, Eventual Smut, Third Person POV, 18+ Only Word Count: 16k+ Summary: When a deep space transporter crash-lands on a barren planet illuminated by three relentless suns, survival becomes the only priority for the stranded passengers, including resourceful pilot Y/N Y/L/N, mystic Namjoon Kim, lawman Taemin Lee, and enigmatic convict Jungkook Jeon. As they scour the hostile terrain for supplies and a way to escape, Y/N uncovers a terrifying truth: every 22 years, the planet is plunged into total darkness during an eclipse, awakening swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating creatures. Forced into a fragile alliance, the survivors must face not only the deadly predators but also their own mistrust and secrets. For Y/N, the growing tension with Jungkook—both a threat and a reluctant ally—raises the stakes even higher, as the battle to escape becomes one for survival against the darkness both around them and within themselves. Warnings: Strong Language, Blood, Trauma, Graphic Injury scenes, Jaded Characters, Smart Character Choices, This is all angst and action and that's pretty much it, Reader is a bad ass, Survivor Woman is back baby, gardening, terraforming, some mental health issues, survivor's guilt, lots of talking to herself, and recording it, because she'll lose her mind otherwise, fixing things, intergalatical politics, new characters, depression, body image issues, scars, hate for Disco music, morally grey people, will this make us look bad as an organization?, questionable character choices as well, strong female characters are everywhere, cynical humor, bad science language, honestly all of this has probably had the worst science and basis ever, I researched a lot I promise, let me know if I missed anything... A/N: This was so much fun to write. Give me some good lore and characters and I'll eat that shit up. Sorry for the lack of good romance so far, but hopefully you guys will think the wait was worth it.

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Aguerra Prime hung in the void like a mirage—too beautiful to trust. From orbit, it looked almost like Earth on a particularly clear day: swirls of deep ocean green wrapped in cloud-white, kissed by sunlit blues that shimmered as the planet slowly turned. But the illusion unraveled the moment you touched ground. The air had weight to it, a faint chemical tang that clung to the back of your throat, even after filtration. The oceans stretched endlessly across the surface, glistening with promise, but anyone with half a brain knew better than to get too close. The water was alive and teemed with native microbes and corrosive compounds that could dissolve human skin in minutes. Rainfall could be fatal without proper shielding. Even the soil, rich and dark in places, had to be treated before anything could grow.

Still, people adapted. They always did. Within a few short decades, colonies had pushed back against the wild terrain. Engineers built water purification towers along the cliffs. Bio-domes and coral crete cities rose along the coastal ridges, each one a careful balance of technology and caution. Life took root—hard-earned, and always on the edge—but it took root all the same. They called it New Oslo, this particular stretch of civilization: a sleek, functional city curved against the curve of a jagged coastline, looking out toward a horizon that always seemed a little too still.

And it was here, on the outskirts, that the cemetery lay.

Jemas National Cemetery sat on a plateau just above the mist-line, where the sea was visible only as a silver suggestion beyond the hills. The wind moved constantly, sweeping over rows of white stone markers in gentle, unhurried waves. The markers were all the same shape—rectangular, unadorned except for names and ranks and dates—but each one told a story that someone, somewhere, still carried.

The sky that morning was a low sheet of gray, the kind of cloud cover that blurred the light and made everything feel quieter. The ground was damp from a night of cold rain, and the air had that heavy stillness that comes after weather—when nature pauses to catch its breath.

A small crowd had gathered. No more than thirty people stood near the front rows, dressed in dark coats and muted colors, hands tucked into pockets or clasped together in front of them. No one spoke. Even the children, if there were any, kept quiet. It wasn’t the kind of silence that demanded reverence—it was the kind that happened naturally, when grief was fresh and shared.

At the center, just beneath the main flagpole where the banner of the New Oslo Coalition fluttered at half-mast, a wooden podium had been set up.

Yoongi stepped up to it with a practiced stillness. He didn’t glance at his notes—didn’t need to. His eyes moved over the crowd, not looking for anyone in particular, but acknowledging each of them all the same. He took special care not to lock eyes with her uncle, or anyone else on that side of the field.

“She was twenty-nine,” he began. His voice was clear but soft, carrying without force. “Bright. Focused. Asked too many questions. Always wanted to know why before she said yes. The kind of mind you build missions around.”

Some people nodded. Someone near the back exhaled sharply but didn’t speak.

“Y/N was one of our best crewmates. When the Hunter-Gratzner was greenlit, she was one of the first to volunteer. Not because she wanted the recognition—but because she believed in the work. In exploration. In reaching farther.”

He paused, the wind nudging the edges of his coat.

“When the ship went down on M6-117,” he said, “we lost more than a vessel. We lost a crew. We lost civilians. We lost her. And no speech will ever make that okay. It shouldn’t. This isn’t closure. It’s a marker—a place to say we remember.”

Behind him, the flag caught the wind again, the fabric snapping softly.

“But we continue,” he said. “New Oslo grows. The program moves forward. And we carry them with us. Not just in memory, but in mission. In the work we keep doing, because it still matters. Because they believed it did.”

He looked down for a moment, then stepped away without another word.

There was no music. No twenty-one gun salute. Just the sound of the wind moving through the grass, and the occasional shuffle of feet as the mourners broke apart slowly, each of them retreating at their own pace. Some walked past the headstone and placed small tokens—stones, flowers, folded notes—on the cold white marble. Others stood for a moment longer, eyes closed, lips moving in silent conversation with someone who was no longer there.

And then, gradually, the crowd thinned, until only the marker remained, fresh in the ground, surrounded by the soft hush of wind.

The Gabril Space Center was a monument to ambition—New Oslo’s gleaming centerpiece. All glass and chrome, it stood out against the overcast sky like something conjured, too sleek for a world still fighting to call itself home. Inside, the vast atrium echoed with quiet movement: engineers pacing between briefings, analysts buried in screens, the ever-present hum of filtered air and low voices carrying through the open space.

Mateo Gomez moved with purpose, his steps measured across the polished black floor. The heels of his boots tapped softly, the sound swallowed quickly by the high ceilings. Security nodded as he passed, not out of obligation, but recognition. He was someone here. Not at the top—but close enough to knock on the door.

To his left, a news feed looped silently across a wall screen. The headline crawled in red across the bottom: President Speaks at Hunter-Gratzner Memorial. Above it, the feed cut between slow-motion clips—Y/N laughing as she tumbled weightlessly through a shuttle bay, sunlight catching in her hair, then Yoongi shaking hands with the president in front of a somber crowd. Mateo didn’t look twice. The footage had been everywhere for days. You couldn’t walk a corridor without catching her face, mid-laugh, frozen in time. Grief, he was realizing, had become ambient noise in this building. No one talked about it directly, but it was in the way people walked, in the silence that lingered between conversations, in the exhaustion behind their eyes.

Yoongi’s office was at the end of the administrative wing—glass walls, high windows, and a sweeping view of the southern launch pads. The sky beyond was dull and featureless, just layers of gray pressing down over the concrete runways. He was alone when Mateo entered, seated with his back half-turned, watching the muted broadcast play across the mounted screen behind his desk.

Mateo stepped inside without ceremony and held out a slim folder.

“I thought the speech was good,” he said.

Yoongi didn’t turn right away. His hand reached back, taking the folder without looking. He flipped it open, scanning quickly.

“I need authorization for satellite time,” Mateo added.

Yoongi’s voice came without hesitation. “Not happening.”

Mateo’s jaw tensed. He wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make it easier. “We’re funded for five Nexus missions. I can get Parliament behind a sixth—if we make Y/N’s recovery part of it.”

Yoongi turned a page, barely reacting. “No.”

“We’re getting hammered out there,” Mateo said, stepping forward. “Protests at the gates. Parliament’s dragging their feet on the new appropriations package. The Starfire crew’s threatening to walk unless they get better answers from us, and Cruz—Valencia Cruz—is done playing nice. She’s been fielding calls from half the Intercolonial press.”

“We don’t need a PR stunt,” Yoongi said, still not looking up. “We need results. Nexus II is targeting the Sundermere Basin. We’ve picked up energy signatures—unexplained. Possibly artificial. That’s where the focus is.”

“We can do both,” Mateo said. “Two objectives, one launch. All I’m asking for is eyes on the crash site. A few hours of satellite sweep. It won’t interfere.”

Yoongi finally looked up, pinning him with a sharp glance. “It’s not about interference.”

“Then what?”

Yoongi leaned back slowly in his chair, arms folded across his chest. He didn’t speak right away.

“If we so much as point a satellite at that wreck,” he said finally, “we’re rolling the dice on a media firestorm. If the images get out—and they always do—and if she’s... visible? Intact, partially intact, anything remotely identifiable? That’s headline footage from here to Earth. And we lose control of the story the second that happens.”

Mateo didn’t flinch.

His voice dropped to something low and steady, but the heat behind it was unmistakable. “So that’s it? We just look the other way? Let her rot on a dead planet because it's easier for NOSA’s public relations team?”

Yoongi’s response came hard, like a reflex. “She’s not rotting, Mateo.”

He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, gaze sharp but tired. “You know the sand on M6-117 acts like a thermal buffer. Once she’s under, the surface temperature plummets. Radiation drops. Wind scours the top layer clean. She’s probably preserved better than anything we’ve ever brought back in a sample container. But that’s not the point.”

He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaling through his nose.

“If someone gets footage—anything, even grainy—of what’s left of her... charred, exposed, half-eaten—do you understand what happens next? That becomes the image. Not her work, not her dedication. That.” He tapped the desk once, firm. “And then it won’t just be about Y/N anymore. They’ll turn on us. They’ll ask why we greenlit a civilian-led mission without making sure access to Shields wasn’t shut off sooner. Why the automated course correction failed. Why NOSA sent their golden girl into what’s now being called an ‘unmapped danger zone’ by half the media outlets out of EarthGov.”

He stood abruptly and walked to the window, voice flattening as he looked out.

“They’re already lining up hearings in the Science Oversight Committee. NOSA’s funding is getting picked apart by three subcommittees. The EU bloc wants our Sundermere data classified until they’ve ‘evaluated its economic potential,’ which is code for: 'we want a piece of it.’”

Mateo’s mouth tightened. He’d heard some of that too—leaks coming from the Earth-side delegation, whisper campaigns starting in defense circles. Even the South American Consortium, which usually stood by NOSA, had gone quiet.

Yoongi kept going. “We release one image of that crash site, and the narrative shifts. It stops being about science. It becomes a political mess. Parliament will freeze funding. The Americans will yank their comms array support. And don’t think for a second the Lunar Coalition won’t swoop in to take the Sundermere Basin off our hands.”

He turned back, face lined with the weight of too many choices. “We don’t just lose Y/N. We lose everything.”

Mateo didn’t speak for a long time. His jaw was tight, his breath uneven like he was trying to wrestle something down inside himself before it came out the wrong way.

Finally, he said, quietly, “She was everything.”

Yoongi didn’t respond. He stared out past the desk, past the room, past everything. Mateo kept going, his voice lower now. The heat had drained out of it, leaving something heavier—guilt, maybe, or shame.

“She wasn’t just a solid astronaut. She was the astronaut. Everyone wanted her on their crew. She stayed late to double-check other people’s numbers because she didn’t want anyone getting hurt. When the Gratzner protocols started falling apart mid-flight during test flights, she didn’t panic—she rewrote them in real time, while the rest of the crew was trying not to pass out from pressure drops.”

He shook his head once, eyes distant. “She was the best botanist we had. Not just because she could ID a plant by sight—on three different planets—but because she remembered every soil variant, every gas pocket, every light-cycle condition that might screw up a grow. And then on top of that, she took flight training so she could back up a pilot in an emergency. Who does that?”

Yoongi said nothing, his jaw working like he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite get it out.

Mateo watched him. “She respected you. You trained her. You went to bat for her when she got passed over the first time. And when the Gratzner crew got shuffled last-minute, she didn’t hesitate—she switched assignments with you. So you could stay back and stabilize Nexus scheduling. She did that for you.”

Yoongi’s shoulders tensed slightly, barely perceptible—but it was there. Outside the office windows, the fog hadn’t lifted. It moved in slow currents over the landing field, softening the harsh outlines of the launch towers. Launch Pad 4 stood at the far end, silent, skeletal, waiting.

Mateo’s voice dropped further, now close to a whisper.

“She’s still up there. No body. No grave. No closure. Just a name on a rotating wall display and a headline that gets smaller every week. People walk past that screen like it’s just background noise. Like she’s already fading out.”

Mateo let out a quiet breath and gave a small, lopsided smile—one of those half-formed expressions that came with memory.

“You remember French Fry?”

Yoongi blinked, caught off guard. He turned slightly, eyes narrowing in thought. “The support drone? The one Dr. Nguyen built to assist with nutritional diagnostics?”

Mateo nodded. “Yeah. The one that kept trying to back itself into the convection oven.”

Yoongi let out a low, almost reluctant chuckle. “Right. Quinn said it was fitting. Said she named it after Y/N because it was brave and always in the wrong place.”

Mateo smiled a little wider. “She wrote that letter to engineering—pretending to be French Fry’s lawyer. Filed a fake complaint against the entire culinary systems team. ‘Negligent appliance zoning resulting in repeated suicide attempts.’ She even cited precedent. You laughed so hard you snorted coffee all over your tablet.”

Yoongi looked down and gave a small shake of his head. “I made her rewrite it three times. Just so we’d have copies.”

A flicker of something softened his face—nostalgia, grief, maybe both—but it faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

“She’s not forgotten,” he said, voice tight at the edges.

Mateo studied him. “Then stop acting like she is.”

Yoongi turned back to the window, arms folded tightly over his chest. The fog outside had thickened, curling around the perimeter lights like smoke. The towers stood still and sharp in the distance, black shapes against a washed-out sky.

Yoongi’s shoulders shifted—barely—but Mateo caught it. He knew the signs. Something had landed.

“She was my friend too,” Yoongi said, finally. His voice was quiet, but there was no doubt in it. “I watched her go from a kid who couldn’t even lock her pressure collar without double-checking the diagram, to a mission lead who had half the command wing checking their math twice because she was just that fast. That sharp.”

He paused, looking down at the floor like the memory was playing out there in front of him.

“She wasn’t just ahead of the curve. She was right. Consistently. The scary kind of right, where people stop arguing even when she’s the youngest one in the room. Not because they’re giving up—but because they know she already figured it out.”

He looked up again, met Mateo’s eyes—really met them—for the first time in a long while.

“And yeah,” he said. “I owe her. I didn’t ask her to take my place. I told everyone I was going, locked the schedule myself. But she knew. She always knew when I was lying, even when I thought I wasn’t.”

He let out a dry breath, more exhale than laugh.

“Somehow, she talked that stone-faced bastard Osei into signing off on the reassignment behind my back. I didn’t even know until I found the note in my locker. All it said was, ‘I trust my crew more than you trust yours. I’ve got this. You’ve got work to do here.’”

A flicker of something passed across his face—pride, maybe, or just the hollow ache of being known too well by someone who was now gone.

“That was her,” Yoongi said, voice quieter. “Always a step ahead. Always taking the harder hit if it meant sparing the rest of us.”

Mateo started to say something, but Yoongi held up a hand—not to cut him off, but just to finish his thought.

“I’m not being cold,” Yoongi said. “I’m being realistic.”

He exhaled, rubbing his palms together like he was trying to keep them from shaking. “Nexus II is barely holding. EarthGov’s budget committee is sharpening knives. Half the Parliament’s ready to gut interplanetary funding if it means buying more leverage back home. We’ve got maybe one window left. One shot at Sundermere before the politics close in.”

He gestured toward the fog-draped launch field outside, where the towers sat dark and skeletal.

“That crater isn’t like the rest of the planet. Wind systems don’t match surrounding patterns. The thermal shifts, the power readings—we’ve never seen anything like it. Eastern ridge is lighting up magnetically. We’re seeing what could be frozen permafrost below the crust—something wet down there. And the biosigns from the last probe? If those weren’t just sensor ghosts, we could be sitting on proof of subsurface life.”

He turned back to Mateo, the weight in his voice unmistakable now. “You know what that means. Terraforming viability. Real colonization. Not domes. Not provisional crews hoping the bioraptors don’t punch through the fences at night. Actual reclamation.”

He looked tired. Not the kind of tired that came from long nights, but the kind that came from too many decisions like this one. “We can’t afford to screw this up. We lose this shot, and M6-117 goes dark. For good. No follow-up. No second wave. Just another failed world buried under bureaucracy.”

Mateo didn’t move. He didn’t argue. He just spoke, calm and deliberate.

“I’m not asking you to risk the mission, Min.”

He stepped closer, closing the gap between them—not confrontational, just steady.

“I’m asking you to write her in. Quietly. Secondary objective, folded into the atmospheric sweep. No flags. No fanfare. Just one pass over the Gratzner wreck. If we get nothing? Fine. But if we see anything—something clear, something dignified—then maybe we give her family more than a looping photo and a footnote in the archives.”

He let the silence hang for a beat, then added, gently, “We’re not chasing ghosts. We’re just trying to finish the story. Close the chapter that never got an ending.”

Yoongi sat back down slowly. The motion looked deliberate, like every joint had to agree to move.

He tapped the armrest once, then stilled.

The quiet that followed wasn’t tense. It was thick. Heavy with memory. The kind of silence that only came after too many years spent carrying too many names.

Mateo didn’t press. He’d known Yoongi long enough to understand his rhythms. He didn’t rush decisions. He let them settle. Let the silence test their weight.

Outside, the fog pressed harder against the windows, thick and unrelenting. The field lights cut through it in faint, useless beams—small cones of visibility swallowed by the gray. The launch towers sat still in the distance, silhouettes fading at the edges like ghosts.

Inside, the soft flicker of the memorial screen lit up the far corner of Yoongi’s office. The same reel, still looping.

Y/N drifted across the frame, weightless, laughing—caught mid-spin inside the Gratzner’s jump bay. Her hair floated around her like silk in water, her limbs relaxed, fluid, untethered. She looked effortless. At ease. Like she belonged up there. Like space had always been hers.

For a second, Mateo forgot where he was. She didn’t look like someone they’d lost. She didn’t look like a name carved into polished stone. She looked like the version of her that used to barrel into early-morning briefings, still half-wired on caffeine and a new theory about bioreactive algae in thin atmospheres. Tablet in one hand, no fewer than four open windows of data stacked across it. Half the time, she was already arguing the point before anyone else had sat down.

She never waited to be asked. She never needed permission.

She just moved—with purpose, with momentum—and dared the rest of the room to catch up.

Then the image on the screen blinked away.

Her official portrait replaced it: eyes forward, hair pulled back, lips in a neutral line. The uniform was crisp. The Coalition flag blurred in the background like a watercolor made of shadow.

Remembering the Crew of the Hunter-Gratzner.

Mateo stared at it. The screen. The text. The way it tried to tidy her into something easy to mourn.

It felt false. Not a lie—but not the whole truth either. Too polished. Too clean.

He could still hear her voice, and not in a nostalgic, far-off way. It was clear. Immediate. Frustrated and full of fire.

He imagined if it had been Jimin Park left on that wreck, or Armin Zimmermann. Y/N wouldn’t be standing in an office, tiptoeing around politics. She’d already be halfway down to satellite ops with a backdoor login and a hard case full of signal boosters.

She’d have that look—mischievous, sure, but dangerous too. Like she knew exactly how many rules she was about to break, and had already decided they weren’t worth following.

And she’d smile, that crooked, knowing smile, just before she said it:

“Fuck bureaucracy.”

Mateo exhaled a breath that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. He didn’t mean to smile, but it came anyway. It was small, worn at the edges, but it was real.

Because that was her. All of her.

And the truth was, she wouldn’t have just gone after the data—she’d have dragged him along with her, even if it meant putting both their jobs on the line. And he would’ve gone. Without hesitation.

Because she would’ve done the same for him.

And that, Mateo thought, was the point. That was why this mattered.

Behind him, the silence stretched a few seconds longer—until Yoongi finally spoke.

His voice was quiet. A little rough. But steady.

“Go for it.”

Mateo turned, not sure he’d heard him right.

Yoongi didn’t look away from the window, but he nodded once.

“Have April Borne take a look. She’s smart. Discreet. Doesn’t scare easy.”

He paused.

“Get the orbital pass scheduled. Quietly. If there’s a clean window, I want her running the image enhancement—no chatter, no metadata tags. I want to know what condition Y/N’s in before we even think about next steps.”

Mateo nodded. Slowly. He didn’t say thank you. That wasn’t how they worked.

Yoongi leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath, the kind that had been sitting in his chest for hours. Maybe days.

Mateo turned toward the door, ready to move. But he stopped just before stepping out, his hand hovering near the panel.

“Min,” he said quietly, glancing over his shoulder, “this doesn’t change anything about Sundermere. We do the work. We follow through.”

