#queue will go on a journey without rest.

[blehrbie-blog]

Neteyam x Reader story

Sooo, I haven't written anything in genuine years. But after watching Avatar:TWOW I've become hyperfixated and have been scrolling and refreshing the Neteyam x Reader tag basically since the movie came out. As a consequence I've had this idea in the back of my mind that I thought was very sweet and cute (something we all need after that movie) so I decided to sit down and give it a go and see what comes out of my brain. So here it is. I haven't properly edited it and it's pretty much a 1000 words of word vomit and a bunch of time skips but it made me happy to write so I'm sharing it.

Oh, BTW SPOILERS!! but also I don't stick to the event's of the movie so idk I'm just putting it out there in case someone hasn't watched the trailer.

So the idea is our girl meets Neteyam informally for the first time when they're 9. She gets cornered in the jungle by a Palulukan and Neteyam helps her run away from it. She had always known who he is being the firstborn son of the Toruk Makto. She remembers her mom telling her about the big ceremony the Tribe had when he was first born. Everyone knew him.

- You shouldn't go into Palulukan territory without being careful - he says, looking a bit unsure about her now that there's no imminent danger.

- I didn't know I was in its territory

 - Don't wander off too far on your own then.

___________________________

After this meeting, you get closer and become friends, which means as a consequence you occasionally hang out with the rest of Neteyam's family. However, as he gets older and his Dad starts preparing him to be a warrior and later on Lo'ak as well you don't have as much time to spend as you once did laughing and roaming around in the jungle exploring thick forests and shallow pools of water. It's not like you have nothing to do with your life, you do! You've been thinking of taking up lessons from the Tsahik, to see how you can use the spirit of Eywa and nature to help people who are hurting. It just so happens that the Tsahik is Neteyam's grandmother so you sometimes end up seeing him come back from a mission with his father and you share sweet smiles from across the camp.

When the tribe moves to the floating rocks, you are required by the Tsahik to help those injured from the journey and the ones getting used to the new terrain. So you're even more often in the same circles. As you're working one day about to go over to help Ninat with her sprained ankle, someone taps you on the shoulder

-You seem busy with work. - says Neteyam smiling sweetly at you

-Oh! Yes, I was just about to start. How's your training going?

You hadn't spoken in a while, just a quick wave or nod when crossing paths throughout the day. You hadn't noticed but he towers over you by a couple inches now. He nods towards his dad who's speaking with Neytiri at the edge of their tent.

-You know, just the usual responsibilities of carrying on the legacy. - His eyes gaze into you softly, like he's memorizing your face after not seeing it for long. He shakes it off and looks down - Have you got many tasks today?

-Not too much actually, just need to check up on Ninat and prepare some medicinal salves.

- I want to see you later – He looks back up into your eyes and smiles – Maybe we can go on one of our expeditions like before.

You chuckle – Sure, I'd love that.

With a final nod of approval, he stalks away to his parent's side.

When you meet later towards sunset he's waiting patiently with his Ikran by the vines connecting the Hallelujah Mountains to the Jungle below.

-We won't go too far out into the jungle so we have time to come back before sunrise. - He says as he connects his Queue with the Ikran and gazes at you expectantly – Hop on.

Can I trust that I'll come back alive from this flight? - you raise a skeptical eyebrow. He only went through his Iknimaya ritual not too long ago.

He reaches out a hand to help you up onto the animal – I don't think Eywa would forgive me if I wasted you on a simple flight.

You smile warmly into his shoulder as you hold tight onto him feeling the powerful animal shift under you as you fly out.

Roughly 10 years later

____________________________

When he comes back from the Mitkayina islands. He's taller and broader and his hair is much longer pulled into a loose braid around his Queue. You have a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you first see him. He's magnificent and commanding in his presence. The tribe has gathered all around to accept him and Jake back with a warm welcome. And even though you're hidden by your fellow Na'vi, his eyes immediately find you in the crowd and issue an eager and warm smile on his face.

As soon as he has settled the greetings with the current Olo'eyktan and the Tsahik, he finds you – walking to your sleeping pod. You would have gone to say hello and see him up close but, honestly, you were a bit intimidated. What you now knew was a childhood infatuation with him all those years ago still couldn't handle seeing him all of a sudden in all his... perfect glory. You were a little intimidated. But that doesn't stop him from reaching out for you. You see him jog over with a grin. He grabs you by the shoulders about to pull you into a hug but stops himself at the last moment. His eyes roam you over from head to toe and he looks up with glistening eyes -You've grown! - His tone sounds almost unbelieving

-That tends to happen as time passes, yes – you chuckle, hands coming up to hold onto his arms. His strong arms.

-I'm not too sure what I expected you to look like but you're... way beyond any expectation – He sounds so awe-struck as he's still taking you in, that you start to feel a little embarrassed.

-I can say the exact same thing – You say as you meet his gaze again. As you do his face softens and he brings you into his arms finally.

-I missed you, my friend.

Your hand caresses his hair gently – I missed you too.

You break apart and you decide to go for some late food with him abandoning your plans of sleep.

_______________________

Months later, when they have their first kiss. It's a slow thing. He will say something dry-humoured in his soft voice and she'll forget to laugh too busy staring at him, realizing how in love she is. And has been all these years. And when he notices that she hasn't replied he'll look at her and know immediately. That she's realized, at last. And he'll come to hold her like she's the most precious thing in his world. He'll thread his fingers through her hair bringing her face close to his. Forehead pressed to hers, patiently waiting for her to join him in the reality he has been living. Where they have loved each other for a while, longed and missed unbelievably because of it, and are finally able to bask in it. The warm smiles and looks, the casual closeness that not being apart allows. The things he has been dreaming of. He looks at her lips and back at her eyes, pulling back slightly to give her some space. Maybe she's not entirely understanding his feelings, maybe she's too caught up in her own to recognize his signs, he thinks, ready to give her all the time- When she grabs his neck and drags him back to her. - Neteyam... – her eyes are glossy like she's about to cry. So he caresses her cheeks gently and finally presses their lips sweetly together. And he can not compare it to any other feeling he has ever experienced. It's not like loving her, that's easy and at the same time overwhelming. It has brought him to the point that he is ready to lay down his life and all of his family's expectations to travel back to the tribe just to see her. To be reunited. But this feeling, this kiss is like knowing, that he won't be alone in his love and he can give her his all, his soul. They stay there, lost in the sweetness of being together like never before until the sun has long set and the moon has long risen.

_______________________

That is it! I do realise I keep skipping between tenses, I apologise if anyone finds it annoying and hope you enjoyed!

Edit: I thought it might be useful to put a link to part 2 down here so: Next

[blueseachelle]

X reader request for some vax smut. So you know like how he can’t get the vestige off? Well that shouldn’t stop the reader from getting him off now should it? I was thinking maybe some hard grinding and getting him off through his new armor, and him putting that newfound uh…speed to good use.

I love this. So, I’m gonna totally make this in the woods. I don’t know a lot about the armor, Ya know, details….. Like a place to take out his-…..So anyway, please enjoy! I hope this satisfies you. If not, I’m always up for a rewrite. Not afraid to be told I didn’t fulfill your wishes. Please, let me know! Enjoy!

My Knight Trapped In Armor

Critical Role Vox Machina

Vax x Fem! Reader

Minors Do Not Interact

You have been with the group since the beginning for this long journey. Currently, collecting all the relics is your main mission. You’ve have gotten ahold of the first of the vestige and Vax had the honor of putting it on…. He was happy about it until he figured out that it will never come off.

You have been with Vax for a long while. You, Vax, and Vex were practically raised together. Ever since they ran from home you have always been there. You saved them from there first big fight. You haven’t strayed since that. You have always been there and helped them recruit the now known Vox Machina.

Vax has always had a crush on you, just didn’t want to ruin the friendship you had. Vex sees you as a little sister, Vax didn’t want to make it weird. He didn’t take the leap of faith until after the falling out at Whitestone to tell you how he felt, of course, with the encouragement of his sister. You returned the feelings and been with him ever since. So, onto the story.

The crew decided to make camp for the night. They found a nice clearing right before night fall so, everything was set up and ready to go before dusk. Everyone sat around the camp fire having normal conversation. Vax sat close to you. His new armor poking you every now and then but, you ignore it because you like the contact with him. Of course, you knew he could never take this off because his deal with the Raven Queen. You don’t even think that he knows how much he can… take of without something happening or being *gulps* cut of. Magic armor is dangerous.

In the middle of a small exchange with Scanlan, you felt Vax’s hand rest on your thigh. You gave him a side eye and he responded with a slight motion with his head. He wanted to go for a walk before it was too dark. You knew his queues by now. So, being the cunning girl you are, you got Grog into the conversation which accidentally (on purpose) made an argument between them about something dumb that somehow everyone else ended up in. As soon as the heat was off of you, Vax took your hand and walked of in the direction he suggested with his head.

You walked for a good 10 minutes before Vax finally stopped in his tracks.

“There. I think we are far enough, Darling.”

He turned to face you finally. He leaned down and gave you a kiss. You just giggled and kissed back,

“I think I know why you brought us out here. It’s been a little while, huh?”

He pulled away slight to lock eyes with you. You could see the lust and love for you run through his head.

“Of course it has. Everything is been chaotic as hell and you have been so badass recently. Finally, I can deal with this pent up heat you cause me. Darling, I would love to have you if you’d let me.”

He brought your hand to his face and kisses it. You giggled once again.

“Of course, My Love. I would love to have you.”

Vax gave you a toothy grin. He pulled you a little farther to the nearest tree and took a seat against it you. You took the queue and sat in his lap. You kissed him. Your hands locking themselves in his dark hair. He kisses back and set his hands on your hips. The kiss continued to deepen. He snaked his tongue into your mouth.

One of his hands reached up and made it’s way into your hair. The kiss finally parted. He used the interlocked hand in your hair to pull your head slightly back. He leaned forward and bit onto your neck. He proceeded to bit and suck on the supple skin. You let out a small moan. You felt the smirk against your neck as he continued down.

When he got to you collarbone, he released your hair. In return, you gripped his and pulled slightly. He growled out,

“Hey, are you gonna be nice or do I have to get mean?”

You gulped,

“N-no, Vax, Sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He reached down and grabbed at the hem of you shirt. Your armor has be taken off since the campsite. You knew it would be safe there so, you’ve been without it. You pulled up you shirt over your head and set it on the ground next to you. Your chest was now in full display to him. (With the armor your wear, it naturally cups your breast so, no need for a bra.)

“What a good fucking girl.”

You just let out a small squeak at the statement. The squeak turned into a moan as Vax took a nipple into his mouth. With the help of one of his hands, he played with your breast, switching between them. He nipped, sucked, and pinched at your nipples. All you could do is grip his hair and push your chest into his mouth. You, caught up in the pleasure, subconsciously started grind onto him. He could feel the friction through his armor. He kept his lips around one of your nipples as his hands left to join on your hips.

He pulled you down onto him. The pleasure increased for both of you. He could feel you through his armor, every little movement and pulse your pussy did. The friction of the engravings on the armor hit every friction need that you usually would have. Vax’s lips came off your nipple with a wet pop. Your nipples were now red and starting to swell slightly from the abuse that endured.

Vax removed his hands to reach down to his pants, he felt for and opening, anything that he could use get his cock out. He could only sit there for a second and watch his beautiful girlfriend drunkenly grind on him. Screw it, he wasn’t about to stop her to look for a opening. He’ll look for next time. Right now, he is going to get the both of you off. He grabbed you by the hips and started to grind up into her.

You closed you eyes in pleasure and arched you back. Your gripped his hair tighter and let out a moan of his name. He grunted in response and speed up. He could feel it. She’s getting close, well, he was too. He leaned up and kissed her desperately. You moaned into the kiss and turned it into a sloppy wet kiss. He felt like he needed to step the grinding. He moved a hand to caress the back of her head as he leaned forward to lay her on the grass. The kiss continued as he grinned harder and faster into her. The Vestige he wore increased his speed significantly.

You let out a loud moan of his name. He swallowed the moan. You broke the kiss reluctantly. Vax moved instantly to bite your neck. The coil in your stomach tightened,

“V-vax. I’m close. So so close.”

She desperately clawed at his back, which, of course, was armored. He growled. You knew that he was too. You arched your back off the ground. He quickly moved his arms under you. He quickly attached to one of your swollen nipples. That was all you needed.

“V-Vax-“

You didn’t even finish your statement because the tightened coil snapped. Vax felt how you froze and the pulsation against the armor. He ground down a couple more time before finishing himself, in his armor. And you, your panties and shorts you wore. You both caught your breath as you held each other.

“I love you so much, Baby.”

“I love you so much, My Love.”

After a couple minutes, Vax sat up first and grabbed your shirt. You thanked him and put it on.

“At least it’s dark, no one is gonna see my shorts. I’ll clean them tomorrow when the sun is up again.”

Vax chuckled and helped his Beloved up off the now wet ground,

“Yeah, but, the next question is, I can’t take this off… How the hell are we gonna clean my pants?”

You just giggled,

“We’ll figure it out, My Knight Trapped In Armor.”

Vax just grinned and kissed up before walking back in the direction of camp. You used your abilities to illuminate the surrounding area since the sun already set. You loved this man to death. You know that you would figure out something to make this easier for the both of you to get used to but…. what just happened… Wasn’t half bad.

I hope you have enjoyed this read! If you have anymore requests, I have an request post available. With that, see ya next post!

[lensman-arms-race]

Journey's end (human reader meets Sabre, ~4.1k words)

This was a request from @ren-chan082. The original prompt was:

I was wondering if I could request one involving Energized Tv Man a.k.a Saber with the reader… I mean, imagine if the group of humans that Camerawoman found reunited with Saber and Poly to be taken to a more safe place but one of them ends developing a tiny crush for Saber The main problem could be that apparently Saber distrusts humans and doesn't like to have any nearby so there would be a lot of tension between them? I think that could make for a pretty interesting plot about both of them… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I beefed the prompt slightly! Ren-chan mentioned the group of humans we see at the end of episode 73, but my brain parsed 'Camerawoman' as 'TV Woman' - because of course it did. We haven't yet seen TV Woman encounter unskibbed humans, so I made up some. If I had written about the humans from episode 73, I would have made them more militaristic. I hope it's still to your satisfaction!

I wanted to make this a 'Y/N' fic, but I find that abbreviation looks unattractive (and I keep parsing it as 'yeah, no'), so I named the reader-character 'November'. Because of N for name, and N is November in the NATO alphabet.

Request queue

Hosted versions of this fic: skibzone (my site), AO3

---

You take the opportunity to check the contents of your pack to review what you and McPiss managed to grab today, while they keep vigil out of the window, scanning the streets for approaching skibidis.

You'd met Tranter McPiss a couple of months ago, a fellow scavenger in the ruins of the skibidi plague's aftermath. Not the most fun or charming person you'd ever met, but competent and sensible enough. Naturally, you'd stayed together for safety in numbers and for companionship (such as it was).

