#sanitizing tunnels

[azmaarts]

Jason the Mosquito Sniper (Part I)

Welp. I was incredibly productive with my schoolwork yesterday BUT NOT TODAY. Only managed to finish my physics homework and half of my calc. Have only barely started writing out my upcoming college applications (Part II). I'm scared. :,D

ANYWAY... Started this thing back in... the second week of November?? Daum. Look at how Dickie's hair grew. ;w;

These two panel sheets were drawn nearly a month apart... AND I STILL CAN'T DRAW DICKIE'S ABS.

DEFENESTRATES MY PEN.

[chisatowo]

Finally got around to designing my girl (in a he/him way (in an agender way)) and while I might change his outfit his general shape came out perfect I think! He’s a salmonid but kind of a different type than the ones in game? As in they’ve been living in a very different environment for a couple centuries now so while they’re not a different species they do look very different

[primepaginequotidiani]

PRIMA PAGINA Giornale Di Sicilia di Oggi martedì, 03 settembre 2024

[euroblastme01]

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[advantechbake]

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works": Mutual aid, the built environment, the climate, and a future of comfort and abundance

This Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra's new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other "charismatic megaprojects," connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning.

Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.

Think of the automobile versus public transit: if you want to live in a big, built up city, you need public transit. Once a city gets big enough, putting everyone who needs to go everywhere in a car becomes a Red Queen's Race. With that many cars on the road, you need more roads. More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.

Geometry hates cars. You can't bargain with geometry. You can't tunnel your way out of this. You can't solve it with VTOL sky-taxis. You can't fix it with self-driving cars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need transit. There's a reason that every plan to "disrupt" transportation ends up reinventing the bus:

https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/09/when-silicon-valley-accidentally-reinvents-the-city-bus/

Even the cities we think of as motorists' paradises – such as LA – have vast, extensive transit systems. They suck – because they are designed for poor people – but without them, the city would go from traffic-blighted to traffic-destroyed.

The dream of declaring independence from society, of going "off-grid," of rejecting any system of mutual obligation and reliance isn't merely an infantile fantasy – it also doesn't scale, which is ironic, given how scale-obsessed its foremost proponents are in their other passions. Replicating sanitation, water, rubbish disposal, etc to create individual systems is wildly inefficient. Creating per-person communications systems makes no sense – by definition, communications involves at least two people.

So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance.

Infrastructure is vital and difficult. Its amortization schedule is so long that in most cases, it won't pay for itself until long after the politicians who shepherded it into being are out of office (or dead). Its duty cycle is so long that it can be easy to forget it even exists – especially since the only time most of us notice infrastructure is when it stops working.

This makes infrastructure precarious even at the best of times – hard to commit to, easy to neglect. But throw in the climate emergency and it all gets pretty gnarly. Whatever operating parameters we've designed into our infra, whatever maintenance regimes we've committed to for it, it's totally inadequate. We're living through a period where abnormal is normal, where hundred year storms come every six months, where the heat and cold and wet and dry are all off the charts.

It's not just that the climate emergency is straining our existing infrastructure – Chachra makes the obvious and important point that any answer to the climate emergency means building a lot of new infrastructure. We're going to need new systems for power, transportation, telecoms, water delivery, sanitation, health delivery, and emergency response. Lots of emergency response.

Chachra points out here that the history of big, transformative infra projects is…complicated. Yes, Bazalgette's London sewers were a breathtaking achievement (though they could have done a better job separating sewage from storm runoff), but the money to build them, and all the other megaprojects of Victorian England, came from looting India. Chachra's family is from India, though she was raised in my hometown of Toronto, and spent a lot of her childhood traveling to see family in Bhopal, and she has a keen appreciation of the way that those old timey Victorian engineers externalized their costs on brown people half a world away.

But if we can figure out how to deliver climate-ready infra, the possibilities are wild – and beautiful. Take energy: we've all heard that Americans use far more energy than most of their foreign cousins (Canadians and Norwegians are even more energy-hungry, thanks to their heating bills).

The idea of providing every person on Earth with the energy abundance of an average Canadian is a horrifying prospect – provided that your energy generation is coupled to your carbon emissions. But there are lots of renewable sources of energy. For every single person on Earth to enjoy the same energy diet as a Canadian, we would have to capture a whopping four tenths of a percent of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth. Four tenths of a percent!

Of course, making solar – and wind, tidal, and geothermal – work will require a lot of stuff. We'll need panels and windmills and turbines to catch the energy, batteries to store it, and wires to transmit it. The material bill for all of this is astounding, and if all that material is to come out of the ground, it'll mean despoiling the environments and destroying the lives of the people who live near those extraction sites. Those are, of course and inevitably, poor and/or brown people.

But all those materials? They're also infra problems. We've spent millennia treating energy as scarce, despite the fact that fresh supplies of it arrive on Earth with every sunrise and every moonrise. Moreover, we've spent that same period treating materials as infinite despite the fact that we've got precisely one Earth's worth of stuff, and fresh supplies arrive sporadically, unpredictably, and in tiny quantities that usually burn up before they reach the ground.

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking. Here, read an essay of hers that prefigures this book:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

How Infrastructure Works is a worthy addition to the popular engineering books that have grappled with the climate emergency. The granddaddy of these is the late David MacKay's open access, brilliant, essential, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, a book that will forever change the way you think about energy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/04/08/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-the-freakonomics-of-conservation-climate-and-energy/

The whole "Without the Hot Air" series is totally radical, brilliant, and beautiful. Start with the Sustainable Materials companion volume to understand why everything can be explained by studying, thinking about and changing the way we use concrete and aluminum:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials-indispensable-impartial-popular-engineering-book-on-the-future-of-our-built-and-made-world/

And then get much closer to home – your kitchen, to be precise – with the Food and Climate Change volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Reading Chachra's book, I kept thinking about Saul Griffith's amazing Electrify, a shovel-ready book about how we can effect the transition to a fully electrified America:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Chachra's How Infrastructure Works makes a great companion volume to Electrify, a kind of inspirational march to play accompaniment on Griffith's nuts-and-bolts journey. It's a lyrical, visionary book, charting a bold course through the climate emergency, to a world of care, maintenance, comfort and abundance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[umi-usagi]

Oh no, the person who wrote the entries wasn't fired. People are not aware but stuff like this in the beta writing phases of nintendo stuff is incredibly common due to a peculiar type of way to avoid specific censorship.

Nintendo and other family friendly companies such as disney are notorious to bring the axe onto stuff very easily even simple. Think about what the creator of gravity falls had to fight against during the making of the series. Even small stuff would have been axed for even being inplied to be inappropriate.

But in a brilliant stroke of irony, turns out its far easier to plan ahead for this and make stuff far more extreme and edgy that wanted so that once its sheared down, the original planned idea passes through. Censors will definitely home in on the absolutely unacceptable stuff and leave aside whats left once they think they have "sanitized" it enough.

So what happens is that the writers probably did want to put in game something akin to the canonical sinnoh library myths, but knew that adding those would have been impossible, so they planned out several different gruesome stories about human and pokemons relation and send them in bulk with the intention of absolutely appalling the censors, who would definetely tunnel vision on the evidently inappropriate stuff but leave the skeleton alone. But said skeleton is what they actually wanted to put in.

Think about it as a way to smuggle gold through a border by hiding it in a cart of manure. Guards will see the manure and not ask about whars under it.

Heck, they even blatantly copied actual myths with animals that had specific pokemon equivalents. Typholosion is a badger and was used as a stand in for the Mujina, an evil shapeshifting badger. Octillery to the Tako-nyobo and slaking as the "forest people"/satori/other monkeylike mythical creatures.

[fairuzfan]

im sure you probably get asked this a lot, but i have no idea what the whole deal with israel and palestine is

the only thing ive heard is from someone i overheard next to me in a lecture that palestine terrorists attacked israel or something but im starting to think im missing a lot of important context with that

Hi, thanks for sending this in. I've had this in my inbox for a while now because I feel like I didn't know where to start. There is this new crash course online that educates about history and information regarding Palestine's colonization and the history leading up to October 7th, 2023. I recommend taking a look at this resource first:

Generally, a quick rundown is that on October 7th, a group of resistance fighters launched a coordinates attack on the state of Israel and took some hostages back to Gaza. They had done this specifically because Gaza was experiencing a critical point on the 20 year seige the Israeli state imposed on them — even before this they were struggling to find clean water and their economy was severely damaged since their imports were calculated by the calorie by Israel. So they were starved and malnourished, many people with medical issues were not granted access to seek help outside of Gaza if they needed specialized care.

In 2018, Gazans had launched the "Great March Of Return" where they marched en masse to the militarized fence separating Gaza and "Israel." This was, by all accounts, a peaceful protest, though the Israeli government responded with brutal force, killing children as small as 2 years old and elderly people as old as about 80 years old.

This had gone on for a while in 2018, after every Friday prayer, and hundreds died. Even if they were not killed, a large number of them were critically wounded. There are many Palestinians disabled from bullet wounds, and the Israeli government purposefully does not allow them to seek treatment if they require it.

This, coupled with the estimation that Gaza would be absolutely unlivable in a couple years, caused an armed resistance to break out, which is what you hear with the "terrorists" attacking Israeli settlements. Now the reports of who killed Israeli civilians is widely argued, with many claiming that Hamas (some of the resistance fighters) did not kill the majority of Israeli casualties, like in this account from a survivor in which they described that the majority of deaths from the kibbutz were because of Israeli indiscriminate firing:

I can't say I totally understand what is going on now with the resistance fighters, but I know that Israel has tried, and failed, a number of times to invade gaza, always getting fended off by the resistance.

Now, gazans are suffering collective punishment where they are bombed indiscriminately in residential areas, hospitals, and schools, all under the excuse that there are "Hamas tunnels" they wish to destroy that lie under Gaza. They provide no evidence of this — they just claim it and drop the bombs. About 10,000 Palestinians have died from the bombing, many of them in pieces, about half of them children. They are also suffering an unprecedented siege where absolutely NO water, fuel, or food is allowed in Gaza (except for like 20 trucks one time) since October 7th. Gazans are reported to have completely run out of clean water. A vast majority of them are showing symptoms from drinking dirty water like vomiting and diarrhea. The water in Gaza does not work, so they are suffering from sanitation issues that will no doubt make the spread of disease proliferate.

I can go on about the issues the Gazans face, but you can scroll through my blog to learn more. Right now Gaza is suffering a humanitarian crisis and genocide. Palestinians in the west Bank are getting arrested en masse, tortured and humiliated by Israeli police and settlers. They are also getting shot randomly. Right now is the collective effort to completely erase Palestinians off the face of the earth, led by Israel and the United States, all for their own selfish interests.

Check out some posts here as well:

Please let me know if you have any questions about anything. Feel free to dm.

[xantchaslegacy]

Keen Sense and Curiosity

Some more Phyrexia happenings; check out the story on Ao3 too if the spirit moves you ;)

The cavern was empty.

As empty as any place could be on a plane where even metal lived, and tunnels of living flesh laced through the world from surface to core, and back again.

Walls of matte metal enveloped the cavern, carved smooth in some places by patient hands, and elsewhere patched with stretches of rougher-hewn, and more frequently, unhewn steel. Pools of varying depth and size blotched the cavern floor, brimming oily fluid; a mixture of effluvia that seeped in from the Hunter’s Maze above, and runoff from the labs that pumped in through meat-pipes from the Surgical Bays below.

The liquid churned, filled the air above it with the thick scent of life. It glowed, reflecting the false sunlight of the Hunter’s Maze that shone through tunnels of mirrored steel, flooding the space with a placid light. The fluid hummed in many low notes, a liquid choir that sang, just then, for no-one.

Even absent the creatures of Phyrexia, the cavern was active.

Active, but empty.

Two predators stalked into the cavern.

Glissa and Vorinclex prowled through the space. Side by side, elf and hulking praetor, scanning for danger by sight and smell and sound. Watching each others’ flanks with the practiced instinct of packmates.

Glissa tapped her scythe against the porous steel of the cavern.

Nothing of concern, as far I sense.

Vorinclex growled, low, and lumbered forward.

I smell nothing alarming. Stay alert.

Glissa sniffed her concurrence and fell back to the shadows, watching her companion as he went.

Phyrexia’s tongue was efficient, but the language of beasts had a guttural elegance that script and speech wanted for. That the "civilized" coveted.

Vorinclex sniffed the air once. Twice.

“Prawn.”

Speak of the devil .

Jin-Gitaxias strode into the cavern through a rounded tunnel that sloped upward from the Surgical Bays. Two chrome-capped cronies accompanied to him, chattering in their sanitized tongue.

“Hm.” Jin turned his head at the sight of Vorinclex. “You aren’t tardy.”

“As agreed.” Vorinclex’s voice, guttural even when he displayed the full and disarming range of his articulateness, rolled from his throat at a growl in Jin’s presence. “Brave of you to saunter out of your sterile little bunker.”

“As agreed.”

This cavern was a compromise of a rendezvous. One of many pockets between the Hunter’s Maze and Jin’s Surgical Bays that had formed as a semi-organic side effect of the intentional terraforming that had created the layers of their new Phyrexia.

The place had proven of interest to both factions so far, exacerbating the developments of predators in the vicious swarm, and (by the accounts of the Progress Engine) expanding the scope of Jin’s research with equal explosiveness.

It was one of the precious few, if not only, places in Phyrexia where the Vicious Swarm and the Progress Engine dwelt in equal measure, and felt equally comfortable.