Yoongi looked up, met his eyes.

“I know,” he said. “But we don’t leave her behind if we don’t have to.”

Mateo gave a small nod, then walked out.

Behind him, the door slid shut with a soft hiss. The memorial reel began again—Y/N caught mid-laugh.

April Borne leaned back in her chair, the tension in her shoulders barely easing as she stretched. It was late—closer to early morning, really—but the satellite ops floor was still lit, still humming with quiet, steady life. The room was mostly empty now. Just her, two unmanned desks, and the soft thrum of servers overhead.

She turned her attention back to her screen.

A new work order had come in. That wasn’t unusual. NOSA’s satellite grid ran constant, and last-minute data requests came through all the time—environmental sweeps, storm modeling, orbital drift corrections. But this one was flagged priority access, and the requestor name gave her pause.

Gomez, Mateo.

Her brows pulled together.

It wasn’t that unusual to see an exec’s name on a late pull—especially someone with Mateo’s clearance—but something about it felt… off. Not wrong, exactly. Just heavier than usual.

She scanned the attached coordinates.

Virelia Planitia.

April Borne leaned forward, eyes steady on the screen as she keyed in the coordinates. She spoke the name aloud without thinking—softly, to herself.

“Virelia Planitia.”

Her voice barely rose above the background hum of the satellite control center. The name settled uneasily in her chest. It tugged at something. Familiar, but not quite present. Like a dream half-remembered or the tail end of a story you weren’t supposed to hear.

She frowned, tapped a few commands into the interface, and dragged the scan window to cover the last ten hours. High-res sweep. Shadow filters on. Wind distortion compensation running. She hit ‘execute’ and waited.

The feed loaded slowly—one frame at a time, each one rendered from hundreds of kilometers above the surface. The first image came into view.

April straightened a little in her seat.

The terrain was flat, dry, and empty. That harsh, burnt-red shade she’d come to associate with M6-117. At first glance, it looked like a thousand other scans she'd run. But then the structure emerged—off-center, slanted slightly, one edge half-swallowed by windblown grit.

She leaned in.

The main habitat shell was still there. Warped, battered, but intact. One of the secondary units had collapsed entirely—just a heap of buckled alloy. The solar arrays were bent at sharp angles. Two were missing. The comms rig looked fried—its base blackened and skeletal.

But even from this distance, something about it looked wrong.

April’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she stared.

And then it clicked.

She knew this place.

Not personally, but in the way everyone at NOSA knew it—through internal reports, redacted footage, and that cautious silence that always settled in when the Gratzner was mentioned. The crash site. Y/N’s mission. The one they stopped talking about once the press coverage turned invasive.

Why the hell was Gomez pulling visuals on it now?

She adjusted the contrast, enhanced the light angles, and let the AI sharpen through the wind smear. More images filtered in. No movement. No heat signatures. No visible wreckage outside of what she’d already seen.

And no body.

No gear. No emergency markers. No personal effects scattered on the sand. Just the cold outline of a structure long abandoned.

April checked the coordinates again. Ran a depth overlay. The sand patterns showed recent shift, but nothing major. A few centimeters of coverage at most. Enough to bury light debris, maybe, but not a person. Not if they were still out in the open.

She felt a slow chill settle in her chest. There was nothing here.

No proof of life.

But also… no proof of death.

She saved the clearest frames, tagged the metadata, then paused—hovering over the folder name before clicking ‘Secure Archive.’ Just clean, time-stamped data. No notes. No assumptions.

Then something stopped her.

April blinked. Sat back slightly. Let the frame reload.

She rewound the sweep by ten seconds, held her breath, and froze the feed at the right angle. One image, high-altitude, but clear enough. She zoomed in—slowly, carefully—until the detail sharpened.

Solar panels?

She frowned. That wasn’t unusual by itself, not on a planet littered with old equipment and failed expeditions. But these… they were intact. Fully mounted. Angled just right to catch the light. And clean.

Not just visible through the dust—clean. Polished. Reflective.

Her stomach tightened. That didn’t track.

M6-117 was one of the worst environments NOSA had ever sent people into. The storms didn’t come in seasons; they came constantly. Fine red grit moved like static electricity, clinging to everything. Even low-orbit observation satellites picked it up as visual noise. Nothing stayed clean there.

But these panels—wherever they came from—weren’t just clean. They were in good condition. Better than good. Better than possible.

She leaned in again, squinting at the feed.

No scorch marks. No structural collapse. No wind shear damage. No burn-off. And most of all, no way in hell they should be anywhere near the Gratzner wreck.

The geology teams had placed their equipment miles to the west, near the old settlement edge. These were nowhere near that. These were close—too close—to the coordinates of the crash site.

She checked the registry again. No update. No new deployments logged. No ops schedules submitted. No teams down there. Nothing on file.

Her hand hovered over the mouse. The air felt suddenly too thick in her lungs.

It didn’t make sense.

Not unless…

A cold sensation moved across the back of her neck. Not fear, exactly. But a kind of awareness. The sharp-edged kind that told you, with absolute certainty, that you’d just stumbled into something no one meant for you to see.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

The words left her before she’d even registered saying them.

Her hand went for the phone. She knocked it off the cradle in her hurry, caught it before it hit the floor, then slammed it back onto the desk and jabbed in the code for internal routing. Her fingers felt clumsy. Cold.

The line clicked.

“Security,” came the voice on the other end, flat and bored.

“April Borne,” she said quickly, her breath not quite under control. “Satellite Control. I need Dr. Mateo Gomez’s emergency contact. Right now.”

There was a pause. The kind where someone checks credentials before pushing the big red button.

“Yes,” she snapped, “him. It’s urgent.”

As the operator responded, April barely heard the words. Her eyes were still locked on the image. On those panels. On the sunlight reflecting off metal that should’ve been buried beneath half a meter of dust by now.

She didn’t know what she was seeing.

But it wasn’t nothing.

And whatever it was… it hadn’t happened by accident.

The line crackled once, then went quiet.

April stared at the monitor as the call transferred. Her knee bounced beneath the desk. She didn’t even realize she was doing it.

There was a pause—three rings, four—then a tired voice answered, low and groggy.

“This is Gomez.”

April straightened in her seat automatically. “Uh—Dr. Gomez? This is April Borne, I’m in Satellite Control. Sorry. I know it’s late.”

There was a beat of silence. She could hear the shift in his breathing, that sudden tension that hits when someone wakes up mid-sentence and knows something’s wrong before you say it.

“You’re calling from SatCon?” he asked, voice already sharpening. “What’s happened?”

April swallowed. “You… you requested a sweep over Virelia Planitia. I pulled the footage. I was just running it through standard filters, but something came up.”

He was fully awake now. She could hear movement—sheets, maybe. The dull thud of feet hitting the floor.

“What kind of something?”

She hesitated—not because she didn’t know how to explain it, but because part of her still wasn’t sure she believed what she’d seen. “There’s solar paneling near the crash site. New-looking. Clean. Fully intact. Reflective enough to bounce a glare off the satellite lens. That’s not standard equipment for that zone. I double-checked against our infrastructure maps—there’s nothing logged for that sector, and the geology team didn’t build that close to the wreck.”

“Any activity?” he asked. “Movement? Heat signatures?”

“No. Everything looks dead. But the panels are positioned perfectly. They’ve been adjusted. Recently. They’re too clean for anything natural to explain it.”

The line went quiet again for half a beat.

Then: “You didn’t tag the data?”

“No. Just stored three clean frames to a secure archive. No labels. No flags.”

“Good,” Mateo said. “Stay there. I’m going to call the director. We’ll loop you back in once we’ve figured out next steps.”

He hung up before she could respond.

Mateo was already halfway into a clean shirt, one hand pressing his phone to his ear as he paced across the narrow strip of carpet in his quarters.

Yoongi picked up on the second ring.

“It’s me,” Mateo said. “Wake up. We’ve got movement at the Gratzner site.”

There was a pause on the other end. A sigh, maybe. But not confusion. Not disbelief. Just that heavy exhale Yoongi gave when he knew a night was about to get longer.

“I’m listening,” Yoongi said.

“She caught something on the last sweep—clean solar arrays, set up near the wreck. They’re in active orientation and fully intact. Way too clean to be left over from the crash.”

There was a short silence, then: “You sure it’s not leftover equipment from geology?”

“Already checked. Placement’s wrong. Too close. And it doesn’t line up with the last terrain integrity scans. She’s good, too—didn’t tag the frames. Kept it quiet.”

Yoongi was quiet for another second.

Then: “Loop her in. I want a direct line. No chatter. No routing through the board.”

“I’m already on it.”

Mateo hung up, grabbed his tablet, and keyed in the SatCon line again.

April answered on the first ring, breath caught somewhere between relief and panic.

“Dr. Gomez?”

“April. I just got off with the director. You’re cleared to send the frames. Full-resolution, no compression. Direct to me, then back it up on an external drive—don’t touch the servers again until I give you the go. Understood?”

“Understood,” she said quickly.

“I know this is probably not what you expected when you signed on,” he added, voice a touch softer now. “But you handled this the right way. We don’t get a lot of clean threads in situations like this. You just gave us one.”

There was a pause on her end. “Do you think she’s still alive out there?”

Mateo didn’t answer immediately.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

Thirty minutes later, Mateo Gomez stood in the center of NOSA’s mission control floor, surrounded by quiet urgency. The room was dim but alive—screens flickering, feeds updating in real-time, the soft clicks of keyboards like rainfall on glass. A satellite image of M6-117 glowed across the central display, the barren red landscape stretching outward around a single, unmistakable structure: the Hunter-Gratzner’s crash site.

Alice Saxe, Director of Media Relations, stood just behind him, arms folded, heels echoing as she paced.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she muttered. “Please. Tell me I’m looking at an old sweep or some kind of glitch.”

Mateo didn’t respond right away. He just turned back toward the monitor, pointing.

“Panels have been cleaned. Adjusted for sunlight. This isn’t weather. You know that.”

“Dust storms on M6-117 don't clean—they scour,” Alice said. “If the wind had hit those arrays, they'd be torn to shreds or buried. Not gleaming.”

Yoongi Min stepped closer, still in his travel jacket, his face unreadable. He hadn’t spoken since entering the room, but his silence was the kind that pulled everyone’s attention without asking for it.

“How certain are we?” he asked finally, voice low and steady.

“Ninety-nine percent,” Mateo said. “We cross-checked the coordinates. The battery Y/N removed from the Gratzner on Sol 17 was logged dead, but this panel—this entire array—has been relocated and is drawing ambient current.”

Yoongi stared at the display wall, eyes locked on the satellite footage. His jaw tightened, but he didn’t speak. Not yet.

Mateo stepped forward and tapped the screen again, bringing up the enhanced overlay. “Look at this,” he said. “This isn’t erosion. This is structure modification. The H-G’s been partially disassembled. You can see where the supports were moved. That’s not decay. That’s work.”

Alice, standing just behind them, stopped pacing. Her heels had been a steady rhythm of tension, but now she went still.

“Someone’s there,” she said, voice quiet.

“Or was,” Mateo replied. “But whatever this is—it’s recent. That site’s not dead. It’s active. Or it was, at least, in the last seventy-two hours.”

Yoongi’s brow furrowed. “That old cargo hull from New Mecca—the one that dropped signal last year. Could she have found it?”

“We thought about that,” Mateo said. “And maybe she did. But if she’s using it, it’s not for communication. There’s no distress signal, no coded pulse, nothing on open channels. Our guess? She stripped it for power. Kept what she needed to survive and stayed dark. She’s rationing.”

Yoongi’s mouth opened slightly—he was about to say something—but Alice beat him to it.

“If she’s alive,” she said, stepping forward, her voice low but urgent, “if Y/N is actually alive out there, someone on Nexus II needs to know. Her cousin’s on that ship, Yoongi. You know that.”

Yoongi turned to her, his tone calm, but threaded with steel. “We’re not telling them.”

Alice stared at him, eyebrows raised. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m dead serious,” he said. “We keep this contained.”

“For how long?” she asked, incredulous. “Until she runs out of food? Until someone leaks the satellite footage and the public gets there first?”

“They’re eight months out from New Mecca,” Yoongi said. “Ten from reentry. We hit them with this now—with this? We don’t know what that does to the crew. To him.”

“They already buried her,” Mateo said quietly from across the room. “Held a private vigil in the observation deck. And now we’re going to rip that away from them—with no rescue window? No extraction plan?”

He looked up, meeting Alice’s eyes. “Jimin Park’s been holding that crew together since day one. He’s not just her friend, Alice. Her uncle adopted him after she brought him home. They’re practically siblings at this point. You think he won’t try to reroute the mission himself?”

Alice looked between the two men, then back at the screen where the crash site stood frozen in grainy satellite stills. Her arms slowly folded across her chest.

“So we just let them believe she’s dead? Again.”

Mateo didn’t answer, but his silence said enough. Yoongi took a breath.

“We hold the line,” he said. “Until we know she’s stable. Until we know this isn’t a glitch. A mistake. Or worse—something we can’t fix.”

This time, Alice didn’t argue. Not because she agreed, but because the logic—cold and cruel as it was—held.

She rubbed at her temple and nodded once. “Parliament’s going to eat us alive. I spoke to Oversight this morning. Image data clears internal review in twenty-three hours. Once it does, it’s public record.”

“Then we get ahead of it,” Yoongi said. “We don’t let this leak through the back door. We put out a statement. Brief, clear, controlled.”

Alice looked at him flatly. “Right. Something like: ‘Dear people of Aguerra, you know that young pilot we gave a state funeral? Turns out she’s alive and living on protein paste in a desert crater. Oops. Love, New Oslo.’”

Mateo didn’t laugh. Neither did Yoongi.

The tension in the room didn’t allow it.

Mateo’s eyes were fixed on the satellite feed again. The structure sat quietly in the frame, unchanged and unmoving—just a tiny silhouette against endless red. A single, skeletal lifeline in an ocean of dust.

“This wasn’t supposed to be possible,” he murmured. “We reviewed every survival scenario. Every thermal failure point. Ration shelf-life. Physical trauma after impact. We mapped it all. And still…”

Still, she was alive.

Yoongi moved toward the chair by the wall, where he’d dropped his jacket earlier, and slid his arms into the sleeves.

“I’m going to Helion Five.”

Mateo looked over, confused. “Why?”

“She has family there,” Yoongi said. “Her aunt and uncle emailed me last night saying they were going to see them. They’re hosting a memorial tomorrow—small, just close relatives. They don’t know what we found. I’m not letting them hear about this from a newsfeed. When they get back here they need to be prepared to face the news.”

Alice’s tone softened. “If she’s alive, they’ll be relieved.”

Yoongi paused at the doorway. His voice was lower now, almost flat. “Relief depends on what we find next. All we’ve got are images—no movement, no signal, no confirmation. If she is alive, then we’ve got six weeks of rations left to work with. Maybe less. And that’s not accounting for muscle atrophy, radiation, psych strain. A year in M6-117’s gravity at surface level... even if she’s standing, she’s not strong.”

Nobody responded.

The weight of it pressed into the room.

The monitors kept humming. Soft alerts blinked on screen—routine, irrelevant. And yet the atmosphere felt anything but ordinary.

Mateo finally broke the silence. His voice wasn’t loud, but there was something in it—something fragile and steady at the same time.

“Can you even imagine what she’s been through?” he asked. “What it’s like waking up to that sky every day. Knowing no one’s coming. Hearing your own breathing and nothing else. Watching the light change and wondering if that’s your last sunrise.”

Alice didn’t respond. She just stared at the image, arms still crossed. Her jaw was clenched tight.

Yoongi followed Mateo’s gaze back to the screen. He didn’t speak right away. When he finally did, his voice was quieter than either of them had ever heard it.

“She thinks we gave up,” he said. “She thinks everyone walked away.”

He didn’t look at them when he said it. He just stared at the image—at the wreck, the clean panels, the threadbare hope they’d uncovered far too late.

“And she’s probably right.”

No one corrected him.

No one even moved.

The planet’s surface shimmered through the thick, dust-streaked viewport like a mirage, a fluid illusion of red and gold under the hard light of three suns. M6-117 had never just been a planet—it was a crucible. A punishing, relentless force that didn’t care about the limits of human endurance. It didn’t roar. It didn’t lash out. It just endured, and made you suffer for trying to do the same.

The wind outside never really stopped. It howled sometimes, hummed at others, but it was always there—scraping sand against the Hab walls like claws against a coffin lid.

Inside, things weren’t much better.

The air recyclers wheezed rhythmically in the corner, fighting a losing battle against the heat and the grit. Everything smelled faintly of copper, sweat, and the unmistakable tang of fried wiring. Every square inch of the Hab was claimed by something—wires, taped-together filters, stripped-down equipment, makeshift solar controllers, and the skeletal remains of old repairs that had failed just long enough ago for her to stop cursing them daily.

And cutting through all of it, like some absurd joke the universe refused to stop telling, was Vicki Sue Robinson.

“Turn the Beat Around” blared cheerfully from the corner speaker. The volume had long since stopped being adjustable—another casualty of the power surge two weeks ago. The computer, apparently, had decided that disco was essential for morale.

Y/N sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by the chaos. Dirt smudged her cheeks and collarbone. Her jumpsuit, once standard-issue and crisp, had been patched so many times it looked like a quilt. Her hair was pulled back into a crooked, low bun, strands slicked to her forehead with sweat. She was pale beneath the grime, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, but awake. Alert. Still breathing.

The camera was on, its tiny red light a familiar companion. She looked directly into it, her face unreadable for a long moment.

Then she spoke.

"I'm gonna die up here."

The words were delivered flatly—no drama, no fear. Just fact. A statement she'd repeated enough times to wear smooth.

She paused, then gestured vaguely toward the speaker, where the disco beat continued its unforgiving march.

“…if I have to listen to any more goddamn disco.”

Her voice cracked slightly, and for a second it was hard to tell if she was about to laugh or lose it. She went with sarcasm.

“Jesus, Captain Marshall,” she muttered, leaning back against the wall and closing her eyes briefly. “You couldn’t have packed one playlist from this century? It’s like being trapped inside a time capsule designed by someone’s dad during a midlife crisis.”

She opened her eyes again and tilted her head toward the camera. Her mouth curled into something that could’ve been a smile, if not for how tired her eyes looked.

“I’m not turning the beat around,” she said dryly. “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

The music played on, oblivious to her suffering. And for a while, she let it. Just sat there, letting the thumping bass fill the silence she no longer had the energy to fight.

Her gaze drifted around the Hab. The exposed wiring. The jury-rigged cooling coils. The last two nutrient packs, stashed carefully in a corner and rationed down to sips and guesses. Everything here was improvised, fragile, a monument to survival one piece of duct tape away from collapse.

Her tone shifted when she looked back at the camera again. Softer now.

“You know,” she said, brushing a dirty hand across her forehead, “I used to hate noise. Back on Helion Five, I thought silence was peace. I'd take long walks just to get away from everything. Loved the stillness—the wind across the glass domes, the sound of my own footsteps. It felt clean. Safe.”

She exhaled through her nose. It wasn’t a laugh exactly, but something close.

“Now I’d give anything for a little chaos. A toddler screaming at the top of their lungs. Some teenager blasting synthpop out of a cracked speaker on the transit line. My Aunt Rose laughing way too loud at one of Uncle Sean’s awful cooking puns. Jimin calling me just to argue about who’s faster in a sim run. I’d take any of it.”

Her eyes glistened slightly, but she didn’t blink. She wasn’t going to cry. Not today. Not yet.

“But no,” she added with a half-hearted shrug. “Instead, I get this. Captain Disco’s Last Stand.”

She waved toward the speaker, now cycling into another painfully upbeat track. It might’ve been Bee Gees. She honestly couldn’t tell anymore. It all blurred together.

“Thanks for that, Cap,” she said, voice cracking just enough to be heard.

For a while, she didn’t move.

Y/N just sat there, her arms draped loosely over her knees, fingers slack, her body sagging under the weight of heat and fatigue. The music played on in the background, cheerful and relentless, as if completely unaware it was serenading a graveyard.

Her face hovered somewhere between disbelief and resignation—eyelids heavy, mouth drawn tight, eyes glassy but dry. Like she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or scream, and had settled instead on stillness.

Eventually, she exhaled through her nose. A slow, weary breath. The kind that didn’t relieve anything but bought her one more second of not falling apart.

She straightened a little, not with purpose, but out of habit. Pushed her shoulders back. Wiped at her face with the back of one dirty sleeve. Sniffed. Brushed a clump of red dust off her jumpsuit—pointless, really, but it made her feel slightly more like a person.

Still not crying.

“Anyway,” she murmured, her voice rough but steady. She cleared her throat. “Guess I should get back to it.”

She glanced to the small diagnostics tablet lying on the crate beside her. One of the few pieces of equipment still fully functional, thanks to two days of rewiring and one desperate bargain with a soldering gun.