Some toothpaste to add to the cache. You start picking off the cardboard boxes so you can pack the tubes in more neatly and make a bit more space in the pack. Few jars of peanut butter, probably the most calorie-dense food you're likely to find. Just about every veggie seed packet you could stuff into the pack's many pockets. You and McPiss plant those in available bits of ground as you go, in the hope they'll spread.

"Stop rustling for a bit," says McPiss quietly. (You silently take your hands out of the pack and let it down to the floor slowly.) "I hear something," McPiss whispers.

You strain to listen… it's footsteps. You don't know whether to feel panicked or hopeful - is it fellow human survivors, or some of those sinister hardware-headed robots? Or, worst of all, it might be some of those body-snatcher skibidis that have grafted fallen robot's bodies to their toilet bowls.

You're relieved that you can't hear any of that 'skibidi skibidi skibidi' chant that signals the arrival of the blood-crazed biting toilet-people. Might you dare to hope you've found another band of humans?

As the footsteps get closer, your hopes are dashed by hearing some garbled robot speech. Shit. Your guts feel as though someone's dumped a bowl of cold acid in them. Can you and McPiss escape through the window? It's a hell of a drop - could you climb down somehow? Are you better off staying put and trying to talk your way past the robots?

You frantically try to come up with a sensible plan and share it with McPiss, whom you can sense getting tense and frantic alongside you, as though something is saturating the air between you.

The footsteps stop for several seconds. If you stay quiet and still, will they go away again? …Despite the lack of footsteps, something enters the room nevertheless. You can't parse what you're looking at. The sight resolves itself as the head of one of the television-robots, its screen glowing… but without the rest of the robot. It's… hovering on little rockets, you realise. Ohh shit, it's seen you.

The hovering rocket-television displays a cutesy emoticon on its screen… then its screen background goes from a soft purple to a hot sugar-pink, as the hovering monitor smoothly advances towards you. A suggestion hangs heavily in your mind: "Don't worry". You feel you should be appalled at being manipulated like this - you know that thought didn't come from you! But the gesture feels so kind, so considerate, as though the hover-television is letting you borrow some of its courage. Just as the ethical implications of this sink in, a headless robot body walks in, flanked by two more TV-headed robots. The headless one confidently steps forward to meet the hovering TV-head, which must be its own. The two parts of the robot elegantly re-capitate with what looks like practised ease.

One of the flanking robots (they look like Floaty-Head's bodyguards, you reckon) says something - you can't work out what language it spoke. Human-made televisions were invented in Scotland… might they be speaking Scots Gaelic?

The two bodyguard-type robots step forwards, one coming towards you and the other towards McPiss. 'Your' robot says something you can't parse, its screen changing colour from a green-tinted mid-grey to a pale cyan. The screen glows bright, making you flinch, then fades back to its former grey, along with a benignly smiling emoticon. Did the robot just… scan you? Mark you? Whatever it did, it seems pleased with the result.

The other robot appears to have reached much the same conclusion as McPiss. Both bodyguards rejoin their comrade with the detachable head, who has the aura of one who's in charge. Hover-Head's screen fades out from pink back to purple, releasing its mental hold on you - you feel like yourself again, but a little more afraid without the constant reassurance being beamed into your brain.

"We're fucked, aren't we?" McPiss whisper-hisses to you.

You're not so sure. The robots outnumber you, and they could have killed you by now - but they haven't. And the floaty-headed one used its screen-power to soothe you and encourage you. If they'd wanted to kill you, wouldn't they have paralysed you with fear?

You're about to say something to McPiss, then something occurs to you as one of the 'bodyguard' robots speaks - the sound of their speech sounds like a recording being played backwards. (This robot has what looks like an LED torch mounted to its head-casing, you notice just now. Their compatriot has a noticeable trait of their own: some hot pink socks, in stark contrast to the rest of their sombre black get-up. What if… you called them Pinky and Perky. What if you did that.)

You notice Floaty-Head display a cheery emoticon, then turn the dials on their head-casing. Their speakers click and buzz until the robot is apparently satisfied with what they hear.

"Calibration," says the robot. "Humans, do you comprehend?" Its voice is like a flock of metal birds of various sizes speaking together in perfect synchronicity, with the slightest reverb.

McPiss looks to you, apparently for support. Should you say yes to the robot? …Do you have anything to gain by pretending that you can't understand them? Probably not.

"Yes," you say. "Yes, we comprehend you."

"Imperator to squadron," says Hover-Head. So their name or title is 'Imperator'? You file that away in your brain-meats. "Unskibbed humans found. Duplicate communication parameters."

"Copied," says Perky. …You need to mentally assign these two some different nicknames.

"You're far from Sector Carina-Seven," says the TV-robot with the detachable head - the Imperator. (Maybe they can all detach their heads and this is the only one you've seen doing it? Or maybe not - Pinky and Perky don't have the head-rockets. Argh. You can't keep calling those two that.)

"…Sorry?" ventures McPiss.

The Imperator displays an amused emoticon on their screen. "This sector isn't safe for D-class personnel and below. Given how unprepared you seem for combat or recon, and how easily we were able to approach you, I am assuming you are lone operants acting without orders or backup."

"We're not with the skibidis, if that's what you mean," you say. "Or whatever you call the toilet people."

"Yes, we call them skibidis too," says the Imperator. (Didn't they call you and McPiss 'unskibbed'? You've just worked out what that must have meant.) "…If you're not affiliated with the Alliance, you won't know the sector names. Carina-Seven is the current safe zone for unaffected humans."

"Can you… tell us how to get there?" you ask.

McPiss seems displeased by your question - they probably think you're being too eager to trust these robots. You'd agreed with McPiss that the faceless, slightly weirdly-proportioned robots were creepy… but now you're rethinking that stance. At close range, they're almost cute!

"We can do you one better," says the Imperator, displaying a delighted emoticon. "My colleague can take us there."

"One moment, please, while I confer with my colleague," you say to the Imperator, then gesture your head to McPiss to get into a huddle with you. Well, two people isn't really enough for a huddle. It's half a huddle. A hud.

"We don't know their motivations," says McPiss quietly once you've moved away from the robots. "I think we should part ways with them while we still can. We know what we're dealing with out in the wilderness - these robots are an unknown."

"I'm inclined to go with them," you say. "You have a point, but… if they wanted to kill us, they could have done that many times over. And we know the robots are enemies of the skibs too-"

"Don't give me that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'," interrupts McPiss. "The enemy of my enemy can smooch my hoop as well."

"I just think if we don't go with them, we'll regret it later," you say. "I'm tired of running and hiding and not having a safe base to call my home."

"I exert no hold on you," says the Imperator. (How much of your conversation did they hear?) "I cannot force you to come with us." (Well… physically they can. The Imperator is probably speaking of ethics rather than capability.) "But I advise you to choose quickly-"

On cue, you hear the sound of approaching skibidi activity…

"Let's regroup with my colleagues for now," says the Imperator, "And you can decide where to go from there. Grab your bag." You do so, and the Imperator and their two guards converge smartly on you. You're unnerved but you hold firm as the Imperator claps a hand on your shoulder - you're aware of one of the two guards doing the same to McPiss.

Your surroundings suddenly become very dark and close, as though walls of black fog swept in and converged on you, until all you can see is the Imperator… The walls of fog fall away just as suddenly as they materialised… and your surroundings are different. What just happened? Did you just go down a wormhole?

"You could have warned us that was going to happen!" shouts McPiss. You agree a little - that was a bit scary and you would have appreciated the heads-up.

"Skill issue," remarks someone. You jerk your head to the source of the sound and realise there's another TV-headed robot here, of a different model from the Imperator and their two guards. You thought the Imperator looked elegant, but this unit… "They made it in a rizz factory and didn't know when to stop," you hear yourself thinking. Gah! Get it together!

"Be gentler," chides the Imperator. "These humans have had a frightening day."

"These skibidis-in-waiting, you mean?" the new robot says, idly drawing and flexing some magenta-purple blades installed on its forearms, in a casual display of power. "You do them no kindness prolonging their misery, Imperator. Only a matter of time before their brains rot."

The Imperator displays a glaring displeased emoticon, apparently not impressed by the bladed robot's rudeness. The two of them 'stare' silently at each other for a couple of seconds - are they communicating on a wavelength you can't hear?

"They're clean," says one of the guards (the one with the torch on its head). "Both scanned."

Purple Blades nods silently to the Imperator, apparently concluding their imperceptible conversation. "I take it back," they say, approaching you and McPiss. (McPiss bristles and stands their ground, but you try to stay relaxed - you'd be far better off with these TVs as allies rather than enemies.) "Had a dicksplash of a day. Frustrated. Took it out on you." The robot makes a show of deliberately tucking away its blades, then presents its gloved fist to you. What does this gesture mean? Should you… copy it?

You raise your own fist and bring it in, mirroring the TV-unit. It completes the gesture - and you realise it was going for a fist-bump all along. You happily push your knuckles into place - what excitement!

"What should we call you?" you ask.

"Sabre," replies the blade-armed TV.

"I'm November, and my companion is Tranter McPiss," you say.

"Why would you tell them that?" protests McPiss angrily.

"What are they going to do; get in touch with our bank?" you point out. You continue to Sabre: "…You smell of burning. Did you run into skibidis too?"

"You can tell?" asks Sabre. You guess robots can't smell. "Blew a fuse. Don't know which one. Diagnostic system failed. Takes forever to check all fuses systematically. Grumpy about it."

"I can smell that on you," you say. There's a definite burnt metal tang, with the unpleasant sour back notes of burnt rubber. "May I… examine you a bit more closely? I might be able to find it."

"If you must."

You move your head closer and sniff at Sabre's torso while walking around them. Sabre seems mildly alarmed, and their head moves on a swivel to track you, even as you walk behind them. Evidently they can spin their head like an owl. (The Imperator and their two guards seem to keeping their eyes - well, their screens - on you too. McPiss is keeping their distance - they don't seem eager to help out.)

"Mind how you go, meatbag," warns Sabre. "I'm pointy."

"The smell is strongest here," you say, pointing to a spot on one of Sabre's shoulders. "I would guess your blown fuse is under here."

The two bodyguards move in, as Sabre takes off their coat. "Hold that for me," instructs Sabre, handing it to you. …Oh, it's nicely warm. The two guards set to work with what you assume is a robot first-aid kit, containing several small specialised-looking tools. Sabre undoes their jacket and shirt, revealing a glimpse of sleek and slightly angular plating. You realise you're clutching the coat quite hard…

The guards are evidently trained in field repairs, as they remove a panel of Sabre's plating, exposing a bank of fuses. One of the guards pulls out the blown fuse (while Sabre appears to be trying not to flinch) and the other replaces it with a fresh one from the kit. You remember what Sabre said about having to check all their fuses systematically - you guess it would be hard for them to remove their own body panels because of the awkward angles, especially with their blades in the way.

"You'd better appreciate this," says the Imperator warmly. "I don't share my spare fuses with just anyone."

"Thank you, Imperator," says Sabre, then: "…Thank you, November. That saved a lot of time." They take their coat back from you. "Are you cold, human?"

"I am a bit," you concede. You'd had to leave your coat behind earlier that week and you hadn't found a suitable replacement yet. (You guess it was this week. Keeping track of time has fallen a bit by the wayside these days.)

Sabre moves to put their coat on you before you can object. They hold the sleeve out for you to insert your arm, and you do so without really thinking about it. It's hard to not take something that someone is handing right to you. The cuffs snap closed with magnetic clasps as you put the sleeves on - they have large slots in them for Sabre's arm-blades.

You shiver in delight inside the coat. Its warm weight feels nice, and you rather appreciate the view of Sabre in just their jacket. "See, McPiss," you say, "We were wrong; robots are nice."

"For your knowledge," says one of the guards (the one sans torch), "We prefer to be called 'techfolk' rather than 'robots'. It's true, we are robots, but so is a mindless factory assembler."

"Understood," you reply. You suppose calling them 'robots' is like calling a fellow human an 'ape' - it's correct, but can be wielded offensively. "Well, what do you think?" you ask McPiss. "I reckon our best chance of survival is to head to… Carina-Seven, was it? Join the other humans there. I'm so happy to know there are still more of us out there!"

"I can see there's no dissuading you," says McPiss. They move in close to you so they can whisper. "I think you're being too trusting."

"I think you're not being trusting enough," you say. "This would be a stupid amount of effort to go to for a trap. I'm going with the techfolk. I really hope you'll come too." You address the Imperator: "What happens now?"

"My colleague Polycephaly will take us the rest of the way," says the Imperator. "We'll need their teleportation ability to get us all the way to Sector Carina-Seven from here." The Imperator addresses McPiss: "Consider this the warning I didn't give you last time. Are you ready to depart?"

"I know I am," you say.

Sabre steps near you and offers their hand. You guess they're initiating a teleport, and you take it. Your world is swirling black fog for a moment, and then you are somewhere else. Next to you, the Imperator spawns in with McPiss, followed by the two bodyguards.

Your body surges with terror at the unmistakeable sound of a skibidi chant rapidly getting closer-

"Doctor Polycephaly diagnoses you with being annoying. Here's your prescription."

The skibidi song rapidly takes on a panicked tone as the approaching skibidi gets lifted into the air and thrown away, explosively shattering its porcelain on impact. You can't work out what you just saw… until you realise there's yet another TV-headed techfolk here - you actually hadn't noticed them at first because their sheer size made your brain not register them as an entity. This unit's colossal!

"Some fresh meatbags," observes the huge TV - Polycephaly, you think the Imperator said. You're startled to see four more TV-screens suddenly unfurl on stems from behind the big unit's back. Polycephaly kneels and cranes their subscreens inwards, apparently getting a better look at you and McPiss. "Bound for Carina-Seven?"

"Just so," replies the Imperator.

"You know the drill," says the giant TV. "Fog tax." Polycephaly's main screen turns void-black - not the black of a switched-off screen, but black like a hole cut in reality. Clouds of void-blackness spill out of Sabre's, the Imperator's and the guards' screens and fly towards Polycephaly, as if the big TV is vacuuming up their energy. The four smaller TVs jokingly protest at this treatment, to Polycephaly's amusement.

Polycephaly stands up again, and takes a few steps to a nearby shipping container. They pull open its doors and then pat the roof. "Get your arses in my box, mammals, unless you'd rather take your chances with the skibs," says Polycephaly.

You get inside the shipping container, a little hesitantly - how is this going to work? You feel braver once the Imperator, the guards and Sabre follow you in. If they're getting in, it's clearly the right thing to do. McPiss brings up the rear. You can see their point about preferring to face an known evil than an unknown one, but you're daring to hope that going with the TVs won't turn out to be an 'evil' at all. You feel a pang of guilt that you ever thought of the robots - the techfolk - as creepy.

Polycephaly closes the doors of the shipping container, shutting you all into near-darkness. The only light comes from the four TV's screens - the Imperator and the two guards with their green-tinted grey, and Sabre's richer royal purple.