Or equally un - comfortable, Glissa mused . Depending on who’s around.

“Vorinclex.” Jin-gitaxias’ voice, metallic and self-important, rang through the chamber like a bell. “It is surprisingly civilized of you to leave your attack dog behind.”

G lissa only sneered from the shadows at that. It was impossible that Jin-Gitaxias did not now she was there.

Vorinclex snorted. “We are praetors. We do not fear to fight our own battles.”

“Battle…? This is a simple trading of knowledge to benefit both our factions in the work to come. I understand if such a complicated notion frightens a simple brute. If you prefer to turn your tail...”

“I would not waste a chance for Phyrexia’s evolution,” Vorinclex spat. “Though I doubt I’ll find anything useful to the Swarm in the body of some sulking cell-scraper.”

“I am equally skeptical,” Jin replied, “that the mass of flesh that transports your meager brain will prove of any interest to our synthesis. Still, Norn will insist we work more collaboratively sooner than later. What she wishes, we must actualize. Better we begin such efforts in advance. In any case, further exploring the opportunities this space has to offer for our experimentation is worth a pointless hour of diversion.”

“Your portion of this space,” Vorinclex corrected. “The properties of these pools will be a boon to accelerate the development of the swarm’s best predators.”

“That is the agreement,” Jin said. “Wasted as it is on you and yours.”

Glissa scowled. The arrogance of the Engine’s Praetor was a sort of grating that only the self-proclaimed “civilized” could manage.

“That is part of the agreement.” Vorinclex prowled closer to Jin along a strip of metal ground that divided two of the pools, and sat up on his haunches, lording the few inches of height his current body had over the other praetor. “Sharing this space. Are you ready to share your secrets as well?”

“For the good of Phyrexia,” he added, smirking with his voice, if not his actual maw. He dislocated his jaw, and spat something at Jin’s feet. A red-white blur bounced once with a dull clatter then lay still on the cavern floor.

A phyrexian’s head and upper body, red-muscled and clad in plates of white porcelain steel.

“A souleater,” Jin observed, in his dispassionate way.

“One of Norn’s,” Vorinclex said, picking at his teeth with a finger on his smaller limbs. “A lurker. She may approve of our cooperation, but I will not suffer her eyes and ears where they have no business.”

Glissa smiled grimly. The cavern had been cleared of members of the Swarm and the Engine alike in preparation for this meeting, in some cases by force. Those efforts had revealed this member of Norn’s Machine Orthodoxy sects, lurking about the sub-layer. She had personally beheaded the agent herself and eaten its body with Vorinclex.

Jin-Gitaxias stooped slightly to inspect the half-corpse at his feet. “Norn will be displeased with her servant’s dispatching.”

Vorinclex licked his chops. “Are you displeased?”

“I serve Phyrexia’s greater ends. I have no opinion on small matters.”

“So it pleases you to come here for Norn’s benefit?”

“There is every chance our Great Synthesis could benefit from this exchange,” Jin replied. His jaws hardly moved as he spoke. Glissa wondered if his vocal chords even required motion of the mouth to communicate, with all the modifications he’d made to his body. “Allow the two most advanced specimens of our respective factions to examine each other and find how our best qualities can be shared between our...separate efforts to advance Phyrexia. It will certainly benefit your blind efforts to learn from us, and Norn will undoubtedly want you operating at a greater capacity than you do now.”

“Our glorious, ineffable leader,” Vorinclex snarled.

It’s good he speaks like that all the time, Glissa thought. Otherwise his scorn for Norn would be a more open secret.

“Our flawless mother.”

Jin-Gitaxias was harder to read. Glissa wished dearly to know what he actually thought of their self-proclaimed ‘mother.’

V orinclex spat into the pool. “ Your flattery would be wasted even if she was here to hear it .” He tilted his head, appraising Jin. “Shall we begin, or would you like to waste more time with words?”

Jin held up a closed hand, then raised a single index finger.

“I will insist on taking my observations first,” he said. “If you can contain yourself that long.”

“Please.” Vorinclex spread his arms wide, and his shadow fell on Jin’s toadies as well as the praetor himself. “Observe. I know you can’t wait to see what a real phyrexian looks like.”

“It is not eagerness, simply concern is that your own clumsy analyses will damage my instruments before I can take your measure.”

Vorinclex huffed, and lowered his arms to his sides while Jin turned to his attendants, who were busy pouring steaming liquid into a basin. Jin dipped his fingers into the stuff.

Sterilizing, Glissa realized. The acidic smell was powerful, even at a distance . Since the Swarm and the Engine had begun making joint use of it, each had introduced elements to the odor of the place, and while the acidic curdle of the Progress Engine's experiment pits did permeate the place, it usually melded queerly well with the more vital, vibrant scents of the Hunter's Maze, making a smell that was inoffensive to a hunter's nose, and even invigorating, at its best.

“So much ceremony,” Vorinclex observed. “I could inspect you twice over in the time it takes to complete your pageantry.”

“At least one of us needs to approach this exchange seriously.” Jin raised his hands from the bowl and began cleaning them on his apron, wiping each digit with a slow meticulousness that seemed maliciously deliberate. He looked to Vorinclex, still squatting on his haunches. “Will you lie supine for me?”

“Guess.”

“Hm.” Jin snapped, and his transcriptors snapped to attention. “Prepare to take notes.”

They chattered in affirmation.

Jin’s hands, those massive, long-fingered things that made Glissa think of blightwidows, began probing at Vorinclex’s shoulders, tracing along the massive spiked plates that protected his upper body. The light scrape of chrome on bone-steel rang like a chime through the cavern.

“Grand,” Jin remarked. “Such ostentatious plumage is likely effective in scaring off other simple beasts, I presume. I doubt our synthesis has much need for...bony shoulders.”

“Still,” he added, “It has a certain animal charm. It suits you.”

"When you find yourselves in the wilderness of a new plane, with nothing but your test-tubes and little needles to defend yourselves against the incomple at , you'll feel different."

Jin made a dismissive *click*-ing sound. "I have faced the strongest among the incompleat and triumphed." his hands trailed down from Vorinclex's bone-spurs and dragged way across his collar and breast. another crisp metallic note sheared the air. "This robust musculature, on the other hand…" His fingers splayed over the chest, probing at intervals with prods that brought soft huffs to Vorinclex’s breath. Jin’s other hand began taking measurements of Vorinclex’s arms, working its way from shoulder to arm to wrist to-

-Vorinclex seized Jin’s fingers, and lifted the arm above his head with a casual tug.

“A practical demonstration,” he growled, cutting Jin off. “Strength like this emerges through the struggle of life against life and death. Something that doesn’t happen in your test tubes and operating tables.”

“Untrue at its premise,” Jin replied, mildly. “In any case, the structure of your muscles can be examined, and reproduced by construction or artificial growth.”

Vorinclex cocked his head by the slightest degree. “I’ll believe it when I see it. How will you learn the structure of my flesh?”

“Our oil and research have yielded have many ways to examine what lies within. Lenses that can see past base matter. Magical tracers injected into the body and tracked with external scanners. However-”

Jin’s finger thinned, a subtle and silent shifting of the metal in his digit that Glissa might have missed if not for her eyes, compleat with a hunter’s acuity.

“I prefer to look for myself.”

Glissa tensed. Jin meant to cut Vorinclex open. She would allow it, of course, so far as Vorinclex was prepared to allow it, but would be ready to spring to his side should the need arise.

Jin, however, simply stood, half hanging by his wrist, looking at Vorinclex with his sharpened digit raised.

“Well?” Vorinclex sounded vexed by the pause. “Will you or won’t you?”

“We civilized people call this ‘waiting for permission,’ Jin said, enunciating the last three words with an insufferable deliberation.

Vorinclex barked a laugh, and released Jin’s hand. “When does the great butcher prawn wait for any thing’s permission? What sort of Phyrexian waits and does not just take what it intends?”

Jin ‘tsk’-ed through grit teeth. “Discourse between praetors should have more weight and social depth than the intercourse of beasts.”

“What do you know about the intercourse of beasts?” Vorinclex shifted, closing the distance between them. “Fine. This is permission to take whatever measures and make whatever cuts you need to slake your idiot thirst.”

“Whatever measures? I will remember that.”

Jin’s blade sank into Vorinclex’ upper arm with a disquieting ease. The muscle there was dense, as Glissa knew from hunting and scrapping with her companion. If the lack of resistance gave Vorinclex any pause, he showed no sign.

Nor did he look bored. He was watching Jin intently as he drew the blade down and lay open the topmost layer of Vorinclex’ skin and steel-twined muscle.

“The musculature...” Jin pulled aside Vorinclex’s hide and sliced deeper into the limb. Red and green and black dribbled in oily clumps from the cut. “...Impressively dense, as expected. Supply. Pliable. The proteins comprising the circulatory system...”

He trailed off, muttering and slicing. His unsharpened fingers working aside the fibers inside Vorinclex. Every few seconds he pulled a needle of silver from his knuckles and sank it into the flesh, marking a spot in the meat. Vorinclex’s gaze followed Jin as he moved down the arm, exhaling to punctuate each piece of Jin that was slipped into him.

"You've let the growth of your organics guide the development of your mechanical components," Jin observed. "A common thread in the Swarm specimens I've explored."

"They work in harmony," Vorinclex replied, as if explaining nursing to a newborn. "These components want to work as one, so there is no need to meddle in the finer details. A creature need only to act, and the instincts of the oil will guide the organic and its modifications to the best natural conclusion."

Jin scoffed. "Without adequate guiding intelligence...without intent, you are wasting time and resources with an uncoordinated approach."

"Oil is intelligence. Where you see only a vector, there is a guiding natural brilliance already present in the oil that outstrips the capacity of any sapient mind. Even yours, prawn. You say I waste resources? I say you waste time trying to bend the direction of an already perfect path to compleation."

“That’s as good as an admission of complacency,” Jin replied.

“It’s efficient use of our energies.” Vorinclex reached down and tapped one of the needles thrust through his upper arm. “unlike this.”

Jin only scowled at that.

After the arm came an incision along the back, then a cut along Vorinclex’ backmost thigh, down to the knee. The muscle within was vivid red and a maroon cocktail of oil flowed down the limb to the ground, where it soaked into the floor and trailed off into the pool behind him.

With every prod and pin from Jin, more of these fluids leaked down Vorinclex’s body in minute rivulets.

Still, Vorinclex stood as high on his haunches as he had at the outset.

“Another beast might have fallen from being cut open in this way,” Jin remarked.

“A lesser beast,” Vorinclex replied.

M ore cutting. More needles. Jin chattered away all the while as he cut deeper and deeper, until his probing found Vorinclex’s internal organs.

“Some actual efficiencies,” Jin murmured, shifting aside steel-mesh sacks and crocus-flesh enhancements, “And more than a few vanity organs that I presume let you play at being king of the beasts.”

“Not a king, just an aspiring apex.”

Jin fell silent after a period of further muttering and poking. His fingers ran the length of Vorinclex’s splayed-open leg, flank, and arm, tracing the patterns of muscle fiber within.

After a minute of this silence, Vorinclex stirred.

“Is something displeasing you, prawn?”

“The lack of something has me...intrigued.” Jin ran his sterilized digits through the fibers of Vorinclex’ arms. “It is known you boast a prodigious healing capacity, and yet I see nothing at work-”

“Watch your fingers,” Vorinclex said, interrupting.

The meat of his arm began joining with a sudden, soft, squirming, sucking noise so low and quick it barely registered to even Glissa’s ears. Jin withdrew his hands, but the closing muscles bunched around the longest of his fingers, and the digit came away trailing a gobbet of Vorinclex’s flesh.

Jin held up the stringy chunk of shuddering meat, turning it over in his fingers.

“A healing that must be triggered consciously. Interesting.”

“A healing that can be subdued intentionally,” Vorinclex cut in, as the rest of the cuts began sealing all along his body. “Aren’t scientists not supposed to jump to conclusions?”

J in ignored the question. “I will take this as a sample.” He held his hand out, and one of the transcriptors scuttled forward, producing a jar with a black seal about its lid. Jin popped the seal off and dropped the meat into the jar. H is minion shuffled back away, nearly tripping as Vorinclex growled at it, spattering the ground with spittle.

Having deposited most of the flesh. Jin wiped the rest from his fingers into a smaller tube, and examined it by the light; a series of metal tunnels reflected the false sunlight of the hunter’s maze down into the caverns; more than generous to see by.

Satisfied by what he observed, Jin tucked the test tube away in a slot in his flank. He spread the remaining smear of oily tissue onto Vorinclex’s arm, along the line of the now-healed cut. His other hand hovered above the healed-over incision on the leg.

“My pins are still inside your-”

“They are mine now. Carry on your examinations.”

“In that case-”

With a deft movement – a pull at the leg and push to the chest so subtle Glissa barely registered either, Jin unbalanced Vorinclex and flipped him into the pool. Vorinclex was too large to submerge fully in the fluid, and he displaced enough of the humming green stuff that Jin’s transcriptors were obliged to shuffle hastily backwards from the splash. Vorinclex let out an angry yelp, but Jin strode into the pool in two smooth steps and, straddling Vorinclex’s waist, grabbed his head in one massive hand. Jin continued vocalizing his examination as if nothing at all had happened.