“Filters are holding at sixty-three percent. And the east panel’s… yeah, losing charge again. It dips below thirty, I lose the A/C circuit. Which means no airflow. And considering it’s been climbing ten degrees at dusk every cycle—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

She looked up at the camera again, her gaze settling on it like she was seeing through it, not just into it.

For once, she wasn’t performing. She wasn’t trying to document for science, or for protocol, or even for the off chance some bureaucrat in a clean uniform might review the footage someday. She was talking like the way people do in the dark, to themselves, when they need to say something out loud just to believe it.

“I know no one’s watching this live. Not anymore. I stopped pinging outgoing signals after the relay failed on Sol 117. Probably should’ve done it sooner. No point wasting power on a message no one’s receiving.”

Her voice caught, just a little, but she pushed through it.

“I know it’s all getting logged somewhere. Maybe. If the system hasn’t corrupted yet. Maybe it’s already lost. Maybe this is just talking into the void.”

She shrugged faintly, the gesture brittle.

“But if you’re watching this someday... if you’re here, and you found this place—first off, congrats. You made it farther than anyone ever expected.”

She hesitated. Her gaze drifted toward the speaker again, where the music was cycling into another track—something fast, with horns, absurdly upbeat.

“And second... turn the music off. Please.” Her smile was thin, cracked at the corners. “Do that one thing for me.”

She didn’t laugh. It was too dry for that. But something about the absurdity, about the sheer persistence of disco as a background to slow starvation, made her eyes crease with irony.

“Seriously,” she said. “You survive a crash. A storm. A breach. You figure out how to repurpose three dead batteries and a solar sled with two legs and a dream. And your reward? Is nonstop seventies dance hits and a broken coffee machine. Just... poetic.”

The camera light continued to blink, silent and impassive.

Y/N leaned forward slightly, fingers brushing the panel beside the lens. Her expression didn’t shift much, but her eyes lingered.

“I don’t want to die here,” she said finally, her voice low. Steady. “But if I do... just let it mean something. Let it matter. Not in the reports. Not in the mission logs. Just... to someone.”

She hovered there a moment longer. Like part of her still thought maybe—maybe—someone was out there watching. That someone might say something back.

No voice answered.

She reached out and tapped the switch.

The camera blinked off.

The silence that followed felt heavier than it should have. Not total, not complete—disco still played, faint and fuzzy through the corner speaker. But it no longer had anything to talk over.

Outside, the wind moved across the open plain, dry and sharp, dragging the planet’s endless red dust in slow waves across the wreckage.

Inside, Y/N pulled herself to her feet with a small grunt. She cracked her neck, wiped her palms on her thighs, and moved toward the power grid diagnostics. Her fingers worked on autopilot, adjusting output thresholds, checking the panel logs, splicing a broken wire.

The work was hard. The air was thin. The gravity pulled harder every day.

But she did it anyway, because surviving wasn’t something you did all at once. It was something you did a little at a time.

And that was exactly what she did.

Y/N sat hunched over the workstation, elbows braced, head bowed, the soft mechanical hum of the Hab wrapping around her like a half-remembered song. It was the kind of ambient noise you stopped noticing after the first few days—until it changed. And then, you couldn’t unnotice it. Every now and then, a subtle click or muted groan would echo through the walls. Nothing critical, according to the diagnostics, just thermal shifts or aging components settling in their housings. Still, every sound tightened her chest for half a second, her eyes darting upward, ears straining. Alone out here, you learned to take every anomaly personally.

Outside the small viewport, M6-117 lay still and inhospitable. Just more of the same: a rust-colored expanse, baked flat and cracked like old pottery, broken only by distant ridgelines that shimmered faintly in the perpetual twilight. The sun didn’t really set on this planet—it dimmed, sulked low, and hovered just below the edge of the horizon in a long, bruised dusk. The sky was always the color of dried blood.

She rubbed the side of her head, trying to ease the throb pulsing just behind her right eye. The recycled air was running too dry again. She could taste it—metallic, sand-scrubbed, stale. The CO₂ scrubber was overdue for recalibration, but she didn’t have the right calibration beacon anymore. It had corroded, probably during the last atmospheric pressure swing. So instead, she rationed deeper breaths and kept going.

On the desk before her, a battered old map lay flat beneath two metal clips. She'd found it weeks ago, buried in the remains of a modular crate in the collapsed outpost 11.3 kilometers south. Miraculously intact. The paper was faded and fragile—yellowed along the folds, edges torn like old lace—but the lines were still there, hand-drawn in black ink: contour lines, elevation notations, faint topographic notes in a steady, meticulous script. Whoever made it had cared. Had known this land in a way she still couldn’t.

Her fingertip traced a route from her current position—just north of the crater shelf—toward the ridge to the east. The terrain didn’t look too bad on paper. But out here, paper didn’t always mean much. The ground was deceptive. Soil crusts looked solid until they weren’t. The wind could strip visibility to nothing in seconds.

Her other hand flipped open the small, leather-bound notebook she carried with her everywhere. The pages were crammed with field data: raw numbers, scribbled gear checks, half-legible sketches of terrain and stars, and messy calculations that had been corrected and overwritten a dozen times. It looked more like the workings of a mind unspooling than a logbook. Her handwriting, once neat and looping, had degraded into tight, utilitarian scratches.

She found a blank page and murmured under her breath, “Let’s try this again.”

The sound of her own voice startled her a little. It had been hours—maybe a day—since she’d spoken aloud. It was easier not to. Words hung around in empty rooms too long when no one was there to catch them.

“If I head east,” she said, pencil moving across the page, “should reach the base of the ridge in seven hours. Eight if the dust is soft again. Nine if I hit another sink pocket. Oxygen reserves—”

She did the math aloud, letting the numbers ground her.

“One tank, plus a quarter from the spare. No margin for a second night, not without overclocking the cooler again. Battery’s still inconsistent. Can’t trust the sled.”

She paused, glancing at the solar charging sled leaning half-dismantled against the wall. It had started losing efficiency after a microburst sandstorm two weeks ago, and she hadn’t yet figured out whether the issue was solar array degradation or a faulty power regulator. She’d tried bypassing the controller last night, but the patchwork wiring sparked too easily.

She scratched out a quick packing list on the edge of the page: oxygen tank, regulator, ration pouches, the repaired water canister, signal flares, analog compass, a pair of makeshift coolant bands she’d fashioned out of gel packs and copper wiring, and—if she could get it working—the sled.

Planning helped. It gave the hours shape, gave her something to press her thoughts into. Numbers didn’t lie. They didn’t shift when you weren’t looking, or twist on you like memory did. If the numbers worked, you had a chance. If not, you didn’t. Simple as that.

She leaned back, rubbing at the back of her neck. The collar of her undersuit itched with salt and static from the Hab’s dry air. She hadn't bothered to look in the mirror above the tiny sink station in days. She knew what she'd see—skin dulled by stress and recycled air, hair matted and wild, eyes too bright from too little sleep. Vanity was the first thing this planet had taken from her. She didn’t miss it.

Her gaze drifted back to the map. Near the bottom, half-obscured by age and sun-bleached discoloration, a name had been scrawled in faded ink: Rexlin Crest.

She whispered it out loud, just to hear it. “Rexlin Crest.”

It sounded like something out of an old explorer’s journal. Solid. Permanent. Like it had been here long before she arrived and would remain long after she was gone.

Her thumb brushed the paper’s brittle corner.

“Whoever you were,” she said softly, to the unseen hand that had drawn the lines before her, “you got to know this place. Maybe even beat it, for a while.”

She imagined someone else sitting here, maybe in the very same fold-out chair. Same hum of the air system. Same relentless sun through the viewport. Were they alone, too? Did they make it back? Or had the sandstorms swallowed them whole?

“I wish you’d left instructions,” she added, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

She leaned forward and began jotting again—exposure zones, possible shelter along the ridge, estimated elevation gain, minimum safe battery levels. It was half engineering, half superstition. But it filled the hours. And hours were the only thing left she could control.

Outside, the dimming sky dipped another half shade. Inside, the Hab’s shadows lengthened, stretching like tired limbs across the metal floor. This was always the hardest part of the day—the shift between false day and false night, when the silence didn’t just fill the room, but seemed to press against it.

She drew in a deep breath, held it, then slowly exhaled. One more note, small, in the bottom corner of the map:

Leave before the light shifts.

She closed the notebook carefully, fingertips lingering on the weathered cover. Then she folded the map along its deep creases, treating it like something sacred, and laid it down next to her gear. The fabric of the Hab rustled faintly as she moved. The cooling unit kicked into a new cycle behind her with a tired groan.

She stood, joints stiff, shoulders tight. Reached for her toolkit. Time to check the panel. The ridge wasn’t going anywhere—but if she wanted a shot at reaching it, she had to be ready when the light changed.

Outside, the landscape remained as it always was—still, brutal, and indifferent. M6-117 stretched outward in all directions like the surface of an open wound, cracked and scorched beneath the punishing glare of three pale suns. No clouds. No movement. Just an endless sprawl of rust-colored dust, broken occasionally by fractured stone or the bleached bones of abandoned equipment. The air shimmered faintly at the horizon where heat rose in silent waves, distorting the already-barren view into something dreamlike and unstable.

There was no wind today. Just heat. Dead heat—the kind that didn’t blow or shift or give you something to brace against. It simply was, sitting on the world like a weight, pressing down into your chest until breathing felt like work. The kind of heat that crawled under your skin and stayed there, baking you slowly from the inside out.

She stepped out into it anyway, ducking around the side of the habitat module with practiced caution. Her boots crunched over sun-baked soil, each step kicking up a faint puff of red dust that drifted lazily before settling again. Even that small motion was enough to start sweat rolling down her back, sticking her shirt to her spine. Her limbs felt heavy. Gravity here wasn’t much higher than Earth’s, just enough to matter. Enough to remind her that everything—every task, every movement, every breath—took a little more than it used to.

She made her way toward the east solar panel, squinting against the glare as she approached. It wasn’t broken—if it had been, she’d already be dead—but it was underperforming. Again. Dust built up too quickly. Static charge in the atmosphere made it cling like ash. She brushed it away with slow, circular strokes of a microfiber rag, then crouched to check the diagnostic panel. Her fingers hesitated a moment above the interface before she keyed in the recalibration code. The converter was still lagging on transfer rates. Not much. But enough to matter over time. Everything out here was a slow bleed—energy, oxygen, patience.

When she was done, she stood slowly, wiping the sweat from her brow with the crook of her arm. Her sleeves were crusted with salt. She paused for a moment, letting her eyes sweep the horizon. Still no movement. Still no sound, except for the occasional creak of thermal expansion from the Hab behind her. M6-117 wasn’t hostile, exactly. It didn’t try to kill you. That would imply intent. The truth was worse—it simply didn’t care. You could live, die, scream into the dust until your voice broke. The planet would stay exactly as it was. Unchanged. Unbothered.

Back inside, she sealed the hatch and let the air cycle through the filters. Not that it helped much. The interior of the Hab was hot and stale, thick with the scent of sun-baked plastics, dried sweat, and decaying soil packs long past viability. She shrugged off her jacket and dropped it over the back of the chair before sinking into it, the old cushion wheezing faintly under her weight. Her body ached in that deep, marrow-level way that came from living on a world that didn’t want her.

The map was still open on the desk, just where she’d left it. Paper warped slightly from the ambient humidity, corners curling upward like they were trying to peel away from the surface. Her gaze drifted across the hand-drawn contours, finally settling on a single label: Sundermere Basin.

A crater. Large. Deep. Possibly ancient. It was one of the few locations flagged for potential hydrological activity back before the surveys were abandoned. Some even believed it once held standing water—maybe briefly, maybe seasonally. She didn’t know. No one ever finished the scans. Budget cuts, changing priorities. Then silence.

She leaned back, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to push away the growing pressure behind them. It didn’t help. Nothing helped anymore. She rolled her head, neck cracking, and turned slowly toward the small camera perched above the workstation. The red light was still on, but she had no way of knowing if it meant anything—if the logs were storing, if the system was even linked to a satellite that still functioned. If the storage drive had corrupted two weeks ago, she could be speaking into a void.

Didn’t matter. Speaking helped.

She cleared her throat, voice rough and low from disuse. “Alright,” she said. “Time to start thinking long-term.”

She looked back at the map, her finger tracing slowly across the crumpled surface to a point just past the eastern ridge. Her touch was deliberate, like she needed the tactile sensation to make it real.

“Next NOSA pass is Helion Nexus. It’s scheduled to run a survey arc through this sector on its way to Taurus One.” She tapped the crater. “This is the basin. It’s thirty-two hundred kilometers away. Give or take.”

The number hung there. It wasn’t just a measurement. It was a judgment. A reminder of the scale of her isolation. Of the odds.

“Presupply missions are already underway,” she continued. “Which means a Sandcat unit should be there by now. Sitting tight. Synthesizing fuel. That’s the pattern—establish the route, prep the surface, load the caches before the main ship swings through. If it all goes well, they’ll start feasibility studies for a permanent outpost.”

She went quiet for a moment, eyes fixed on the crater.

“That’s my shot.”

Her voice dropped.

“If I can get there—if I can leave a signal, something visible, big enough to catch on orbital imaging... maybe they’ll realize someone’s still alive down here. Maybe they’ll come back.”

Her finger hovered above the basin on the map—just a moment longer—then pulled back. No decision was ever final out here, not until you started walking. She rolled her shoulder with a quiet wince and pushed up from the desk, joints stiff from hours of stillness.

In the far corner of the Hab, under a tarp stiff with dust, Speculor 1 lay half-buried in red grit. Its frame had caved slightly on one side after the last seismic tremor—a subtle one, barely noticeable at the time, but enough to shift the drone’s weight off its stabilizers. Now it sagged like a carcass, picked over and hollow. She’d stripped it weeks ago for parts—rotor assembly, drive stabilizer, the nav panel wiring—but she’d left the battery.

Because batteries were a pain in the ass to pull, and she hadn’t needed it. Until now.

She crouched beside it, letting her knees pop. Her legs protested the bend. The casing had expanded from heat cycles, and the bolts had gone stiff with corrosion. She ran her hand along the edge, feeling for weak points. The metal was hot, even in shadow, and rough with pitted oxidation. She grabbed the wrench from her belt, tested a bolt. It didn’t move.

“Of course,” she muttered.

She braced her foot against the frame and pulled. The bolt twitched—maybe a millimeter—but didn’t give. She exhaled, lips tight, and tried again.

It took her almost forty minutes. Not because the work was complicated, but because her hands kept slipping, blisters reopening under old calluses. Sweat dripped into her eyes, stung her skin, soaked the back of her shirt until the fabric clung like wet gauze. She didn’t yell. Didn’t swear loudly. Just let out the occasional breathy grunt of frustration. Anger took too much energy, and there was no one here to hear it.

When the battery finally came free, it did so with a groan of metal and a jolt that nearly knocked her off balance. She sat back on her heels, panting, the heavy unit cradled in her arms. Still warm from residual charge. Intact. She turned it gently, checking the leads.

Not ideal. But salvageable.

She stayed there for a minute, elbows resting on her knees, catching her breath. Her hands trembled slightly from exertion. Not fear—just tired nerves and low electrolytes. The battery was heavier than she remembered. Or maybe she was just weaker than she wanted to admit.

She looked over at Speculor 2—the only other drone with wheels still turning. It sat near the maintenance bench, hooked up to a cracked solar panel, the whole machine leaning slightly to the left like it had given up on holding itself level. But it powered on. Most days.

“Where the hell am I gonna fit this?” she muttered, dragging the battery toward it.

The movement kicked up a cloud of red dust that clung to her pants and got into the creases of her skin, even through the fabric. She coughed once, throat dry, and wiped her face with the inside of her sleeve. The battery landed with a dull thud beside the chassis of Speculor 2. She’d figure out the wiring tomorrow.

By the time the third sun dropped below the horizon, the sky had cooled from a harsh white to a dull bronze, then to gray. But the heat didn’t leave. Not really. It just shifted, pressing in lower, heavier. Like the planet was exhaling slowly, watching to see what she’d do next.

Inside, the Hab was quiet—only the low hum of the systems cycling and the faint rasp of dust against the outer hull. She sat again at the workstation, flipping a stained towel over her shoulders before leaning into the console. Her skin was raw from salt and grit. Her back ached. Her eyes burned.

She pressed record on the feed. The red light blinked to life. It was muscle memory now, not protocol. She hadn’t logged a formal report in days. Maybe longer. She didn’t even know if the feed was transmitting. Could be filling corrupted drive space, could be echoing out into dead silence.

Didn’t matter. Talking helped.

“Alright,” she said. Her voice came out scratchy, lower than usual. She cleared her throat, tried again. “Time for a reality check.”

She pointed to the map, where the basin was still circled in smudged graphite.

“Problem A: both Speculors were built for short-range runs. Recon missions. Surface scouting. Thirty-five kilometers max before recharge. Maybe thirty-seven if the slope’s good and the wind isn’t punching me in the teeth.”

She raised one finger.

“Problem B.” Another finger. “The basin’s just over thirty-two hundred klicks away. That’s... fifty days, give or take, assuming nothing breaks and I don’t drop dead in the middle of nowhere. I’ll be living in the Speculor. Eating, sleeping, breathing in something the size of a food truck. Life support in that thing is a joke. Maybe twelve hours of clean air if I run it lean. One day if I’m lucky.”

She paused, then gave a dry laugh. It barely registered in the room.

“Problem C...” She held up a third finger. “If I don’t re-establish contact with NOSA, none of this matters. I could hike all the way there, build the biggest damn signal tower on the planet, and no one will even know to look. They’ll fly right past. Too high. Too fast. And I’ll be just another piece of debris down here.”

She dropped her hand, rubbing her eyes. Her vision swam briefly—fatigue or dehydration or both. The light from the screen painted the side of her face in a sterile blue glow. It made her skin look thinner than it used to.

“So,” she said finally. “Overwhelming odds. Minimal gear. Rations running low. Life support at half-capacity. No comms. No backup. And I’ve got one ride held together with salvaged screws and electrical tape.”

She stared at the screen. Her reflection hovered faintly there—sunburned, sharp-jawed, eyes sunken from sleep deprivation. Hair tied back in a rough knot, wild at the edges. She didn’t look like a hero. She looked like someone surviving one day at a time.

She smiled—barely—and it cracked her lip.

“I’m gonna have to figure this out,” she said, voice quiet now. “No one’s coming to save me. So I’m gonna have to save myself.”

She hesitated, then nodded once to herself.

“Let’s hope Helion Prime’s tuition wasn’t a waste.”

She reached forward and ended the feed. The screen went black. The silence filled the room again—settling in the corners, humming through the walls. Out here, even silence had weight.

The next day unfolded in fragments—sweat-slicked hours, bruised knuckles, half-coherent muttering. A blur of motion stitched together by urgency and the dull ache of too little sleep. She moved on autopilot, her thoughts always two steps behind her hands, like her brain was being dragged along by the sheer momentum of necessity.

The first sun hadn’t fully cleared the jagged horizon when she was already outside, kneeling beside Speculor-2. The rover's shadow stretched long across the cracked dirt of Virelia Planitia, thin and sharp in the early light. Her fingers were stiff from the cold night, trembling faintly as she tightened the final brace holding the new power core in place.

The rig was a mess. A Frankenstein hybrid of salvaged components and wishful thinking. The battery from Speculor-1—ripped from its corroded chassis the day before—had taken nearly all her strength to move. She’d hoisted it onto the frame with gritted teeth and every ounce of leverage she could muster, her arms shaking from the effort. The thing wasn't designed for this kind of integration. It sat like a tumor on the side of the rover, cables sprawling out like veins, half of them stripped and re-soldered under poor lighting with tools that had started to wear down months ago.

She’d fashioned a harness to hold it in place—carbonfiber strapping from the remains of a collapsible cargo rack, lengths of shock cord cut from an old deployable tent, and a few tension hooks she’d yanked from her spare EVA gear. It wasn’t pretty. The whole thing groaned and flexed when the rover shifted even slightly, like it resented being alive.

“Stay put,” she muttered, adjusting one of the final tension straps. Her voice was hoarse, not from emotion, just disuse and dust. “Seriously, just... stay.”

She pressed a knee to the rover’s side to brace herself as she pulled the strap tight, fingers slipping against grit-caked metal. The battery shifted again. She swore under her breath, louder this time, a raw edge sneaking into her tone.

The wind was picking up—dry, abrasive, and sharp at the edges. It rolled across the plain without mercy, lifting trails of dust that swirled around her boots and vanished before they went far. The air here had no moisture, no softness. It scoured.

By late afternoon, her knuckles were scraped raw, and the sun had climbed to its punishing apex—one of three that would cross overhead before the sky dimmed. Heat radiated off the rover in shimmering waves. Her shirt clung to her back, soaked through, and her lips were cracked from breathing through her mouth too long. But she kept going. Adjust. Recheck. Re-secure.