"Feeling okay?" Sabre asks quietly. They pat your hand. Oh! Before you can say anything, all of you are plunged into swirling blackness. This feels the same as when you were transported earlier. Did Polycephaly teleport the entire shipping container?

That question is answered when the doors re-open. McPiss immediately hops out, reminding you of re-wilded tigers dashing to freedom from their transport crates. The Imperator glances behind them to make sure you're following, giving you a reassuring smiling emoticon, then steps out accompanied by their two guards.

"Out you get," says Polycephaly, slapping the container roof. You obey, Sabre walking alongside you.

"Ni hao, Imperator. Wo happen so?" A human voice!

"Buono estente, Gladys," replies the Imperator to the human. "Beaucoup skibidis, but two newbies."

"Skibidis, quelle fuckery. Oho!" says the human - Gladys? - noticing you and McPiss. They wave hello to you, and you wave back. So does McPiss - they seem happy to have found more humans instead of robots.

You take in your surroundings. Is this the Sector Carina-Seven that the Imperator mentioned? There are many humans here, some at work and some at leisure. You notice a few of the Camera-headed robots - techfolk - here too, talking in a sign language with some humans.

McPiss introduces themself to Gladys. "McPiss - Tranter McPiss," they say, holding out a hand.

Gladys shakes hands. "Dailyo, McPiss. Gladys, je suis. Welcome a Sector Carina-Siete."

"November," you introduce yourself with a handshake. You get an idea - you'll probably score points if you contribute supplies to the group. You open your pack and start bringing out toothpaste and peanut butter.

"Zahnpasta avec karanga squishy? Bonus est!" Gladys clearly approves. You guess a mix of people from around the world live here and have fallen into using a pidgin blend of their own languages. Gladys calls over a couple more people to help unload. "Sprechen a beth?" Gladys asks you.

"…Not sure what that means, sorry," you reply.

Gladys tilts their head slightly, apparently taking in what you said. "Oho," they say. "Macaroon!"

Someone else approaches. "Parler zum newbies," Gladys tells them.

"Ey up," says the new person. "My name's Macaroon - Chris P. Macaroon." (Gladys must have summoned someone who speaks the same language as you.)

"Ey up, Macaroon. I'm November and this is my colleague McPiss," you explain. "We ran into some skibs but luckily the Imperator ran into us first."

"And I didn't want to come with because I assumed it was a trap," says McPiss. "For once, I'm glad to be proven wrong."

"Nice coat," says Macaroon to you.

"I should give it back," you say. "I borrowed it from Sabre - have you met them?" You begin taking it off so you can give it back to its owner.

"Sabre, lending your coat to a human?" says Macaroon. "I didn't think you liked us that much."

"Skibidi-headed, but not as stupid as you look," concedes Sabre. It seems McPiss isn't the only person glad to have been proven wrong today.

"That's high praise, coming from Sabre. Gladys and I will get you another coat from somewhere," Macaroon says to you. "And we'll give you a tour. You and McPiss should both get settled in for today - tomorrow we can talk about adding you to the duty rota and get you some Alliance tablets. These things, I mean, not medicine tablets." Macaroon flashes their digital device.

"Thank you," you say. "I can't believe my luck! Earlier today I was scrabbling in the wilderness running from skibs, and now this!" Life will be so much easier with a home and some friends.

The Imperator approaches you and McPiss, having been talking to a small group of humans and Cams. "I must take my leave," they say.

"Imperator, I'm so glad we met you," you say sincerely. To your surprise, the Imperator extends their arms to offer a hug. You gladly step forward to accept. You've been on the run and on edge for so long, it feels overwhelming to stand on safe ground and enjoy the simple pleasure of a hug. Your eyes prickle pleasantly with the beginnings of happy-tears. And the Imperator gives great hugs, warm and firm, no shyness or limpness. The Imperator gives you a final little squeeze, then ends the hug.

The Imperator offers a hug to McPiss. "Have you got over your dislike of robots?" the Imperator asks cheerfully, displaying a happy emoticon.

"I have," says McPiss, then accepts the hug readily. "Thank you, Imperator."

You seize your chance. You don't know when you'll see Sabre again. "Sabre… could I hug you?"

There's a pause. Have you offended them? Then: "If you must."

You'll take it! You hug Sabre, noting how carefully they move to not injure you with their blades. Their coat smells of your warmth, as if you've known them a long time and their scent is familiar to you. You delightedly snuggle into them as much as you dare.

"Sabre, cwtsh?" Gladys says with amused surprise.

"Mind your own business," says Sabre. They deliver a final squeeze to signal the end of the hug - did they pick up that habit from the Imperator?

"Will I see you again?" you ask Sabre as you disengage.

"Possibly," says Sabre non-committally, as they press something into your hand. They vanish in a column of black mist, to your surprise. …Is that what teleportation looks like from the outside?

You notice the Imperator and their two guards stepping back into the shipping container, which Polycephaly slaps their hand on and teleports away, in a big cloud of smoky black fog. Dang - you'd wanted to thank and say goodbye properly to Polycephaly. Hopefully you'll see them again, if the robots - no, the techfolk - find some more humans.

You check what Sabre gave you. It's a business card of sorts, with some contact details on it. Well, you know what you'll be doing when you get your tablet tomorrow…

[dontbooatme]

dp x bnha au

And if I ever did anything with this it'd be mostly Danny's POV, despite the focus in this post but..

Okay, hear me out:

Maddie Fenton is born into the world of bnha. She has a very rare quirk that's difficult to activate/has very specific requirements to activate: the ability to rip open portals into alternate dimensions. She activates it by accident and ends up lost in the Ghost Zone. She gets separated from the portal she made in some way shape or form, but it stays open. Maybe hostile ghosts show up and she runs, because she's young here. 7-8 probably. So she's lost in the zone--until she finds a natural portal into the dp universe.

And she ends up stuck in a world without quirks.

She grows up there, everything else about her history stays relatively the same. Except she has a new motivation for being obsessed with ghosts and the Ghost Zone and creating portals. Because she's only ever used her quirk once when she was in her world and she grew up the rest of the way without any form of quirk counseling she could have had in her first world.

And of course she's tried to use her quirk again. But it's fickle in the first place, and there are so many other universes than the one she looking for.

But veil between the dp verse and the Ghost Zone is thinner here in a way that's not true for her world. Natural portals open here without the help of a quirk. She's seen that. And the energy traces they leave behind after they close is something that can be studied.

So she turned to learning how to make a portal to the Ghost Zone through science.

But then she meets Jack and they ultimately end up having Jazz and Danny. And she's still desperate to build that portal. But now she has a stake in this world that she didn't have before.

She doesn't know what she's going to do when her and Jack's work is done. Take her family with her? Does she want to uproot their lives and move to a universe she hasn't been in since she was a kid? Has, probably, been pronounced dead in? Where her family won't have any documentation anywhere for any place under the sun? Does she just want the chance to see it before she slinks back to this world like an outcast?

She still ends up married to Jack, and they still have Jazz and Danny and her and Jack still end up successfully building a portal to the Ghost Zone when he's 14.

And Danny still has his accident.

But instead of coming out in the human world, he ends up trapped in the Zone. With an overloaded/exploded, non functional portal left behind in the lab.

Which leaves Maddie and Jack in the position of having to build the portal from scratch. Which takes time. But only after they collect the materials. Which also takes time and some of them aren't easy to get their hands on.

And of course, they first have to realize Danny's missing and why he's missing before they really get to work on rebuilding the portal.

And he happens across the very same portal Maddie created way back when.

Queue Danny, lost in Musutafu, unknowingly in a parallel to his mom's journey. And discovering he has a thing or two in common with this very strange world he's been dropped into. Quirks being one thing, when he figures out he had a quirk even before he had ghost powers. But cultural differences that are specific to the bnha verse and that Maddie brought back with her could be another. He just pops up into this world, maybe hesitant to backtrack into the zone because ghosts and definitely unlivable conditions, and he walks into town as a teenager with no knowledge of quirks and no control of the quirks he has. He.. causes a bit of a disturbance.

And queue a Madeline Fenton who's now more desperate than ever before to burst through the veil and get into the Ghost Zone.

Idk, this idea just hit me. There are definitely kinks to work out. Like where a gaping portal in bnha would have to be located so it isn't easy to find. Or how Danny ends up lost there despite a gaping portal back to the Zone. Maybe the issue is that the Fenton portal is what's not functional. So he has access to the Zone, but that's the cut off point. And he knows better than to trust the reliability of natural portals, due to his mom's research. And how much she stresses how dangerous they are. Unbeknownst to him, because she has personal experience on that front. Or smth idk yet

I think in this au Danny would originally have a regenerative/quick healing type of quirk. To explain why he had a seemingly quicker/easier recovery period than Vlad did after their accidents.

And maybe Jazz has a quirk too. But I think for this au they should both have quirks that are pretty subtle. Something that might make them weird in the dp verse, but something that doesn't set them apart too much. So when everything about the dimension hop/quirks come to light, everything about that revelation is a huge shock

Also the jumpsuits would probably be something Maddie treasures a lot. Something that feels familiar to her with the relation to pro hero costumes. Maybe she even had a parent who was a prohero. And the jumpsuit is the closest recreation she could make of the suit x parent wore. A suit that Danny now wears when he goes ghost.

Maddie got her quirk when she was younger, but she didn't activate it for the first time till she was 7-8 due to how fickle it is

And, obviously, we'd have to bring Kurogiri into this. Because, portals

Ooh, that would probably leave Danny wanting to seek out the league, Kurogiri specifically once he finds out theres someone else who can make portals. Whether or not Kurogiri would even be able to make portals to a different universe? That's a different story

[heavybreathingcatt]

HBC’s BL3 re-write

CORE PLOT & CHANGES

The plot: VH's are hired by Lilith and Maya to find the other Sirens and save them from being consumed by Tyreen. The final Siren is in a Vault. 

There aren't multiple vaults, and there isn't a huge range of planets. 

The story focuses on a smaller cast. (sorry, Clay, and… others I've forgotten already)

The story is mainly on Pandora and one other world - Prometheus

There are more moons and space stations to explore to create environmental variation. 

THE VILLAINS

The Twins are much older and have some empathetic qualities to improve their characters. To me, they were just 'too mean'. Without them showing they cared for something, it made their characters fall short. e.g. Handsome Jack and his 'love' for Angel. After Troy died, I had expected Tyreen to absolutely lose it in grief… except there was nothing. 

Tyreen and Troy are first introduced as employees of Maliwan (it's a ruse for them). They work on the PR team, continuing the BL theme of evil corporations and how they use social media today. They'll eventually reveal their true intentions. @agentandromeda contributed this neat idea.

TYREEN

My Tyreen rewrite would include her wanting an heir. She cannot have children as she kills the child in the womb. So she is seeking a Siren apprentice as she refuses to let her powers go out into the wild to find a new host upon her death. Tyreen is seeking the power of all 6 sirens for herself. She doesn't give a shit about opening the Pandora vault (scrap that entire plotline). The final Siren is hidden in a Vault, which is the vault hunter's mission. To beat her to it to save the Siren. Lilith and Maya have hired the vault hunters as they want to protect their fellow Siren. 

TROY

Troy slowly begins to resent Tyreen as he wants to be her heir, yet Tyreen doesn't think he is worthy. This will lead to Troy betraying Tyreen, and this act will lead to his death. However, Tyreen is convinced the VH's corrupted him and contributed to his death. She is blind that her own actions led to it.  

ANGEL

As she was a constant presence in the first two games, I think it was a missed opportunity not to continue that. Tyreen learns that Angel must have passed her powers onto someone, and so Tyreen hunts the Angel AI to know where this new Siren is. Lilith orders the VH into Helios to retrieve the Angel AI before Tyreen. Lilith loses her powers to Tyreen during this mission.

The VH's also have to collect more fragments of Angel's lost memories and code to restore her. These will be in-game missions.

To gain the final piece of Angel's code, they need to break into one of Handsome Jack's deadlocked facilities on Pandora. Moxxi has a plan to hunt down the last known doppelganger, and her 'friend' Fiona is keen for a heist. Queue Handsome Jackpot DLC (but it's in the main campaign). Free Timothy, and he will let you into a new area on Pandora. Enter Jack's effed-up facility, find the final piece of Angel's code, and restore her! Yay.

She will act as a guide throughout the rest of the game, just as she did in Bl1 and 2. 

Other notes:

Angel and Ava build a bond.  

Angel is never fully restored and doesn't have all her memories of her final moments. This can be something she learns on her journey. The AI doesn't think of herself as Angel. She knows the original Angel created this AI for her Dad to keep him company after she died. 

MALIWAN

Plays the role of corporate big bad, as Hyperion did in BL2. Maliwan mostly has the same storyline as bl3. Katagawa Jr. is still around and wants Rhys' bussiness. Katagawa Jr doesn't die early in the game and has a bigger role in slowing down the VH's work. Maliwan is also trying to reclaim old Hyperion assets on Pandora, so the VHs come across Maliwan when restoring Angel. 

ATLAS

Atlas is introduced when Lilith realises they must take their Siren search off Pandora. They plan to steal an Atlas spaceship (because converting Sanctuary into a spaceship in 5 years is dumb. Dumb dumb dumb). Lol, VH's are caught trying to steal the ship by….. SASHA! She is head of security at this one facility. She takes them to Rhys. Rhys will lend them the spaceship if they do missions with Sasha to reclaim old Hyperion bases for Atlas (they're overrun with bandits). Do this, get a ship. Yay.

Sasha stays on board the spaceship with the VH as a tech expert. She will give you missions throughout the game.

TIMOTHY

After he's rescued from the Handsome Jackpot, he hangs out on the Atlas spaceship and gives you missions. Like finding his old Digi-structuring watch and restoring some of his old looks. 

AVA

Tyreen sees the same potential in Ava as Maya did and tries to seduce her to the dark side, lol. Tyreen is convinced this has worked, but Ava plays double agent and uses the opportunity to get close to Tyreen to finish her off. She fails, and Maya is killed trying to save her. Tyreen gains Maya's powers, and Troy wants a share but doesn't get any. Maya's death happens towards the end of the story, allowing for far more time with Maya. VH's will receive missions from Ava to build a memorial for Maya. 

LILITH

Lilith goes into murder mode over Maya's death. VHs will do revenge missions for her. She is consumed with so much rage that Ava and Angel take over the Atlas Ship and missions for a bit. Lilith calms her anger once Troy dies. 

HELIOS

Is now a major plot point and a place to explore. It's huge. A future mission for the VHs is to sell old Hyperion tech to Rhy's/Atlas found on Helios. 

JAKOBS

Sorry, we ain't going to Jakobs planet. It doesn't serve the plot but can be visited in bl4 or a DLC. Rhys sends VHs to go check out his terraforming facility (as seen in tales) as someone is taking his prized jellies as trophies. Spoiler alert: it's Wainwright. He has a thing for trophy hunting and read an article by some dude called Sir Hammerlock that said Pandora had excellent trophy hunting. 