“These teeth,” Jin murmured, his voice dropping in volume as he leaned in close to examine Vorinclex’ mouth. “Ingenious in form for affecting lethal lacerations in prey, though they are not especially well-rooted. Prone to falling out in the process of your...consumptions, I’d hypothesize.”

“Teeth break,” Vorinclex growled back. “Better to get good use out of them a few times and have a robust body to push new ones into place.”

“Wasteful.” Jin loomed closer. Vorinclex would have a front-row view of the blue praetor’s pristine, regular rows of chrome teeth. “Better something that lasts.”

“How long would it take you to replace those trinkets in your mouth if I savaged you right now? I can push out new teeth in seconds. I don’t need to go crawling back to a lab to replace my fierce parts.”

“You’d break your teeth a dozen times on mine before you even scratched my mouth.” Jin moved his face bare centimeters from Vorinclex’s, as if he meant to test his hypothesis on the other praetor there and then. “So savage away. But not until I’m finished with you.”

Jin’s fingers ran leisurely down Vorinclex’s side, fingers curving around from chest to back, probing his musculature and carapace with minute twitches, before coming to a rest on hips, where groin met thighs.

“Powerful legs. Claws and teeth that could render steel to fragments. You have excelled in your advancements toward animal perfection.” Jin dragged two fingers back up along Vorinclex's flank, the chrome making a surprisingly soft sound as the tips trailed over the metal-shod bone and exposed muscle.

Vorinclex snorted. His voice spoke dismissal of Jin’s comment, but he seemed, to Glissa’s eye, to almost preen at the comment, like a wolf showing off its coat.

“I am testament to the Swarm’s success. We have taken life that once barely subsisted and hobbled along among tangles of rust and created an ecosystem of thriving, ever-improving predators.”

Jin grunted at this newest failure to provoke Vorinclex. It was such an annoyed, base sound that Glissa had to suppress a giggle.

“Regardless of this...low success,” he said after a pause, “I hypothesize there might still be shortcomings in your Swarm.” Jin’s left hand snaked under Vorinclex’s gut, while his right slithered down Vorinclex’s thigh.

“And I would hypothesize those weaknesses might be reflected in your own...form.”

“You’ve seen me inside and out. Look as long as you like, you’ll find nothing resembling weakness.”

“We will see.”

Jin continued to inspect Vorinclex’ chest and neck. He kept up a constant monologue of numbers and measurements, his transcriptors at rapt attention. Neither had materials for writing. Sound recording devices built into their skulls, Glissa mused.

“You will be the first to attempt traversal across planes,” Jin commented after a while. “Our research to date suggests this will be a catastrophically traumatizing experience for your body.”

“I look forward to new hunting grounds.”

“There will be immense pain and an almost complete immolation of your form.”

“Is that all?” Vorinclex affected a yawn. “Good to know. I’ll bring my rubbers.”

Jin grumbled again. “It is regrettable Vrig failed to divine the secrets of Memnarch’s soul-traps...we might have achieved Phyrexia’s interplanar ends without such needless agony.”

Glissa stifled another giggle. It could not have been plainer Jin was hoping the comment would lead for a chance to expand on his tedious science.

“Research and development? Limited?” Vorinclex’s feigned shock was somehow more and not less pointed when growled. “Imagine my surprise.”

“It takes astoundingly little imagination to imagine you surprised,” Jin’s fingers darted suddenly to Vorinclex’s thigh, forefinger and thumb pressing into the veins below the hips.

Vorinclex grunted once. A soft bark that indeed betrayed surprise.

Glissa tensed, again.

“Curious.” Jin’s fingers had paused along the inside of Vorinclex’s thigh. “I would have suspected this organ here might be rendered obsolete by a...properly evolved creature.”

Vorinclex did not squirm. He was too proud, to perfect for such a thing. But he did shift noticeably under Jin’s observation

“Such a novel shape the tissues have taken.” Jin’s hand shifted under space where Vorinclex’ hind legs met. “The Grand Evolution is abundant with its own surprises. This feels like...an advancement of the Crocus blooms, yes? Grafted onto...no...grown from your body?”

Vorinclex did not shy away from Jin’s gaze.

“Some creatures among the swarm yet benefit from physiological stimulation to encourage breeding.”

“It yields rapid generations and equally explosive improvements in biology,” he added, sounding as defensive as an apex predator of Phyrexia could.

“The father of machines disdained such methods of reproduction,” Jin mused aloud. “Much of old Phyrexia did, at least on the nine spheres.” His hand had disappeared up to his first elbow, and it did not escape Glissa’s notice that the fingers on his right hand were running through the fur on Vorinclex’s back, caressing the spine. “‘Grow’ is our watchword. Not ‘breed.’”

“The father of machines failed,” Vorinclex spat. “And perhaps he disdained procreation because he was too preoccupied with writing into the scriptures his own sad failures to acquire the mate he desired.”

“And who have you been mating with?” Jin inquired. “Beasts? Elves? Wurms? I would have guessed you and yours were too busy trying to eat each other and preening your muscles and metal at one another to find time to breed.”

“I will take a sample,” he added, gripping tight onto Vorinclex’ fur.

“Don’t waste breath talking about what you will do. Do it.”

“Mm.” Jin withdrew his hand from the spine with a jerk and a sound like a canvas torn in two, pulling out a clump of spined hairs from Vorinclex’ back.

Vorinclex tensed and growled.

Jin’s other hand came away from between thighs, and Vorinclex jerked this time. Jin held between thumb and forefinger a strip of tissue.

“I presume your healing is as robust in your crocus organs as it is in your muscle?”

Vorinclex rose up, though not to his full height, dripping pool-fluid. “Prodigiously robust. You can inspect closer, if you dare place your head where your hand was bold enough to wander.”

“Regardless,” Jin replied, clinically smug, returning his hand to Vorinclex’ leg. “That the most advanced among the Swarm...the apex of phyrexian evolution, even, would possess such an organ...” He trailed off, and made a series of soft clicking “tsk”s. “I would think that you might think it...weakness.”

Vorinclex lunged toward the edge of the pool. Jin, not expecting the move, was thrown forward and landed in as semi-sprawled position in the shallows. Glissa suppressed a laugh to see the praetor so prone, his little skirt and apron askew about his legs.

“You are losing focus, prawn.” Vorinclex's voice was dangerously low as he prowled forward to loom over Jin. “I am ready to take my turn.”

“Impatient,” Jin clicked. He pulled back the skirt, perhaps to keep it from getting wetter, though it was thoroughly soaked from what Glissa could see. The fluid of the pool also, had shifted in color, while they stood in it, from an acid green to something more like the blue-green light when Lyese and the Eye of Doom both broke the horizon together.

“Worried that I’ll break you?”

Jin hummed, a raspy vocalization of frustration . “Not at all. My concern is that your clumsy pawing will not yield the data your swarm need s to adequately better itself.”

“Never mind my paws, Jin. I have my other ways of taking your measure,” Vorinclex rumbled. His maw thrust forward, to within inches of Jin’s neck. From her place, Glissa could hear his breath. See it steam along the metal of Jin’s jaw.

“A predator can probe by scent and taste alone.”

“Bestial senses,” Jin scoffed. “Your means of analysis are as crude as those you use to advance your evolution.”

Vorinclex responded by placing his forelimb across Jin’s shoulder, pushing him down into the shallows of the pool, and sniffing further down the other praetor’s neck, approaching his shoulder.

“Hm.”

He stopped there, inspecting the metal of Jin’s collar in a slow circuit. Jin seemed unsure what to do with his head as Vorinclex probed, and opted to remain still. Vorinclex moved almost painfully slowly, and Glissa could not help but wonder what was driving this uncharacteristic display of patience.

V orinclex’s breath continues to fog on Jin’s chrome surface as he moved, leaving a misty, matte trail on the shining body that faded quietly as he wandered across Jin’s form .

Jin kept silent for several more minutes as Vorinclex probed further down, inspecting chest and shoulders. Every few seconds he would adjust his fore-paws, never pressing down on one stretch of Jin’s body for too long, but never taking off enough weight to allow him to rise, either.

“How are you recording this?”

Jin’s voice was strained, the already metallic voice reverberating as if spoken through a funnel of steel. Almost as like he’d run a long distance.

Vorinclex paused at the question. He was just then running the edge of his snout along Jin’s elbow, and he made a slow, deliberate trail of Jin’s head as he re-positioned himself to look Jin in whatever portion of his face would best correspond to eyes.

“Recording?”

“Yes.”

“I will remember, of course,” Vorinclex placed a broad paw over Jin’s midsection. Maroon-muscled digits closed around Jin’s silvery, snake-like spine. “An apex’s eyes miss nothing. An apex savors every meal it takes the measure of.”

“You intend to eat me, Vorinclex?”

“If I ate you, Jin-Gitaxias….REALLY ate you, I would not get to see the despair in you when the Grand Evolution crushes your Synthesis, and all the other fool dogmas of Phyrexia under its heel. When all is one with our mighty Swarm, when all are free of sapience and weakness...perhaps on that day I will eat you. But no sooner.”

“But since you brought it up...” Another paw closed around Jin’s corded spine, though Vorinclex kept his weight on his hind legs so his weight did not crush the other. “I can’t think of a better use for you than nutrition to fuel the Great Evolution.”

“Can’t think, that is one among many defects,” Jin rasped. “No imagination. No critical thought. Nothing beyond instinct. Fitting traits for a king of beasts.”

“Your opinion,” Vorinclex growled, shifting forward so his shadow fell of Jin. “Me, I like my current position.”

“You don’t dispute it?”

“I wouldn’t want to waste your time debating with a mere beast.” Vorinclex’ jaw shifted into something only a few would recognize as a smile. “This spine of yours...” He pressed forward slowly, and Jin sank further into the pool, a glowing mix of oil and other fluids washing over him. “Strong. Stronger than it looks. I’ve torn apart wurms with less durability.”

“The result of rigorous research and development,” Jin said, the pride tangible enough that Glissa could detect it even in his metallic monotone. “Not the sort of strength one could just evolve through blind-”

“And yet,” Vorinclex continued, pressing down further. “Even with such a strong support, I suspect there’s no real backbone beneath it. That must be why your posture is so slovenly.”

“Ah-” Jin started to say something, but whatever it was caught in his throat, and instead a low, tinny buzzing noise came from his chest. his fingers found the hollows in Vorinclex’s forearms. The same forearms that held him in the pool. His fingers wove their way into the space, gripping onto the other praetor’s limbs.

“Ah, it looks like I’ve found something.” Vorinclex, if it was even possible, leaned in closer, bearing down on Jin. “This can’t be where air flows through, so I can only assume I’ve hit a nerve.”

“How-ah!” Jin cut off again into more buzzing.

"I'm gleaning more than you know." Vorinclex' hands were almost entirely submerged in the pool, but it was clear from the movement of his arms that he was probing the length of Jin's spine. "I'm intrigued by how you've arranged your nerves to run the length of this tube-body of yours. Incredible use of space, but not without its tender spots…As for your form..you could have a raptor’s grace, if only your limbs were not so inefficient in proportion to-"

Jin’s hand jolted up Vorinclex’s arm, and pressed at a spot just below his jaw, where head met body. Vorinclex’ weight shifted suddenly to one side, and Jin used the momentum to roll the both of them sideways, splashing through the pool, which hummed with tripled vigor.

Jin rolled atop Vorinclex, and for a split second Glissa’s leg’s fell into a crouch in preparation to strike his head from his body-

But Vorinclex, using the sheer advantage of his weight, carried the roll another turn, and pinned Jin beneath him, once again half-submerging his chrome form in the fluid.

They remained that way for long seconds, Jin humming hoarsely, and Vorinclex’s arms tremoring.

“Very clever, little prawn,” Vorinclex said, finally. “All that time spent studying was not entirely wasted.”

“Your evolution has granted you some low advantages,” Jin conceded in his tinny rasp. “I am beginning to re-evaluate my chances of thriving in your death-trap of a home.”

The pool fluid around Jin was slowly turning a more metallic sheen, a mixture of blue, purple, and black metallic. Where it dispersed into the blue-green, it became more muted, but seemed to churn with a thick urgency

"Of course you would not survive in the Maze. Your form has been molded to fit into your filthy operating theatres."

“So I should simply remain in my labs in perpetuity?”

"I didn't say that. You and your meat-molders are more than welcome among the Swarm. I'm intrigued to see how perfect your form could be if you let the oils of the Maze shape you into a true predator."

"You said I would not survive."

"Because you would never embrace it. It isn't in your nature. If you could come down from your chrome pedestal, and hunt and adapt like any other beast, you could be something tremendous."

“You underestimate me.”

“That was never a problem. That you overestimate yourself is.”

“I am capable of cooperation and collaboration, it is others who are too insular or insecure to take full advantage.”

“I’m taking full advantage now, or didn’t you notice?”

“You have lingered unusually long on my spine.” Jin shifted his grip on Vorinclex’s left arm, his fingers moving closer to the shoulder. “It is an unparalleled example of compleation, but I wonder how useful the time you are spending on it is now.”

“Lower then.” Vorinclex shifted his grip, and his attentions, to where Jin’s skirt began. If you insist.”

“‘What is planted below will determine what flourishes above.’”

Vorinclex paused, one of his fore-paws beginning to pull back apron and skirt. “Poetry?” He asked, scorn clear in his growl.

“One of Sheoldred’s prophecies,” Jin replied. He kept a grip on the nearest of Jin’s paw’s. “One I have been pondering at length when my schedule allows. Her counsel and her company have been more useful than seeking cooperation from you or the furnace-rat.”