When she finally cinched the last strap into place, the sun had already begun its slow descent toward the western ridge, and the second sun’s orange glare had started to stretch the shadows thin again. Her fingers twitched with fatigue as she stepped back, watching the way the harness held. The load sagged a little on the left side. One of the bolts bowed slightly under pressure.

Not ideal. Not even close. But it was holding.

“For now,” she murmured.

She reached out and patted the side of the rover—more instinct than comfort—and let her hand drop to her thigh with a sigh. “Ugly little bastard. But you better run.”

The cabin was hot when she climbed in. Heat trapped inside all day had turned the interior into an oven. She sank into the pilot seat, the worn padding creaking beneath her, and braced her forearm on the side console as she powered it up. There was a long, silent beat where nothing happened—then the interface flickered to life, dim and uneven. The main screen coughed out a few lines of static before stabilizing. A soft mechanical hum kicked in. The motors weren’t exactly happy, but they were responding.

“Come on,” she whispered, coaxing the throttle forward.

Speculor-2 jerked like it had been startled awake, lurching forward with a sudden, uneven groan. The wheels rolled—then caught, then rolled again. One of the rear stabilizers squealed in protest. The entire chassis shuddered under the added weight of the rigged battery. But it moved.

It moved.

She clenched the steering grip, steadying the throttle as the rover crept forward across the flat plain, carving a slow path through the red dust. Every jolt sent a new symphony of rattles through the hull—loose bolts, worn bearings, stress fractures singing in metallic protest. She listened closely, eyes narrowed, memorizing each sound. Anything unfamiliar could be a warning.

But the battery held. The patched-in solar array, still streaked with fine dust despite two cleanings, managed to feed just enough power to keep the system balanced. The charge monitor bounced around like it couldn’t make up its mind, but it didn’t dip below the red.

No grace. No stability. But forward was forward.

A thin smile ghosted across her lips. Not triumph—there was nothing glorious about barely functioning equipment and jury-rigged systems—but it was momentum. And in a place like this, that was as good as hope.

Later that evening, after she'd parked the Speculor under its tarp and run another systems check just to be sure, Y/N walked the half-kilometer out to the crash site.

The wreckage had settled into the dirt like it belonged there now—like the planet had accepted it as part of the terrain. The ship’s hull, once white, was sun-bleached to a dull bone color, panels curled back like torn paper. Most of it had been stripped, either by her own hands or the wind. Scorch marks painted the ground around it, long since faded into rust-stained soil.

She didn’t go there often anymore. Not because it was dangerous. Just because it meant something—and meaning was heavier to carry than tools.

Still, some days, when the horizon felt too wide and the Hab walls too close, she came out here. Not to mourn. Just to remember what it felt like to have been someone else.

She sat on a slanted piece of hull that still had a little give under her weight. The heat from the metal bled through her pants. Her boots scraped at the dirt, and for a while she just watched the sky deepen from orange to a bruised violet, then finally into that strange navy-black that came before the second and third suns disappeared completely.

Once it was dim enough, she pulled the laptop from her pack and propped it against the bent edge of the hull. The screen flickered to life—slowly, with a faint whine from the boot-up cycle. She'd almost cried the first time she got it running again, weeks ago. Maybe she had. It had been dead weight until she repaired the charge ports, using copper wire and a tweezed fragment of circuit board from a defunct comms unit.

The power came from a cluster of solar panels she’d scavenged from the abandoned settlement ten kilometers south. Hauling them back had taken three full days. Fixing them had taken ten more. Half the cells were cracked or warped, the regulators burned out, the housing warped from heat exposure. She wasn't even sure how she’d managed to make it work. Some of it had been trial-and-error. A lot of cursing. A few sparks. But it held charge now, enough to trickle into the battery bank and bring dead things back to life.

Like this.

She tapped through a few folders, fingers moving carefully over the half-working keyboard, until she found the show she'd been watching in scattered fragments—Star Trek: Voyager. She pressed play.

The familiar theme filled the air through tinny speakers, the orchestral swell strange against the wind-hiss of M6-117. The sound wasn’t great, but it was enough. She leaned back against the wreckage, pulling her knees up, and watched Captain Janeway lead her crew toward another impossible decision.

“Try commanding a starship on four hours of sleep and a protein bar, lady,” Y/N muttered, half-amused. Her voice cracked dryly at the edges, and she swallowed, reaching into her pack.

Dinner was half a ration pack—lukewarm reconstituted noodles and synthetic soy crumble that smelled vaguely like salt and old rubber. The texture was off, as always. Too soft in places, too dry in others, like someone had tried to guess what food was supposed to feel like and missed by a few critical steps. She forced herself to take slow, mechanical bites, chewing each one longer than she needed to.

Her stomach wasn’t making this easy anymore. It had started pushing back over the last few weeks—tighter, more volatile. There were mornings when even water sat wrong, heavy like ballast. She didn't have a fever, and the diagnostics hadn't flagged anything catastrophic. But she could feel the change. Fewer calories going in. Less energy coming out.

She could see it in her body now, too. The way her suit gaped slightly at the hips, where the seal used to be snug. The hollowness in her face when she caught an accidental glimpse of herself in the corner of a screen. Not thin in the graceful, movie-star way. Just diminished. Like something carved down over time.

She set the food aside, half-finished, and pulled up her shirt, squinting down at her side in the low light. The scar was still there—prominent and angry-looking even now, though the skin had flattened some. It curved beneath her ribcage, a long, uneven slash she’d stitched herself in a feverish haze after a jagged piece of support strut caught her during the initial crash. It wasn’t pretty. The lines weren’t straight. The knots were uneven. But it had held. No infection. No rupture. The skin had taken to itself again.

She ran two fingers over the edge of it. The flesh was still tender in the cold, the nerves tingling oddly when she pressed too hard.

“That’s healing,” she said to no one, voice low and scratchy. “Kind of.”

She let the shirt fall back down and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, palms running slowly through what was left of her hair.

It wasn’t much.

She’d tried to salvage it in the early days after the explosion. Most of her eyebrows had vanished in the flash. So had a palm-sized patch of scalp near the crown of her head, and the smell of burning hair had haunted the Hab for weeks after. She’d used her utility scissors to cut away the worst of it—everything charred or melted or singed down to the root. What remained was jagged, uneven, and brutally short. It didn’t lie flat. It didn’t style. It just existed. A mess of stubborn strands over pink skin, some of which she wasn’t sure would ever grow back.

She hated it. She looked like a scarecrow.

She scratched absently at her thigh, grimacing as coarse body hair caught against her nails.

“What genius decided razors were against regs?” she muttered, mostly out of habit.

Her legs were a thicket now. Her arms too. Every inch of her seemed to have sprouted an extra layer of insulation in protest of her hygiene situation. She felt like a mossy rock.

She sighed, rubbing her eyes. “I’m one inch away from full Sasquatch.”

It made her think of Aunt Rose, who used to offer to wax her legs in the kitchen while they watched cooking shows. And Uncle Sean, who’d just laugh and ruffle her hair and say, “Body hair’s normal, French Fry. You want to look like a seal, that’s your business, but you don’t have to.”

They were good to her. Always had been. Steady. Quietly dependable in the way that mattered.

She hadn’t thought about them much in the first month. There’d been no room for it—every second had been triage, assessment, raw survival. But now that the routine had calcified into something functional, their faces came back more often. Sometimes sharp. Sometimes like shadows through frosted glass. She wondered what they thought. If they still hoped. Or if she was just a ghost to them now—an old photograph with a candle beside it.

She picked up the food pack again, poked at the congealed noodles, then sealed it up and shoved it back into the storage bin. Her appetite had already checked out.

The episode of Voyager finished in the background. She didn’t look up as the credits rolled. She just sat there in the fading light, the glow from her laptop screen painting faint blue lines across the jagged piece of ship hull she’d made into a bench.

Above her, the stars were starting to break through the dark, scattering wide across the planet’s quiet sky. Most of them were unfamiliar, sharp and small and cold. But one or two... maybe. Maybe they were part of the same sky she used to look at from her aunt’s back porch, drinking tea with her feet up on the rail, the dogs barking at shadows.

She hadn’t cried in weeks. Maybe longer. There came a point where your body conserved water the same way it conserved power. You just stopped trying to let anything out unless it was essential.

But she felt the ache behind her ribs anyway. The shape of a feeling too big to hold and too vague to name.

Eventually, she shut the laptop, packed it carefully back into its sleeve, and stood. Her knees cracked as she straightened, and her lower back screamed in quiet protest. She adjusted the scarf around her head—not out of vanity, just to keep the dust from settling in the still-healing patches—and started the slow walk back to the Hab.

Each step left a deep print in the soil behind her, but the wind would smooth those out by morning. Nothing lasted out here. Not even footprints.

Inside the Hab, it was quiet—the kind of quiet that wasn’t really silence but the low, constant hum of life support systems doing their best to impersonate normalcy. Fans cycled air through tired filters. The waste processor made a dull clicking sound every thirty seconds. Somewhere behind the walls, a motor groaned softly as it adjusted temperature output for the night. It was familiar, if not exactly comforting.

Y/N moved slowly, her boots whispering across the metal floor. The overhead lights were set to 20%—just enough to see by, not enough to strain the system. Her muscles ached with that heavy, systemic fatigue that never fully left anymore. It lived in her bones now. She paused to stretch her lower back before settling into the chair at the workstation.

The console screen flickered to life under her fingers, casting a cool blue light across her face. The reflection that looked back at her from the glass was... hard to recognize. Her cheeks were hollowed out, skin raw in places from sun exposure. The bridge of her nose and both temples had started peeling again, the result of another week spent outside under UV levels that would’ve made Earth’s OSHA teams scream. The synthetic lotion in the medkit was nearly gone. She was rationing that, too.

She leaned back in the chair, staring at the blinking red light on the camera.

Routine. Just another status update. She told herself it mattered. Maybe not to anyone watching—if anyone was watching—but to her. Keeping the habit meant something. It created shape in the otherwise formless days.

She adjusted her posture, cleared her throat, and pressed the record button.

For a few seconds, she didn’t speak. She just sat there, fingers laced in her lap, jaw tight. Then, quietly, she muttered, “You’re still talking to yourself, Fry. Not exactly the behavior of someone thriving.”

Her mouth curved, almost involuntarily—a crooked smile that looked more like memory than mirth. It didn’t last long.

She exhaled slowly and glanced down at the table, collecting her thoughts before bringing her gaze back up to the camera.

“Status update. Night 87. I think.” Her voice was hoarse, dry at the edges, but steady. “I’ve managed to extend the Speculor-2 battery duration by about 65 percent by wiring in the power cell from Speculor-1. It wasn’t clean. None of the mounts matched, the leads were corroded, and the charge regulator had to be… mostly invented. But it’s holding.”

She paused, running the back of her hand across her mouth, then winced when it scraped against cracked lips.

“Downside is the thermal exchange. Running the internal cooler now drains half the extra power I gained. Every cycle.” She looked away, toward the corner where the cooler’s fan ticked unevenly. “If I use it, the system runs hot but safe. If I don’t… the cabin gets hot enough to start soft-cooking me by hour thirteen.”

A beat passed.

“I mean, it's not an immediate problem. I won’t roast in my sleep or anything. But it’s going to get ugly if we’re dealing with consecutive heat days and I’m trying to recharge at the same time.”

Her tone had flattened, practical now. She was just stating facts. That’s what this had become—an endless balancing act of systems management, each choice eroding something else.

“Speculor-1’s gone,” she added, more softly. “I stripped the last viable parts this morning. I left the frame propped against the comms array, like a monument to engineering failure.”

She gave a weak snort, then coughed again, one hand bracing against the table as she waited for the tightness in her chest to ease. Her breathing had been getting shallower. Not dangerously so, just... noticeable.

She reached for her water ration without thinking but stopped halfway, hand hovering over the canister.

Too soon.

She let it drop back to her lap.

“Saving that for tomorrow. If the panels charge well enough overnight, I’ll allow myself a full sip. Maybe even warm it. Celebration-style.”

Her lips twisted in something like a smile, but it never reached her eyes.

She sat still for a long time after the log ended, her hands folded loosely in her lap, eyes unfocused. The hum of the Hab filled the silence around her—a low, rhythmic pulse of recycled air, processor clicks, the faint ticking of heat exchange coils trying to keep everything within the margins of survivability. Background noise, constant and impersonal, like the slow breathing of a machine too tired to do much else.

There was always grit on her skin now. A fine layer of dust that got into everything no matter how careful she was. It settled into the folds of her elbows, clung behind her ears, made her scalp itch even under the scarf. She’d stopped trying to scrub it off completely—there wasn’t enough water for that kind of luxury. She just managed it. Like everything else.

She leaned forward, elbows on the edge of the desk, and stared into the dead console screen. Her own faint reflection looked back—blurred, colorless, a sketch of a face half-swallowed by the glass.

And, not for the log, not for the record, just quietly, like saying it aloud made it feel more real, she said, “I miss hot water.”

She closed her eyes briefly, picturing it—steam rising from a shower stall, the sting of water too hot on cold skin, the way your shoulders drop when it hits just right.

“And cold fruit,” she added, her voice barely more than a breath. “Like, right-out-of-the-fridge cold. Cherries. Grapes. That sound they make when you bite down.”

Her throat tightened for a moment, unexpected.

“And I miss showers where your skin doesn’t come off with the towel,” she finished, trying to laugh but not quite making it. It came out as a rough sound, not bitter exactly, just dry.

There was a long pause. Then, quieter still:

“I miss people who answer back.”

She let that hang there. Not dramatic. Just true.

Her hand hovered over the stop button, thumb resting against the worn edge of the key. She hesitated, then pressed it.

The little red light blinked out, and the screen dimmed.

For a moment, she stayed where she was. The seat creaked as she shifted her weight, the movement small and deliberate, like even gravity had become something to negotiate. Finally, she pushed back from the workstation and stood, careful not to knock into the table or clip her hip against the nearby crate. Everything in the Hab had its place. Every inch was accounted for. You learned quickly not to waste space—or motion.

She made her way toward the back, her steps slow, the floor groaning faintly under her boots. The cot was wedged between the emergency stores and the last of the sealed rations. The mattress was thin, uneven, and smelled faintly of rubber and something sour she couldn’t identify anymore. But it was where she slept. Where she rested, anyway.

Sleep was a loose term these days. There were hours when her body shut down, yes, but real sleep—the kind that left you rested, unaware of time passing—that had become rare. Now it was more like dipping in and out of a shallow tide. Just enough to stop the worst of the fraying.

She sat on the edge of the cot and pulled off her boots with slow, practiced movements. Her socks were stiff with sweat and dust. She peeled them away and flexed her toes, wincing as the skin pulled against cracked patches along her heels.

When she finally lay back, it was with a low groan, her spine clicking against the pad as she shifted to find the least uncomfortable position. One arm rested across her stomach, her fingers drifting automatically to the line of the scar that curved beneath her ribs. The skin there was firm but raised, the texture different from the rest of her. She rubbed it absently with her thumb.

Another part of her patched together with whatever was on hand.

She stared up at the ceiling, where she’d memorized the path of every exposed wire and panel line weeks ago. Her eyes traced them now, one by one, like a bedtime ritual. It gave her something to follow. Something that stayed the same when everything else was falling apart.

Outside, the wind started to pick up, a soft scrape of dust brushing against the outer shell of the Hab. It sounded like fingertips across the hull. Like something just barely there.

She didn’t close her eyes for a long time.

When she finally did, it wasn’t sleep that took her—at least not at first. Just stillness. Just a pause between one breath and the next.

And eventually—after five hours of turning, thinking, listening—her body gave in.

And she slept. 

The next morning, she drove.

The speculor's suspension jolted her in waves, the frame creaking with each dip and shift across the uneven terrain. The windscreen was streaked with red dust and micro-abrasions that caught the light, scattering it in soft bursts of glare that made her squint. She blinked behind scratched goggles, trying to keep her eyes on the faint path she’d plotted three days earlier.

The red plains of Virelia stretched out in all directions, an endless, cracked expanse of oxidized clay and powdered iron. Everything was sun-bleached and raw. The land had a scabbed-over look, like it had once been wounded, and then just… never healed. Every kilometer looked like the last. Monotony baked under three suns, broken only by the slow crawl of the rover and the faint, rhythmic thrum of its motor.

Speculor-2 groaned and bucked over a rocky patch. One of the stabilizers complained—a metal-on-metal screech that made her wince—but the system recovered. She tapped the console gently, like soothing a skittish animal.

“Easy,” she said, voice raspy with dust and disuse. “One piece at a time.”

The only other sounds were the distant pop of heat-stressed metal and the occasional whisper of wind dragging itself across the dry ground. It wasn’t silence, not quite. Just the kind of quiet that made every small noise feel bigger.

She’d been driving since before first light, watching the stars fade out one by one until the sky turned that strange pale gold that passed for morning here. Now, sometime before local noon, with the second sun beginning to crest, she spotted something.

A flicker. A flash of color on the ridge ahead.

She blinked and sat forward, eyes narrowing. At first, she thought it might be a trick of the light. A lens flare. But the shape held as she got closer—sharp-edged and irregular against the clean lines of the hill. Not natural.

She stopped the rover at the base of the rise, letting the engine idle as she stepped out, boots landing in the soft dirt with a puff of dust. Her knees cracked when she stretched. Every joint in her body reminded her how little rest she’d had, how little fuel she’d been feeding it. She ignored it.

The shovel came off the gear mount with a soft click, slung over one shoulder like second nature. The climb wasn’t far, maybe twenty meters of loose gravel and packed sand, but by the time she reached the top her thighs were burning, her breath coming in short, dry pulls.

There it was.

A flag.

Faded almost to gray, the edges torn and flapping weakly in the breeze. It was anchored into a low mound of hardened earth. Not part of any official outpost, at least not one she recognized. But unmistakably human. Fabric didn’t just appear out here.

Her chest tightened—not in fear, but something adjacent. Something closer to proof. She hadn’t seen a sign of another person in over three weeks. Not since she left the crater rim and started moving inland. She knelt beside the mound and reached into the pouch on her belt, pulling out the small, battered cam recorder and clicking it on.

“Recording,” she said, more for the log than for herself.

The camera’s indicator light blinked green, steady.

She turned the lens to face her, sweat glistening on her brow, dust streaked across her scarf and cheeks.

“Good news,” she said, voice rough but lightened with something close to wry humor. “I may have found a solution to the cabin heat issue. It’ll require mild radiation exposure, one highly questionable engineering decision, and—if I’m remembering my protocols correctly—a violation of at least six interagency regulations.”

She turned the camera toward the flag and the mound it was planted in. Just below the surface, partially embedded in the soil, was a weather-sealed data tag.

She wiped it clean.

RTG: DO NOT EXHUME.

Her smile faded a little. That part wasn’t a surprise. She’d guessed it before she even climbed the hill.

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. An old-style power source. Still warm. Still dangerous. Still working.

“I know, I know,” she muttered under her breath as she gripped the shovel with both hands. “‘Don’t dig up the big box of plutonium, Frenchie.’”

She hadn’t thought about that line in years.

It had come from her old heat systems instructor back during training, a no-nonsense ex-NASA engineer with a voice like gravel and no patience for theatrics. The man had stood at the front of the lecture hall with one hand on a scorched titanium shell and told the entire room, “You crack one of these open, you don’t get second chances. So unless you want your great-grandkids glowing in the dark, you leave it buried. Say it with me: Don’t. Dig. Up. The. Box.”

They’d laughed at the time.

Now, crouched on this godforsaken hill under a sun that never quite knew how to set, she wasn’t laughing.

She drove the blade of the shovel into the ground. The soil fought her. Hard-packed, sun-baked—more like concrete than dirt. She worked in a rhythm, short and precise, trying not to waste energy. But even with the right technique, it was brutal.

The first strike jarred up her arms. By the third, her shoulders burned. By the fifth, her elbows throbbed like she’d been lifting freight by hand. She ignored it. Kept digging. Sweat trickled down her spine beneath the base layer of her suit, pooling in the small of her back, sticky and irritating. Her hands ached inside the gloves. She was breathing hard now, each pull of air dry and metallic in her throat.

On the seventh strike, she heard it.

A dull, unmistakable thunk.

Her body stilled, shovel frozen in place. She crouched quickly, heart pounding in her ears, and set the tool aside. Carefully, deliberately, she brushed away the remaining dirt with both hands. The loose grit clung to her gloves, sticking in layers, but eventually a smooth surface came into view.

There it was.

Compact. Cylindrical. Still intact.

The casing of the RTG was streaked with heat scoring, but otherwise unblemished—no cracks, no corrosion, no obvious compromise. It looked almost new, like it had just been placed there yesterday instead of god knows how many years ago. The outer shell had a faint metallic sheen, broken only by tiny vents and the faint lettering along one edge, still visible through the dust.