Queue introducing these future love birds. Seeing a romance start/blossom in a game is more important than having it established. By the end of the game, these two are an item. 

FIONA

She is introduced when it comes to getting Timothy out of the Jackpot. She wants those dollarydoos. She and Moxxi flirt a bit. After the heist, she hangs out with Sasha and will also give you missions. 

AURELIA

Aurelia is introduced when Wainwright wants to ask Hammerlock to marry him (end-game content). He wants the family together; this leads to a series of fun missions to reunite the siblings. It works… kinda. She doesn't die. lol. Maybe she turns the wedding into an ice palace and storms off when Hammerlock doesn't like the vibe. She's not a villain, just an annoying sibling, as she should be. 

5th SIREN (Angel's heir)

It's not Tannis lol.

It's… Colonel Tungsteena Zarpedon Daughter. 

Because Angel feels terrible about what happened to her mum and thinks the daughter — Brittania — will continue her fight. She has Angel's powers but doesn't understand where and how she got them. She is currently on Elpis (yes, we get to go back to space Australia), and she is trying to rebuild the damage Hyperion and Dahl did. Maya/Lilith sends the VHs there to make sure she is safe and to beat Tyreen to her. VHs do a few space-Australia missions for Brittania to win her trust.

Then Tyreen and Troy rock up. Boss fight time. Tyreen kills Brittania and takes her powers. Troy asks for the power, but Tyreen refuses (contributing to the building animosity between them).

6th SIREN (locked in a Vault)

New character. She's been locked in the Vault for a long time and has consumed far too much Eridium. She has some mutations and is quite ethereal in voice and character. She's confused and overpowered and initially fights the VH - boss fight. Once defeated, she calms down, but then the twins rock up. 6th Siren flees before a confrontation; she can escape with the help of Troy, who doesn't want to see another Siren drained (it's also a rather selfish act as he wants the powers that Tyreen isn't sharing, so it's a bit of a eff-you to his sister).

Tyreen is furious, and she leaves to hunt the 6th Siren. 

VH's and Troy have a boss fight, and he dies. 

FINAL BOSS FIGHT

Tyreen has cornered the 6th Siren. VH's rock up. Tyreen drains the powers from the 6th Siren and then begins the final boss fight.

VHs kill Tyreen, and all the powers she took are returned to their heirs. 

Maya > Ava

Brittania > unknown

Tyreen > Unknown

Lilith > back to Lilith

The 6th Siren comes back alive to the surprise of everyone. All the Eriduim she had drained over the decades kept her alive, so she re-awakens. She thanks the VHs and then leaves through a portal. 

End game.

[canmom]

Das Abenteuer der Canmom in Köln (zur Gamescom)

It's time for canmom to have another adventure! What will that wacky lil porygon do next?

[you may be wondering, whatever happened to the plan to transfer l'aventure de canmom à Annecy to the main site for easier reading? that's still planned to happen, hopefully pretty soon! I've just been very busy.]

So: I work for a small VR games company called Holonautic. I've been working for them for around four months now (time flies)! This week some of us were in Cologne, Germany, attending Gamescom. Until this trip I hadn't met any of them in person, and indeed only had a vague idea what they looked like, because the modern world is wacky that way.

What's Gamescom? It's a major industry expo where game devs show off their games to the public and journalists, and otherwise have various industrial sorts of chats. The event fills a massive convention centre (the Kölnmesse), similar to the Excel Centre in London. Thousands and thousands of gamers enter in massive queues, and once inside, they queue up some more to get a chance to play some work in progress games at massive display booths.

Or maybe they go to the indie room, where there are hundreds of tiny desks just wide enough for a dev to set up a computer with a demo... or the retro games area, where various old consoles were set up for people to play... or one of the zones set up for laser tag or something like that. There was a lot going on!

Even Cthulhu came down to check out the games.

My own experience of Gamescom involved very little of that. With my Trade Visitor badge I could skip the queues, but most of my time was spent in a corner of the Business Area demoing our game to influencers, other devs and members of Meta and Unity, and then heading out to restaurants to have dinner with other VR devs in the evening. I had a good time though! It was great to meet the rest of Holonautic in person, and get to see the sights of Köln a tiny bit. And it was a very rewarding feeling to see other people enjoy the game I'd been working so hard on.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my trip, do a bit of amateur sociology, think about the place of videogames in the world and all that - and also talk a little about how the game sausage gets made - at least as far as I can without breaking NDA. Sadly, the game I spent most of the weekend demonstrating remains under wraps, so I'll have to tell you about that another day. I didn't get to see a ton of games but I'll also talk about the handful of indies I did see!

This time I travelled by train (non-transport nerds, feel free to skip this paragraph), taking the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, and then the ICE 19 to Cologne. Although it was slower and a bit more expensive than flying, once you factor in the time it takes to travel out to the airport, and the security generally being much more straightforward, I think I much prefer the trains. I spent my journeys drawing other passengers (coming soon to @canmom-art) and reading Osamu Tezuka's manga Ayako (which will be its own post). It was all told very straightforward and comfortable.

[minutiae: I thought I was clever by getting an Interrail pass instead of just buying tickets the usual way, but I didn't realise that you also have to pay for seat reservations, so in the end the Interrail probably cost about as much for a 'there and back again' type of trip.]

By far the most expensive part of the trip was the hotel room. We stayed in a hotel pretty close to the centre of Cologne, but it turned out that its proximity to be about 15 minutes walk from public transport, so we didn't end up saving that much travel time. Since I ultimately spent almost no time in my hotel room, I think if I go next year, the call will be to stay at a hostel. But anyway, let's talk games.

How a game gets released on the Quest

So, Holonautic specialises in VR games. I wrote about our previous games in this very nerdy post, but in brief, there are broadly two major types of VR game: PC VR and standalone VR. For PC VR, the game runs on a computer, and the headset just contains a screen and something that can be tracked. For standalone VR, the headset is essentially a powerful Android smartphone with a custom OS; it uses the headset's cameras for tracking and does all the computing on the headset.

With the success of the Oculus/Meta Quest series, standalone VR became really, really popular - much more so than PCVR ever was. It makes sense: for native games you don't need a powerful gaming PC and there are no cables to trip over or expensive base stations, but you can still play PCVR games if you want to. Almost all of Holonautic's games are Quest-native.

For PCVR games, you can use one of various APIs, such as OpenXR, to wire up your game to VR tracking and input. Moreover, Valve built pretty good VR support into Steam, and since Steam is pretty much anything-goes, it's pretty easy to release a PCVR game in a way people can get it - but marketing is all on you, as with any Steam game.

The Quest is a different story. Compared to other consoles, Meta (which absorbed Oculus a few years ago) occupies a bit of a strange position in this industry, simultaneously the hardware manufacturer, the only publisher, and also a developer of first-party titles.

I don't have any good pictures for this part so here's me in a massive cathedral. Metaphors? No no. It's just a holiday photo...

There are two ways that games can get released on the Quest. There's the store, which is heavily curated: here, Meta acts as a publisher, releasing only games they think will sell, but they also put games through months of QA and handle all the marketing for you (i.e. putting it in front of people when they boot up the Quest). To get on the store, you basically need to have an in at Meta - there's a whole process, I'll talk about that in a moment. There's also 'App Lab', which is much less heavily vetted - but also it's a lot harder to get an audience on App Lab. If a game is particularly successful on App Lab, Meta may end up promoting it to the store. But a lot of games just languish there.

Of course, just because you have a liaison at Meta does not mean you have a free pass onto the store. There's a whole series of stages you have to go through: first you write up a detailed pitch, then if approved (based on what else may be in the works, Meta won't approve two overly similar games), you have a few months to make a 'Minimum Viable Product' prototype of your game and show it to Meta. I joined the company about a month before the MVP was due on our game.

Assuming your contact at Meta likes the MVP, you get a few more months to make a 'Vertical Slice', which is essentially a small portion of your game that's more or less complete. (For example, a single level.) Then, you show this to Meta again. If you make a good impression, they'll give you the go-ahead to finish the game and release it on the store.

Here's another random picture of Köln from the famous Hohenzollern Bridge. Are you saying this wall covered in padlocks is symbolic of something? Overactive imagination, I tell you.

So if yo uwere wondering, the last few weeks of intense work were all about making that vertical slice be as good as possible (and it got pretty clutch at the end). Since we were all going to be at Gamescom, we agreed with our guy at Meta that we'd demo the game in person.

The upshot of all this is that selling a VR game is heavily heavily shaped by Meta, and specifically the individual at Meta who makes the call. Holonautic has a longstanding contact with a laid-back American guy I'll call W.; he has in the past championed some of our games like Hand Physics Lab that left other Meta staff unconvinced. (As it turns out, W. was right and Hand Physics Lab was successful.) But he's not shy about saying that a game doesn't make the cut and should go to AppLab instead. Our game would live or die based on W.'s opinion.

But not just W.; Meta itself as an organisation is also looking for certain things, shaped by its internal politics. They have new features they want to tout - so if you can come up with a game that uses mixed reality, hand tracking and shared anchors that's probably going to count in your favour. And they have certain directions they are keen to push: sporty exercise games are in favour at the moment.

What does this mean for the evolution of the medium? Well, of course people will make the games they want to make, and just because Meta likes an idea doesn't mean it will sell. But Meta does have a lot of power to dictate the general direction of VR games - and if the Apple Vision Pro takes off in a few years, Apple will no doubt end up with a similar role.

It's been interesting to see the forces that shape a game up close: our ideological desire to make things that are new and different and meet our personal tastes, balanced against the need to have successful games to keep the company afloat (good old M-C-M'), and the need to satisfy Meta; all of this leaves its fingerprints on the game.

To not keep you in suspense, I think the demo to W. went pretty well; I can't really say more than that. It was also a good chance to tell the Meta guys about the parts of their APIs that are jank and hard to use - and to their credit they were apparently rather desperate to get feedback and I feel hopeful that they'll make it better.

It's hard to talk about Meta, because it's just such a massive organisation. We can talk about massive erosion of privacy, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and so on - but we're dealing with a small sub-corner of this huge beast, which is less a social media company and more of a games publisher and console manufacturer. But I definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to let a Facebook device loaded with cameras into their house! I could go more into privacy and the Quest 2 but it would be way too long a tangent. Ultimately this is probably a 'no ethical consumption'/'we live in a society' type of deal - one day Meta's domination will erode and we'll have to deal with a different superpower.

Whatever happens, we can continue to explore what's possible in this medium! I think of all the ethical bargains that must be made with the tech industry, I have done OK.

What Cologne is like

On Tuesday, I arrived in Cologne Central Station (Köln Hauptbahnhof) and walked over to my hotel, where I met my colleagues. Most of them looked fairly similar to how they'd set up their VR avatars... but none of them had realised I'm super tall. surprise, bitches ;p

We went out to an Indian restaurant where we all ended up ordering biryani. This being Germany, the portions were massive, so I asked for mine to be in a box to finish later, forgetting that my hotel room had no fridge or microwave and I'd have zero time to eat it (rip). Overall I think I hit it off pretty well, and we chatted for a while about games we liked, the mess that happened at Za/um, movies and the like - it was good to get a chance to interact more casually in person instead of only ever talking about work stuff. Everyone was exhausted from travel so we turned in pretty early, though probably not as early as the restaurant would have liked...

The thing that surprised me most about Cologne is how much it didn't feel strange or unfamiliar. If not for all the signs in German and cars driving on the right, you could drop me in an area of Cologne and tell me it's an unfamiliar part of London and I'd easily believe you. The parts of the city that are filled with business parks and glass-fronted chain stores could exist almost anywhere on Earth.

That said, there are some ways the Germans do things differently! One is restaurants. I visited three different restaurants and two of them worked on a 'self-service' model. Essentially, you order your food at the bar, and they give you a little buzzer device. When it buzzes, you go back up to the bar and collect your food. Nobody would wait tables, there would just be one person behind the bar taking orders and such (though someone would still have to clean your table).

Restaurants also close very early in Cologne. I think a couple of times we put staff in an awkward position of wanting to go home but having to sit around until our party was done. That said, at one point I walked through a riverside area with a few dozen steakhouses, and that seemed to stay open a lot later.

Köln has a decent amount of graffiti, a surprisingly large portion of it in English. Under most bridges there's usually a good number of tags. I didn't manage to get any good photos but shout out to the person who wrote something like 'this world is too damn loud', which is a big mood for autistic girl walking away from a convention centre lmao.

Wednesday: in which our heroine finds out what an influencer is

The next morning we all went down to a German bakery (pictured above). According to my colleagues, the thing to get is a Bienenstich, or 'Bee Sting', a kind of cake with crispy honeyed almond flakes on top and cream in the middle. Here's a really bad photo:

It was pretty tasty!

We scooted over to the convention centre on the metro, and made our way in. I started getting used to navigating the Messe. Our company didn't get our own booth this year, but XR game devs are pretty tight-knit, and Niantic, creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go, there to promote their new phone-based AR Monster Hunter game - lent us some space in their booth to do a demo to the popular VR influencers Cas and Chary.

We headed over to Hall 8 and none of us could find the Niantic booth. Eventually we figured out why: the Niantic booth was outdoors. On a very bright summer day.

The Quest 2 has a bit of a finicky relationship to light. If it's too dark, the cameras can't pick up anything and tracking can fail - hand tracking is especially susceptible. But bright sunlight is also a problem. Essentially, the controllers on the Quest 2 contain small infrared LEDs, which are tracked by the headset's cameras. This works very well, in general - but in the sun, the background infrared radiation can completely overwhelm these LEDs and the controllers become essentially unusable. You also have to be very careful never to let the sun shine through the lenses inside the headset when you take it off, or the focused sunlight can destroy the screen.

So, an outdoor demo was a problem. Luckily, Niantic had an air-conditioned tent in their little zone. We all filed into the tent and started testing the headsets. Even inside a tent, it was too bright for the Quest 2 hand tracking... but we managed to figure out the Quest Pro still worked (since it uses cameras in the controllers for tracking), and rushed to test everything would work. Before long, Cas and Chary arrived, and we demoed the game. Look mum, I'm in a tweet:

Before this convention I had very little knowledge of the whole world of VR influencers, and honestly I still don't, but it seems to be a big thing - a good word from an influencer is a massive boost to a game's chances. I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is between an influencer and a journalist; both are in the business of reviewing new tech and games and rely on a reputation of unbiased analysis for credibility, and both are courted by devs hoping to promote their games. I guess an influencer is like a fully independent journalist? In any case, Cas and Chary were really sweet in our extremely brief meeting, and it was amazing to see the first people from outside the company having fun with our game.

We got word that bHaptics, a Korean company which makes haptic suits and gloves for use with VR devices, had some space in their booth and were willing to let us do some demos there. So we set off back down the entire length of the convention centre to go into the secret Business Area.