“Sheoldred.” Vorinclex spat the name as if it had been a bone lodged in his throat. “A waste of your time. If there’s one thing more useless than your science it’s prophecy and soothsaying. The only reality you should care about is the reality of flesh and fangs.”

“They have proven exceptionally useful, her prophecies,” Jin replied, almost sing-song through the grate of his voice. “She has been my most fruitful partner outside the Engine.”

Vorinclex grunted, and leaned further into Jin. The chrome praetor sank another few inches into the pool.

Jin's own arm shifted as Vorinclex's did, his fingers still clinging to the hollows in the other praetor’s arms.

Vorinclex seized Jin’s shoulder in his maw and, with a quick thrust of his head, tossed him further into the pool. Before Jin could even conceive of rising up, Vorinclex was looming over him again, this time with a massive limb planted to either side of the chrome Praetor’s head.

“Enough talk. I’m not done knowing you.”

Keeping his left paw planted, Vorinclex cradled Jin’s head in his right. The muscle of his arm began to distend and lengthen. Moments later, branches of flesh were snaking under and across Jin-Gitaxias. Vorinclex’s lower arms began to distend as well, and resumed the probing at Jin’s legs.

An exasperated sigh escaped Jin as the upper-arm tendrils splayed his arms out, binding his limbs to the ground and tethering b etween his long fingers.

“Silence is a waste. I have plenty of additional data I might gather from observing your clumsy pawing.”

“Speak to your toadies if you wish. I don’t mind your noise.”

V orinclex pulled back Jin’s skirt in one swift motion, and a rip cut through the humming as his skirt tore along one side, revealing sleek legs of chrome.

“The leader of the Swarm is notably and conspicuously preoccupied with my lower anatomy,” Jin said, conspicuously loudly. Louder at least than his trascriptors would have needed him to speak to hear. “His probing, already indelicate, becomes borderline frenetic as his bestial sensory organs take account of the perfection of my form.”

The distended muscles around Jin’s upper body tightened audibly. He did not abate in his monologue, but the fluid around him grew more intense with it’s churning, and deepened in its dark-metallic tint.

“-seems completely capable of processing auditory information, even when preoccupied with pursuits of base interest-”

Vorinclex bared his maw, and something not dissimilar to his distended arm-muscle snaked out. It was not a tongue exactly, as sapient creatures of flesh might understand it, but a sensory organ modeled after crocus organisms Glissa had perfected with compleat frogmites.

Just now, this organ took the measure of Jin’s legs, probing the knit of cable and struts that joined below the waist, extending into chrome-capped knees.

“-searching perhaps for an equivalent anatomy to his own, not appreciating that, unlike the cumbersome designs of the Swarm, creatures of the Progress Engine make use of modular bodily components that may be included or exempted from certain activities based on their applicability to the situation at-”

The tendrils about Jin’s chest began to writhe, and pulled his arms from a T-formation to up above his head, dragging him further up along the bank.

“-ah-”

Vorinclex’s secondary arms moved up again to Jin’s core, leaving the explorations below to the tongue. His palms rested along the segmented coil enveloping Jin’s spine.

“-feeling to measure the reactions of my nervous system to his probing and brutalization. A simplistic approach, but showing more attention to detail than one might expect from-”

Jin’s ankles and feet received more lingering examination. Vorinclex tested the durability of each digit with his snout, pushing them to the extent of their flexibility. The construction of Jin’s heel seemed of particular interest.

“-most likely having discovered yet another anatomical superiority his own faction lacks in-”

Two tendrils wound a spiral around Jin’s neck.

“-a curious maneuver. What sort of response he hopes to elicit is a mystery, as even he must know respiration in a specimen as advance as myself is-”

Jin cut off suddenly as both tendrils slithered into his mouth and down his throat, writhing all along their length as they went.

Vorinclex gave no outward sign he was conscious of what his arms were doing. Glissa had no doubt he was enjoying the opportunity deeply regardless.

The opportunity, and the rasping, muffled sound of Jin attempting to continue his monologue.

Vorinclex brought one of his smaller arms up to the side of his head and tapped around where his sheltered ears lay. He favored Jin with a shrug.

Jin’s muffled attempts ceased suddenly, and a rattling vibration started up in his chest.

“His tactile limbs navigate the obstacles of my internal organs with unexpected efficacy. A lifetime meandering through the unorganized hazards of the Tangle and the Hunter’s Maze have helped develop a low cunning useful for-”

A voicebox somewhere on his body, built into the chest, maybe. Glissa smirked from the shadows. Leave it to Jin-gitaxias to build in redundant systems to make sure no one could ever shut him up.

Vorinclex’s maw had returned to Jin’s midsection as his tendrils lifted Jin’s arcing spine out of the fluid. His tongue traced over each coil of the segmented spinal spikes that fanned out around Jin’s back.

“-that he can carry out so many parallel probings of my form is astounding, especially given the thoroughness. It is of course a shadow of the theoretical network efficiency our faction has already accomplished with the vedalken mindmeld, but nevertheless-”

Vorinclex released his grip on Jin’s spine, but his body remained bent over the surface of the pool, as if straining of its own volition.

“-able to contort my body from within using his tendrils-”

That he can keep rambling on with several tons of muscle and steel shoved down your gullet is incredible enough, Glissa mused.

“-tendrils prove resilient to the acids of my stomach and the abrasive metal components of my internal-”

Tiny offshoots of Vorinclex’s arms, thin fibers of metal and crocus-perfected flesh, w o rked like roots into the crevices of Jin’s upper body. The fluid all around them was properly churning now with the combined effects of their movement and the essences leaking from both of them into the pool.

“-provided his brain is capable of such memorization, the beast should have explored enough of my innards to form a rudimentary map of my major external organs.”

“A fair exchange of information.”

Glissa almost started at Vorinclex’s voice. He’d been silent for nearly a half-hour.

Jin shuddered and tsk-ed. “This is...not equitable...I did not explore you nearly as deeply with my dissections-”

“I can feel your pin-probes working their slow way through me, collecting information,” Jin cut in. “Spare me.” He moved his face closer to Jin’s. “What is your conclusion on my own research technique, hm?”

Jin turned his head. “You were studying my actions. My reactions. Taking note of how I grapple with you, and my stimulus response to your aggression.”

“Obviously. This is how a predator learns.”

“Learning...what use is learning to you?”

“Everything learns.”

“Your evolution is a mindless charade. You mean to tell me you have a use for the scientific process?”

“You misunderstand the Grand Evolution, and you do degrade it by comparing it to evolution writ large. Even at it’s basest, evolution is not a process of becoming the biggest, the strongest, or the most fang-filled-”

“As if any of those things are prized or rare in our Phyrexia,” Jin observed.

Vorinclex made a rasping sound that Glissa knew to be a chuckle. “Evolution simply rewards whatever creature can rut and breed best. What makes a new generation that survives to do the same in perpetuity wins.

“Our Grand Evolution is more than just evolution as the flesh knows it. We see a process failing, we see a useless limb or vestigial encumbrance, and we remove it there and then. A jaw formation fails to aid a predator in its hunting? The jaw must go. A venom fails to kill outright from a single bite? The glands that produce it must be replaced. A creature like you-”

Vorinclex leaned into Jin, his voiced dropped to a strained snarl. "You are s quandered potential. You've coated yourself in such potent metals. Hacked yourself and your septic underlings into such ingenious shapes. But now you languish in front of vats and corpses, those clever bodies untempered and untested against real strength."

J in barely stirred at the commentary. “Your approach is both more scientific and more reckless than I thought. No concern for long-term consequences. Short-sighted and slapdash modifications.”

Vorinclex pulled his head back. “You got me talking again, silver-prawn. You’re such a fool I forget how clever you can be.”

“More flattery than I anticipated.” Jin raised a hand and brushed the side of Vorinclex’s jaw. Vorinclex leaned into the gesture, almost imperceptibly.

“Interesting.” Jin’s hand came away, and he inspected something along the back of his thumb. “Heightened levels of adrenaline, even compared to your baseline.” He wiped the thumb on Jin’s forearm. “I will take samples for my research.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Jin half-rose to a seated position, long strands of Vorinclex' arms still draped around his shoulders. He looked to Glissa like one of the vedalken draped in their bulky suits.

With the same hand he’d caressed with, Jin flexed, and the middle finger elongated, thinner than the scalpel-finger had been, until it was needle-fine. One of the transcriptors waded into the shallow of the pool, and affixed a clear container to the back of Jin’s hand.

Vorinclex carried on tasting the air about Jin’s neck and face all the while, arm draped round the other praetor’s back.

As the Transcriptor waded out again, Jin slid the needle into Vorinclex’s collar with a smooth deliberation. A snake slipping into a burrow. Vorinclex showed no overt sign of feeling it, though he kept steady, even as his probing increased in intensity about Jin’s chest. If Jin's instruments were as fine-tuned as he claimed, they were sure to have picked up on the rumble within Vorinclex' chest, mixing with the sounds of the fluids in the pools.

The glass vial on Jin’s hand began to fill.

“Under the fallen father, Phyrexia developed many variations of oil, as you well know.” Jin leaned forward into Vorinclex’s shoulder. “Substances found in the artifacts of planes explored during our many years of exploration, powdered powerstone, the fluids of the many lesser creatures whose bodies we mastered...we produced glands to resist acid and fire, to fuel sleepless hulks and unailable plague vectors.”

A fluid, clear and green-tinted, and laced with golden filament, filled the glass. More still poured into the container at a thick flow.

“The oil is an art we have all benefited from and contributed to. Even you beasts of the swarm.”

“I’ve touched the inside of you, prawn. Your oils are not more impressive than mine, just different.”

“Did you enjoy their taste, Vorinclex?”

Vorinclex laughed – a thundering rumble from his gut.

“I should be asking if you are enjoying the taste of me right now.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot you were in there.”

Jin bit down, hard, severing the tendrils Jin had shoved down his throat.

“Ah-”

Vorinclex pulled his hands up, tearing the thinner cords of sinew and steel. His fore-arms re-formed in full with a sharp, violent sucking sound, and he pounded back down into the pool, dousing them both.

Jin, for his part, vibrated with a grinding noise from inside his chest. His needle had snapped off in Vorinclex’s neck.

“Now that is what I would call fair exchange.”

Vorinclex spat into the water, and stalked back up out the side of the pool, shaking out his coat as he went, splattering the walls and floors with the fluid of their exchange. Jin clambered back up the bank of the pool, reclining with an arm balanced on his knee.

“You’ve ruined my skirt.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a nicer one somewhere.” Vorinclex stretched out his forelimbs. “Was that useful for you, prawn?”

“It was not entirely unproductive,” Jin replied. His transcriptors approached him from behind, still muttering away.

“I could learn even more if we had our entire network of caverns and pools at our disposal.” Vorinclex’s claws flexed. “If you were willing to let me hunt you through the space, I could glean multitudes about how you tick...if such a thing interested you…?”

“Guess.”

“Hmph.”

“A moment.” Jin turned to his transcriptors and, with a single deft swipe of his hand, separated their domed heads from their bodies.

The heads never hit the ground; Jin plucked them out of the air with his other hand, and tucked them into a compartment at his waist. The bodies slumped in place, sagging but standing upright.

Vorinclex sniffed. “Failed in their recording?”

“Succeeded, which is why I will be taking their knowledge into myself. It is an unnecessary risk to have such valuable data wandering around inside beings so susceptible to bribery or abduction. Here-” Jin waved a hand over the bodies, and began collecting the jars and other vials they had assembled. “A gift – you may eat those. I have no more use for their ambulatory parts. These were grown from samples of myself; they can be your consolation prize, since you cannot have me.”

“A waste of resources.” Vorinclex looked down on the bodies with disdain. “Phyrexia is still a closed system until Norn can break through to new hunting grounds. Can’t your research make use of them?”

Jin looked up at Vorinclex, but did not answer right away. He continued to collect the samples the transcriptors had gathered.

“Most likely,” He said at last. “It was only a goodwill gesture.”

“I eat only what is worth being eaten. Those septic corpses are worth nothing.”

“Hm.”

“The exploration of your form is goodwill enough,” Vorinclex rumbled.

“I will offer something else then.” Jin made a strange gesture; a movement of the hand from chest to side. “We are, despite valid criticisms, among the pinnacles of our factions. Your crocus creations-”

“Glissa’s Crocuses. They are the fruit of her labours.”

Jin clicked irritably. “The crocuses are, despite their crudeness, well suited to aiding the sort of newt and germ generation the progress engine has perfected. We might then make children from our respective materials-”

“Yours and mine?”

Jin paused, but Vorinclex pressed on.

“You and me, specifically?”

“It is a proposal with immense promise.”

Vorinclex tilted his head. “I would be...curious to see what comes of it.”

Jin leaned forward, and Glissa imagined for a moment she saw his jaw clench into a smile. “An understandable position. We have this space here, and Norn will approve of anything that could add such potent forces to Phyrexia. If you would only-”

“I won’t,” Vorinclex cut in, with a sudden, unmistakable edge.

“...why?”

“What does it matter ‘why’? I said no.”

Jin hummed in exasperation. “We have already seen great leaps and bounds in our respective factions’ grand designs. Why not join our own materials to see what can be made anew for Phyrexia? Urabrask and Sheoldred have their own project underway, and even the tangle has a fine specimen resulting from your proximity to the Furnace.”

“Norn will have no children of mine.”