It looked like the nose of a missile. Sleek. Purposeful. Designed for function, not comfort.

She crouched beside it, one hand resting on her knee, the other hovering inches from the surface. Her chest rose and fell in steady, shallow breaths. She didn’t touch it.

“RTGs,” she said quietly, more to herself than the camera now tucked into her chest rig, “are great for spacecraft. Reliable power, no moving parts. Efficient thermal conversion. And if they stay sealed, they’ll run for decades.”

She paused.

“But if they crack…”

She didn’t need to say the rest.

There was a reason they buried these things when missions went sideways. A reason they marked them with durable warning tags and logged the coordinates in deep-storage government databases.

Radiation leaks. Long-term exposure risk. Inhalation vectors. Cancer clusters. Soil contamination that lasts longer than recorded history.

She sat back on her heels, just looking at it.

“That’s probably why they marked it,” she murmured. “So some other unlucky asshole wouldn’t stumble across it and decide it looked useful.”

A short, dry laugh escaped her lips. It was closer to a cough than anything resembling amusement.

“So naturally,” she said, shaking her head, “here I am.”

She took a long breath, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. The silence stretched. The wind picked up slightly, just enough to stir the edges of the flag still fluttering weakly behind her.

“As long as I don’t break it,” she started to say, but then stopped herself. Her expression twisted. She looked down at the generator again.

She shook her head, muttering, “I was about to say, ‘everything will be fine.’ Jesus.”

The words sounded ridiculous even to her.

Fine had left the conversation weeks ago.

With one last breath, she leaned in, testing the RTG’s weight with both hands. It didn’t budge at first. The casing was half-set in packed dirt and clay, and whatever mounting system had once held it had partially fused with the soil. She braced her boots, adjusted her stance, and heaved.

It shifted—slightly.

Then more.

She worked at it in short bursts, alternating between shoveling out more earth and trying to lever the generator upward without putting too much strain on the shell. Every motion was deliberate, her eyes flicking constantly to the casing for signs of damage—any hairline crack, any hiss of escaping gas. Nothing. Just the soft scrape of metal against dirt and the strain of her own breath echoing inside her helmet.

When the RTG finally came loose from the earth, it shifted without warning.

She stumbled backward, almost losing her grip as the full weight of it landed in her arms. Forty kilos, maybe more. Compact, deceptively heavy—built that way on purpose. Layers of shielding, composite housing, enough thermal insulation to keep the core from turning a useful tool into a long-term death sentence.

Her boots slid slightly in the loose grit at the top of the hill. She bent her knees, catching the shift just in time, and steadied herself with a soft grunt. The muscles in her arms screamed in protest. Her lower back joined the chorus a few seconds later. She sucked in a breath and readjusted her grip, fingers aching through the gloves.

She didn’t say anything. Didn’t curse. Didn’t make a joke.

There wasn’t enough energy for that anymore.

Step by step, she started the descent.

The hill was steeper than she’d thought. Not a lot, but enough. The weight threw off her balance, every movement a negotiation between gravity and her own diminishing stamina. Her boots punched into the clay with each step, dust puffing up around her knees. The sun—two of the three now overhead—glared down with white intensity, stripping shadows, bleaching the world into dull, washed-out tones. The third sun was still climbing, pale and distant, but it would join the others soon enough.

Her breath rasped in her throat, shallow and fast. The heat inside the suit was building. Sweat pooled in the bend of her elbows, the back of her neck. Her cooling band had long since given up trying to regulate anything. She could feel the flush in her cheeks, the dizziness sitting just behind her eyes.

Don’t drop it.

She kept repeating that in her head.

Don’t drop it. Don’t trip. Don’t set it down too hard. Don’t jostle it. Don’t crack the casing. Don’t end your life in the middle of nowhere with your name on a future cautionary PowerPoint slide.

By the time she reached the base of the hill, her legs felt like rebar. Her hands were shaking. She staggered the last few meters to the rover and let the RTG down as gently as her body would allow, placing it on the reinforced cradle she’d rigged earlier—originally designed to hold water tanks, now hastily reinforced with struts, clamps, and a frankly insulting amount of duct tape.

She took a knee, head down, catching her breath. Her chest heaved. Her arms hung limp at her sides. A strand of hair, wet with sweat, stuck to her mouth and she blew it away, eyes closed.

When she finally climbed back into the driver’s seat, the heat inside the cabin hit her like a wall. She groaned softly and pushed the door closed behind her, sealing the oven shut.

The temperature inside was pushing into the red. The insulation helped, but not enough. Her shirt was gone—discarded somewhere on the rear bench an hour ago. Her undersuit clung to her in damp patches, soaked through. Her hair was plastered to her head in stringy clumps. Every breath she took tasted like metal, stale air, and dust. Her ribs ached from carrying the weight. Her hands were trembling again.

She sat behind the controls for a long moment, staring ahead through the sun-drenched windshield. The landscape beyond wavered in the heat—red plains shimmering, horizon pulsing faintly like the planet itself was breathing.

Her expression didn’t change.

Then, finally, she reached up and wiped her brow, flicking sweat off her fingers with a motion that was more ritual than relief.

“I’m still hot as hell,” she said, voice rough, barely louder than a whisper. “And yes… technically, I’m warmer now because I’ve just strapped a decaying radioactive isotope to my power cradle.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the cargo bay, at the shadowed outline of the RTG now secured in place.

“But honestly?” she said, facing forward again. “I’ve got bigger problems.”

She leaned toward the dashboard, opened the glovebox, and pulled out a small black data stick—Captain Marshall’s personal drive. The one she’d told herself she wouldn’t touch. Not unless things got really bad. Not unless she needed something—anything—to take the edge off the silence.

She slotted it into the console port with a faint click.

“I’ve gone through every file,” she muttered. “Scans. Reports. Debrief footage. Personal logs.”

She scrolled quickly, flicking past folder after folder.

“And this…”

She tapped on a music folder. Her brow furrowed.

“…is officially the least disco song he owns.”

She pressed play.

A moment later, the opening beats of Hot Stuff by Donna Summer burst through the cabin speakers—bright, bouncing, unapologetically alive.

She didn’t smile. Didn’t laugh. Her expression didn’t move at all. She just put both hands on the controls and started the rover forward, the electric whine of the motors joining the steady thump of bass.

Outside, the Hab shrank behind her, its white frame slowly swallowed by heat shimmer and distance, until it was just another shape in the desert.

The camera on the dash was still rolling, recording without commentary.

It caught her face, lit in flickering fragments—sunlight, dust, and 1979 optimism bouncing off the console.

She didn’t say another word.

She just kept going.

The satellite images scrolled slowly across the wide display at the front of the press room—high-resolution feeds pulled from a string of polar-orbiting relays. On screen, M6-117 stretched out in every direction, a vast red wasteland under three pale suns. In the middle of that emptiness, one small machine—Speculor-2—crawled forward, dragging a faint trail through the brittle dust behind it. The vehicle looked impossibly small. Fragile, even. But it moved with purpose.

In the rows of press seating, reporters leaned forward in their chairs. Some were scribbling notes, others just watching—expressions caught somewhere between fascination and dread. The silence was tense, broken only by the occasional click of a camera shutter or the low hum of tablet microphones still recording.

“Where exactly is she going?” someone finally asked—a woman near the front, eyes sharp behind rectangular glasses. Her voice carried the brittle edge of disbelief. “She’s… alone. That’s not protocol.”

Up on the small stage, Mateo sat behind a long table, facing the media. His posture was tight, both hands clasped together like he was bracing for impact. His suit, once crisp, now bore the signs of long nights—creases at the cuffs, tie knotted slightly off-center, dark shadows under his eyes. Behind him, a small display showed the current rover position and its trajectory plotted across the planet’s digital terrain.

Alice stood just off to the side, arms folded across a slim tablet, her stare fixed on Mateo with a kind of practiced intensity. He could feel her watching—waiting to jump in if he veered too far off-message.

Mateo cleared his throat. “We believe she’s conducting a series of long-range mobility tests,” he said. “She’s been extending the duration of each excursion, likely to assess rover endurance under load. We think she’s preparing for something longer.”

“To what end?” another reporter asked. “Why leave the habitat at all, if it’s functioning?”

Mateo exhaled slowly. “To re-establish contact. That’s our current assessment. We believe she’s aiming for the Helion Nexus pre-supply site—roughly 3,000 kilometers from her current location. That location would’ve had a reinforced communications relay. If she found the right maps in the nearby settlement... it makes sense.”

A pause followed. Then: “She’d risk her life to send a message?” The voice came from a CNN correspondent in the front row, skeptical and direct.

Mateo nodded. “That’s the problem she’s facing. She’s entirely alone. No signal. No uplink. From her perspective, we’re gone. Making contact isn’t just important—it might be the only way she survives.”

“But what would you tell her—if you could?” another reporter asked. “Keep going?”

Mateo hesitated, eyes flicking to Alice. She didn’t say anything. Just held his gaze for a moment. His voice was quieter when he answered.

“If we could talk to her, we’d tell her to stay put. We’d tell her help is coming. She just has to hold on.”

He paused again. Then added, “We’re doing everything in our power to bring her home alive.”

The room murmured. Pens scratched across paper. Someone whispered into a phone. Alice’s jaw clenched.

As soon as the cameras cut and the lights shifted, she was already moving—her heels sharp on the tile as she caught up with Venkat in the corridor outside the press room. Her voice was low, fast, and tight.

“Don’t say ‘bring her home alive,’” she hissed, eyes darting toward the passing cameras. “You’re reminding the world that she might die. That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do.”

Venkat didn’t even slow down. “You think people forgot?”

“I think they didn’t need it underlined,” she snapped. “You asked me for notes, and I’m giving them to you. Mateo was… fine. ‘Meh,’ if I’m being honest. And yes, I am trying to make the world forget that there’s a very real chance Y/N Y/L/N is going to die alone on a dead rock. That’s my job.”

Venkat gave her a sideways glance. “A lot of conviction for a PR position.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “I’ve got two ex-husbands, both of whom I’m still paying alimony to, and neither of whom could hold down a job if it were duct-taped to their chests. Conviction is all I’ve got right now.”

“Hard to believe you walked away from either of them,” Venkat offered lightly.

She cut him a look sharp enough to leave a mark. “I left both of them. Don’t test me.”

They walked into the executive briefing room together. The mood inside was quiet but strained. Several department heads had already gathered—some flipping through reports, others just sitting, staring at the large monitor on the wall that still showed Y/N’s rover inching across the Martian plain.

Yoongi looked up from the head of the table as they entered. His face was unreadable, his posture relaxed but not at ease. He tapped a stylus against the table once, then again.

“Don’t say ‘bring her home alive,’” he said, voice dry. “Not helpful.”

Mateo dropped into the seat beside him with a sigh. “I know, I know. But I’m not a news anchor. You shove a mic in my face and expect precision, you’re gonna get a few stumbles.”

“No more Mateo on television,” Alice said from the doorway, making a quick note on her tablet. “Duly noted.”

Mateo opened his mouth to protest, but whatever he was about to say vanished when April entered, flanked by a junior aide and carrying a stack of printed briefings, slightly curled at the edges. She moved fast, a little out of breath, and started distributing the documents down the table.

“She’s seventy-six kilometers out,” Yoongi said, already flipping through the first page. “Tell me that’s a typo.”

April shook her head. “No, sir. It’s accurate. She drove out from the Hab in a straight line for almost two hours. Then stopped for an EVA—likely a battery change or cooling swap—and then kept going.”

“Seventy-six kilometers?” Creed said from the back of the room, chuckling. “Are we doing a father-daughter update now? Where’s the SatCon lead?”

“She is the lead,” Mateo replied, sharper than necessary. “April’s the one who found the first visual confirmation Y/N was alive. She’s running point on this.”

Alice shot Creed a glare that could've stripped paint.

“Just asking,” Creed muttered, holding up a hand.

Yoongi didn’t look up. “April. Is this another systems test?”

April hesitated, flipping through her own notes. “Possibly. But if something goes wrong that far out… she won’t make it back.”

The room went quiet.

Yoongi rubbed his eyes, jaw tight. “Did she load the Depressurizer? Or the Reclaimer?”

April shook her head slowly. “We… didn’t see that. Not in the window we had.”

Yoongi’s head snapped up. “What do you mean, you didn’t see it?”

“There’s a recurring satellite gap,” she explained quickly. “Every forty-one hours, we lose visual for seventeen minutes. It’s orbital. We’re adjusting for it, but that’s what we had.”

“Unacceptable,” Yoongi said flatly. “I want that gap down to four minutes. Less, if possible. Use every tool we have. Trajectory, relay orbit, blindspot hopping—whatever it takes.”

April blinked, surprised. “Uh—yes, sir. I’ll—yeah. I’ll get it done.”

Yoongi flipped another page in the brief, the paper whispering under his fingers. The room was quiet—oppressively so. The only background noise came from the low hum of the ceiling projector and the occasional creak of someone shifting in their chair.

Across the table, Alice stared at her notes but wasn’t reading them. Her lips were pressed into a thin line, her pen unmoving above the page. No one had spoken in over a minute.

On the wall, the satellite feed continued its slow, deliberate loop—Speculor-2 creeping across the surface of M6-117, a single tire track the only sign it had ever passed through.

Yoongi leaned back slightly in his chair, arms folded, eyes still fixed on the screen. He didn’t speak right away. When he did, his voice was quiet, almost conversational.

“Let’s assume she didn’t load the Depressurizer or the Reclaimer.”

A beat passed.

“She’s not headed to Helion Nexus yet. But she’s thinking about it. She knows that’s the only place with a shot at communication. Probably found the old nav data in the settlement ruins. She’s working up to it. Probing range. Testing reliability.”

He turned toward the far end of the table.

“Marco, what’s the earliest we could land a presupply package at the Nexus site?”

Marco Moneaux looked up slowly. The Jet Propulsion Lab director looked like hell—collar unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, eyes glassy from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He ran a hand through his graying hair before answering.

“With current planetary alignment, launch windows are limited,” he said, voice raw. “Best-case, we’re looking at two years. That’s if everything goes right and we start building now. And construction alone would take at least twelve months.”

“Six,” Yoongi said, flatly.

Marco blinked. “That’s not how orbital mechanics work.”

“Six,” Yoongi repeated. “You’re going to tell me that’s impossible, and then I’m going to give you a stirring speech about the ingenuity of JPL and how lucky we are to have the best minds in the solar system. And then you’ll sit down with your team and start doing the math.”

Marco let out a slow breath, the kind that came from years of losing arguments that turned out to be winnable after all. “The overtime budget’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“I’ll find the money,” Yoongi said. “We just need the schedule.”

Across the room, Creed shifted, his arms crossed, jaw set tight. His usual smirk was gone.

“It’s time to tell the crew,” he said.

Mateo looked up sharply. “We agreed—”

“No,” Creed cut in. “You agreed. You talked, Alice nodded, and I didn’t have time to get a word in. But I’m telling you now: this is bullshit. One of them has a sister out there, and she’s alive and fighting, and they don’t know. That’s a hell of a thing to ask a crew to live with.”

“Her cousin needs to stay focused,” Mateo said carefully. “They all do. They’re still in descent planning. We tell them now, it’ll fracture everything.”

“They’re not robots,” Creed said, voice rising just slightly. “They’re not going to fold if we’re honest with them.”

“We’re not there yet,” Yoongi said, quiet but firm. “We tell them when we have something real. A trajectory. A payload manifest. A launch date. Until then, it’s just a burden.”

Creed leaned back in his chair, arms still folded. He didn’t look satisfied, but he didn’t argue again. Not yet.

At the head of the table, Yoongi turned back to Marco. “Six months.”

Marco gave a slow, resigned nod. “We’ll do our best.”

Yoongi didn’t look away. “Y/N dies if you don’t.”

No one spoke after that.

The Hab had started to feel more like a jungle than a research station.

Potatoes grew in every corner now—lined in shallow bins, sprouting from hacked-together troughs, wedged into plastic storage drawers with holes drilled in the sides for airflow. They clung to the walls in hanging bags of soil and insulation wrap, their leaves stretched greedily toward the panels of grow lights overhead. A dozen different containers buzzed with tiny pumps and improvised irrigation systems, everything patched together with old tubing, leftover fasteners, and a prayer.

It smelled like damp earth and warm plastic. Not unpleasant. Just persistent. Like the place had stopped pretending to be sterile.

Y/N knelt in the middle of the chaos, a serrated knife in one gloved hand, gently pulling a plant from its bin. She worked slowly, methodically, fingers careful not to damage the roots. Once it was free, she used the blade to slice through the clumped soil, separating the plant’s young potatoes from the main stem. Some were no bigger than a thumb. Others had grown fat and knobby, streaked with red dust and tangled with hair-thin roots.

She set the largest ones aside and began cutting the rest into seed pieces, each chunk still bearing one or two pale eyes. They’d go back into the soil in a few hours, restarted for another cycle.

She moved with practiced rhythm—precise, calm, almost ritualistic. These plants were the only reason she was still alive. There wasn’t room for mistakes anymore.

Across the room, the camera sat perched on its usual shelf, its red indicator light blinking patiently. She’d left it on standby for the last few days, waiting for something worth recording.

Wiping the back of her hand across her cheek, leaving a streak of dirt behind, Y/N stood, walked to the table, and hit the record button.

She perched on the edge of the workbench, still holding one of the potatoes in her hand. It was lumpy, coated in clingy soil, but she turned it slowly for the camera like it was something rare. Something fragile.

“It’s been about eighty sols since I started this mess,” she said. Her voice was steady but low, worn around the edges like fabric left out in the sun too long. “These guys were the first thing I planted once I stabilized the water filtration. They weren’t supposed to work this well.”

She gestured toward the rows of bins and hanging planters.

“I’ve got over four hundred healthy potato plants now. Not bad for emergency rations, right?”

A small, tired smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“The smaller ones go back into the soil,” she continued, holding up one of the cut seed pieces. “The bigger ones? That’s dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch. Depends on when I remember to eat.”

She held up the full potato again, this time more like a toast. “Locally grown. All-natural. Organic, Hexundecian potatoes. Can’t say that every day.”

She let the potato drop gently onto the pile beside her, her expression sobering.

“But…”

Her voice trailed off, the weight behind the word doing most of the work. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands clasped loosely in front of her.

“None of this matters,” she said finally, “if I can’t make contact with NOSA.”

The sentence landed like a dropped tool—loud in the quiet room.

She stared at the lens for another beat, then clicked the feed off.

Turning back to the table, she swept the dirt aside with her forearm and unfurled one of the maps she’d been revisiting every day for the last week. The surface was creased and frayed, the ink faded in places, but the terrain lines were still visible, along with the handwritten notations she’d scrawled in the margins over the last few weeks.

The map wasn’t paper. It was synthetic weave, coated in resin. Durable. Meant to last.

She spread it out like a gambler laying down cards in the final round of a bad hand. She'd traced this same route twenty times. Calculated elevation gains. Wind direction. Potential shelter zones. Solar charge patterns.

None of it added up.

“Come on,” she muttered, fingers tapping the edge of the map. “There’s something I’m missing.”

She scanned the familiar routes, her eyes jumping between landmarks—Sundermere Basin, Ridgefall Bluff, the old survey trench near Solvent Crater. Her handwriting wove through the terrain like a nervous heartbeat.

And then she saw it.

Two small words, printed in faded ink near the bottom corner: Thessala Planitia.

She froze.

Her eyes locked onto the name, her whole body still for a moment as if afraid she might break the spell by breathing too loud. Then, slowly, she leaned in, her hand brushing across the label like she needed to confirm it was real.

“Thessala Planitia…”

The name echoed in her head.

Buried in one of the briefing files—early mission studies, pre-expansion data. There’d been a fallback relay planned there. A testbed for the old drone network. If anything was still intact…

She straightened, dragging the map closer, scanning the terrain for possible access routes. The soil there had been flat. Storms had hit it, sure, but the area was geologically stable. The signal loss might’ve just been a relay failure.

Her breath caught.

“I know what I’m gonna do,” she whispered, her voice sharper now—not confident, but charged with urgency.

She pushed off the table and grabbed the nearest notepad, sketching out a quick overlay. Her fingers moved fast, scrawling numbers, plotting arcs, connecting points across solar window charts and terrain profiles.

The plan wasn’t clean. It wasn’t safe. And it sure as hell wasn’t official.

But it was something.

And that was more than she’d had an hour ago.

She moved across the Hab in a blur, checking charge levels, opening storage crates, reviewing consumables. Her hands were shaking, but her movements were quick, practiced. The kind of urgency born from too many days of waiting for a sign and finally, finally getting one.

In the corner, the camera blinked back on, recording her again.

She didn’t notice.