Wednesday at Gamescom is restricted to trade visitors, meaning it's much less crowded than the later days. On those later days, that restriction only applies to the three halls designated as the Business Area. Like regular Gamescom, these halls are divided into flashy booths trying to sell you stuff, but in this case it's mostly companies trying to sell services and tools to developers: backend services, special 3D pens, anti-cheat... also a bunch of stands selling merch and figurines for some reason (maybe because they want to manufacture tie-in merch for your game), as well a bunch of national organisations promoting the game development scene in xyz country.

The Belgian stand functioned as a meeting spot, and they were also handing out vouchers for free beer. A strategy that seemed to be quite effective, judging by how crowded their booth became that evening.

We tested our headsets in the bHaptics zone, and discovered DOTS Netcode's prediction/rollback is good enough to make the game feel smooth even on public convention centre wifi, which was rather satisfying - so you know, good job Unity! Unfortunately the Shared Anchors continued to be a pain. We briefly ran into the head of DOTS at Unity and arranged a demo, scooted off to meet W. from Meta who bought us drinks, scooted over to Niantic again to meet some members of XR Bootcamp (a training course in XR game dev, whose cofounders Ferhan and Rahel seem to be the glue that holds the whole XR dev scene together), and at last wandered back to the Belgian zone...

...and then I went back to bHaptics to have a go at their gear. I didn't take a photo (rip) so here's a photo by CNet showing the full bHaptics getup, which in combination looks... kind of like you're the member of the SWAT team on washing up detail...

(source: Scott Stein/CNet)

I had never gotten to try any sort of haptic suit before this, so it was quite novel. Essentially the vest contains 40 (or 16) vibration motors; the gloves contain further motors on the tips of each finger, and there's another motorised ring between you and the headset. There are also motorised wrist bands, motorised ankle bands...

The first demo was designed to showcase the features of the suit and wristbands, so you could try out various actions like shooting guns or putting stuff in a backpack with and without haptics. A second demo focused on manipulating objects: no wristbands, just the glove and hand tracking.

Of the various devices, the most convincing was probably shooting with the haptic suit. Vibration motors are well-suited for brief, intense pulses, and firing guns definitely felt more impactful with the suit on - not a perfect simulation of impact, but a strong effect. The backpack demo was especially impressive: it really felt like dropping heavy objects into a backpack. You also got to shoot at your own mirror image and feel the bullet/laser impacts, which felt like a rather roundabout way to give myself a back massage, but I could see it being effective in the right game.

The hand demo convinced me less. The problem is that vibration is a poor simulacrum of pressing against a solid surface, so it just felt distracting to have a vibration pulse when i grabbed an object - and you still had the usual physics jank associated with manipulating objects in VR using hand tracking. The final section of the hand tracking demo was social interaction: you were faced with rotated clone avatar, and you could shake your hand, punch or slap yourself, or give yourself a hug. As someone who lives half a world away from most people I love, I think giving someone a hug in VR would be a fantastic use of the technology, but sadly this hug was... not entirely convincing. It is very hard to simulate a steady touch with vibration motors.

Ultimately I think the best use for this haptic gear may not be simulation fidelity, but more abstract: similar to the haptic suit used in certain public demos of Rez Infinite, pulsing in time to music. Such uses are mentioned on the bHaptics site, and I'd love to have been able to try that kind of demo. (And yeah, I'm sure you could hook it up to the other kind of remote-controlled vibrating devices if you so desired, though you'd probably have to do a bit of work to wire everything up.)

It was really cool to finally get to experience haptics, and I was very grateful to the bHaptics members for taking the time to show me their gear.

After I'd satisfied myself, I caught up with the gang; we went out to dinner with other XR devs at a Turkish restaurant called Bona'me near the river. (The food was tasty and had a decent amount of vege options, once again in huge portions but this time we split them between the table. ...and once again we were the last table to leave by a long way, and I feel bad for the staff who had to sit around waiting for us.)

There, I met a solo dev called Ben Outram, who's spent the last three years working on a game called Squingle, a fascinating psychedelic game about manipulating bubbles in a world of DMT-core abstract visuals. (Honestly, check this game out, it's nuts. Meta are sleeping on it, it should absolutely have a full store release.)

Thursday: chaos reigns

On Thursday it somehow ended up that in the space of an hour, we would be demoing our game to the head of DOTS development at Unity (whose name I somehow never managed to catch), demoing our other game Cybrix to Cas and Chary, and then doing the big important demo for meta. Then it turned out that our metro line was blocked by an accident up ahead. We hurried out to get an Uber, and our driver gave us a rather... exciting ride; he rolled down the window to argue with another driver and dropped us off in the middle of the road while we waited in traffic. Rather harried, we arrived back at the bHaptics corner and set up for the demos in an unused area of floor nearby.

I'm not sure if I can say too much about how our demos went, but unfortunately we ran into some versioning issues and were not able to show Cybrix to Cas and Chary before they had to rush off (we weren't the only one to face transport issues that morning). Lesson learned: test everything, not just the part you're worried about. It's not the end of the world, though, and we all headed over to W.'s hotel, into a swanky suite with a nicely laid table for the most important demo of the week. We had the room for maybe 20 minutes, then we were out the door again to the lobby of another hotel to talk it over.

After that... suddenly the afternoon was free, ish. We went back into Gamescom and ate some very expensive ramen. Then, word came that some more influencers wanted to try out our games, so it was back to bHaptics and well, the story gets a little repetitive at this point :p I can't say much more than that without talking about our game, so I will just have to say that the demos went well.

This was my view for most of Gamescom.

At the end of the day, I had a couple of free hours to scoot over to the indie games area and try out some games before everyone went home. At this point my social batteries had run very dry indeed so I was glad to get some time to just play games.

The indie zone was divided into lots and lots of small booths, typically just wide enough for one computer. And even late in the evening, it was very, very busy...

This is just one small corner of the indie area.

Not really knowing almost any of these games, my 1337 MLG Pro Gamescom strat was to wander around until I spotted an empty chair and then play whatever game was going and chat with the dev if they were around. This worked out pretty well! I'll write up the games I played in a moment, but first I'm overdue to wax philosophical.

What was really striking about walking around the indie area is just how many games there are. Wandering around you can pretty quickly spot patterns and influences just by glimpsing at screens (here's a combat tutorial, there's a crafting/survival game, and yonder a narrative game that's borrowed the entire interface of Disco Elysium).

I've seen, up close and personal now, just how much fiddly effort and dedication it takes to make a game. There's something kind of strange and alienating to me about encountering all this creative output in a massive aggregate, where you can only give it maybe half an hour in a noisy room, surrounded by a dozen more or less similar games, in a way that kind of demands you rapidly assign it into a broad, combinatoric category: x art style, y core mechanic, z emotional register. Presenting this game this way really seems to file them all down to Content, which can be boxed and tagged and matched to a consumer with the appropriate set of subculture flags.

One thing that is distinctive about games as a medium to me is the very strong separation between 'mechanics' and 'presentation'. To produce a game you don't just need a system to manipulate, but also associate it with a narrative to make it comprehensible and lend it some sort of affective impact.

So you could theoretically make a game with the exact same mechanics as, say, Half-Life 2 - the same movement, the same enemy hitboxes, the same collision geometry and shooting mechanics and progression - but a completely different presentation style and telling a completely different story. Indeed, a typical early stage of game development has placeholder 'programmer art' and 'greybox' levels.

Equally, you could lift the iconography of a game and drape it over a completely different mechanical substrate - and indeed, it isn't at all uncommon for major franchises to launch spinoffs in different genres.

So games as a medium consist of all these different pieces which you can attach in various ways to define a game which you can name. And once this is done, that game becomes in a sense 'concrete': we act as if Half-Life 2 is an object with a distinct existence. It's a powerful social construct. Then, a successful game is then one which manages to unify all these disparate elements into some sort of whole that feels coherent. Game development sees all the possible elements of a game gradually collapse into whatever gets released. It's highly stochastic: an arbitrary decision by a tired dev, or even a glitch, might later become fixed as one of the core icons of the great 'Franchise'.

When there were less games around, and it was a lot harder for people to get their hands on dev tools, it made sense to think of games as solid, discrete things. Whatever you got on the cartridge or disc was pretty much immutable. Now, though, most major games operate as a 'service' that is constantly modified, and it is not uncommon either for players to mod a game, on a continuum from small changes like injecting shaders or changing music, to total conversion mods that are a 'whole new game'.

And indie games, then... you've got a subculture which heavily emphasise sharing techniques, and it's just as beholden to genre as AAA games. The existence of all these games side by side, even though each one has its own name and identity, seems to further break up "games" into combinations of pieces. When I encounter a new third-person action game, it's as a variation on a kind of broader, abstracted super-game. My first task is to discover the particular quirks of this manifestation of the third person action game. The days when we had a shared culture of 'games everyone has played' are basically already gone, but we still have a certain degree of shared context, because each game is a probe into that constantly evolving game-space, which someone has gone to the trouble to fish out and decorate...

I suppose this is all coming back around to the otaku database thing, isn't it? Or just semiotics in general...

Anyway, here's what I found on Thursday:

I played an FPS called Serum, in which the core conceit is that you inject big syringes into your arm to give yourself powerups. Otherwise, it seems to be a game about gathering and crafting. Sadly the demo computer didn't have headphones, so I was missing sound, and seemed to be a bit underpowered for the game. Nevertheless, I walked around a bit, manufactured a healing serum, and shot some wolf and rabbit monsters with a bow and arrow.

I feel like I was rather ruder than I intended to be, because in talking to the dev afterwards, the first thing I mentioned was the performance issues and he had to apologise like, yeah, we're running it on a laptop (it sounded like he said with a 3070? but I must have misheard him, unless he has very high standards for underpowered), it does run better on a proper computer. The environment design in this game was definitely really strong. Not quite sure how the serum mechanic would work in practice - it sounds quite like Bioshock's plasmids, but the demo didn't really give the opportunity to try out the different options.

I played Dead Pets Unleashed, an adventure game about a demon girl in a struggling punk band. One of the devs was hanging out with this one and generally had a great vibe, joking about how almost nobody picked a certain option and suggesting the route that would get the most out of the demo.

The game uses a sidescrolling perspective with hand-drawn sprites. The art style is very consciously flat, its population of monster people allowing an impressive variety of colours. It broadly alternates between conversations with choices that adjust stats (e.g. +punk, -social) and a variety of minigames - there was a music minigame of course (the conceit being chasing away intrusive thoughts), but I also washed a dildo, constructed a hot dog, and waited tables. Generally it oozed style, absolutely nailing the punk vibe, and had a bunch of cute features like changing your character's outfit. You can play the same demo on Steam. I think this is one I might well get when the full release comes.

And then I played... a game I can't even find now! I really should have made a note or taken a picture or something. It was a kind of Amanita-like point and click game in which you play a tin can person, manipulating objects as you try to rescue your can dog, descending into a city made of cardboard boxes. The puzzles were occasionally a bit obtuse, but the cute style really carried it. The devs weren't on hand for this one, but they did have a wall where you could leave postit notes with your comments on the game, including one with a fairly essential hint for the first puzzle. It was called something like 'can world' or 'box world', but at this point, I can't find it anywhere. It's a shame because I thought it was neat.

That was all I had time for on Thursday: I zoomed off to another restaurant by the river to eat some more falafels. Someone let off some fireworks for some reason.

We started to make our way back, across the famous Hohenzollern Bridge, which is one of those bridges with a tradition that lovers will attach a padlock to the fence to symbolise how long their relationship will last.

At this point the padlocks have started to resemble kudzu, hanging down in strands of linked padlocks, or even growing up onto the superstructure of the bridge on chains. Questionable symbolism or not, it all makes for a fantastic textural effect, especially since it maintains the sheer density of padlocks for the entire length of the bridge.

While we were crossing, a boat passed under the bridge carrying some kind of a party. From a distance, all you could really see was a mass of glowsticks, and all you could hear was the ghost of the beat. It was a cool sight.

At this point I was pretty much completely exhausted so while there was some kind of industry party I definitely could not handle the crowds and walked home past the cathedral for an early night, eager to head in early to Gamescom tomorrow with a good night's sleep...

Friday: just like in my Bloodbornes, amirite gamers?

Predictably I overslept. Since I'd only get a few hours at Gamescom, I decided to visit the famous cathedral. I took that photo that I posted earlier, where somehow my little phone camera absolutely nailed the lighting, even if the cathedral is severely out of focus...

I headed inside the building too.

Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is a bit of an oddball, historically. While it wasn't uncommon for cathedral-building projects to last a century, after working on this thing from 1248–1560 they downed tools, leaving the city with a half-finished cathedral for about 300 years.

They had the front and back of a cathedral, with a big crane on the front part.

In the 1800s, the middle ages were in and the state decided it would be a good idea to have a big cathedral - both to make their new Catholic subjects happy and a symbol of THE NATION. After raising a stonking amount of money with one of the world's first NGOs, they built the rest of this thing, which briefly became the tallest building in the world. Hooray, said Emperor Wilhelm I. I love being a big strong nation with a big cathedral dick.

The cathedral survived the first world war, but got hit by a lot of bombs in the second - though the towers remained standing. After the war, they put it back up again. Now, it's a tourist attraction. Transsexual atheists can walk in and turn their phone to funny angles to try and capture the ceiling...

You can call this a Deutsch angle, because... ok whatever guys they can't all be winners.

They've got some old school Christian-style guro in here.

The interior is pretty cool: huge vaulted ceiling, massive stained glass. The stained glass unfortunately photographs really poorly on a phone, the colours washed out pretty much no matter what. They did have this funky ladder contraption, which I assume is probably used for maintaining/washing the windows...

After a little while in there I decided this was pretty neat but I'd go to Gamescom, to say goodbye to everyone and maybe get a glance at some of the mainstream game zones. As it turned out we had another demo lined up, so we went back to The Corner Near BHaptics and did the routine. This time the audience was mostly other VR devs so I got to have some nice technical discussion.

At last, I had about an hour before my train. I thought about exploring the indie game zone some more, but decided I should really at least take a glance through the other halls. What I discovered was... queues! Many many queues. And various elaborate dioramas.

Sometimes they had actors to go with them. I decided to include the people taking the photo because... I don't even know what I was going for with this one to be honest, it seems kind of banal.

Here's a queue of people waiting to play Rogue Trader, which boldly tells you it's the first(!) CRPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hopefully not also the last. 'Warhammer CRPG' is a concept that 16-year-old Bryn would have gone completely insane about. 31-year-old Bryn was still a bit curious, but not enough to wait for a sitting down queue with less than an hour left at the con.

I didn't take a lot of photos of the Extremely Gamer Shit, but for a taster, this lady was DJing a set on something called the 'Leet Desk', which appears to be a desk with built in RGB lighting, billed as 'the desk for gamers', because we can no longer contain the rainbow puke. When I walked past, she was playing an EDM remix of a tune that I vaguely recognised from a movie or a game but couldn't place specifically, which felt about right. Maybe it was Skyrim?