"The swarm is already committed to her expansion. To our expansion. What does it matter whether they are of your direct lineage?"

"There is no singular "Swarm" to be committed. Glissa and I don't limit where our hunters range, and I won't deny them whatever killing grounds the Orthodoxy open for Phyrexia. They're free to join Norn's conquests whatever way they please.”

Jin hummed with irritation. “If they are free, then...I ask again, why not-”

“If a phyrexian I spawn chooses, they may follow Norn. If a predator can make itself mightier on the flesh of the planes she wishes to open up, I welcome the chance. If the creatures our factions collaborate on here are meant for her schemes, so be it. What I will not do is personally sire for the sole end of adding to her legions. I won't give my own brood to be her tools. She has you for that, prawn."

Silence. Jin turned away, and busied himself with extracting the vials and other samples from the bodies of his transcriptors, tucking them into a bag at his waist, and several slots along his back.

“It’s a wasted opportunity,” he said at last, not looking up. “This space has already proven useful to our efforts beyond measure. I foresee much great progress being made here.”

“That’s why we were here to-” Vorinclex’s gaze swept the cavern. “Yes. That’s why we agreed to this.”

“I am trying to discover the way forward for all Phyrexia. Not just for Norn’s benefit.”

“Then you should look up from your dissection tables, Jin, and see the world Norn is making with clear eyes, and how you contribute to it.”

“As you do.”

“I know what I am contributing to, and how I am contributing.”

Jin hummed. “I am not ignorant.”

“You don’t have to be ignorant to fool yourself.”

Jin hissed at that, so low it was almost lost in the humming of the cavern, but still he hissed. He turned away from Vorinclex.

From the transcriptor’s bodies, Jin extracted two more vials – long, empty lubes of glass. He waded out into the pool, and knelt.

The fluid was much changed by their activities. From acid-green to blue-green, to something that seemed to Glissa’s eye like colored quicksilver, shimmering form purple to blue to green to black to purple again. It sang a markedly more complex tune now than the humming of the fluid in the other pools.

Slowly, Jin tipped the vials into the fluid and filled them up, stopping each with a plug of gummy black material.

“I will test incubating my next batch of larvae in the fluid from this pool,” Jin said, tucking the vials into compartments in his breast. “It has absorbed some of my own essence, which should at least...counterbalance any defects you might introduce.”

“I’m sure the notion does not make you uncomfortable,” Jin added, somehow baring even more of his teeth than usual. “I do not fear to create life for Norn’s Phyrexia.”

Vorinclex said nothing, but regarded Jin for a few seconds longer.

Then, still without a word, he lowered his maw into the fluid of the breeding pool, and began to drink.

And drink.

Jin just stared. Glissa realized her own breath had caught in her chest.

And still, Vorinclex drank deeply of the stuff, and the humming of the fluid shifted, chords of sound rippling through the cavern as he sucked the glowing stuff up into his maw.

When he at last lifted his head, minutes later, the gaze of every other person in the chamber followed the movement.

He merely licked his chops, and stretched out his shoulders with what Glissa knew to be intentional effect.

“Meager,” Vorinclex noted at last. “But, if I cannot eat you, that’s the next best thing. Maybe you managed to leak a useful mineral or two into the pool.”

Then, with a deliberate grace, he looped out of the pool, leaving Jin to watch him go in silence. Iridescent, humming fluid dripped from his sides onto the spongy metal floor, which soaked the liquid up with a greedy haste.

Glissa smiled at Vorinclex as he rejoined her, then back at Jin, shooting the latter praetor a tight smirk and sneer.

Your scientist has been pleasantly rattled.

Vorinclex grunted.

He’s not mine. And now I’m liable to be sick.

Glissa snorted a laugh.

They began their climb back to the Maze. As the breeding pools disappeared behind them, Glissa patted at Vorinclex’s flank, where Jin had cut into him and delved inside. He rumbled his appreciation, but when she went to wipe the fluid from his jaw, he pulled away.

She let him be. There was much work being done, and yet to be done still. This diversion had certainly been trying enough on its own.

As the light of the Hunter’s Maze began to fill the tunnel, Vorinclex’ tongue slipped out the corner of his mouth.

Almost absently, he began to lick traces of fluid from his chops.

"Keen Sense and Curiosity” is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.

[thr0wnawayy]

A Thought, A Theory

I'll probably make a more indepth post or may just update this one once the offical translations get dumped (which means pictures!), but I have a bit of a crack theory that chapter 430 isn't as real as we've been led to believe.

(As for when this actually takes place, that's up to you but I like to imagine the start of his third year marks the beginning of his mental decline)

This mostly comes from some inconsistencies in regards to the hero rankings and some other stuff

Its stated that Best Jeanist and Endeavor are still active. With the exception of Jeanist, this should not be possible for obvious reasons.

2. Something feels off visually and narrative-wise, I don't know how to describe this other than everything looks too ideallic. Like it feels too sanitized and sterile, this probably because Hori ripped the last bits of life this story had away. But hush. Also Aoyama is there didn't he leave UA? (and Japan)

3. Apparently people forgot the connection between Endeavor and Shoto. Normally this would be a good thing as Shoto would be able to become his own person.

This falls flat when you remember that also includes people forgetting the reason and happenings behind Shoto's existence, it just feels to good to be true. Everyone overlooks the bad and gets tunnel vision over any semblance of good.

Now you may be wondering, so what's going on.

Well, Midoriya's having a breakdown fantasy to cope with the fact that he won't be becoming a hero due to the loss of his quirk.

It sounds crazy but consider the following.

Midoriya subconsciously knows the way he's been treated was wrong. This manifests within the escapists fantasy in Bakugo's drop in the rankings + the attitude surrounding him (as well as his damaged hand never fully healing)

He meets a kid who just so happens to be in a near exact same position as he once* was (and still is to an extent). One could take this as his mind's way of trying to cope and heal itself, by having Midoriya do what he does best and help others, henceforth working though his trauma by using the kid as a stand in.

*Even the kid's "bully" seems to be a warped version of Bakugo (perhaps this is how Midoriya tries to fool himself into believing how it was)

We see Kota. I believe that here, Kota serves as what Midoriya thinks he could have been had he not failed. Kota is the idealized version of Midoriya here, the unobtainable.

I believe the abandonment/limited contact from his classmates to be based in reality, unfortunately. Whether it was by choice or forced by their PR to preserve their images (can't be seen around the "freaks" for too long, now can we?). The lie may come in the form of busy schedules.

(either it's what Midoriya tells himself or he's been told, you can't tell me they can't just make a group chat or video call. At least a High School Reunion)

The Mech Suit is a massive cope, it's the dying whimper of Midoriya's childish hope that All Might will save the day. This time there's no magic quirk, no garrish mech suit, no plot twist.

No. There's only Midoriya and the consequences of his, his classmates and hero societies actions. It doesn't matter how shiny and seamless the illusion, how sweet the lie.

You can't hide the blood.

[mj-iza-writer]

I did something extra special for my birthday, I just turned 28.... I'm getting old. Anywhoo, I went to an aquarium today and had so much fun.

Warning: mentions one main character with terminal illness, innuendo that said character is dying. Character death at end. I almost started crying writing this. I need to stop doing this to myself.... this was supposed to be happy. 😤

Whumpee watched some fish swim in a small pool.

Caretaker stood at the counter, purchasing tickets for them both.

"Is there any issues a wheelchair user should be concerned with?", Caretaker asked the cashier.

"Not really. Our facility is wheelchair friendly, except around the shipwreck area. Some of the wooden boards may be a little harder to get through", the cashier frowned, "I apologize."

"Not a problem", Caretaker smiled, "thankyou for your help and letting me know."

Caretaker walked over to Whumpee's wheelchair.

"Are you ready to go inside?", Caretaker smiled at Whumpee.

Whumpee excitedly nodded.

Caretaker saw that Whumpee's oxygen line was crooked.

"Please don't play with your oxygen line Whumpee", Caretaker adjusted it.

"Sorry, my cheek was itchy", Whumpee giggled, "I tried to fix it."

Caretaker looked over Whumpee.

Even in the warm summer heat, Whumpee was dressed in thick pants and a cozy cardigan. Their illnesses made them look like a skeleton of a person.

"Alright here we go", Caretaker unlocked the chair.

Whumpee was instantly amazed by the first room.

"Wow this is amazing", Whumpee awed.

"Look up Whumpee", Caretaker pointed.

Whumpee looked up.

A giant skeleton hung overhead.

"What is that from?", Whumpee looked back at Caretaker.

"I believe a whale or something along that line", Caretaker winked.

Whumpee nodded.

The next room was a tunnel, all sorts of fish swam along the sides and overhead.

"I can't believe I almost left this life without seeing an aquarium", Whumpee's head swiveled as they tried to see every fish they could.

Caretaker felt their heart sink.

"I know Whumpee, we will get as many adventures in before your body gives out on you", Caretaker gently rubbed Whumpee's shoulder.

Caretaker's mind drifted to their last doctor's appointment. The news wasn't great, Whumpee's illness they had been battling had turned terminal.

"Caretaker look at the shark", Whumpee pulled Caretaker from their thoughts.

"Whumpee, there's a bathroom up here, I'm gonna pop in there really quick", Caretaker turned the chair, "do you need anything?"

"Can I have my water before you go in?" Whumpee smiled, "I think I'm okay."

Caretaker handed them their water before going into the bathroom.

Whumpee had only taken a few sips when the water suddenly went down the wrong way.

Caretaker heard Whumpee start coughing and rushed to finish.

Whumpee had managed to catch their breath. They looked for their water bottle, and realized it was on the floor.

"Crap", they sighed.

Someone came by and saw Whumpee's struggle.

"Here let me get that for you", they bent and picked it up.

"Thankyou so much", Whumpee grinned.

"Are you okay. I heard you cough. It sounded pretty bad", the person questioned, "I'm a nurse, I don't mind."

Caretaker hurried out of the bathroom, "oh thank goodness", they breathed a sigh of relief, "can't leave you alone for a minute can I?"

"Water went down the wrong way", Whumpee whispered hoarsely, "they helped me pick up my bottle", Whumpee reached up to their nose, "I think I got a nose bleed from that though."

"Yep that is easy to do with your oxygen drying you out", Caretaker hurried to their bag and started pulling things out.

"Would you like some help? I'm a nurse", the person offered again.

"I appreciate it, but I think I have everything I need", Caretaker smiled, "thankyou for helping them also, I really appreciate it."

"Of course", the person turned, "I hope you feel better soon."

"Thankyou", Whumpee grinned.

Caretaker pushed Whumpee to an empty bench and set to work.

They squirted on some hand sanitizer, before sliding gloves on and sanitizing the gloves. Caretaker gently removed the oxygen chord and handed it to Whumpee.

"Hold that to your nose while I clean you up", Caretaker sighed as they pulled out some tissue.

"Not too bad Whumpee", Caretaker grinned as they finished up with the bloody nose, "you should be good to go."

"Can we sit here for a little while? These fish look cool", Whumpee looked around, then let Caretaker replace the oxygen.

Caretaker packed the care bag up then pushed Whumpee to get closer to watch the fish.

"I'll be back on that bench if you need me, just let me know when you're ready", Caretaker patted their shoulder, "don't hurry though, just enjoy this."

Caretaker quietly watched Whumpee, who was giggling at the fish. They saw the stranger from earlier in the corner of their eye.

"May I?", the nurse questioned.

"Yes absolutely", Caretaker scooted over a little.

"I know you probably can't talk much about it, but are they okay?", the nurse pointed at Whumpee, "I know it's none of my business, but they've been on my mind since I saw them earlier while you were buying the tickets."

Caretaker glanced at Whumpee before turning to the nurse, "they have been fighting an illness for a long time. Unfortunately, we just found out it is terminal", Caretaker sighed, "they don't have much longer unfortunately."

The nurse looked at Whumpee sadly, then at Caretaker.

"We are doing different adventures. As much as their body will allow at least", Caretaker sighed, "they've never been to an aquarium, so this is what we decided on today."

"Will you both be okay?", the nurse fought tears from falling. This wasn't the time for them to cry.

"We are both living each day like its their last. We are both scared for that day, but I am also scared for the next days to follow. I uh, I don't want to be alone, I don't want my dear friend to leave me. I know that sounds horrible of me. Because I don't want them to be in pain any longer. They don't deserve this. They are the kindest human you could have ever known. So full of life", Caretaker wiped away a tear, "I apologize for saying all of this to a complete stranger."

"It's okay, it's not easy to be someone's caregiver. You take on so many responsibilities, and often don't get to talk about your needs", the nurse patted Caretaker's hand, "you are doing amazing things for them though. I'm glad they have a friend like you."

Whumpee watched the fish. They didn't let on to the fact they could hear the whole conversation.

That night, Whumpee lay in bed and watched Caretaker get their monitors set up for the night.

"Caretaker?", Whumpee whispered.

"Yes Whumpee?", Caretaker looked at them with concern, "are you uncomfortable?"

"I heard your conversation earlier with the nurse", Whumpee whimpered.

"Oh you did?", Caretaker sighed, "I'm sorry."

"I-I'm sorry Caretaker, I know this has been hard on you. I'm sorry that you have to watch me die in front of you", Whumpee was almost crying.

Caretaker knelt down, "Whumpee I don't.... Whumpee I get to take care of you. It's hard yes, but I couldn't imagine letting someone else do it. It's not a chore to take care of you... I hope you know that."