She was already halfway to the rover.

April leaned forward over her console, elbows digging into the edge of the desk, her eyes fixed on the satellite feed streaming across her screen. A soft pulse of red sand flickered in the top corner—M6-117’s weather signature. Below it, the rover moved.

A tiny dot on a huge, empty map.

Speculor-2 crept along the surface like it was tracing the memory of a path no one else could see. The feed lagged every few frames—just enough to remind her how far out the signal had to travel. But the movement was steady. Deliberate. She watched it update, frame by frame.

“She’s moving again,” April called over her shoulder, her voice tight. Not alarmed. Just tense, like a violin string pulled one notch too far.

Mateo was already halfway across the floor by the time the words finished leaving her mouth. He didn’t bother with the usual preamble—just leaned over her shoulder, squinting at the data. His tie was askew again, and there was a faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. Sleep clearly hadn’t made the cut last night.

“Where the hell is she going?” he muttered, dragging a knuckle along the edge of the screen as if that would help clarify things. “She hasn’t deviated from her heading in almost two weeks. No course changes, no sign of instability… And now she just shifts south?”

April tapped in a few quick commands, the camera feed adjusting. The map zoomed out, giving them a wider view of the rover’s path—long, straight, precise. Until now.

“Maybe she’s rerouting around something,” April offered. “An obstruction, maybe? Subsurface instability?”

Mateo shook his head, eyes narrowing. “Out there? That whole stretch is Virelia Planitia. It’s flat as hell. No rock ridges, no sand traps, no canyon shelves. We scouted it top to bottom back in the ‘42 survey.”

He fell quiet mid-thought, his brow furrowing. Something flickered behind his eyes.

Then—without a word—he straightened.

“I need a map,” he said suddenly, already turning toward the door.

“What?” April stood quickly. “Wait—what kind of map?”

“A big one,” he called over his shoulder. “Topographical. Uncropped. Now.”

April followed, catching up as they exited the SatCon control room and made a sharp turn down the hallway. They pushed through the breakroom doors, startling a junior technician in the middle of stirring instant coffee. He blinked as they barreled past him.

On the wall behind the vending machines hung a poster-sized map of M6-117—glossy, tourist-style, with color-coded regions and labeled basins. A leftover from a team-building event. No one took it seriously.

Until now.

Mateo strode straight to it, yanked it off the hooks in one sharp motion, and laid it flat across the nearest table. The tech made a protesting noise behind them.

“I’ll replace it,” Mateo said distractedly. “Promise.”

He pulled a pen from his pocket—a half-dried Sharpie with a frayed tip—and clicked it with one hand while holding the map with the other.

April was already beside him. “Hab’s at thirty-one point two north, twenty-eight point five west.”

Mateo made a small black X on the map with a practiced flick. Then he traced a line with the side of the pen, dragging it along the same route they’d seen on the satellite feed—first the original heading, then the sudden veer south.

He paused. His hand stopped.

The pen hovered just above a name printed in small, faded text.

Thessala Planitia.

His expression changed.

He looked down at it for a moment, then stepped back from the table like it had spoken to him.

“I know where she’s going,” he said, and now there was a flicker of life in his voice—sharp, focused, like adrenaline had finally replaced exhaustion.

April leaned in, frowning. “Why there? It’s barely mentioned in the archives. Wasn’t that one of the early relay fields?”

Mateo was already walking again, muttering to himself.

“She found something,” he said. “Or she remembered something we forgot.”

“Mateo,” April called after him, “where are you going?”

“To requisition a vessel,” he said without looking back.

“Requisition a what?” she blinked.

But he was gone, disappearing through the far doors.

April stayed behind, staring down at the map on the table. The line he’d drawn still shimmered faintly with fresh ink, curving down toward the unexplored southern edge of the old communication corridor. For a moment, she just stood there, trying to piece it together.

Behind her, the technician finally spoke, still holding his coffee cup like he didn’t know whether to drink it or set it down.

“Who was he talking to?”

April didn’t look away from the map.

“I honestly don’t think he knows,” she said.

The suns were relentless.

All three of them hung high in the sky, casting the landscape in a harsh, overlapping glare that bleached the colors from everything and made the horizon shimmer like liquid glass. Heat rolled off the planet’s surface in thick, invisible waves, distorting the air above the red-gold earth. M6-117 didn’t just radiate warmth—it seethed with it, pulsing beneath the cracked crust like something alive and indifferent.

Speculor-2 crested a ridge slowly, its patched-together suspension groaning in protest with every dip and jolt. The frame rattled, bolts ticking against their housings, panels humming with vibration. A warning light flickered on the console and died again—just long enough to remind her that nothing in this machine was built to last this long, or go this far, under this kind of heat.

Y/N kept both hands tight on the wheel, thumbs hooked around the inner grips. Her fingers were sunburned despite the gloves she wore inside the cabin—dry, peeling, red at the knuckles from weeks of constant exposure. The inside of her suit felt like a second skin now, stiff with dried sweat and dust. Every movement was deliberate. Careful. Muscle memory guided more than thought at this point.

She squinted through the scratched visor of her helmet, adjusting the glare shield with a flick of her wrist. The hill dropped steeply in front of her, and beyond it—partially buried in the sand—something metallic caught the sunlight.

A glint. Small. Angular. Manmade.

Her breath caught, just for a second.

She eased off the brake and nudged the accelerator, coaxing the rover down the slope. Loose gravel crunched beneath the tires, kicking up fine red dust that clung to the undercarriage like ash. The descent wasn’t smooth, but the rover held. She kept her eyes locked on the object ahead, refusing to blink, as if it might vanish if she looked away.

A glint in the sand didn’t mean anything. Not necessarily. The desert was full of wreckage. Half-buried relay towers, crumpled drones, abandoned survey rigs—all slowly dissolving into the landscape. Most of them were long dead. A few had power cells that could be salvaged. None had been what she needed.

But this one—this thing—was different. It had shape. Intent. Angles that didn’t come from natural erosion or careless debris drops.

Her pulse thudded in her throat as she approached.

If it was what she thought it was—if the signal booster inside was even half-functional—then maybe, just maybe, she could finally reach someone. Send a ping. Even a basic carrier wave. Something.

And if it wasn’t…

Then she would’ve spent the last three sols pushing this machine farther than its power specs could tolerate, rationing food she barely had, gambling what was left of her energy reserves on a hope stitched together from half-legible maps and half-forgotten notes.

The rover bumped to a stop at the base of the hill, its shadow long and flickering on the cracked ground. She sat still for a second, one hand resting against the center of the wheel, her other already reaching for the suit’s outer seals.

She didn’t let herself think about what came next. Not yet.

She just sat there, the heat pressing in from every side, watching the metal shape glint quietly in the sand.

Then, slowly, she opened the hatch.

Mateo pushed through the double glass doors of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility on Aguerra Prime, his steps quick and clipped, boots echoing off the polished tile floor. The lobby was sleek—steel beams arched overhead in clean, geometric symmetry, and the walls glowed faintly with soft-panel lighting that pulsed in rhythm with the environmental systems. The air smelled like ionized metal and coffee. People moved with purpose, heads bowed over tablets, quiet conversations unfolding in pockets of motion.

Marco Moneaux was already waiting near the reception hub, leaning slightly against a rail, one foot bouncing with contained urgency. His white lab coat was creased around the elbows, and his badge hung slightly askew from his lanyard. When he spotted Mateo, he straightened immediately, crossing the floor in three brisk steps.

“Mateo,” he said, extending a hand. His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn’t spoken in hours—or had been speaking for far too many.

Mateo took it firmly, giving a nod instead of wasting breath on greetings. Both men knew the situation was too tight for small talk.

They fell into step without instruction, heading down a wide hallway flanked by tall windows. Outside, the manicured edges of the campus gave way to open, sloping fields. Beyond that, rows of solar arrays shimmered under Aguerra’s twin moons. Herds of deer grazed in the distance—engineered wildlife released to test the long-term viability of the terraformed perimeter.

Neither man looked out the windows.

Inside, they passed knots of engineers and research assistants moving between labs—some glancing up briefly, most too focused on the screens or equipment in their hands to notice the urgency that trailed them like heat.

As they turned a corner, Mateo asked the question that had been eating at him since he left orbit.

“What are the odds Y/N can get it working again?”

Marco didn’t answer right away. He exhaled through his nose, scrubbing a hand through his graying hair as they walked.

“Hard to say,” he admitted finally. “We lost reliable telemetry in ’97. Battery degradation, most likely. Last signal showed grid instability in the comms array. And it took a beating during the eclipse event. Radiation, dust storms. You remember—that wiped out the prototype colony near Terminus Ridge.”

Mateo nodded. “Barely.”

Marco glanced sideways at him. “Just for the record, it lasted three times longer than any of our best-case simulations. Not that I’m defensive.”

Mateo gave a dry, humorless smirk. “Nobody’s pointing fingers, Marco. If Y/N found it and it still has a frame to stand on, that’s a win. I just need everything you’ve got. Every record. Every system map. And I want to talk to everyone who was working the array back then.”

“They’re already here,” Marco said, tapping the badge on his wrist. “As soon as we got confirmation of the rover’s course change, I put out the call. Took some favors, but we pulled a few out of retirement. Not all of them are thrilled to be back.”

“Doesn’t matter if they’re thrilled,” Mateo muttered. “They’re here.”

Marco didn’t argue.

They reached a reinforced service door at the end of the corridor. It slid open with a hiss, revealing the garage—more a hybrid workshop and restoration bay than a storage area. Industrial lights hung low from the ceiling. Tables were littered with open toolkits, diagnostic gear, spare parts. A team of engineers in cleanroom gear moved among the equipment, focused and tight-lipped.

In the center of the room, covered by a heavy fire-retardant sheet, stood something massive.

Mateo slowed as he approached.

“This the replica?” he asked, eyeing the draped silhouette. The outline was unmistakable—angled, precise, deeply familiar.

Marco nodded once. “Built from the original schematics. All internal systems match phase one spec. Obviously we couldn’t rebuild the quantum banks without violating half a dozen containment laws, but we ran full diagnostic simulations on the rest. Guidance. Thermal. Comms. Power draw. It all holds.”

He stepped forward and pulled the cover back in one motion, revealing the spacecraft beneath.

Prometheus.

It gleamed under the harsh lights, a mosaic of matte plating, reinforced glass, and composite shielding. Its two primary sections—the large lander and the smaller Pioneer-class speculor—were connected by an exposed conduit spine that had once bristled with telemetry dishes and stabilizers.

The moment the sheet hit the ground, the room seemed to go quieter.

Mateo stepped closer, his expression unreadable. For a long time, he just looked. Not at the tech, or the wiring, or the damage estimates. He looked at the shape of the thing. The idea behind it.

Prometheus wasn’t just a machine. It was a symbol—of intent, of failure, of hope held a little too long in too many hands.

He exhaled, the weight in his chest shifting as he reached out and let his fingers brush the cold edge of the hull.

“Prometheus,” he said, almost under his breath. The name sat heavy between them.

Marco didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

Around them, the engineers watched silently. No one moved to interrupt.

Mateo stepped back, his mind already running again—calculating transmission lag, estimating power loads, cross-referencing timestamps from the satellite data.

“She’s betting everything on this,” he said. “And I think she’s right to.”

Marco gave a slight nod. “Then so are we.”

Mateo turned to him, jaw set.

“Get your people ready. I want diagnostics running on every subsystem we can simulate by the hour. If there’s even a flicker of life left in that array—if there’s anything Y/N can wake up—we’re going to meet her halfway.”

The sand on M6-117 wasn’t like sand on Aguerra Prime. It didn’t shift or drift like ocean-dunes or kick up in satisfying clouds when you stepped through it. It behaved more like talcum powder laced with metal filings—dry, clingy, corrosive. It coated everything. Her boots were already buried up to the ankles, the fine red dust swallowing the seams and grinding into the joints like it was trying to unmake her gear piece by piece.

Y/N stood still for a moment, catching her breath, feeling the wind rasp against her suit. It wasn’t a howl, not like Earth storms. It was subtler—more like static moving across bare skin. Just enough pressure to sting, just enough to remind her that if she stood still too long, she’d vanish beneath it.

The grit had worked its way into the folds of her gloves. Her hands were dark with oil and dust, the fabric ground smooth in places from overuse. Every finger flex sent a tug of pain down her forearms. Muscle fatigue had long since crossed the threshold of discomfort and settled into something quieter—something meaner. Constant, background. A presence she’d stopped trying to fight days ago.

The rover, Speculor-2, sat parked near the base of the rise—its chassis darkened by days of exposure, its rear wheels half-embedded in a shallow depression. It hadn’t been able to handle the slope. Even with reinforced tread plates and the bolted-on stabilizers she’d installed from salvaged struts, the incline was too sharp, the gravel too loose. It had choked out a few meters from the base before sliding back down in a slow, deliberate shrug of failure.

So she went the rest of the way on foot.

The shovel clanked dully against rock as she hauled it behind her. It dragged a long, narrow trench through the red powder—like a second shadow. She was too tired to carry it properly. It didn’t matter. She just needed it there.

The object she’d seen from the ridge—barely more than a glint through the glare of the triple suns—had pulled her in like gravity. At first, she thought it was another old relay node or maybe one of the early colony drop-capsules, the kind that had scattered debris across the southern hemisphere during the first failed expansion push. There were plenty of those. Too many, honestly. Ghosts of optimism gone stale.

But as she dug, the shape began to shift.

Not a cylinder. No external dish arrays. Not a capsule either. The angles were wrong—too square, too deliberate. Her breath caught when her shovel struck something beneath the dust: a sharp clang, metal on metal, followed by a hollow thunk that seemed to echo in the silence far louder than it should have.

She froze, hands tightening on the shaft.

Then she dropped to her knees and started clearing it by hand, pushing sand aside in fast, desperate sweeps. Her gloves caught on the edges of heat-scarred plating. The metal was warm to the touch, even through insulation. A low panel came into view, then a section of grating, a stabilizer fin warped out of alignment. The hull was charred in places, a mosaic of soot and impact scoring.

And then—partially hidden beneath a layer of red grime and sun-bleached streaks—she saw it. The outline of a nameplate. The letters were too faded to read clearly, most of them worn smooth by wind and time. But the shape, the placement, the size—she didn’t need to read it.

She knew.

“Please,” she murmured, voice cracking through the filtered mic. Her lips were dry. She didn’t notice. “Please let this be it.”

She sat back in the dust, resting her hands on her thighs, heart thudding hard enough to shake her vision. A sharp exhale left her lungs like a pressure valve had opened. She didn’t smile. Not yet. But she didn’t cry either, and that felt like progress.

The shape of the lander was mostly intact beneath the sand. Time had tried to bury it, but it hadn’t finished the job. She traced a line down the edge of the hull, checking for structural faults—any sign that it might collapse the moment she tried to move it.

So far, it looked solid. Scarred, yes. But solid.

She stood, her joints protesting. Everything ached. Her back. Her legs. Even her ribs. She pulled the tether rig from her back harness—a bundle of couplers, salvaged webbing, and what remained of Speculor-1’s rear axle assembly. It was barely a system, but it was hers. It had worked before. It would have to work again.

She dug around the base of the lander, loosening the packed soil just enough to wedge in the rig’s anchors. Sweat dripped down her spine beneath the inner lining of her suit. She ignored it. Her fingers worked quickly but carefully, avoiding the weakest points of the frame. One wrong move could shear the tether. Or worse—destabilize the whole thing and trap it again, just out of reach.

When the last hook snapped into place, she gave the line a slow, deliberate pull. It groaned. Everything groaned these days.

But it held.

She exhaled.

The second sun was just beginning to dip, its wide arc casting long shadows across the ridge behind her. The third—smaller, colder—peeked over the distant horizon, turning the dust into glinting embers. Her suit’s internal temperature had spiked past safe thresholds at least an hour ago, and her visor had started fogging despite the airflow unit. She’d wiped it clear three times already. Her gloves left streaks across the inside of the glass.

She climbed into the rover one limb at a time, slow and deliberate, like someone recovering from surgery. Her muscles didn’t respond so much as comply, reluctant and stiff from exertion and exposure. Her gloves trembled slightly as she gripped the hatch rail, shoulders aching beneath the strain of low oxygen and long hours in thin gravity.

No sudden movements. No unnecessary ones, either.

There were rules for exhaustion like this. You moved like everything was made of glass. Because if you dropped yourself now—if you fell, if you slipped, if you overextended—you might not get back up.

Inside the cockpit, the air smelled like hot plastic and sweat. Her breath fogged the inner edge of her visor for the fourth time that hour. She twisted her head slightly to wipe it with the back of her glove, but the smudge only smeared. Visibility was good enough. It would have to be.

The rover’s engine groaned to life on the third ignition cycle. It coughed, stuttered, then caught—a low, wheezing hum beneath her boots. She exhaled shakily. Part relief. Part preparation.

Her hand moved to the throttle.

As she eased it forward, she felt the slack in the tether vanish—then tension. The custom rig stretched and flexed, cables pulling taut with an audible snap. For a second, nothing happened. Just the sound of the engine and the wind scratching at the hull like dry fingers.

Then the rover lurched, tires clawing at loose sand. The rear axle let out a groan like a dying animal.

Behind her, the lander moved.

Not much—just a few centimeters—but she saw the shadow shift in her rearview, saw the line of red sand behind her deepen as the metal hull began to drag through it. A gouge formed, long and deliberate, the weight of the spacecraft carving its own slow scar into the Martian plain.

It followed her like a reluctant pet. Heavy. Damaged. But willing.

She didn’t look back. Not yet. She couldn’t afford to see how far there was to go.

Her eyes stayed on the way forward—on the faded twin tracks she'd made on the way up, etched into the dust with the same dogged desperation that had brought her here in the first place. They weren’t perfect lines. They wobbled, meandered slightly, climbed and dropped with the terrain. But they were hers.

And they led home.

She pressed her gloved palm against the control panel. The warmth of the rover’s systems buzzed faintly through the material, a small pulse of life she clung to like a heartbeat. Her own pulse echoed back—too fast, too shallow. Her suit pinged her vitals. She muted the alert.

The suns were shifting overhead. The largest of the three had already begun to dip low, casting wide, ochre shadows across the plain. The second sun lingered higher, still burning cold white through the thinning sky. The smallest—the one that barely deserved to be called a sun—hung at the edge of the atmosphere like a memory.

She didn’t sleep that night. She didn’t log any journal entries, didn’t record a status update, didn’t talk to the onboard assistant. There wasn’t anything left to say. Not yet.

She just drove.

One hand on the wheel. The other bracing the tether release, just in case.

The land was mostly flat, but the surface shifted more than it looked. The rover bucked now and then, hitting shallow ridges or spots where the ground gave under the weight of two machines. Each time the suspension rocked, she reached up to steady the makeshift coupling. It creaked. She listened closely for the sound of failure.

When the power dipped below twenty percent, she stopped. Set the panels out. Killed every nonessential system—cabin lights, redundant sensors, everything except the nav core and the battery buffer. Then she climbed out, boots crunching over grit, and walked the length of the tether.

The rig was holding. Barely. The rear axle—originally not meant to support any load at all—was beginning to warp under the repeated strain. A hairline fracture had formed near the secondary bolt plate. She tightened what she could. Reinforced with spare composite tape. It would get her to the ridge. After that, she’d be on hope and inertia.

Back in the cockpit, she stared at the charge percentage while chewing a protein tab she couldn’t taste. Every tick upward felt like watching rain fill a cup—too slow, too fragile. She closed her eyes. Let her breathing slow. Didn’t fall asleep, but drifted somewhere soft and blank, just long enough to make the next stretch survivable.

When the panels hit 31%, she powered up and moved again.

The last five kilometers were the worst.

The terrain turned patchy—intermittent shelf rock and shallow drainage troughs that the rover’s nav AI kept flagging as hazards. She ignored the warnings. Manually overrode the terrain bias. This far in, the rover trusted her more than it trusted itself. She appreciated that. But only barely.

The Hab finally came into view after a slow crest over the last ridge—a pale dome against rust-red nothing, distant and still and strange. It looked smaller than she remembered. Fragile. Like someone had left a plastic toy in the middle of a battlefield.

She exhaled.

Behind her, the lander rattled as it shifted slightly, the tow rig flexing under a final jolt. It was still there. Still dragging its way home like the last survivor of a war.

By the time the Hab came into view—just a pale, sunburned dome on the horizon—the rover was running hot. The dash had been lit with a persistent yellow warning for the last twenty minutes: Thermal Load Approaching Limit – Power Efficiency Reduced. Not critical. Not yet. But close enough that the hum of the cabin fan had taken on a wheeze, and the heat exchanger sounded like it was breathing through a straw.

She guided the rover up the final slope with the same deliberate care she’d used for every kilometer since dragging the lander loose. The rig held, barely. A shudder ran through the chassis each time the terrain shifted beneath the load. She could feel it in the pedals, in the wheel, in her wrists.