A lot of people walked around with the Hoyoverse bag, Hoyoverse being the collective term for the games of Chinese developer miHoYo such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact. Their slogan was 'tech otakus save the world', which thanks to their cunning move of handing out large bags, was soon paraded all over the convention. I feel like the jury is still out on the impact (ha ha) of tech otakus on the world...

In the end, the last hour was spent briefly walking around to see the halls and then I left to say my goodbyes and hop back on the train. The journey back was totally straightforward. I finished reading my manga and drew some more train passengers, who were generally pretty happy to be drawn.

Cosplay

It's a con, there's gotta be cosplayers right? Sure enough, the crowd was peppered with stormtroopers, kitsune, army men, luffies and various spooky skull guys... I didn't get many photos but here's a couple.

Obligatory stormtroopers. Luckily, the inside of the con was airconditioned, those suits look toasty.

These three kindly stopped to pose for me. I don't know what game they're doing, Dead by Daylight maybe? DbD girls, tell me ^^'

This robot-girl cosplayer's costume is neat: when you look close you see it's made of old PC parts. Or at least the casings of them. I spotted a graphics card and an old VR headset. She also has built-in stilts so she towered over everyone, big respect. She was hanging out in the hall on Wednesday, so she might have been there in an official capacity, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Observations of demographics and stuff

It's been a good long while since I've been to any sort of nerd convention. Mostly I've been to scifi/media fandom cons like Nine Worlds and Worldcon, or general nerd-shit cons like MCM Expo, and in the old old days, Warhammer cons like Game Day. But this event being specifically a gaming expo was pretty new to me.

Predictably the demographics skewed male (but not overwhelmingly) and white/East Asian (almost without exception). The various national organisations present were primarily European (which tracks for an event in Germany) but there were large stands e.g. promoting Korean game dev or the Guangzhao region of China. In the indie zone, there were a good handful of Japanese devs, and I spotted one game that was fully in JP. Here and there, you'd spot banners promoted other gaming expos - a lot in Europe, but also there is apparently a Gamescom Asia in Singapore, and a Tokyo Indie Games Summit which sounds pretty fun. By contrast, while I don't have any real stats to substantiate, I would say I saw very few organisations were promoting game devs from South America, Africa or Oceania.

Beyond that... this is very definitely a place for nerds, but there's a lot of different varieties of nerd you can be now. So sure, T-shirts with slogans and cargo shorts for many, but equally you could dress super goth, you could show off all your tattoos, you could go in your colourful coordinated kitsune cosplay or just wear some bright hair die. I'm confident I saw a few other girls from the isle of 🏳️‍⚧️, but 'hello I clocked you let's be friends' is not the best introduction even from another trans girl lmao - in general I didn't really talk to people besides the group I had arrived with. I think if I'd gone alone, it would not be the sort of con where you make a lot of friends, but who knows?

All in all, a solid adventure. I'll probably go again next year, if I can find somewhere cheaper to stay. I never did get to see the chocolate museum.

ok, story over - thanks for reading, nerd ;p

[wowgodmusthateme]

Lo’ak accepting neteyams death

So this is my first requests and my first I guess you can say angst story, It was supposed to be short and simple but I got carried away.

TW: Lo’ak blaming himself , lo’ak and jake crying together (Jake being a good dad🥺)

I hope you guys enjoy and my requests are open

Hey, it’s not your fault

It’s been 2 months, a week and five days since the death of netayam, that day was engraved in everyone’s minds, the blood, The tears, the loud cries from netiri . It was eating him alive it’s all he could think about, he couldn’t escape, even in his sleep that nightmarish day plagued his mind. Everyone around him could tell how it was effecting him, his eyes had lost all its wonder, he stopped talking, stayed out of trouble and did what he was told. It didn’t take a genius to see that he blamed himself.

1st person pov.

Life was now meaningless, there’s no point of doing anything without him around to nag me. It should have been me, was the only thought that lingered in my mind as I stared out into the open sea, I found myself doing that a lot lately. I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I didn’t hear my father sit down beside me, “son” he said, he tried to sound tuff, he tried to sound strong, but I know more than anyone that he’s not “it’s not your fault” . That’s what they all say, but it is, if I would have listened he would still be here, it makes me angry. I want to shout. I want to scream, so hard and so loud that eywa finally takes pity on me and steals my breath right out of my lungs. I want to be with him again.

The sound of my father, clearing his throat is what brought me back, only then did I feel the hot tears streaming down my face. When I lifted my had to wipe my face my father’s hand caught my wrist “don’t” he said, his voice shaking. When I looked up I saw something I’d never thought I’d see , my farther, the great toruk makto with tears in his eyes, and for some reason that’s all it took to push me over the edge. I couldn’t fight the tears any longer, they came out in broken sobs immediately I was pulled into my fathers chest. I felt his chest shake. He was crying. We cried together for a long while, I let so many tears fall that I was convinced there was no more water in my body.

“He misses you” I looked up at my father, his eyes were bloodshot red, “lo’ak son you must go see your brother” a lump appeared in my throat I was sure that if I opened my mouth that my sobs would start again. “Yes sir”

We mounted my father’s skimwing, the journey to the spirit tree was painfully slow, and quite the only sound that could be herd were the waves. They used to be beautiful they used to be calming, but now they only live as a dreadful reminder. When we arrived at the cove of our ancestors, i was the only one to dismount the creature, this was my journey and my journey alone. The tree of our ancestors was supposed to be a happy place, a place of great joy but all I could feel was sadness.

When I connected my queue I was immediately transported home, not the beach but home. It made me feel warm, it made me smile. I herd the sound of a stream and felt a strong pull towards the sound of the water I let my feet take me to the sound. Then I found it. I found him. He must’ve felt my presence, when he turned around I ran to him I’m an instance. I hugged him so tight, I feared that I’d break his ribs. He embraced me back. We stayed like that for what felt like a century. When we finally pulled back he was smiling.

“Im sorry, i should have listen, it should have been me” his smiled dropped in an instant. “ no” he said resting his hand on my shoulder “ no this path was chosen for me a long time ago and so was yours, this is not your fault, I am at peace, i am finally home” he said with a smile “it is time to let go my brother, it is time for you to find peace” “netayam” I said with a shaky voice “lo’ak brother I see you” he said before fading away.

[bikepackinguk]

Day Fifty-six

Eight weeks in!

After a very rainy night and morning, my tossing and turning in the tent allowed aome water to ingress, so it was a damp start to the day. After waiting out the morning's rains, a few bits were strapped onto the bike to allow them to dry over the day, then we're off once more.

Out from the trees and back onto the road, it's a bumpy ride mostly downhill to see the sun shining over Holy Loch by Sandbank, followed by a nice easy cruise along the waterside to the ferry terminal at Dunoon.

Perfectly timed to buy a ticket and roll straight onto the ferry, it's the last one I'll be taking in a while, and I'm granted a lovely sunny sky to enjoy the short journey over to Gourock.

Onto the coast west of Glasgow, I get something I haven't had in weeks - long, long stretch of gloriously flat coastal riding. Now the day truly begins!

Here is also a salient lesson in not relying too heavily on GPS navigation when cycling. Google continually suggested I turn off the A78 and head up some steep hills to avoid the traffic, as it was unaware of the frequent off-traffic cycle paths alongside the road.

Onwards! The cycle paths continue until a little past Inverkip, where the road is rejoined for a while. Whilst the traffic is quite heavy, the flatter terrain means good speed is made, and the views over the water to my right make for a good backdrop.

Past Wemyss Bay there's a big traffic jam queueing for the ferry over to Bute, which I can sail past on the pavement and following this the road traffic lightens significantly.

It's some nice miles along the water's edge from here and I set an easy pace for myself. After weeks of punishing hills, this is a great payoff for me.

Rolling into Largs around lunchtime, I enjoy a good rest and coffee by the Pencil Monument, along another great stretch of trails off the roads and around the sea.

There's aome great trails here that even when close to to busy major road are nice and peaceful due to the treelines around, but eventually we head back up and are riding back alongside the traffic. The path surfacing is a bit sketchy in places, and I rejoin the road at times without any stress to enjoy the speed.

Further south, I swing west to roll around the coastline past Hunterston nuclear power plant, and take in a short stretch of offroad trail past the hills to see Portencross Castle and enjoy a nice sit by the water's edge.

Back up to the road we go, and it's more glorious flat-ish riding down past Saltcoats, with Arran just visible in the distance as the skies get greyer and greyer and the winds begin to pick up once more.

The cycle paths continue around the south side of Kilwinning, with some lovely rides through parks and forested areas around the banks of the River Garnock.

It's hitting evening here and a nicely sheltered patch of forest is an opportune spot to rustle up some dinner. I'm back in more populated areas now with more plentiful opportunities to resupply, so I have less need to keep bigger stocks of food on me. Eating up the weight being carried is no bad thing.

The rains have been starting to spray a little by now, and a check of the forecast shows heavy rains imminently on their way and continuing well into the small hours, so it's probably a good idea to shelter up. And the patch of woodland by the river I've just had dinner at is absolutely ideal.

So, tent is up, a good lie down with a full belly is being had to the background of the rains coming down.

An earlier finish today than many, but this has been an excellent day for both the legs and morale. It's not only been a long time since I had a good break from the climbs, but also many weeks since I had some good riding without having to deal with traffic, which is always far more enjoyable.

Roll on tomorrow for more!

[creelsclocks]

CREEL'S CLOCKS CHAPTER 5.

Summary: Halloween is a month-long affair, 001. We've been over this. Warnings: Mentions of child abuse, mentions of animal cruelty, mild gore.

Eddie rests his chin atop the fence's wooden post. "Look at all those pumpkins, man."

001 looks at them. Pumpkins are strange round orange things that he's never seen before, and this field is further out than either of them have thought to go together. Behind the trailers and through the woods, rolling pastures and farmlands lay, a winding dirt road leading straight through the middle and, presumably, out of Hawkins. Sometimes, the boy thinks to slip out of whatever house he's hiding in for the night and follow that dizzy bend into the great unknown. He has no home, not really. He'd be leaving little behind.

"I am seeing them," he replies belatedly, voice flat while Eddie's trembles with tangible excitement. "You really want to take one?"

"We gotta." That's all Eddie says as he hoists himself up and over the tall wooden gate, a wide grin on his face as his sneakers hit the dirt on the other side. “C’mon. Now you.”

001 stares at him through a gap in the fence before his eyes flit to the side. There’s a moment of silence, and then the gate’s latch unfastens, opening with a slowly rising creak.

Eddie deadpans. “Showoff.”

Shoes are things that 001 is still adjusting to. The slip-ons at Hawkins Lab were more like socks, and the moment he’d touched ground that wasn’t pristine linoleum, he’d realised that they were about as thin as a sheet of paper. Much like his caretakers in that place, they’d shielded him from nothing. Conversely, Gareth’s old trainers that he’d dug out of his closet for him are thick and roomy, and the rubbery soles that protect his feet also threaten to trip him up as they traverse through the field. The uneven terrain annoys him

“Remind me why we are doing this,” 001 mutters, trying not to sound too rueful. It's only grass.

"Halloween."

"It is October 10th."

"Halloween is a month-long affair, my friend. We've been over this."

Eddie had spared him no detail when it came to coercing him into coming along to steal a pumpkin to serve as this year's jack-o-lantern. Just two hours ago, 001 hadn't even known there was a holiday this month; now he knows about scary movies and trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns — all things that Eddie has promised him hands-on experience with. He'd even said he felt he'd be 'good' at trick-or-treating, for he could use his powers to play tricks on people that were stingy with candy.

They walk into the main field, garish orange blinding their vision. Fall is a wonderful season, ripe with colour and temperatures that please 001 greatly, but this is a different kind of bright. A visual overstimulation that is most unpleasant.

"Why must you steal it?"

"We don't have the money," Eddie replies, his eyes scanning the field eagerly, intent on picking out the best one. "Or rather, we can afford a pumpkin, but I don't want Uncle Wayne to shell out to buy one that we're not gonna eat." He levels the other with a dubious look, eyebrow raised in silent challenge. "You care about stealing?"

"Not particularly. I have stolen a lot of food and water just to survive. But I thought it would be easier just to buy one from the store."

"Sure, it's easier. But it's more fun this way."

001 can't argue with that. He'd had little choice in the matter– before he found Eddie, he'd raided several convenience stores and supermarket aisles just to keep from starving, though he'd only taken things he recognised– but he'll concede that it tops standing in a queue and handing over what little pocket change Eddie has. As if they're not poor enough without capitalism draining the boy's pathetic four-dollar savings.

Their journey takes longer than 001 anticipated, and now they're in the centre of this field that seems to stretch on forever. In the distance, to his left, he notices a little house. It's a single story cottage-looking deal, with what looks to be a wooden fence surrounding the property.

"Somebody lives here?" He doesn't often get nervous, but the idea of crossing paths with another adult has apprehension curdling in his gut. More people to see him. More chances to identify him.

"Farmer Callahagn," Eddie replies with a nod. "I mean, somebody's gotta grow this shit, right? You thought it'd be empty?"

001's mouth presses into a thin line, gaze lingering on the house before Eddie's hand resting on his forearm realigns his focus. By now, he's learned not to flinch in the wake of his touchy nature. It's harmless. His skin still crawls, though.

"It'll be fine, dude. We'll be in and out, like an uncle at Thanksgiving."

001 makes a face. Given Eddie's uncouth nature, he can't make heads or tails of whether that was a very inappropriate joke or not. This only serves to amuse the other, a wicked grin on his face as he waltzes further into the pumpkin patch.

Eddie takes his time examining them, as if he's a connoisseur in all things fruit, before he spots one that makes him gasp and point. It's considerably larger than most they've seen, fat and ridged in a manner that's so aesthetically pleasing that even 001 feels slightly mystified. He never knew things that came from the soil could grow this large.

"Holy shit!" he exclaims through a laugh, his fingers curling in the back of 001's shirt. "This is it, man. This is the winner."

The boy watches resolutely as Eddie squares his feet, rocking back and forth on his heels before locking his hands around the desired pumpkin. With a strained sound, he tries to pick it up — and then quickly gives up.

“Damn, this thing’s heavy.”

“What did you expect? It’s huge. And you haven’t even freed it from its vine yet.”

001 squats, hands feeling along the pumpkin’s outer shell before he secures the vine in his fist. It’s thicker than he anticipated it being, vaguely rubbery in texture, and he doubts he can tear it with his strength alone. It's a job for shears — or a psychically gifted child. With a look of concentration, he stares at the thick green rope, envisioning it splitting, and it gives way with a sharp qwick!

“Try now.”

He backs up as Eddie takes centre stage once more. With planted feet and squared shoulders, he just about manages to lift it from the floor. Just about.

“You might have to help me with this one, man.” The strain in his voice is tangible, as is his smile.

001 sighs. “You’re quite foolish. You know that, yes?”

“Yeah.” Eddie beams as if a pretty girl has just called him cute. “Now let’s get outta here, before Old Macdonald shows up.”