Whumpee nodded, "I'm sorry still that you have to do this..... I-I don't want to die.. I don't want to leave you either", Caretaker wiped away tears from Whumpee as they spoke.

Caretaker then wiped their own tears, "it's okay Whumpee, "I know", they forced a smile, "what should we do tomorrow? Hmmm, no more talk about dying."

The night nurse came into Whumpee's bedroom and started getting ready to watch over them.

"Can we go for a walk in the park tomorrow?", Whumpee smiled at their nurse.

"Absolutely", Caretaker nodded and nudged Whumpee's cheek lovingly, "goodnight Whumpee, sleep tight."

Caretaker jumped out of bed when they heard the monitor make the sound no one in that house wanted to hear.

Caretaker raced into Whumpee's room and saw the nurse trying to get Whumpee back.

Caretaker went to Whumpee's side and grabbed Whumpee's hand.

"Whumpee come on", Caretaker cried as they buried their face into the thin hand, "we need to go to the park tomorrow."

Their thin hand was already cold.

"They're gone", Caretaker sobbed as they looked at the nurse, "they're gone."

"I'll call the ambulance", the nurse wiped away tears as they left the room.

"Whumpee", Caretaker's voice cracked, "I love you so much Whumpee."

At the hospital, the nurse had started their shift. They still had the conversation with Caretaker fresh on their mind.

Suddenly a gurney was wheeled pass.

The nurse overheard someone saying the person on the gurney needed a pronouncement of death.

The nurses heart sank as Caretaker walked in following the gurney.

Caretaker saw the nurse and nodded as they walked past.

Whumpee was pronounced dead.

Caretaker was given a private room to wait for the paperwork to be finished. They hadn't collected Whumpee yet, so Caretaker sat beside the bed and gently held Whumpee's hand.

The nurse came in in time to see Caretaker wipe their eyes on their sleeve.

Caretaker turned to see them.

"I-I'm sorry", the nurse whispered, "I am so sorry."

Caretaker nodded, "thankyou", their voice stuck in their throat, "I think they knew today was their last day. They didn't want to say it though."

The nurse nodded, "do you have anyone coming up here for you or them?"

"Yes a few friends will be up to mourn with me for a few moments. One of them is the transport for Whumpee's body."

Caretaker sighed, "we already had everything set up for when this happened, Whumpee was happy they got to pick their own casket and funeral playlist. I was always amazed they could find some humor in this."

The nurse nodded as they stepped closer, and patted Caretaker's back.

"I'm going to miss them", Caretaker smiled weakly, "they wanted to go to the park for a walk.... today I guess it's early morning. I haven't even looked at the time yet."

Some people came into the room.

"Hey Caretaker", they greeted then looked at Whumpee.

"I'll leave you to be with your friends and family", the nurse started to go.

"Thankyou for helping them earlier today, and mourning with me", Caretaker gave a small grin, "I really appreciate your caring for them."

"Yes of course", the nurse smiled weakly.

The nurse hurried to their station and started to weep.

They told some of the other nurses what had happened at the aquarium and about the deceased patient.

Friends and family surrounded Caretaker and Whumpee.

After Whumpee was taken, Caretaker decided to walk home... making sure to take a long stroll through the park.

Are you crying yet? For some light heartedness, please scroll down and enjoy some pictures from my aquarium trip.

I will not lie. The Sting Rays and Sharks were my favorite. In the video, see if you can find the sea turtle, I didn't even realize I filmed them until later. There were two sea turtles. They were both rescued and were not able to return to the wild.

Taglist. As always please let me know if you want to be added or taken off of the list. It's not a problem at all. @villainsandheroes @the-beasts-have-arrived @sacredwrath @porschethemermaid @monarchthefirst @generic-whumperz @bloodyandfrightened @freefallingup13 @notpeppermint @cyborg0109 @idontreallyexistyet @thebejeweledwatercat @painfulplots @whumpbump @everythingsscary @skittles-the-whumpee @expressionless-fr @theforeverdyingperson @legendarydelusiongoatee @candleshopmenace @whumpanthems @lavndvrr @ivymyers @starfields08000 @a-living-canvas

[idrawfunkythings]

DCAtober Day 15: Hide

Words 1,600+ Summary: You knew Moon loved a good prank. So nothing could possibly go wrong

Author here! This is NOT in any way canon to my fic, but if it were, it would take place after the reader is made aware of the glitch. They know Moon has been malfunctioning, but have never experienced it themselves

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was turning out to be a pretty good night shift.

All your tasks were around the lobby, like rebooting a few Staffbots, clearing out the expired food from the kitchen and greasing the gears of the ride on machines by the elevators. After that, you’d gone to the daycare and done some basic cleaning, going over any spots the Staffbots missed. It wasn’t their fault - they were still learning.

Moon had left you in their company, having to leave to do a sweep of the plex. He’d eyed the bots distrustfully, like they’d somehow manage to take your head off with a mop or something, but you’d assured him that they were harmless (and teased him over the idea of him worrying about you, which made him grab you by the back of your shirt and toss you into the ballpit).

Anyway, you’d crawled out and he’d left, and you were done with your final party room, which meant you got to relax until he got back and harped on about getting rest. The bots rolled around aimlessly when the cleaning was done, which almost felt mean. You had no idea how sentient they were - were they even choosing to wander?

You didn’t want to dwell on that, so you packed up your supplies into the janitor’s closet and slid down the stair railing to the padded play area. A quick check of your watch told you Moon was coming back to the daycare. Hmmm. You were in the mood for a game.

During the day, you’d crawled around with the kids in the playplace - okay, yes, it was gross, but you had done your best not to think about that. You knew for a fact that Sun had sanitized it when they all left, however, because you’d cleared out the leftover rags to send to the laundry. Therefore, there was significantly less kid gunk on it now than at any other time of the day.

You eye the tunnels.

Moon loved to scare you, wasn’t it time you did it back? You doubted you even could, what with his thermal sensors and night vision, but you were choosing to ignore that fact because damnit, you missed having fun like a kid.

Before your brain had the chance to catch up to your idea, you were sliding into a bottom tunnel, scrambling up each level until you were positioned at the exit to the bridge connecting two of the towers. Hopefully, Moon would come searching for you, and you could jump out onto his head.

It was a flawless plan, really.

You hear the shutter door to the daycare open, and restrain a quiet laugh. This was so stupid. Moon’s bells jingle softly as he descends the stairs, shoving open the doors and stretching his robotic joints.

One of your legs is starting to go dead. It wouldn’t hurt for him to hurry up a bit.

“Starlight?” Moon says, red eyes scanning the room. They pass right over you - guess his thermal sensors were turned off for the moment. You shift in your position, and your shoe squeaks against the plastic mat lining the structure. Damnit.

You see Moon’s head whip around at the noise, cursing under your breath. Well, there goes that surprise. Rolling your eyes, you prepare to drag yourself out of your hiding spot and pretend you were simply just exploring the structure, but you freeze at Moon’s face.

His eyes are glowing red as always, but his sclera is narrowed, like a shutter going over a camera lens. Only a small red pinprick pokes through, and both of them are locked completely on you.

The wire drops from the ceiling.

In a heartbeat, Moon is hooked up and drops on the bridge in front of you, faceplate spinning slowly. You hold up your hands, rolling your eyes. Of course he’d tried to beat you at your own game.

“Oh, great party trick, buddy. I’m so scared.”

The robot doesn’t say anything.

“Seriously. Knock it off, dude, you look creepy.”

The wire unhooks and sails away into the darkness of the rafters. Moon’s eyes are locked on you.

You scoot back instinctively, unsure of what else to do. “Are you short circuiting or something?”

His head does one full rotation, during which you both stare at each other, the only noise your quiet breathing and the soft scraping of metal as it spins.

He lunges.

“What the fuck?” You shout, scrambling backwards in a panic. “Okay, you win! Quit it!”

He doesn’t seem to want to quit it, because he’s wriggling into the structure and crawling after you. You drag yourself away, yelping as your hand slips and you tumble down one of the kiddy ramps that takes you to the lower level. Moon follows, on all fours like a lioness stalking her prey. His fingers stretch out in front of him as he descends, the way he does when he’s telling the kids the tickle monster will get them, except this doesn’t feel like a joke anymore.

You flip onto your front and scramble madly, trying to remember the layout of the tower and where the nearest exit is. The problem lies in the fact that you are not kid sized, and you can’t get through the tunnels anywhere as near as fast as they could.

Behind you, you hear quiet chuckles. First intermittent, then becoming constant. You take a corner, clambering through a plastic tunnel to the next tower over. Moon follows, taking his sweet time, peeking around the corner mockingly each time you dare to look back.

You slide down another ramp, finally on the bottom floor, and head for the nearest part of the structure that has an open space. The security desk was right there, and so was the light switch. All you had to do was get there, flick the switch and then berate Moon through Sun for a good half an hour. You were gonna be fine.

Metal fingers clasp your ankle and jerk you backwards.

You scream, because what else would you do, and start madly kicking out at the robot. You feel your feet connect with something, and hear it too because Moon screeches and draws back, giving you time to slip away and onto the playmat.

The desk is right there.

“Intruders are not allowed in the daycare.”

Stupidly, stupidly, you look over your shoulder in shock at the voice. Moon is standing unnaturally, hunched over, his head dangling to the side and his hat sliding off. You’d never seen his hat slide off. You thought it was attached to him.

A hand grabs your shoulder, stopping you in your tracks and making you scream. You struggle, but his other hand comes around and clasps your neck, and then he pounces and pins you to the ground, crushing your throat.

“It’s past your bedtime.”

His voice is distorted, and you can barely make out the sentence with the amount of glitches that interrupt each word. His eyes are narrowed to even smaller pinpricks, and oh god, you might actually die. You might actually die at the hands of your friend, all because of some glitch in his system.

“Do I look like an intruder?” you shout, like any normal person would, because the alternative is getting killed instantly. Moon hesitates, his grip loosening. “Look, at me, cheese head! See this stupid watch?”

You can’t actually show him said watch, because that hand is pinned under one of his knees as he straddles you, but he pauses long enough for you to grab his faceplate with your other hand and slam it to the side, sending his head spinning like a ballerina. He lets go of you to stop it, and lets his guard just in time for you to buck him with your hips and throw him off balance.

Okay, fuck, you have no idea how in god’s name you managed that, especially because he was like one hundred times stronger than you, but you sure as hell weren’t gonna take a break to ponder it. You propel yourself upwards, lunging forwards and sliding behind the desk just as Moon sliced a hand towards where you had been three seconds prior.

You heart is pounding. Your hands are sweaty. You probably would have pissed yourself if you had to deal with that any longer. But you’re alive, so none of that matters right now.

Shaking, you stand up and take stock of yourself. No broken bones, maybe a few bruises. Nothing major. You’re okay. It’s okay.

Moon is glowering at you, hands on the very edge of the desk as he seems to be trying very hard to lean over and finish you off. The desk has claw marks etched into the end. Something was very, very wrong here.

Of course, you don’t feel like dealing with that right now. So you lean to the right, smack the shit out of the light switch, and watch frozen in place as Moon makes the switch to Sun.

“Nice one, asshole,” you exhale, not bothering to give Sun the time to sift through their memory bank and see what happened. You knew most nights he was resting in their head, not watching, and this was clearly no exception. “My shift is over. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

You march out of the daycare, leaving Sun staring blankly at the claw marks in the desk, trying to figure out what the hell he had missed. You manage to make it to the lobby before your legs give out, and you sit there for a good while, remaining in the permanent light given off by the walkway.

You were alive. Everything is okay.

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

Dracula AU, Pt 3

Lena's anxiety lessens only slightly when Kara assures her that no one was hurt. When Kara lifts her hand to unlock the cell, Lena halts.

"Don't." Bitterness grinds like glass in her throat. "We don't know it won't happen again."

Tears of helplessness glitter in Lena's eyes. It's been weeks of this, each day eroding her sense of reality. And now she's imprisoned, trapped in a cell with none of the contact that had served to ground her even slightly.

"I don't know what to do," Lena confesses, her voice cracking helplessly. Her tears spill onto her cheeks. "Kara..."

"We'll figure it out," Kara vows. "We always do."

And this time, they have to.

----

Trapped in her cell, there's little for Lena to do but sleep. After weeks of torment, she's exhausted, and with nothing to keep her busy she slips into uneasy sleep. But this time, she dreams.

She treads through thick mist, heavy and cloying in her throat. It disorients her, so much so that it takes her several moments to realize what she's looking at when the mist parts to reveal a dark, unfamiliar chamber.

It's several moments later that she realizes her body is not her own. Her limbs feel heavy, her motions clunky as she turns to survey the space around her. When she sees a crumpled heap of a body, clearly dead, in a shadowy corner, she knows exactly what's happening.

The mind sharing goes both ways.

"I'm in the sewer," she says aloud, recognizing the echo of flowing water bouncing against the stone walls. Her words hiss behind unfamiliar teeth and lips. She can only hope that the words travel across the link to her own body, that Kara will not only hear her, but remember.

She narrates all that she sees. A dilapidated crate to one side, with an ancient book sitting atop it with tattered pages in plain view. She doesn't recognize the language printed on them, but the letters are reminiscent of the cyrillic alphabet.

When she exhausts what's in the chamber, she ventures into the narrow passageway beyond. She needs to know where she is, but the cramped corridor gives her nothing but the stench of sewage. She wanders aimlessly, uncertain of how far she travels. She speaks her path-- a left here, a right there... until she hears the scuff of a footstep not her own.