At the perimeter, she stopped. Just outside the airlock’s sensor field, far enough to keep the lander’s mass from triggering the external motion alerts. The rover hissed softly as it idled, then fell quiet as she powered down.

Engine. Vents. Cabin systems.

Silence.

Not the peaceful kind. The kind that screamed in your ears after too many hours of mechanical noise. A silence that made her feel like the air itself was pressing inward. Heavy. Expectant.

She didn’t move. Not at first. Her hands stayed on the wheel, knuckles pale where the gloves stretched over them. Her visor was fogged again—smudged from the inside where she’d wiped it too many times. She stared through the distortion at the blur of the Hab’s outline, heart thudding a little too fast in her chest.

Everything in her body was buzzing: overworked muscles, caffeine-depleted nerves, the dull throb in her knees from sitting too long and the low-level dehydration she hadn’t had time to address. Her fingers tingled. Not from cold. From the sheer effort of not falling apart.

Eventually, she forced herself to move.

She braced a hand on the seat frame and pushed up. Her knees didn’t want to cooperate. They locked, then gave in stages, like gears trying to find their teeth. She stepped out into the heat with a grunt, boots landing in the loose sand with a dry crunch. The air hit her like opening an oven door.

The sun was high—well, one of them was. The second hung lower, casting odd twin shadows across the ridge. The third hadn’t risen yet. It would soon.

She turned, slowly, to look at what she’d dragged home.

The lander sat half-sunk in the dust behind the rover, its hull streaked with soot and oxidized grime. Decades of wind had scraped the paint to near-nothing. The serial markings were mostly gone. Its panels were warped, its undercarriage twisted from the pull of the terrain. But it was intact. Whole, in the way things that shouldn’t still exist sometimes are.

She stepped closer and rested one gloved hand against the side of the frame. The metal was hot through the suit, radiating heat back at her like it still remembered the stars it once launched through.

It was real. It was here.

She stood like that for a moment—long enough for her breathing to even out, long enough for the noise in her mind to slow. She didn’t cry. She was too dry for that. But there was something in her chest that uncoiled a little, just enough to make room for relief.

Then she turned, eyes narrowing against the light, and headed for the Hab.

The outer airlock hissed as she stepped inside. Cooling systems kicked in, the rapid shift from Martian heat to artificial climate control leaving a faint sheen of condensation on the inside of her visor. She stripped out of the suit by habit—one latch at a time, slow, steady—and hung it on the pressurized rack. Her undershirt clung to her spine. Her hair was matted. Skin cracked at the corners of her mouth.

She didn’t stop to wash. Not yet.

Instead, she grabbed the roll-out solar blankets from storage—folded, dust-sealed, stored under a bench where no one had expected them to ever be used—and carried them back out through the lock.

Outside again, she worked quickly. The sun had shifted and the temperature was climbing. She moved in a circle around the lander, unfurling the metallic sheets like a protective cocoon. They were reflective on one side, dull on the other—meant to deflect excess thermal load and redirect radiant heat away from sensitive equipment.

Here, they would buy her time. Time before the old machine started cooking from the inside.

She staked them down using stripped rebar, hammering the rods into the soil with the butt of her shovel. Dust clung to her sweat, turned sticky at her collar, itched under her sleeves. Her arms burned from the repetitive motion. Her breathing was shallow again.

But she didn’t stop until the job was done.

Then—and only then—did she step back, strip off her gloves, and sit down hard in the dirt beside the rover. She tipped her head back, eyes closed behind squinting lids. Her lungs filled with hot, dry air. Her limbs felt too heavy to move. Her heart beat slow and hard in her chest.

The real work hadn’t started yet.

She’d have to inspect the RTG housing. Set up containment protocols. Verify the generator’s thermal output, make sure it hadn’t been compromised during burial or the tow. If she ruptured it, there wouldn’t be time to run.

She’d need shielding. Power routing. Cabling. Isolation foam. Diagnostics.

She’d need her hands to stop shaking.

But for now, for just a few minutes, she sat in the red sand beside the machine she had unearthed from half a lifetime of dust, and listened to the wind roll across the plains of M6-117.

Taglist: @fancypeacepersona @ssbb-22 @mar-lo-pap @sathom013 @kimyishin @ttanniett @sweetvoidstuff @keiarajm @sathom013 @miniesjams32

[extremely-nervess]

I would love to know more about morgan the vampire's lore (the black haired, eye scar one) if you would be open to share 🥺🫶🏻

Well, there's not too much.

All of the Morgans are the same character technically :) sorry if that got confusing, I was making a character for VTM, and she took some time to coalesce. In some ways she still is! Morgan's backstory is pretty dark and miserable, I feel self conscious writing it up >_< sorry, I'll give a short overview and if people really really want more detail I'll consider it I guess. Morgan was a bit of a strange person before the world ruined her, and she's much worse now. Twisted, a creep, a lunatic. - She grew up in an abusive home, and when she finally escaped that she was moved to an asylum, the typical, horror story kind where she suffered even further. - When she was around 18 she murdered one of the staff there, and she, and three other patients escaped. With help they got into a college/ bridging program for nursing, but Morgan couldn't manage very well in the real world and got heavily involved with drugs, both using them, and producing them to fund her addictions. - After being expelled she got further involved in the narcotics trade, and eventually became business partners with an ex-hitman. Much older than her, and a true professional. He helped straighten her out somewhat, at least, enough to get her off the opiates she was dependent on. - Morgan spent several years working as a fixer, of sorts. With the freedom to explore and grow a little she found herself to be quite technically capable, and soon branched out from cooking Molly to offering other services too - fake identities, explosives, even custom weapons and one off wet-work. - Morgan's embrace wasn't some romantic thing, nor a relationship cultivated with time and consideration. No, she's practically a Shovelhead, turned by a kindred fleeing the Second Inquisition as a distraction her first moments as a vampire were confusing, violent and painful. - She was staked, and has been kept on ice for several months now, along with a few other fledglings (Other coterie members) so she's very new to the vampire world. We've not really had a proper session yet, so that's where we are just about! Originally I wanted to play a mad scientist Tzimisce, and the labcoated Morgan was that, a similar backstory but a bit less of a loser, and an actual doctor. I just can't enjoy what they've done to the clan in v5 though, it hurts >_< so I left that. Morgan still has a lot of that villainess energy, even if she has less clear ends and means to achieve them. I hope she can find something to obsess over and do wicked deeds for during play, but we'll see!

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hewaaa!! Is your OC related to Director Crowley, The Maleficent crow or something? I saw your design and I found it really interesting 🩵🖤

While Miss Raven and Crowley share many visual similarities + she considers him her legal guardian and family, they’re not actually blood-related! She just showed up at NRC’s doorstep own day and Crowley took her under his wing as his “niece”. In truth, Crowley became acquaintances with Raven’s previous caretaker during his travels. That person—the “Storyteller”—knew that he would soon pass away, so he asked Crowley to please look after his ward for him.

One thing I love about Twst is how even if the inspiration for a character seems obvious at a glance (like Ace is obviously twisted from the Ace of Hearts card soldier), they can embody the traits of other characters (for example, Ace acts like Alice in that he constantly defies the Queen of Hearts). Miss Raven is technically twisted from an Alice in Wonderland riddle that was intended to have no answer... but I wanted my OC to also draw from multiple sources so that they also feel “real” and like they “fit in” the world of Twst.

(By the way!! There’s an excellent post on the Twst subreddit that discussed how Crowley is inspired by various iconic Disney birds. I’d recommend giving it a read; it’s fascinating!)

I integrated aspects of Diablo and the Evil Queen’s ravens in Miss Raven’s relationships with the equivalent Twst characters, Malleus and Vil. Diablo is Maleficent’s only competent minion, performing a number of important tasks on her behalf. Raven and Malleus aren’t familiar with one another, but she does play a key role in that she delivers the notes from the dorm leader meetings he misses. Malleus believes that she is brave to approach him (does this make them friends???), so he had assumed a strange self-proclaimed “mentor” role. He sometimes flags her down and attempts to socialize (key word: attempts) but more often than not he ends up hovering like a sleep paralysis demon… Rave has to wonder if Malleus-senpai is in need of something.

The Evil Queen’s ravens is only on screen for like… what, a minute?? And mostly just acts shocked and scared of her transformation potion brewing. This is paralleled in how Raven is intimidated by Vil’s aura, but does manage to get over it eventually to ask him for advice on how to become a “proper lady” herself. He’s the one that taught her a lot about social etiquette and manners in general.

There’s also other Disney and non-Disney references I’ve included in her lore. The backstory of Miss Raven’s guardian (pre-Crowley) is very similar to that of Beast from Beauty and the Beast… She is pessimistic at times, claiming some prospects are impossible or “nevermore” (Edgar Allen Poe)… She lacks confidence, believing she is an “ugly duckling” and wishes to become an elegant and beautiful swan… Tons more; I can’t list them all here!

In a nutshell, yes. There’s a lot more to it than just borrowing the phrase because I happen to like AiW though!

The riddle “why is a raven like a writing desk” comes from the tea party scene in the original Lewis Carroll novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Disney translated it over to their animated film, but the riddle makes appearances or is referenced in many other AiW adaptations.

According to Carroll, the riddle was meant to be nonsensical and have no answer. (In the book, the Mad Hatter himself admits, “I haven't the slightest idea,” and then Alice asks about why they are wasting their time with riddles that have no answer.) However, many people have come up with their own absurd answers to the supposedly unanswerable riddle, including: “Poe wrote on both”, “they both stand on sticks”, “they both come with inky quill”, and “because there is a B in both and an N in neither”. Ironically, Carroll was pressured into including an answer in a later edition of his book. His response was, “because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” In the original version of this preface, “never” was spelled “nevar” (“raven” backwards).

I liked the open-endedness of the question. It keeps the door open to allow for many possibilities and encourages us to explore, to indulge in our curiosity, to experiment and let our unique perspectives shape unique replies to the same riddle. I wanted to run a blog with that kind of a creative spirit. The fact that both writing and ravens are mentioned are serendipity, but it ends up working out really well for what I do here.

My Twst OC, Raven Crowley, is also closely associated with “why is a raven like a writing desk?”. In fact, she’s twisted from the raven in the riddle, and this ties in with her backstory. Because the riddle is just… that, a riddle (and not an actual flesh-and-blood character that does things in the story) with no answer (aimless, open, without direction), Miss Raven’s character reflects that. She is a curious girl always seeking out new experiences. but she lacks self-confidence, believing that she isn’t a “main” character, just a supporting role or even a background character. Her story is that of finding her own strength, learning to become confident in her own identity, and taking charge of her own destiny—even if she’s unsure of where the winding oath may take her.

It’s all connected! ^^

[knight-of-flowerss]

FRAT BRO??? omg my mouth is watering already at the thought of (hopefully slightly scummy) frat bro cregan 🤤🤤

YESSSSSSIIIIIRRRRR you can either get scummy frat Cregan or sweet frat Cregan. LADIES IM SORRY BUT WE'VE HAD ENOUGH NICETIES FOR CREGAN WE NEED A SCUMBAG! A PROPER ONE!

Note: This is lowkey SO bad but I have an excuse since I've been in hospital and shit BUT I'm posting this cus I need something out, I want to write more for scummy frat Cregan cus UGHHHHHH!!!

MDNI 18+!!!

MASTERLIST

🍺•Frat!Cregan is a strange breed.. while others went to college for an education and maybe to gain a bit of lore to tell their kids in the near future, Cregan went to drink everyday and fuck pussy.

🍺•Luckily, Frat!Cregan got a scholarship for his hockey. He didn't have to do much to impress others. Cregan just flexed his muscles and flashed a smirk and he had everyone fooled.

🍺•Well.. not everyone.

🍺•See, Frat!Cregan had one weakness. Nerds.

🍺•He'd never tell anyone, but he got off to anything to do with geeky bitches. He didn't like big business porn that just stuck glasses on a pornstar and played her off as a nerd. No. He liked the real thing.

🍺•There'd been times where he'd purposefully lingered around the library and fisted himself under the table just to the sight of girls doing anything that wasn't just partying and having their tits out 24/7.

🍺•He didn't care if they were ugly or not, if there was anyone that peaked his interest, you bet that he's came to the thought.

🍺•Frat!Cregan swore it was a gift from the gods when he met you. You were Baela's friend from her lectures that she had invited out. She was the only girl and having to sit with her boyfriend, Jacearys, and his pervy best friend, Cregan. (Baela 100% doesn't like Frat!Cregan)

🍺•So she may or may not have invited you along so she didn't have to be near him, but she had no clue that it was actually doing Cregan a favour rather than making him annoyed.

🍺•You weren't really that excited but you owed Baela for the answers last week so you had sucked it up. Both you and Baela believed that Cregan wouldn't even look at you since you were.. well.. you. A nerd. A geek. A weirdo.

🍺•Well, obviously you had both miscalculated.

🍺•Cregan couldn't keep his grubby paws off of you. Every single thought in his head was consumed by you, wanting to fuck you silly right there in the cinema.

🍺•His hands lingered near you for far too long, his eyes never tore from you and his mouth ran with the dirtiest comments, whispering them huskily in your ear.

🍺•Eventually, it was over and you didn't see Cregan for about three weeks. Thank fucking god. But then Baela dragged you back into the situation.

🍺•A party. A fucking party. She didn't want to go alone apparently, so she dragged you. Yip-fucking-ee.

🍺•And of course, Cregan found you again. Whispering things in your ear once more and instead, letting his hands grasp whatever part of your body he could reach.

🍺•After forcing mixtures of alcohol down your throat, he had you cornered, fingers plunged deep inside your core.

🍺•Cregan swears it's the best thing he's ever done in his life. His fingers manoeuvring into your underwear, past your pubic hair that you refused to shave because 'it's winter and you're not trying to impress anyone', and into your heat, curling slightly as he gets knuckle deep.

🍺•Yeah, it was scummy getting you drunk just to finger fuck you into oblivion practically in front of an audience, but Frat!Cregan couldn't give a single shit. In his eyes, this was for his pleasure, not yours, even though you were the one getting fingered.

🍺•Frat!Cregan who pulls his fingers out of you and makes you suck then while he tells you how he's gonna fuck you silly later.

🍺•Frat!Cregan who eventually gets your number and essentially blackmails you with pictures you never knew he took at the party, eyes rolled back and all.

🍺•He uses those pictures to get more out of you, literally having a folder on his phone named 'wank bank' and it's all pictures and videos of you. Innocents and dirty. Ones he's took and ones you've sent him.

🍺•Also, Frat!Cregan would 100% storm into your dorm on your study nights and fuck you silly on top of your notes, some getting drenched in his cum, making you have to start all over again while he watches you in the corner, hand in his pants. I meant what I said that he'll touch himself to anything as long as it's a nerdy chick.

Tags: @thethreeeyed-raven @lost-in-fiction-like-ur-mom @cryinonthefloor553 @visenyablackwood @velaryyon

[sugar-on-fries]

MY TWISTED DANDY AND ICHOR 'LORE' IS FINALLY HERE ^^

DISCLAIMER, i wrote this in the middle of night at 3am over like 3 days and i refuse to proof-read twice so i apologize for any grammar mistakes and if this makes zero sense.

Also this is literary 1900 words long of me yapping about ichor and dandy so y'know.

Ok so uhhh first. What IS Ichor? I'm not quite what it would be classified in-game and in my as BUT i can tell you how it works in my headcanons! Now, idk how the hell Arthur and Delilah could make an organism with the Ichor in the first place, but in my AU/headcanons the Ichor is basically a compound that can make something live and grow, and with it in your DNA it would be giving you most of the that your body would have whole systems for! I would go on about how ichor would make the Toons live and how they were made, But i'm not a damn scientist and i'm here to tell you what happens when you have too much Ichor in your system. But let's talk about the story for a second, we always have to start somewhere!

LETHAL || MAINS In mid 1986, Dandy was made by Arthur and Delilah for whatever reason, (don't ask me why that's not my department) After MANY failed attempts- Dandy was the first to actually breathe, live, and learn! But unfortunately, his DNA, his tissues, and whole body had WAY to much Ichor, at-least for a Toon, you could say it was a LETHAL amount but in generally his genetic structure was unstable. Delilah had originally declared Dandy a failure to Arthur and even if he would survive as for now and there was no doubt there was going to be consequences sooner-or-later, good or bad, and wanted to euthanize him, but Arthur opted out stating that 'He was already alive for almost 2 weeks now and he was already showing signs of learning his environment as well as attempting to communicate to the both of them, it'd be cruel.' also Delilah is dumbass and didn't tell Arthur that dandy could crashout and mutate due to the side effects of the ichor and him having so much in his system (we'll get to that) so yeah <3 Sometime after Dandy, in late 1987 the five mains we're made with what they learned with dandy, but bc they were still MORONS; Delilah and Arthur (mostly arthur's fault bc i said so) STILL made them with too much ichor, just with slightly less from what dandy has in his body, and since there was now SIX of these brats walking around here, Delilah and Arthur became permanent colleagues! and something something blah blah (i hate writing stories if u cant tell) - in 1989 they made the other toons and collaborated with a museum, and eventually got a tv show for the Toons to promote the museum.

ICHOR EFFECTS The Ichor has the ability to create life but that doesn't mean it can't kill it off too, in my lore the ichor is basically steroids on steroids. Its a weird ass supplement with the ability to make some organisms grow physically and mentally.

Imma get right into what I have made up so far, too much Ichor in your system can go right to brain, literary. The Ichor target's the brain, primarily the pituitary gland, the amygdala and, the frontal cortex. The Pituitary gland is mostly responsible for growth, specifically, it produces growth hormones which in toll promotes growth in bones, muscles, and other tissues, and the Ichor sends signals to the gland causing unwanted growth in the toon's body - now twisteds.

Now, the amygdala and the frontal cortex can (and will in this case) cause aggressive behavior with the amygdala playing a key role in recognizing and responding to threats, and the frontal cortex helping to regulate impulses and make decisions, but since the Ichor is now here - the brain is now getting signals consonantly to be aggressive due to the Ichor. also Ichor is kindaaa toxic to humans without the proper wear to handle it. hope this makes even a lick of sense <333 (also if ur wondering: "since the ichor makes them aggressive why aren't the toons aggressive???" they got media training or smth like that)

TWISTED DANDY Now that we know what the Ichor does to the brain mainly in my lore, now i wanna talk about my glorious king, dandy BUT FIRST lets talk about the mains real-quick. Like i said, the mains have more Ichor than the regular toons. this is my reason why the mains are larger than the regular toons and in my AU/Headcanons, more aggressive. and logically since they would grow WAY more than normal twisted, they would be in CONSTANT AGONY, always full of fear and anger. Now think about when it comes to Dandy, but multiply it by 6 /j I would talk about his in-game twisted form but guess what? this is about MY dandy and MY Ichor lore so idc about him rn, also lets talk about the story for once more! In-game there is a document by Arthur to Delilah about an incident that most likely got Gardenview shut down and it goes along the lines of this: "Delilah, we need to talk. I know you've kept reassuring me that what had happened wasn’t due to anything you had done. Yet I feel as if we still need to talk about this, you had to have known this could happen to him. You had to have known that this was even a possibility. If you did, why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell me? Something like this doesn’t just happen."

Now, this COULD be about ANYONE but imma make it about dandy because I can and for lore reasons. (<- praying that this doesn't poorly age) In my AU-thingy, in this part Dandy didn't FULLY transform into the twisted form i have for him, he transformed into something that was more like his 'canon' twisted form (i dont feel like drawing it use ur imagination /silly) , but overall less aggressive and painful than his 'full' form he was still aggregated and in discomfort generally, fumbling around in pain - trailing Ichor everywhere, labeling the rooms Dandy entered as 'unsafe' and 'a health-hazard' (plus he was lowkey terrorizing kids in this state) and since he trailed so much Ichor that it was in the air EVERYWHERE, the building had to close and eventually got abandoned overtime.

Now back to present! In my designs, dandy is more centaur lookin' with him rocking two sets of arms and two sets of 'legs'! Pictures down below if u don't know what he looks like! Now his 'Front legs' were going to be his arms like in his canon form but he ended up still having his top half and his body turned them into legs. Now fully transformed (but terribly) and now his whole body is even more fucked than it would be if he only transformed halfway, Dandy is now in AGONY <333 !!! When turning into Twisted Dandy, his spine grows rapidly including his muscles, tissues, and literary everything. He would also have bones quickly forming and Ichor rapidly hardening to make his front legs, as-well as everything i just said. same with his tail and everything below the belt, normally in nature this probably wouldn't hurt due to them evolving really slowly BUT even in-game it seems Dandy is doing this within minutes! And even if he was doing this slower than maybe 3 minutes he would still have to transform rather fast, and also in-game we can say that the toons are probably REALLY SHORT probably being the size of 2 to 4 feet tall (i'm being generous with the height rn) and 'canon' twisted dandy standing seems to be really tall too, and being like 3 feet tall and turning into something that's maybe about 12-15 feet tall when standing within minutes, THATS OBVIOUSLY GONNA HURT LIKE HELL.