“I thought his name was Callahagn?”

“Figure of speech.”

With 001 beside him to lessen the load, the comically large pumpkin becomes less of a burden. As they trudge slowly through the thick mud, they talk about what they can carve into it. 001 seems to think a typical face will do just fine, though naturally Eddie wants to go all out. A goat, he yells, impervious to his friend’s cringe. A goat DEMON!

The suggestion speaks to him in a way he doesn’t entirely like. He wonders if it’s because a handful of the orderlies at Hawkins Lab described him as such an entity. ‘Demon’ and ‘psycho’ had been their favourite descriptors — and after the things he’s done, he doesn’t know if he can say that they’re all that unfair.

[ “Let go, you little psycho!” The taste of copper in his mouth, a chunk of worthless meat sitting heavily atop his tongue. He spits it out before he can think to swallow it. It lands by Papa’s perfectly polished shoe. ]

001 shakes his head, and the memory dissipates like smoke.

“What do you think, One?”

“Huh?”

“About a—”

“HEY!”

Both boys halt, the harsh, unfamiliar voice prompting them to slowly turn around. On the porch of the little house stands an old man with a scraggly beard and a dishevelled head of greying hair. He’s clad in unfastened overalls and a stained white shirt, only one boot pulled on. A rifle is clutched tight in his right hand. A jolt of adrenaline passes through 001 at the sight of the weapon, brow furrowing as he looks hurriedly at Eddie.

He’s grinning like a maniac, arm reeling as he thrusts his middle finger up at the farmer.

“Finders keepers!” he hollers, tongue stuck out with an audible BLEH.

Some of that confidence wears off when the man descends his steps in a flurry of motion, gun aimed in their vague direction. It doesn’t occur to 001 that he’d never actually fire it at a couple of kids; he’s already turned tail, begun running, the pumpkin in Eddie’s arms becoming all the lighter as he hones his powers in order to make a quick getaway.

Why wouldn’t he shoot them? The fact that he’s a child has never mattered to anyone before.

A deafening crack sounds to their distant left, and though the bullet flies wide, nowhere close, all 001 can think about is how he feels as if he’s about to be shot. He may not feel much of a desire to live, but he doesn’t want to bleed out in a nobody’s mud, alone and in pain. It takes him back to how he’d breached the main door of the lab upon his escape— and how he’d barely had time to take a gulp of fresh, outdoor air before beginning his mad dash to the grounds’ main gate, bullets and darts tipped with god only knows what sedatives sailing over his head. That’s the fastest he’s ever run in his life, but he feels as if there’s time for that to change. He’s young, and he lives in a world that wants to eat him alive.

Impossibly, he runs faster, Eddie’s excited whooping adding to the ache blooming between his eyes. Blood drips from his nose, eyes deadset on the quickly approaching fence. Don’t lose focus, he tells himself sternly. If you lose focus, all will be lost. You’ll trip. You’ll drop the pumpkin. You’ll get a bullet in your spine. Uncle Wayne will lose a child.

“Get back here!”

“Shit!” Eddie exclaims, hands naturally scrabbling for purchase when the pumpkin suddenly flies out of his grip, launched up and over the fence by an invisible force. It lands with a dull thud several feet away, both boys scrambling up and over the gate before charging into the woods, prize in tow.

Surrounded by trees and pine needles, 001 finally feels the exhaustion take over. All at once, he staggers to a stop, then drops to his hands and knees, and the pumpkin in Eddie’s arms becomes too heavy to carry, bringing him to a halt too. Gulps of air are taken in greedily, crimson dripping steadily onto the dirt. He’s tired. His limbs ache. His chest is tight. Using his powers is one thing, but running for his life on top of that? There’s only so far adrenaline stretches before it becomes terror.

“Shit, dude—” Eddie’s hand settles on his back as he watches 001 pant through the heavy flow. He reaches into his back pocket, a black bandana decorated with skulls withdrawn before he begins to mop him up. The blood soaks through. “I didn’t know this’d screw you up this bad.”

“I am just tired—” He pauses to spit blood into the grass, the glob thick and red, and is wholly unsure how to explain himself. “I’m okay.”

How many times had he assured Papa of the same thing, even when he was completely exhausted?

The way Eddie rubs his back gently is soothing, even if it makes his skin prickle. As his heartbeat slows and his world comes back into focus, he finds the strength to stand up on his knees. He glances at his worried friend, then the comically large pumpkin. Then, he chuckles. It feels distinctly as if he’s cheated death, and the high that comes with doing so was simply late, not missing. Eddie’s eyebrows shoot upwards with evident surprise, though it doesn’t take long for him to join in. He has a stitch in his right side. The laughter isn’t helping.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you can run like that, given your circumstances, but I am. I really am. You and your fuckin’— noodle limbs.” More laughter, breathless and silly. “You were like a rocket on steroids, man.”

“Rockets don’t have limbs,” 001 replies pointedly, head tipped back towards the sky, his breathing now level. The taste of metal lingers in the back of his throat. He’s not even going to ask what ‘steroids’ are. In this moment, he cares about nothing but the feeling of triumph.

“Whatever.” He reaches out to drag the pumpkin into his lap. He expected there to be some damage post-launch, but it doesn’t look any worse for wear. 001 must have used his wizardry to keep it from impacting the ground with too much force. “You were awesome. That guy must’ve been shitting his pants.”

001 glances at him, brow furrowed. He’s never really been praised for his abilities before. Despite them being coveted, he was reminded time and time again that they didn’t make him special, or above the rules. As if he misheard: “I was awesome…?”

Eddie grins wide, leaning back on his hands. “Truly metal, man.”

He pauses a moment, as if unsure what to make of the praise, before he mimics the gesture Eddie had performed in the field.

"What is this?" he asks, eyes drawing focus to his middle finger.

"You're telling me to fuck off, man."

Immediately, 001 stops doing it, fingers curled into a fist that he then holds protectively to his chest. Oops.

In the end, they're able to lug the pumpkin back to the Munson trailer. It currently sits on the table, just waiting to be gutted and carved into. However, before Eddie sinks his blade in, he wants a good idea of the design. That sees them at his desk in the bedroom, flipping through one of Eddie's sketchbooks together.

"You're good at art," 001 says, his stoic tone not lending itself well to the compliment.

"Thanks. I draw a lot for DnD." And during lessons. He'd often rather die than actually do any sort of maths. "I'm telling you, man, you should join in some time. I think you'd be good at it."

They've spoken briefly about DnD, given that it's such a big part of Eddie's life, but 001 doesn't know the first thing about it, and he's slightly intimidated by the sheer amount of rules. He tends to be good at guideline-heavy games— chess being a key example of this— but he's not sure if he can manage both the terms of service and high fantasy improv. He should probably learn the contents of the real world before attempting to commit a fictional one to memory.

"Maybe," he replies, his voice toneless, noncommittal. His finger points at one of the drawings that catches his eye. It's a cluster of bats flying in a downward arch. They're emerging from fork lightning. "I like that."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"I love bats," Eddie says with a grin. "They're so cool."

001 thinks about this for a moment. His relationship with animals in general is poor, given some of the things he'd been forced to do while being trained.

[ There is nothing to be nervous about, 001. Animals don't feel pain. Not like humans do. How can that be, Papa? They are not sentient in the same way that we are. They don't have the same capacity to hurt. ]

It had made so much sense to him when he was seven.

Hissing cats and skittering rats flash in his mind's eye, and it takes him screwing his eyes shut to have the images disperse. He doesn't want to think of all the poor creatures that he harmed under the guise of it being harmless. Psycho.

"I like spiders," he replies belatedly, voice slightly tighter than before. "I draw them a lot, too."

"You can draw?" Eddie is clearly intrigued by that. Every day, he learns something new about this strange boy. The more pieces of the puzzle that he's given, the more that he genuinely likes him. He can be odd at times, certainly, but hell— they're all freaks here. "Show me."

"Okay." Without much hesitation, 001 plucks a pencil from the desk and begins to draw a Black Widow spider in a free space on the page. He takes his time, each stroke methodical, until he’s left a fairly detailed depiction in the corner.

Eddie gawks at it for a moment before looking up at him with a grin. “Whoa! You’re good, too.”

He adds a single string, giving it the illusion that it’s hanging from the top of the page, and 001’s mouth twitches in the form of a slight smile.

Then, he's struck by an idea.

“Oh… what about…” Quickly, he draws a crude sketch of the spider he’d drawn before, then Eddie’s bats below them. The fork lightning crawls upwards until it connects with the spider web he’s drawn, successfully combining the two images together. “What about this, for the jack-o-lantern?”

Eddie stares at the image in silence for several seconds before slamming his hands on the desk. 

“That’s the winner,” he declares with a bright grin. In truth, he probably shouldn’t be this excited to do it. It’s full of jagged edges and sharp corners, hell to navigate with a blunt kitchen knife, and yet all he can focus on is the fact that they did it together. “It’s gonna look awesome.”

“Metal,” 001 ‘corrects’, his plain tone oddly endearing — so much so that Eddie is left beaming.

“Yeah. Metal.”

[cdgairporttodisneylandparis]

How to Easily Reach Disneyland Paris from Charles de Gaulle?

For travelers embarking on a magical journey to Disneyland Paris, the excitement often begins the moment they touch down at Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG). However, the thought of navigating transportation from the airport to the enchanting world of Disney may seem daunting to some. Fear not, as Easy Go Shuttle Services offers a seamless and stress-free solution for your CDG Airport to Disneyland Paris transfer needs.

Convenient Transfers from CDG to Disneyland Paris

Navigating through a foreign airport can be overwhelming, especially for those with little to no knowledge of the local transportation system. Easy Go Shuttle Services eliminates this hassle by providing convenient and reliable transfers from charles de gaulle to disneyland Paris. With their fleet of comfortable vehicles and experienced drivers, travelers can relax and enjoy the journey without worrying about the logistics of transportation.

Efficiency and Reliability

One of the primary concerns for travelers is ensuring that they reach their destination on time. Easy Go Shuttle Services understands the importance of punctuality and prioritizes efficiency and reliability in every transfer. Whether you're traveling solo, with family, or in a group, you can count on their timely services to get you from CDG Airport to Disneyland Paris without any delays. 

Comfortable and Stress-Free Travel

Long flights can leave passengers feeling tired , making the journey from the airport to their final destination seem like a daunting task. Easy Go Shuttle Services aims to alleviate this stress by providing a comfortable and relaxing travel experience. Their spacious vehicles are equipped with modern amenities, ensuring that passengers can unwind and recharge before immersing themselves in the magic of Disneyland Paris.

Expertise and Local Knowledge 

Navigating the bustling streets of Paris can be challenging for first-time visitors, but Easy Go Shuttle Services' drivers are well-versed in the local area and know the best routes to ensure a smooth journey. Whether you're traveling during peak traffic hours or off-peak times, their expertise and local knowledge guarantee a hassle-free transfer from CDG Airport to Disneyland Paris.

Cost-Effective Transportation Option

Traveling can be expensive, but Easy Go Shuttle Services offers cost-effective transportation options for budget-conscious travelers. By booking a shuttle service from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Disneyland Paris, you can enjoy the convenience and comfort of private transportation without breaking the bank. With transparent pricing and no hidden fees, you can rest assured that you're getting the best value for your money.

Booking Process Made Easy

Gone are the days of waiting in long queues or struggling to communicate with taxi drivers in a foreign language. Easy Go Shuttle Services' user-friendly booking platform allows travelers to reserve their transfer from CDG Airport to Disneyland Paris with just a few clicks. Whether you prefer to book in advance or upon arrival, their streamlined booking process ensures a hassle-free experience from start to finish.

Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed 

At Easy Go Shuttle Services, customer satisfaction is their top priority. From the moment you book your transfer to the time you arrive at Disneyland Paris, their dedicated team is committed to providing you with the highest level of service. With a focus on professionalism, reliability, and attention to detail, they strive to exceed your expectations and make your journey truly memorable.

In conclusion, traveling from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Disneyland Paris has never been easier thanks to Easy Go Shuttle Services. With their convenient transfers, expert drivers, and commitment to customer satisfaction, you can enjoy a stress-free journey and focus on creating magical memories at the happiest place on earth. So sit back, relax, and let Easy Go Shuttle Services take you on a magical adventure to Disneyland Paris!

[silverexecutivecabx]

Airport to Anywhere: Personalized Locations with Chauffeur-Driven Transfers

Reaching a new location can be exhilarating as well as intimidating. The trip from the airport to your final location may frequently be a difficult undertaking, requiring you to figure out anything from new streets to dependable transportation. But when you use a chauffeur-driven service, going from the airport to anyplace is easy and stress-free. Let's examine how vacationers preparing for their next adventure can benefit from the ease and individualized attention provided by chauffeur-driven transfers.

Experience Tailored Destinations with Chauffeur-Driven Transfers

Personalized Service: Unlike traditional transportation options, chauffeur-driven transfers offer a personalized experience tailored to your needs and preferences. Whether you're heading to a business meeting, a hotel, or a tourist attraction, your chauffeur driver will ensure that your journey is comfortable, efficient, and tailored to your schedule.

Expert Drivers: With experienced and professional chauffeurs at the helm, you can rest assured that you'll arrive at your destination safely and on time. Chauffeurs are trained to navigate through traffic and road conditions, allowing you to relax and enjoy the ride without worrying about directions or logistics.

Luxury Vehicles: Travel in style with chauffeur-driven transfers, which feature a fleet of luxurious vehicles equipped with amenities to enhance your comfort and convenience. From spacious sedans to elegant SUVs, there's a vehicle to suit every traveler's needs and preferences.

Flexible Options: Whether you're traveling solo, with a group, or for business purposes, chauffeur-driven transfers offer flexible options to accommodate your party size and luggage requirements. From private airport transfers to hourly chauffeur services, you can choose the option that best suits your travel plans.

The Benefits of Chauffeur-Driven Transfers

Efficiency: Save time and eliminate the stress of navigating public transportation or waiting in long taxi queues. With chauffeur-driven transfers, you'll enjoy door-to-door service, maximizing your time and making the most of your travel experience.

Comfort: Sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey in the comfort of a luxury vehicle. Chauffeur-driven transfers prioritize your comfort and well-being, providing a comfortable and spacious environment for you to unwind after a long flight.

Convenience: Forget about arranging transportation or dealing with the hassle of rental cars. Chauffeur-driven transfers offer a convenient and hassle-free solution, allowing you to focus on enjoying your travel experience without worrying about logistics.

Peace of Mind: Travel with confidence knowing that you're in the hands of experienced professionals dedicated to providing exceptional service. With chauffeur-driven transfers, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your transportation needs are taken care of every step of the way.

Booking Your Chauffeur-Driven Transfer

Booking a chauffeur-driven transfer is simple and convenient. Contact a reputable chauffeur service provider or book online to reserve your transfer in advance. Be sure to provide details about your flight itinerary and destination to ensure a seamless and hassle-free experience upon arrival.