She freezes, then ducks out of sight as a sanitation worker turns a corner at the far end of the tunnel. Lena swallows when the scent of his sweat tingles in her nose, his pulse thumping in her ears. Hunger tears at her throat, and she digs clawed fingers into the concrete wall she hides behind her, to fight the ravenous urge to feed.

No. Not just feed.

Hunt.

The man moves on quickly, unaware of her presence. Only when his scent is once again replaced by sewage does Lena release the wall, and turn the corner once more. If a worker is here, there must be a point of entry nearby.

She traces the man's path to a ladder, haloed by sunlight cascading through the open manhole above. The light sears her vision, causing her to recoil. But she grits her teeth-- her fangs-- and pushes through the pain to take one step, then another towards the light.

Hope sparks in Lena's mind-- beyond learning where she might be, perhaps, just maybe, she could kill this monstrous body altogether. She might perish in the light along with it, but Lena can't bring herself to care. It's time to end this.

Almost as soon as the thought forms in her mind, another presence uncurls in her consciousness. The monster slowly wakes, a vague identity that sharpens with every step she takes. Soon, it begins to struggle for control, slowing her progress to a shuffle then a halt. Pain lances through Lena's mind as the monster's mind rails against hers.

It would be so easy to let go-- she WANTS to relinquish control, to return to the familiarity of her own body. But she fights. For every last inch, she clings to control, desperate to gain something, anything, to aid them.

Pressure builds in Lena's chest, shortening her breath. She's not going to make it to the ladder, let alone the daylight above. But just as her consciousness snaps away, she catches sight of a small placard riveted to the wall of the tunnel.

"Hayward!" she shouts, just as feels her consciousness snap away. In a blink, she's back in the Tower, safe in her cell. Chest heaving, she scrambles to her feet. "Hayward Street! Kara--!"

She whirls around, eyes wide as they meet Kara's.

Kara lifts one hand, waggling the small voice recorder held in her fingers. Kara did hear-- and reacted just the way Lena had hoped.

A grin spreads across Kara's features.

"We've got him."

[xandes-regular]

Tartar wins

the zombie AU

-

Written by Xande and Nora B)

“[Congratulations, number 10,008! The door to the promised land will now open!]”

Those words echoed through the tunnels of the deepsea metro. Agent 8 and Cuttlefish stood in front of the telephone as it lifted the thangs off the ground and merged them together. Completely unaware that the artificial intelligence was assembling a device that would end their lives.

Unbeknownst to them, a few floors above an inkling was sneaking around the entrails of the complex looking for a way to reunite with their captain. Having received a distress signal on their CQ-80, Agent 3 swiftly made their way through the cramped corridors of the facility towards the location of the signal.

“[INGREDIENT ACQUISITION COMPLETE… REFORMING MATTER…]”

The voice rang once more, somehow even more robotic than before, sending chills through 3’s whole body. They knew time was running out and that their master was in danger. Room after room, the young squid passed by like a gust of wind, their heartbeat ringing loudly in their ear. Entering the next room they saw ahead a large window that gave them a view of the floor below. Then they saw it in the distance, their captain and an octoling trapped inside an oversized blender, its blades slowly descending upon them. With no hesitation, Agent 3 took a step back and thrust themselves forward, jumping through the window and dropping to the floor below.

3 crashed into the glass ceiling of the metro terminal, diving into it as if it were a pool. It was as if time had stopped. The determined agent descended from above like a sea angel coming to the rescue of their trapped allies. However, to the dismay of all the inkfish present, Agent 3 didn’t quite make the mark, their jump not quite powerful enough to reach the machine and knock it over.

With a dry and loud thud, 3 hit the cold floor of the deepsea metro. It was silent for a minute as the inkling tried to hold their head up to look at Cuttlefish, their eyes locked one last time. 3’s captain had a solemn but proud look on his face, he closed his eyes and gave an approving nod and smile to his prodigy. In the blink of an eye, the blades came down upon the old squid and the young octopus. Agent 3 had failed to save them. Tartar had won.

The squid was paralyzed, their mouth hung open in shock staring ahead at the large blender-shaped contraption now filled with a viscous off-green substance.

“[REFORMING COMPLETE. TOTAL BIOMASS SUFFICIENT FOR CANON OPERATION. TRANSPORTATION REQUIRED]”

The telephone spoke again, a loud buzzer could be heard after its voice stopped. The subway train idle in the terminal suddenly sprang to life and sped off. Taking its place came a more disheveled-looking cart. It was much older than the other train and also much taller. Its doors slid open and out came a few green octarians. Although Agent 3 knew they were dangerous, the young squid found no energy at the time to stand up and fight. Luckily, the sanitized octopodes paid them no mind. Carefully, they placed the blender atop a transportation device and led it back towards the train, the opening barely just large enough to fit the whole machine through. As quickly as the subway cart had arrived it had departed, only the sound of its take-off was left in the abandoned terminal.

The defeated agent sat up, taking a moment to calm themselves and think of what to do next. Their captain was gone and they had no communication with the surface world, and they were stuck underground with no one to help them. The thoughts were overwhelming, they could feel the emotions welling up in their throat and the tears pooling in their eyes. What should they do? What could they even do now?

The squid slapped themself and shook their thoughts away. There was no time to be caught up in insecurities, they had to go after that computer and stop it from completing its plan. They stood up and shook the dust off their uniform, following the noise that still lingered in the tunnels. It felt like they had been running for hours, the roars reverberating and replaying with no end. Anxiety welled up again, what if there’s no escape? What if they had to spend the rest of their life underground?

Bang!

Their mind was rushing with so many thoughts they didn’t see the train parked in front of them and hit it at full speed. The squid shook their head and reoriented themself, realizing they had reached some sort of service terminal. They walked through the large door and found themselves in a room that had no roof, the walls seemed to extend endlessly upwards. It was an elevator. Perhaps to the surface? 3 quickly made their way to the control panel seated on the wall and pressed the button to ascend.

Everything in the metro seemed to take an eternity, it was like the whole building was asleep waiting for something to happen. The elevator was no different, the travel up was dull and long, exacerbated by 3’s anxiety. It felt like a week had passed once they reached the top.

The lift had led them to a spacious room, screens displaying complicated graphs and charts decorated the walls and ceiling with control panels placed beneath them. Before Agent 3 could give their surroundings much thought the floor began to shake, knocking 3 off their balance.

A large window at the end of the room suddenly opened, revealing that they were just above the water. 3 fought through the tremors and approached the glass. They could see inkopolis just barely out on the horizon, but the more the structure shook the better they could see the city. That's when the agent realized the room was getting further and further away from the water, the whole facility was emerging from the depths. Then it all stopped abruptly, the building was perfectly still again. The intercom buzzed suddenly, startling the young squid.

“Krrrt… [Greetings, Interloper.]” The same voice from the old telephone spoke again “[This is commander Tartar. I assume you’ve followed my trail into this room in the hopes of stopping me. However, your efforts were in vain, Inkling.]”

The words shook and confused Agent 3, surely they weren't too late, surely they could still stop whatever the AI's plan was. Once again the room began to shake, Agent 3 once again looked outside and they could see that right below them a large machine was extending from the structure.

“[Now behold as I destroy the world you know and my new perfect civilization rises from its ashes.]”

The machine that had appeared began to whirr and glow as it charged up. 3 jolted around the room trying to decipher the data on the screens, pushing buttons, and pulling levers in hopes of stopping the cannon from firing. However, no matter what the Agent tried, nothing worked. All 3 could do was stand and watch their world in its final moments as time ran thin, hoping something or someone would come and stop the cannon.

All of a sudden the whirring and the light were gone. For just a second, it’s as if time had stopped, giving the young squid some tranquility. Then just as suddenly as it had become quiet it became loud. The machine let out a grueling scream as a blinding flash began to emerge from its nozzle. Following the light, a stream of green ooze shot out. This substance was similar to what the agent’s captain had been turned into. 

Agent 3 watched in silent horror as the ooze quickly traveled toward inkopolis. The sludge covered the buildings and streets, taking in everything in its path. They imagined it covering the citizens and flooding their houses, causing absolute destruction. 3’s body shook and their legs gave out, dropping to their knees in awe and horror as the bright green light flooded the room. 3 had just watched the world die.

Beep!

Once again the ground shook and the cannon retreated into the building's gullet. Though 3 had been stunned by what had just occurred, the sudden noises had snapped the young agent back to reality.

Soon enough the room would be filled with sanitized octarians, 3 had to move quickly. Hastily, the defeated squid stood up and ran back to the elevator, riding it back down to where the old train was.

The doors of the carriage were open and Agent 3 cautiously checked the inside to make sure it was safe. As soon as the squid stepped foot inside something vibrated in their pocket, their CQ-80 device had sprung back to life. As soon as 3 took the machine out of their pocket it vibrated once again and manifested a holographic display. It was a map of the metro.

The agent took a moment to study the interface, the location of the old train was displayed with a glowing circle. Maybe the device could control the train? 3 felt it was worth a try. Their eyes darted around the map looking for a station near inkopolis, the map was impressively huge but after a second of looking they found it.

Simply marked as “final station” was a far-off terminal that linked back to inkopolis square. Without thinking twice, 3 selected that location. The doors slammed shut and the old wagon sped off towards the destination. In a flash, they had arrived at the terminal barely giving 3 the chance to take in how fast the train was moving.

As soon as the doors of the old carrier opened a very particular smell flooded the inside. At first, it almost smelled like pungent rotting fish but very quickly that gave way to an overwhelmingly clean and sanitized smell close to that of a hospital. The weird combination made the agent gag. They took a deep breath, covered their mouth, and walked out cautiously.

The terminal was eerily quiet. The only noise was the humming from the train and the howling winds outside. After walking around for a bit, they could see the exit of the terminal just above a short flight of stairs. 3 carefully made their way ahead, stepping around the small puddles of green ink that dotted the station floor.

Exiting the terminal, 3 was hit with an unpleasant sight. Green sludge covered the streets, mixing in with the rubble from the surrounding shops. The city looked completely foreign to what it used to be. 3 had to push through, they knew they couldn’t afford to dwell any longer.   The city had never felt so abandoned before. Agent 3 began to ponder and a dreadful realization washed over them.  Despite the city just being hit by a giant cannon, 3 had not seen a single body, not one trapped inside a car or lying motionless in the street. It was as if the town had been completely emptied of life. That notion almost gave 3 some comfort, maybe the civilians had escaped the attack and were all safe.

After constant walking, 3 had arrived at a place that seemed much more open, it took them a second to realize that they had arrived at inkopolis plaza. It was clear this place had been the main target of Tartar's attack. Though the rest of the city was somewhat intact, inkopolis plaza was almost entirely gone. The buildings had seemingly disappeared, leaving in their place rubble and more splotches of the bright green ooze.

Crack!

3 had no time to gawk at the uncanny sight. A sound ate away at the silence from a dark corner, a crackling of glass shards. The agent quickly brandished their weapon and cautiously approached the noise to investigate.

The rummaging sound continued as the young agent got closer, the sound becoming clearer as they did. The glass noises became sharper and it was now accompanied by a second wetter sound, it was similar to a water balloon full of slime expanding and slapping the floor. It was a gross sound, as gross as the smell that had followed them since they surfaced. Agent 3 swallowed dryly and trudged forward towards the source.

The agent’s eyes widened as they turned the corner. Crawling in the rubble was a horrific creature, its body was made from that same green ooze that tainted the city, and it limped sluggishly across the floor as if it were struggling to keep itself together. 3 took a step back in shock, accidentally stepping on some broken glass. The creature immediately stopped when they heard the agent. What seemed to be its head flipped 180 degrees to face the young squid, its sunken hollow eyes locked with the young squid the creature let out a grueling noise.

“Ahhhgg-…”

A gurgling sound came forth as air escaped the monster’s throat, it began to move towards the agent. Slimy arm-like appendages extended from the oozy mass reaching for the cowering squid, clumps of green ink falling off of it. Agent 3 was frozen for an instant but their survival instincts quickly snapped them back. Pointing their splattershot at the creature they opened fire and submerged the mass in their own orange ink.

The horrid noise ceased and the agent breathed a sigh of relief taking a moment to recollect their thoughts. As they stared at the orange pile they wondered what that monster was, its strange anatomy reminded them of their own inkling body, maybe it was trying to copy the agent? Before they could give much thought to that idea they noticed the puddle of ink in front of them ripple and warp, its copper sheen slowly rusting to a sickly green.

A figure emerged from the puddle, the creature had been reborn, and Agent 3’s attack had only slowed it down. It resumed its stagnant pursuit of the young squid, this time the bubbling noises were louder and twisted themselves into what seemed like words:

“Hhun... grryy-...”  

A cold sensation stabbed the agent on their back as they realized the creature’s intention. 3 began stepping backwards as the monster crawled towards them. They tap shot the creature but it simply absorbed the inky projectiles into its body. Realizing the uselessness of their weapon, the young squid turned their back to the oozing mass and sped off towards the manhole opening that led to the octo valley.

As the young squid ran through the empty plaza, the piles of rubble that circled the place all began to shake. More creatures like the one pursuing the agent rose from the cracks, flooding the streets and blocking the way to the manhole. 3 saw no option but to retreat to the empty streets.