Plus he would be changing his whole bone and muscle structure- once again IN MINUTES, and that's not even close to everything twisted dandy would have to tolerate. Still in my lore, the Ichor would target his brain which in toll would make his own brain to start yelling at him to become aggressive and sending singles though his body telling it to 'GROW AS FAST AS YOU CAN' but bc i can ,it doesn't numb any of the pain and keeps forcing his body to change and grow as he suffers though it. ALSO my twisted dandy is VERY HOT. Temperature wise. Since he's like idk 3 feet tall its not hard to assume that he would most likely have a fast metabolism, and since he's turning into a giant beast, i would imagine his body regulate his metabolism into a slower one. Basically something like a hare (fast metabolism) can generate heat very fast but can't grasp onto heat as well, but something like an Elephant (Slow Metabolism) is not going to be able to generate heat as fast but can hold onto heat better, And since Gardenview is most likely underground and you most likely are going down, its probably gonna be somewhat warm/hot in the building, and since the museum is shut down I doubt the ventilation is on/working. So my Twisted dandy would be generally hot due to his body changing his metabolism and him not being using to his body holding onto heat for long-periods of times (this is also why I draw him without a shirt fyi)

Also I like to draw him smiling through his tears bc I like to think he believes that smiling can help reduce the thought of pain through the release of endorphins and other neurotransmitters, (personally I don't buy it) and he's crying for obvious reasons. Now Dandy would also go though the most pain due to one little fact ^^ He never gets the chance to get used to the pain. Since the other twisteds aren't switching back to their "normal form's" they had time to get used to pain and the changes to their body, BUT GUESS WHO HASN'TTT- Even though others twisted had the same happen to them (Via, limbs forming rapidly, spines growing, bones and shi acting up) Dandy deals with these changes over and over and over again, not having a chance to adapt to these changes for even a second.

Aghhhh this is getting way too long for my standards and imma end it here, feel free to ask me anything and thank you 4 reading!!!

Also if you want to know why the ichor targets the brain and why it does what it does. that's not my department!! i'm here to yap about the effects of ichor and shi bc theres literary NOTHING on it. Any story plotholes that i refuse to fix or give intel on can be interpreted however u want idgaf <3 ALSO don't take any science facts in here at face-value, i am a stupid child that is not equipped in science in anyway, if you want to learn more about anything REAL in this, please do your own research i am simply using google and my little knowledge in science.

ALSO ALSO ALSO i was originally going to include drawings into this to show what i was talking about but then i didn't end up doing it bc im lazy, but here are the doodles i did make for it ^^

[pamela-lntt]

The bell rings, and, suddenly, we're in Senior Year !

idk what else to say other than uuh hermie (accidental) trans shoes

Like my art? Consider buying me a coffee (kofi) !

Like these sketches? Get one for yourself (commissions) !

Notes (lore wise) about each character below the cut

Okay, I lied, I DO have things to say...

So, of course, every design is based on some of my own ideas of how they'd be in Senior Year, especially with the whole aspect of graduation approaching and them having to go to college pretty soon (I projected a bit since the feelings I had in that time of my life are still clear as day even though I'm a year away from graduating from college myself)

I'll go in order of how I lined them up in the post:

Link:

Part of the Teen High Soccer Team. Still dedicated to becoming a Professional Soccer Player and hoping to get a Sports Scholarship (He, unfortunately, won’t. This will lead him to becoming a P.E. teacher and High School Soccer Coach). Senior Year is also when He and Scary start developing feelings for each other, but they don't confess and become official until their 2nd year of college.

Scary:

Going mainly by Terry again (Scary is now her stage name). Part of the Teen High Soccer Team and torn between studying Arts (writing or music) and Sports (exercise science / sports study); leaning towards Arts. Still making Music, but as a Soloist opposed to a band (she starts gaining fame in her last year of college).

Taylor:

Tech Bro phase that will lead him down the path of trying (and failing) to become a Tech Genius & Inventor. Ends up dropping out of college to focus on that tech aspect (was studying robotics, funnily enough). He's still on his Main Protagonist Syndrome thing and got a proper mobility aid cane as opposed to his secretly-a-Katana cane, lmao. Obviously still into anime, but his whole craze on robotics came out of watching more mecha and sci-fi anime.

Normal (favoritism incoming):

Scared of the unknown of the future & at his lowest. Wants to get as far away from San Dimas as possible (emotional gut reaction that’ll be followed through).

Normal is on a real slump. It’s his final year of high school, and he has no idea what he’s going to do. The future is scary, it’s hard to live in the present and now, more than ever, the past haunts him; the person he used to be who knew exactly what he wanted. Only one thing is clear in his mind: he needs to get as far away from San Dimas as possible. He loves his friends, don’t get him wrong, but they remind him too much of the scars left on him at only 15. What he hates the most, is how he can tell Hermie cares and is trying to help… but no matter what, he can’t help seeing Hermie 1.0… how can you look at someone in the eye when all you can see are the eyes of another?

Normal leaves San Dimas the day after graduation, travelling to the other side of the country (New York). The only people who knew of this were his Family, who support him by paying the bills of his new apartment.

Erica:

Secretly debating whether to follow her parents’ set plan (Becoming a Dentist) or her own dreams (Becoming a Veterinarian with an expertise in horses). She’ll eventually get a bachelor's degree in Biology and enroll in Dental School for 2 years before switching to Vet School. She's also more friendly with the main teens, even considering them good friends, especially Scary, who is the one that supports her in this internal debate of profession.

Margherita:

Youngest Graduate. Plans on studying Theatre and becoming an Actress (focused on plays). Works part-time at the Library with her mom, trying to get a head start on college expenses. She, too, becomes friendly with the main teens, but she mostly hangs out with Hermie since they're both in the same club and have the goal of studying the same thing in the same place. They become best friends in college.

Hermie (favoritism incoming pt.2):

On the tail end of a ‘Trying to Emulate Hermie 1.0’ Phase. Planning on studying Theatre. Will eventually do so while learning to DJ for an ‘easy’ side gig.

Hermie by senior year, like mentioned above, is on the tail end of a “trying to emulate Hermie 1.0” phase and starting the journey he’ll go through in college of self discovery and separating himself from Hermie 1.0 and becoming something fully his own… he can’t seem to let go of Normal though. The feelings Hermie 1.0 had for normal that reside within him are still there, throbbing like a heart beat in the back of his mind. He wants to help him, he has always wanted to help him, but he doesn’t know how. Hopefully being there is enough.

In the end, it wasn't. Normal stays the night the day of the graduation, but when Hermie awakes, he's no longer there. Only two days too late does he learn that their dear friend left San Dimas for good.

Thanks for reading !! As a treat, I'll reveal some things:

I'm working on and wrapping up a small, about 10 second Oakworthy animation that I've shown of a bit over on Twitter

I really really really want to make an animation to the song Lonely Gift by Kevin Atwater exploring Normal and Hermie's relationship in Senior Year and that "want" was the main inspiration for me doing these designs (and now that they're done, I can start storyboarding !!)

That comic I posted a few nights ago, "Escape", takes place during Senior Year and the "Teeny" and "Joker" are sort of daydreams Normal has in his head very commonly when he's by himself. (here's another doodle of them i posted on Twitter)

That's all!! Back to the void I go...

[whoatherebigguy]

I recently made some tweaks to Cyclogenesis Zigra's design and I took the opportunity to finally give him a proper ref sheet, so here he is!

Since the design im using for Rapid Ascent is much closer to his canon appearance, I felt comfortable pushing this guy's look a bit further away from his og look.

basic write up for him[big ol' ramble warning lol] + extra doodles below

also going to use this post to clean up/update the little bits of lore ive been sprinkling about for him, while still leaving enough out that it can be revealed in future goofy comics.

[1st doodle is of a younger version of him, around the first time he tried(and failed) to take over the Earth. 2nd is closer to the "present", hes arguing with Viras as they collectively plot to kill the rocket turtle.]

Anyways, Zigra is obviously one of my favourite characters of all time, hence him getting starring roles in both of the continuities i ramble about lol. I try to keep him very in-character when I write him for Rapid Ascent, but he's a little more complicated in Cyclogenesis as he's one of the 4 "main" characters.

Zigra originally "left"[basically got kicked off of] his home planet to explore the galaxy, he was woefully under prepared, but managed to carve out a niche for himself. However, exploration quickly turned into a stream of failed conquests, which eventually landed him on Earth. This part plays out pretty similar to the og film, with the exception being that Zigra isn't really taking it very seriously. Gamera obviously chases him off both times he tries this and, pathetic failure that he is, Zigra ends up deciding to stumble back to his home planet. Only to find that it's been claimed by the Dominion of Zanon. Cue a horrible attempt at a revenge quest, one that results in him spending the next 6 years in a fish tank. He eventually gets unintentionally "rescued" by a splinter faction of the Virian Expanse and agrees to aid in their goals in exchange for one day using their forces to get revenge against Zanon. During this time is when he gets his armor/exoskeleton to help him navigate on land long term, he also gets Character Development. Going from a selfish entitled loner that thinks anyone smaller than him is inferior, to a selfish entitled loner that thinks anyone smaller than him, except 5 particular Virians, is inferior. Unfortunately, this weird little arrangement falls apart when Viras forms and leaves the faction without a real leader. [bit more about Cyclogenesis Viras here if curious!] Zigra elects to stay loyal to Viras as he feels he's too old to go back to his old ways and too tired to start a new life. The two remain allies for the rest of the narrative, despite many disagreements early on. They eventually end up back on Earth, this time looking to take the Atlantean core[which is currently being used to power Gamera] to keep Viras alive. At this point, Zigra isn't really invested in taking over the planet or even killing the rocket turtle, but he'd rather Gamera die than his only friend so he goes along with it. Ultimately this ploy is what finally ends both their lives, fortunately ive got lots of silly little comics to do before that happens.

I'm writing Zigra with an emphasis on being a sentient alien fish, instead of just a giant fish. His main role in Cyclogenesis is: "guy that is objectively Not Great, but has such awful luck that at some point you just kinda feel bad for him." Hopefully his endless loser moments and affinity to make bad choices are somewhat entertaining lol.

Also he becomes part of Iris , but dont worry about that right now

[deesea-ao3]

Fun Lore Ideas for Fawcett City

I've been sitting on these concepts for ages and need to get them out of my system. For my current WIP, it was important that I have a strong concept for what kind of city Fawcett was going to be. While the plot isn't technically taking place in Fawcett, a huge amount of my lore interpretations/characterisations rely on there being a solid original setting to draw from. Also, it's super fun to extrapolate history and economy for a fictional magic city to try and make it feel as plausible as possible.

Now, to start with, I had to establish where the city would actually be located. Fawcett is typically represented and/or thought of as being in the Midwest, so I was able to whittle down my options even more. I couldn't have it too close to Central City, Keystone City, or Smallville since I wanted Fawcett to retain its isolated feel. It'd be harder for it to get away with being magic if it was a stones throw from speedster stomping grounds, for instance. In the end, I looked up old maps of America DC Comics had officially released for inspiration. What I got were these:

The first didn't have Fawcett at all, and the second had it placed near the border of Wisconsin. The latter was serviceable for my purposes. However, I wanted something more to draw from. I wanted to make Fawcett feel like an actual city with history before I slapped on the magic superhero. It technically was just an ordinary city until Shazam placed a portal there after all.

My second go of looking for inspiration was much more fruitful. I looked at a few fan-made maps and eventually stumbled upon this one in a reddit forum:

Upon closer inspection, I realised something.

That's fucking Chicago.

The idea that then formed was brilliant, my best one maybe ever. If I don't want to write a 2K+ document detailing an organic history of fictional Fawcett City, coupled with local industry and culture to boot, I can just STEAL a real one!

The existence of IRL Chicago is not necessary for my story, and its absence would be barely noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. Functionally, it wouldn't even be gone. Its location and major historical events would still have occurred, just under a different name. It not only saves me tons of labour as a writer, it's also fucking hilarious.

The heart of ALL of magic lies in an abdoned subway station in downtown Chicago Fawcett, the Windy city that houses pagan subcultures, talking animals, cursed objects and people who still think it's 1945.

Southern Lake Michigan has freshwater mermaids. The flat lands of the city proper are surrounded by bluffs as old as the ice age, which thrum with prehistoric magic. The sunset is always pink, and moonbeams are brighter somehow here. In the river that flows through art-nouveau styled skyscrapers swim fish with rainbow scales. The people are happy and chatty and full of little secrets, kept close and safe for rainy days. The woman who dresses in leaves and sleeps on park benches is liable to be simply human, but the jolly old milkman who visits you every morning is fae through and through. Weird is normal and normal is weird.

All while in Chicago, Illinois, one of the most populous, wealthy cities in America since the 1870s. The mechanic who enchanted your car to not break down anymore was raised by regular steel mill workers. The politician who dreams of addressing the city's entrenched class divides is stuck doing paperwork to establish legal protections for the local gnome population's tree houses. When it snows in winter, Yetis clear driveways and salt the sidewalks. No one talks about it much because what is noteworthy about public servants doing their jobs? So what if they're Yetis? You got a problem with that?

Fawcett blows Gotham out the goddamn water for weirdness, but because they're so nonchalant and humble about it, Gothamites walk around smugly assured of their tolerance for insanity, unaware of the bigger fish, which is the average Fawcett citizen. When tourists come to visit, the very genre of reality changes the second they step foot within city lines.

Fawcett solos, tbh. DC writers are weaksauce for not seeing the vision that is mystic Chicago city, home to all of magic.

[theshypinkflower]

Plz, plz miss/mr/mx spare a bit of sano lore & art for the poor plz 🙏 😢 (only if you would like to ^^ also I LOVE ur art/lore/ stuff of the character♡)

I am so terribly for putting this question off for months. It's a long answer and it's kinda hard to do it in one sitting thanks to class. Please know I see all the anons in my inbox and I will get to your asks eventually <3 I'm also trying to make content outside of just my asks so please be patient (also you can just call refer to me with "Miss" dearie <3)

Sano Lore

Let me make this abundantly clear, I do NOT like how EP wrote Sano and Akira. That is the sole reason I rewrote a lot of his characters and redesigned them. Don't take it was me "fixing" his characters, more so just my take on the characters.

Anyways, a lot of this is based of the dark circus AU Gatobob did awhile back. The idea kinda started off as one of those far fetched things that I thought would never work, but after some writing it kinda just started to make a ton of sense. Needless to say, Sano and Akira grew up in a small travelling circus! Their mother was on of those "freak" attractions who ended up having a little rendezvous with their dad (who was human). After the two were born, her lover helped her escape (she really didn't want to be a mom, she probably has some regrets about ditching her kids but in her defense she was young and wanted to be free).

The two had a twin mirror act, mostly consisting of some small acrobatics (cartwheels, roundoffs, shit where you can't really break your neck like the trapeze performers), magic, knife throwing, and some contortionism. Lots of people went to see their constant in sync motion. It was kinda hard to always be in sync when Sano and Akira had clashing personalities that made cooperation a bit difficult.

One night, Akira has a rather haunting nightmare of Sano that keeps him up for a couple days (rocket to insanity reference lmao). I actually imagine Rire is in this dream and knowing Rire, it's all the reason the dream keeps him up. Why is Rire in this dream you ask? I imagine Rire sees potential in the twins (what king doesn't love a good jester?), afterall they are naga, not snake beastkin meaning they can weild magic. Eventually a knife throwing act rolls around and Akira is finding it difficult to focus on where he's aiming. Sano is spinning around and around on a wheel and Akira throws, only to aim straight for Sano's eye.

The accident, to no one's surprise, leaves Sano out of commission. His perception for his stunts thrown off now that one of his eyes is covered, and frankly it's a bit dangerous since he ends up running into things and people when doing tumbling (cheer lingo for cartwheels n shit if you didnt know). Not to mention the eyepatch ruins the mirror act. Instead of having him act, the ringmaster has Sano do some other small jobs, which is devastating to Sano since it means a significant cut to his paycheck. In turn preventing Sano from ever leaving the circus.

Sano blames a lot of what is an accident on Akira, thinking that Akira has some form of jealously against him for being the favored twin (it's no surprise Sano is the favorite). And while Akira may have SOME jealous towards his brother, he didn't mean for the incident to happen. Akira, with his naturally increased strength from being a naga, does a strong man act. He's still a bit twiggy, but he works out a bit to build muscle and strength for his act (his favorite part of the job is flirting with girls by bending horeshoes into a heart).

Sano can't go to a doctor (lack of proper health insurance, the circus has to keep travelling for business, and also because ya know fear of being outed as not human), and it's not like he needs one anyways since his eyes has managed to heal. Naga abilities n shit. Problem is, he can't see. So Sano starts getting really invested in medicine and some of the magic stuff his mom left behind. TLDR; Doesn't show up to work, captures some rando to use, harvests their eye, and performs surgery on himself. He's still a bit blind since its not his eye, but he can definitely see better. Akira finds the body and Sano manipulates him into helping him get rid of it. Akira complies since he doesn't wanna lose Sano.

Eventually, Sano devises the idea to run away from the circus. Akira doesn't want to since he's enjoying himself. People love him! But that quickly changes when he sees Sano gone from his bed. Akira naturally packs a bag and starts looking for him. Now they're on the run together. They're two broke teenagers with no education or any form of identification. And I haven't fully thought out this part yet, but Cain eventually finds these two broke teens and adopts them. Like a said before, second chance at father hood. Heres something im not so sure on yet. Either, Rire convinces Sano to become partners with him in the exchange for more training in magic, or because of Cain's involvement it's a constant fight to keep his adoptive sons safe from Rire's influence.

The rest just kinda plays out. They get their GED's with the help of their angel dad and go to college n shit. I tried keeping this as consistent as possible so let me know if you have any problems. Some of it might change later but I'll probably let you know if it does. There's probably some bits I forgot to include so ask me if you anymore questions!!!

[cupcakeshakesnake]

HELLO UM-

Your little Harbour PotC AU gives me absolute life, just for the record. Even tho i am very very late, thank you for making it :D

There is a headcanon I got that wouldn't leave my brain after looking at your art, originating from that one conversation between Beckett and Jack where there were some implications about canon being everyone’s previous lives. Whether this is actually a part of your au or not, it got me thinking eheheh

Theoretically, (perhaps in an au of an au, if this headcanon contradicts your lore,) what if your au and canon were the same 'verse, just several hundred years later? And what if not everybody were on their second life?

We obviously have a sprinkling of supernatural stuff, so what if the secretly-a-goddess Calypso and immortally-cursed Davy Jones were the OGs that they were in the films? Like, Davy Jones maybe came back somehow (as per movie 5's end-credit scene lol) and took back the role of the Dutchman's Captian after Will went back to Shipwreck Cove. All is good.

He learned his lesson now and actually does his job of ferrying souls. As times changed, so did his ship, in some magical way. She's no longer a sailing ship, and he'll always miss that, but he doesn't mind all that much. His crew usually only stay for that 100 yr contract, so he's seen plenty of sailors come and go. Eventually, he even hires living mortals. Less people die at sea, so by the 20th century, Jones takes a mortal job as a fisherman (or whatever his job is in your au) as well.

Whether or not he knows about the whole reincarnation thing doesn't really matter; the day he employs a familiar man by the name of Bill Turner, he chalks it up to coincidence. Even if Bill has a son named William, well- it's been 200 years, perhaps it's just a really really big coincidence. Either way, it doesn't matter to him.

It's not until he's docked in a small, out-of-the-way harbour, and three troublemaking kids sneak onto the Dutchman that he finally realises. Bill's boy, on his own, is just a matter of coincidence. Those three, together? It's unmistakable. And as bothersome those three pirates were, so long ago, I'd like to think that he looks back on that age, on those people, with some kind of fondness.

(Until he discovers they can be the most INFURIATING little gremlins he's ever met in all his centuries. But he'll find that out later.)

Anyway I drew it :D Have my humble, scribbly offerings.

(I feel bad about running away with this, even as just a headcanon-of-an-au, please don't take this as a 'you should do this' lmao, it's just me adoring all of your content it makes my brain go brrr you are amazing thankyou!!!)

This is so lovely 😭😭😭

The idea of Calypso and Jones being the same ones from canon but just... having had a lot of time to chill down and have a second chance is so??? Imagine what Jones must be thinking looking at those kids... this is so bittersweet (but mostly sweet)

I'm sorry it took so long to respond, I wanted to write a proper reply expressing just how much I love this but couldn't get around to it. Hope you don't mind me posting this publicly; I need everyone else to see this as well.