Conclusion: Your Experience with Chauffeur-Driven Transfers

From airport transfer to anywhere, chauffeur-driven transfers offer a convenient, comfortable, and luxurious transportation solution for travelers. Whether you're arriving at a new destination or heading home after a trip, chauffeur-driven transfers ensure that your journey is smooth, stress-free, and tailored to your needs. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as you embark on your next adventure with chauffeur-driven transfers.

Originally Published by SIlverexEcutiveCab.

[railrecipee]

RailRecipe: Your Culinary Conductor for Train Dining

Get ready to embark on a gastronomic journey like no other with RailRecipe, your ultimate companion for food in train. Bid farewell to bland train meals and say hello to a world of delectable flavors, convenience, and satisfaction.

Picture this: You're aboard a train, watching the scenic views pass by, when the delightful aroma of freshly cooked meals fills the air. With RailRecipe, train dining becomes an adventure, offering a diverse menu to cater to every palate, from hearty breakfasts to savory dinners and everything in between.

No more settling for uninspired station food or lugging around cumbersome food parcels. RailRecipe simplifies the process with its user-friendly online ordering platform. With just a few taps on your smartphone or clicks on your laptop, you can explore an array of mouthwatering dishes, select your favorites, and await the arrival of your culinary delight – all without leaving your seat.

What sets RailRecipe apart is its unwavering commitment to quality and freshness. Each dish is meticulously prepared using the finest ingredients, crafted by skilled chefs who understand the art of flavor and presentation. Whether you crave traditional Indian specialties like biryani and butter chicken or prefer international cuisines like pasta and sandwiches, every bite is a testament to our dedication to culinary excellence.

But RailRecipe isn't just about the food; it's about the entire dining experience. We pride ourselves on our punctuality and efficiency, ensuring that your order is delivered promptly to your seat. No more waiting in long queues or worrying about missed meal times. With RailRecipe, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy a hassle-free dining experience throughout your journey.

Have dietary restrictions or special preferences? Fear not. RailRecipe offers a wide range of options to accommodate every need, including vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and Jain-friendly meals. Simply specify your requirements while placing your order, and our team will ensure that your meal is prepared to perfection, without compromising on taste or quality.

Moreover, RailRecipe commitment to customer satisfaction shines through in every interaction. Our friendly and responsive support team is always available to assist you with any queries, feedback, or special requests you may have. Your happiness is our priority, and we go above and beyond to ensure that your dining experience exceeds your expectations.

In addition to individual orders, RailRecipe also caters to group travelers and corporate bookings, making it the ideal choice for family outings, school trips, or business travel. With customizable menus and bulk order options, feeding a large group has never been easier or more convenient. Simply let us know your requirements, and we'll take care of the rest, allowing you to focus on enjoying your journey.

But RailRecipe isn't just about providing great food on train ; it's about creating memorable moments and enhancing the overall travel experience. We believe that good food has the power to bring people together, spark conversations, and create lasting memories. Whether you're traveling solo, with family, or with friends, RailRecipe adds an extra layer of comfort and enjoyment to your journey, ensuring that you arrive at your destination feeling satisfied and refreshed.

So why settle for ordinary train food when you can elevate your journey with RailRecipe? Join us as we embark on a flavor-filled adventure that promises to tantalize your taste buds and satisfy your hunger. Because when it comes to dining on the go, why compromise when you can indulge with RailRecipe

[omkardroptaxi]

Drop Taxi - Omkardropcab

OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services represent a paradigm shift in the way people navigate their daily commutes, offering a seamless and convenient transportation solution that is tailored to the needs of today's urban dwellers. Unlike traditional taxi services that operate on fixed routes and schedules, Drop Taxi services provide on-demand transportation that adapts to the unique requirements of each individual passenger. Whether it's a short trip to the office, a leisurely ride to a weekend getaway, or a late-night journey back home, OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services ensure that passengers can travel comfortably, safely, and affordably, without the hassle of waiting or scheduling.

On-Demand Convenience: With OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services, convenience is just a tap away. Utilizing the latest technology and innovative dispatching systems, passengers can request a taxi with ease using OmkarDropCab's intuitive mobile app or by placing a simple phone call. Gone are the days of waiting in long queues or frantically hailing taxis on the street – with Drop Taxi services, passengers can enjoy the convenience of on-demand transportation that arrives at their doorstep within minutes, ready to whisk them away to their desired destination.

Flexible Scheduling: One of the key advantages of Drop Taxi services is the flexibility they offer in terms of scheduling. Unlike traditional taxi services that operate on fixed routes and schedules, Drop Taxi services allow passengers to travel at their own convenience, without being bound by rigid timetables or pre-determined routes. Whether it's an early morning commute, a midday errand, or a late-night outing, passengers have the freedom to schedule their rides according to their own preferences, ensuring a stress-free and hassle-free travel experience.

Affordable Pricing: In addition to convenience and flexibility, Drop Taxi services are also known for their affordability. OmkarDropCab's transparent and competitive pricing ensures that passengers can enjoy the benefits of on-demand transportation without breaking the bank. With no hidden fees or surcharges, passengers can rest assured that they are getting value for their money with every ride. Whether it's a short hop across town or a longer journey to the outskirts, Drop Taxi services offer affordable rates that are accessible to all.

Safety and Security: At OmkarDropCab, safety is our top priority. All our vehicles are meticulously maintained and undergo regular safety inspections to ensure that they meet the highest standards of safety and reliability. In addition, our team of experienced drivers are thoroughly vetted and trained to prioritize passenger safety at all times. Whether it's navigating through busy city streets or driving on unfamiliar roads, passengers can trust OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services to provide a safe and secure travel experience from start to finish.

Personalized Service: What sets OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services apart is the personalized and customer-centric approach that we take towards transportation. From the moment a ride is requested to the final drop-off, our team is committed to providing passengers with a seamless and enjoyable travel experience. Whether it's assisting with luggage, providing route recommendations, or accommodating special requests, our drivers go above and beyond to ensure that passengers feel comfortable and well taken care of throughout their journey.

The OmkarDropCab Advantage In summary, OmkarDropCab's Drop Taxi services represent a revolutionary approach to urban transportation, offering a convenient, flexible, and affordable solution that is tailored to the needs of today's commuters. With on-demand convenience, flexible scheduling, affordable pricing, safety and security, and personalized service, Drop Taxi services provide passengers with a seamless and enjoyable travel experience that is second to none. So the next time you're in need of a ride, why settle for anything less? Experience the OmkarDropCab advantage and elevate your journey to new heights with our Drop Taxi services.

For inquiries and bookings, https://omkardropcab.com/ contact us at +91 8939462345

[airportstravel]

Exploring Luton Airport Transfer Services

Traveling can be an exhilarating experience, but navigating through airports and arranging transportation to and from them can often be a stressful aspect of the journey. However, with the plethora of airport transfer services available, this process can be made seamless and stress-free. In this blog, we delve into the convenience and reliability of Luton Airport transfer services, highlighting their benefits and why they are an essential part of any traveler's itinerary.

Convenience at Your Fingertips: Luton Airport, located just outside of London, is a bustling hub for travelers from all over the world. Whether you're arriving in the UK for business or pleasure, ensuring a smooth transition from the airport to your final destination is paramount. This is where Luton Airport transfer services come into play, offering convenience at your fingertips.

One of the key advantages of utilizing transfer services is the ease of booking. With online platforms and mobile applications, travelers can arrange their transportation in advance, eliminating the need to queue for taxis or navigate public transport upon arrival. This not only saves valuable time but also provides peace of mind, knowing that a reliable mode of transportation awaits.

Furthermore, Luton Airport transfer services offer a range of options to suit individual preferences and requirements. From private cars and executive vehicles to shared shuttles and coaches, there is a solution for every budget and group size. Whether you're traveling solo or with a large group, these services ensure that you reach your destination comfortably and efficiently.

Reliability and Efficiency: One of the primary concerns for travelers is the reliability of transportation, especially when it comes to catching flights or meeting important appointments. Airports Travel Ltd pride themselves on their punctuality and professionalism, with experienced drivers who are well-versed in navigating the surrounding areas.

By pre-booking your transfer, you can rest assured that a designated driver will be waiting for you upon arrival, ready to assist with your luggage and transport you to your destination without delay. This level of efficiency is particularly beneficial for those with tight schedules or connecting flights, minimizing the risk of delays and ensuring a seamless travel experience.

Moreover, we offer a door-to-door service, eliminating the need for multiple modes of transportation or transfers. Whether you're heading to a hotel, business meeting, or tourist attraction, your driver will take you directly to your desired location, saving you time and hassle.

Safety and Comfort: In addition to convenience and reliability, safety and comfort are paramount considerations when choosing airport transfer services. We prioritize the well-being of our passengers, with modern vehicles equipped with state-of-the-art safety features and amenities.

Whether you're traveling during the day or night, in rain or shine, you can expect a comfortable and secure journey from start to finish. From spacious seating and climate control to onboard entertainment and Wi-Fi, these services go above and beyond to ensure a pleasant travel experience for all passengers.

Furthermore, Luton Airport transfer drivers undergo rigorous training and background checks to guarantee the highest standards of professionalism and customer service. With their local knowledge and expertise, they can navigate traffic patterns and alternative routes to ensure a smooth and efficient journey, even during peak travel times.

Conclusion: In conclusion, Airports Travel Ltd offer a convenient, reliable, and comfortable transportation solution for travelers arriving in the UK. From the ease of booking to the efficiency of service and the emphasis on safety and comfort, these services provide a seamless transition from the airport to your final destination.

Whether you're a frequent flyer or a first-time visitor, investing in Luton Airport transfer services can enhance your travel experience and alleviate the stress associated with airport transportation. So the next time you're planning a trip to Luton Airport, consider booking a transfer service and enjoy the convenience and peace of mind that comes with it.

[avishgroup]

Avish Group: Your Go-To Online Dry Fruits Shop in Noida for Premium Quality and Convenience

Welcome to Avish Group – your premier online destination for premium quality dry fruits in Noida! In today's fast-paced lifestyle, prioritizing health-conscious choices is more crucial than ever. With our wide selection of top-notch dry fruits available at your fingertips, we're here to elevate your snacking experience. Join us as we delve into the convenience and advantages of shopping for dry fruits online, right here in Noida.

Why Opt for Online Dry Fruits Shopping?

Convenience Redefined: Say goodbye to the hassle of navigating crowded markets and long queues. With Avish Group's online platform, you can effortlessly browse through our extensive collection of dry fruits from the comfort of your home or office.

Unmatched Variety: From crunchy almonds to luscious figs, we offer a diverse range of premium quality dry fruits to cater to every palate. With just a few clicks, you can explore an array of options and find your perfect snacking companion.

Quality Assurance: At Avish Group, we prioritize quality above all else. Our dry fruits are sourced from trusted suppliers and undergo rigorous quality checks to ensure freshness, taste, and nutritional value, delivering nothing but the best to our customers.

Competitive Pricing: We believe that healthy snacking should be accessible to all. That's why we strive to offer competitive prices without compromising on quality, making it easier than ever to indulge in nutritious treats without breaking the bank.

Doorstep Delivery: Sit back, relax, and let us handle the rest. With our prompt doorstep delivery service, you can enjoy the convenience of having your favorite dry fruits delivered straight to your doorstep, Online Dry Fruits Shop in Noida.

Why Avish Group Stands Out:

Premium Quality Guaranteed: At Avish Group, quality is our top priority. Each batch of dry fruits undergoes meticulous inspection to ensure that only the finest products make it to your table.

Extensive Range of Products: Whether you're craving the creamy richness of cashews or the tangy sweetness of apricots, we have something to satisfy every craving. Buy dry fruits online and discover new favorites today.

Easy Ordering Process: With our user-friendly website and streamlined ordering process, shopping for dry fruits has never been easier. Simply select your desired products, proceed to checkout, and await prompt delivery – it's that simple!

Secure Payment Options: Your security is our utmost concern. That's why we offer a range of secure payment options to provide you with a seamless and worry-free shopping experience.

Dedicated Customer Support: Have a question or need assistance? Our dedicated customer support team is here to help. Whether you require product recommendations or assistance with your order, we're just a message away.

Elevate Your Snacking Experience with Avish Group: Avish Group is your trusted partner in the journey towards healthier snacking. With our premium quality dry fruits, convenient online shopping experience, and commitment to customer satisfaction, we're here to help you make nutritious choices without compromising on taste or convenience. Visit us today and embark on a flavorful journey of wellness and indulgence. Happy snacking!

[cabserviceindore]

Travel Smart: 5 Reasons to Choose Cabs in Indore

Indore is a beautiful city in Madhya Pradesh, India. It's known for its rich culture and heritage, as well as its vibrant nightlife. But with so much to do and see, it can be difficult to get around the city without relying on public transportation or private cabs. That's why choosing a cab service in Indore is one of the smartest ways to travel while visiting this bustling metropolis! Here are five reasons why:

1) Convenience: Booking a cab service in Indore means that you don't have to worry about navigating through unfamiliar streets or waiting for buses/trains that may not show up on time – your driver will take care of all of these things for you! Plus, they'll know exactly where they're going so there won't be any surprises along the way either.

2) Comfort: Cabs offer more comfort than other forms of transport since you won’t have to share them with strangers who might make noise or create an uncomfortable atmosphere during your journey. This makes them ideal if you want some peace and quiet while traveling around town!

3) Safety: Choosing a reliable taxi company ensures that your safety comes first – their drivers are trained professionals who understand how important it is to keep passengers safe at all times (especially when driving late at night). So no matter where in Indore you plan on going, rest assured knowing someone has got your back every step of the way!

Also Read: Indore to Bhopal One Way Cab

4) Cost-effectiveness: Hiring taxis can actually save money compared with other methods such as taking public transportation because fares tend to be cheaper per mile traveled than buses/trains etc., plus there’s usually no need for additional tickets which further reduces costs too. Plus many companies now offer discounts depending upon the distance traveled - something worth looking into before booking any journeys! 

5) Flexibility: Finally, another great thing about using cabs rather than public transport services like trains & buses, etc., is flexibility. With most taxi companies offering 24-hour services 7 days a week, you've got complete freedom over when &where to go - perfect if ever find yourself needing somewhere quickly but don't fancy dealing with crowds /queues associated with peak hours!

Overall then, it really does seem like hiring cabs in Indore from reputable providers should always form part of anyone's travel plans whenever visiting cities like Indore so next time round make sure to check out what options are available beforehand and ensure stress free ride throughout.

About the Author:

Experience Seamless Travel with Our Taxi Service in Indore. At Indore Cab, we're dedicated to providing you with a comfortable and convenient transportation solution in Indore. Our well-maintained fleet and professional drivers ensure a safe and reliable journey, whether you need a ride for local travel, airport transfers, or outstation trips. We prioritize punctuality, competitive fares, and excellent customer service. Your satisfaction is our priority, and we're here to make your travel experience in Indore exceptional.