Though the creatures were slow individually, as the living piles of goo stacked against one another their slow crawl turned into a monstrous wave chasing after its prey. 3 ran through the tight street corners making their way to inkopolis square, the once quiet and dead town was now filled with the screams and pleads of a hungry tidal wave crashing against the buildings just behind the agent.   The manhole cover finally came into view, but there was no time to stop as the large mass was following close behind. The agent positioned themselves by the manhole cover and quickly jumped in.

In the blink of an eye, the young squid found themself in the splatoon HQ atop the octo canyon. Thinking quickly, they put the heavy snow globe over the exit hole to stop the creatures and then: Thud!

A loud bang echoed out as the mass hit the blockade, Agent 3 could tell it wouldn’t hold for long but it bought them some time. 3 ran to the camp’s radio system and tried to get communication with the other agents, they tuned into every channel they could but they were only met by static.

“Hey, I think that noise came from over here.”

3’s ears perked, a voice suddenly rang across the HQ. A pair of footsteps approached from within the canyon, a duo of octolings now stood at the inkling’s base. The agent instinctively raised their weapon at the amazones.

“Whoa hey!” The octoling stumbled back and raised her hands. “We’re not a threat! Please don’t shoot at us!” Pleaded the octoling trooper. Although 3 was trained to deal with soldiers much like the pair in front of them, something in the octopus’ voice made it clear she wasn’t lying, reluctantly, the squid holstered their weapon.

Both troops relax and lower their arms. “We’re just here to investigate this outpost.” Explained one of them as the other walked over to the covered manhole, seemingly reacting to the octopus’s presence. The snow globe began to shake violently as the creatures tried to push their way through.

“Hey, that squid was followed! We gotta retreat right now!” Yelled the octoling back at the group, taking her attention away from the cover for a moment. As she got up to run a gooey hand slid through and snatched her arm, quickly riding up her limb, trapping her. More and more slime creeped out of the drain, clumping up into a humanoid shape over the ensnared soldier.

3 stood up and tried to run to save her but was stopped by the soldier’s companion. “No, don’t do that. The oozers already got her, we have to go. now!” The agent didn’t listen to her, however, escaping the octoling’s grasp, they ran to the rescue of the poor soldier. 3 grabbed the octopus by her shoulders and tried to unstuck her, but the creature did not let go of its prey.

The agent could see the monster’s teeth were carved into the soldier’s flesh. 3 pulled harder trying to free the octopus but it was no use. Suddenly, 3’s fingers sunk deep into her shoulders as if they were made of slime, pulling their hands back in shock they noticed they were covered in green sludge.

A green hand reached out and grabbed the squid’s tentacle, it was the soldier’s, she had turned into an oozer. The newly turned zombie bit into 3’s hair, ripping a part of it off. The other octoling quickly pulled 3 away from the ever-growing green mass. She took out a knife, cut off 3’s tentacle, and tossed it back into the pile. “Damn it, Inkling! I told you we had to go!” The soldier yelled, grabbing 3 by the collar as they hastily fled from the breached camp, hoping into a kettle that blew them down into the depths of the Octarian turf.

The duo landed in Cephalo HQ, the soldier fiddled with her shades for a moment before letting out a sigh and grasping 3's arm. “Our fall damaged my communication device so we'll have to make our way to the shelter on foot.” She said as she led the inkling through a hidden path in the cliffside.

Although Agent 3 had explored these underground channels countless times before, the octarian soldier was leading them to a destination 3 did not recognize. The inkling started to wonder if perhaps this was a trap laid out by the octarians to capture the agent.

Snap!

“Hey, inkling. Pay attention.” The octarian snapped her fingers, waking 3 from their thoughts. The soldier knocked at a large metal door, a little window slid open.

“Who goes?” Asked a voice from behind the opening. “I'm part of one of the scout teams. I found this inkling while investigating the Tentakeel outpost.” The octoling answered back, there was a short pause. “Er. I see that much. Where's ya pair?” The soldier sighed. “She was… Taken…” The metal door slid open revealing an octarian troop behind it. “My condolences, Soldier. Make sure ta report back ta ya superior.” The octoling saluted and marched past the guard, 3 tried to follow but was barred by the troop. “Ya follow me now. There’s someone who would like ta see ya.” Nudging Agent 3 just past the door, the octarian slammed the door shut and led the young squid a little further down the tunnel.

Yet another large metal door stood before them, the tentacle person opened it and pushed 3 inside, closing the door behind them. The inkling found themself in a long narrow room, bunk beds lined the walls and a few octarian troops walked around the place. Standing in the center of it all was a tall metal construct, it almost resembled a throne. The top of it suddenly rotated to face the lonesome inkling.

“Oh… What a surprise.” Said a voice that sounded familiar to 3, the metal structure compressed lower to the ground making its pilot evident. “If it isn’t the mighty agent from the squid beak splatoon.” Dj Octavio’s voice boomed, the squid instinctively reached for their weapon at the sight of their old enemy, a large metal hand lunged from the throne and grabbed the agent’s gun.  “Relax, Kid. It sucks for me too but we’re in a truce here.” The octoling emperor motioned towards an empty bunk. “Come on, I can tell you need a break. Sit down, I wanna have a word with you.”

3 sat down on the uncomfortable metal frame of the bed, Octavio followed and sat on his machine in front of the squid. They could see a large cut over the king’s eye they hadn’t noticed before. “First things first… Where’s that old geezer you have for a captain?” The agent was taken aback by the question, all the things that had happened today had distracted them from the loss of their master. They lowered their head somberly. “Ah… I understand. Part of me hoped I’d be there for the old man’s final moments…” Octavio looked away, seemingly deep in thought, the two inkfish shared a moment of silence for their fallen friend.

The DJ’s dry and harsh voice broke the silence. “This whole situation happened so fast. I was still trapped in that snow globe when it all started. Those two cousins were sitting around waiting for the agent to come back, then the sky just…” He waved his tentacles “It turned green, I saw those two trying to contact someone then they just got up and left. I have no idea where they went, but they never came back for me so I just broke outta that glass prison myself.” The king sighed, he was clearly tired and shaken. “My old tentacles don’t work the same as they did long ago so it was a slow trudge through those battlements up there. Luckily I came across some of my soldiers, they told me they were running from the octo valley base, some ‘green creature’ had invaded the place and was attacking the soldiers and their weapons didn’t work on it or whatever…” His eyes focused on the cut tentacle that hung from the side of the squid’s head. “You’ve already come across those ‘oozers’ haven’t you? So I don’t need to explain it to you…  Have you seen the other green ones though?” 3’s ears perked up, their head lifted to meet with Octavio’s gaze.

“I see… It seems sometimes, when an oozer bites someone, they don’t turn into another one of their kind, sometimes…” The king swallowed dryly, bringing a tentacle up to the scar on his eye. “Sometimes they keep their minds and bodies. I came across one of these while I was coming down, it attacked me but luckily my soldiers were there… It gave us quite the fight and ended up running away.” 3 leaned over and put their hand on octavio’s tentacle in an effort to comfort the octarian king.

3 wasn’t used to this more vulnerable side of Octavio, the octopus emperor always seemed cold and evil but right now the agent could see him for what he was, a person. “Inkling… I have a proposition for you…” the squid’s attention was fully directed at the king’s words. “These smart infected could be very dangerous, but I know you’re dangerous too.” He placed his tentacles on the agent’s shoulders. “I’d like to recruit you as an elite among my troops, to protect the innocent people that live underground…” The king’s eye was wide open, they could tell the conflict he was feeling, the same themself was feeling, that of forming an allyship with a past enemy.

The agent was quiet for a second considering the emperor’s words. In some form this whole conflict was their fault, they were the one that failed to stop tartar and the cannon after all. 3 nodded their head in agreement to Octavio’s proposal. “Perfect. Thank you, Kid.” The DJ’s face contorted to the closest thing he could make of a smile. “Now, please, take a rest. You must’ve had a full day.” The king’s throne activated once more and carried him away.

The young squid laid down on the bed, though only one day had passed it had felt like it had been weeks, everything seemed to be crawling at a snail’s pace forward. Much like the deepsea metro before, now it was like the whole world had been plunged into stasis.

3 sighed and closed their eyes. Tomorrow is another day

To be continued 

(This was my first ever writting project so i really hope you guys enjoy this, thank you so much to my friend nora for helping me with this)

[absolutebl]

Hi!

I love your Blog and love to read your takes in everything. So thank you so much for all your Posts and thoughts about the industry etc.

Here is my question: i came across one of your posts where you wrote "actually gay, not bl gay" (it was a Post about Jojo and Only Friends) and while I FELT that I TOTALLY understood what you meant and instantly was like "yes 100% clear" Id love to read and learn more about what this means exactly and why some bls feel quite heteronormative while some dont. Would you mind explain the take on "actually gay Not Bl gay" a little bit? And why some Shows feel just more queer than others (besides the unbelievable stupid "gay only for you" trope lol)

Thank you so much and I hope you will have a nice day!

actually gay, not bl gay

There's actually quite a discourse on this right now mostly originating with @waitmyturtles and @wen-kexing-apologist (Post @killiru references above is here.)

I tend to mostly talk about this in broad brush strokes as a queer lens.

But there's a great ven diagram (which of course I've lost the link to) that approaches the idea of and queer lens by tunneling into its approach and intent:

about queers

by queers

for queers

How do different BLs intersect in different ways with these three elements?

When I said "actually gay, not BL gay" I was alluding to this discourse. Specifically the "about queers" category of BL.

There are characters in BL who read as genuinely gay (as in belonging to the queer family of this terrible reality we live in) and then there are those that seem more performative (to exist in a bubble of fantasy were sexual identity is almost unimportant, only the romance matters, everything is safe sweetness & light). For some queers this can read as manipulative or even exploitive (because it is inauthentic to most queer experiences). For me, it's fine... even desirable. I like the safe bubble. I enjoy the utter delusional escapism of it. Sometimes I will call this sanitized gay. (Since it is designed to make gay palatable to non-gay identified folks e.g. seme/uke.)

A sanitized gay BL may be unintentional but it is nested in origin yaoi and mm romance whose target market has never been the queer community, and whose authors have historically not been members of it, either.

Let's be frank, we queers are generally a terrible target market, we don't have enough spending power - especially not for a piece of pop culture as niched as BL. And as creators we really want our voices to be heard (obvs), which makes us produce content that those unsympathetic or uncaring find uncomfortable. (Yes, I know, fuck them, but also, they have all the money and the entertainment industry is a numbers game.)

So in the arena of office romances, just as an example:

actually gay = The New Employee

sanitized gay = Our Dating Sim

actual gay = Step By Step

sanitized gay = A Boss And a Babe

All of the above have the same tropes, archetypes, and premises. All of them are BL. Some are just... queerer feeling than others. And the characters in those shows (Step by Step and The New Employee) read as more "actually gay."

This has nothing to do with the actors, chemsitry, or how much we may personally like the show (Our Dating Sim is one of my absolute favorite BLs). It has to do with how closely those CHARACTERS intersect with the reality of queerness as we inhabit it today. It will be lots of little touches given to the drama by director and script:

language use,

surrounding friendships (and friendship style),

mannerisms and physicality (specially body language around straights vs other queer characters),

makeup & wardrobe,

facial expressions,

surrounding queer-coded behaviors by side characters,

layers of story nuance that indicate a complicated queer-driven back story.

Markers of specifically a queer identity are given to the leads.

These kinds of BLs are satisfying the "about queers" category. ("By queers" can be difficult to extract because IRL outting is involved. "For queers" is the rarest kind of BL, because making something specifically for us often alienates the majority of the rest of viewership/market. I could be argued that SCOY did this.)

I'm sure I've missed things, but I hope that kinda makes sense?

By/For/About discourse from @wen-kexing-apologist here:

Parts 1

Part 2

Part 3

I'm indebted to them for the links!

More Queer Stuff from Yours Truly

BL Linguistics & Queer Identity - I Am Gay versus I Like Men 

Will BL Get More Honestly Queer? 

Queer lens (from the director) and chemistry (from the actors) in BL (A Tale of Thousand Stars)

Touch & Daisy in Secret Crush On You - Queer Coded Language and 3rd Gender Identity

BL in Taiwan & Gay Marriage

Debating Queerbaiting in BL ( + Devil Judge... is it queerbaiting?) 

BL Actors and the Assumption of Queerness - outing actors, coming out, being out, more:  Is that BL actor actually queer?

So is it really fetishization? straight women loving bl 

Some BL fans are sasaengs, and it’s a problem in this fandom 

BLs That Highlight How Society Treats Queers

10 BLs That Are Honest to a Queer Experience 

(source)

[louserfilm]

Portra 400 // Minolta SRT 100

Long exposures of a passing thunderstorm in Joshua Tree. Photos where light was found and/or created, captured, and immortalized. A recurring theme in my life as of late.

This year I have lost:

my Grandfather

a great love of my life

a pretend friend who wanted more

One a true loss- the others just a shedding of skin. Some days I feel like I am spinning out; other days I think it's nothing but a return to center. A penny in a hyperbolic funnel. The further things spiral out in my life, the further into my passions I tunnel.

I love film photography. I love to write. I love to find the light.

I love to live my life. Mine, mine, mine.

I am also thankful for places I can share the spillage and be more or less anonymous. Nobody I know to step in what I bleed from my brain and try to sanitize or mix in their perception of me. I create, it is, and in the abyss that is the internet it lives. You may see but never assume to know me intimately. Therein lies the beauty.

Thanks for being here in the mess with me.

-Lou <3