#she got SEVERE shell shock being down there in the dead trenches after the realization that came from helspith's poem

[lavellane]

like out of all the many, many traumas ive given elspeth my favorite has gotta be the deep roads lol. and specifically the way she never really got OUT of them. yeah so maybe her body did but not HER. shes still down there with ruck and helspith every time she closes her eyes. and during future expeditions when she goes down into the deep roads for real, it doesnt feel like some horrible nightmare it feels like REALITY and its the surface and love and warmth and alistair thats nothing more than a pleasant dream. one shes always going to wake up from. bc even in her happiest moments she's never not aware of the darkspawn digging up towards her just a few miles under her feet. and never not feeling the eyes of the deep roads looking at her, gleefully waiting for her, and knowing its not going anywhere

[redditnosleep]

B is for Barnacle

by mrmichaelsquid

Gray clouds swirled overhead when I opened the shop door, spilling fast over the sky like lint on a treadmill. The storm was supposed to miss us but debris twisting in dust devils whispered otherwise, leaving the ocean air cold and salty. I usually enjoyed forces of nature, but the chill sought out the clothing gaps to bare skin through my shirt holes and sock ends, so I stomped out the pre-roll I’d been puffing out with the heel of my Timbs to retreat indoors. I popped a few tic tacs when my phone vibrated and I saw the severe storm warning alert accompanied by the annoying tone. Seemed the seaside storm wasn’t going to miss us, it was on target to hit all of us in York, Maine dead center, and soon.

I stand out like a sore thumb in the oceanside town of York with my Flatbush gear; Champion hoodie over a vintage Polo tee and all, but I’m not here to blend in. I’m attending the University of New England, focusing on marine biology (thanks to a generous partial scholarship), and I can afford rent here, not to mention the under 40 minute commute to school. My evening job as a sandwich jockey pays the rent and gives me time to study during the lulls we experience in the off season.

I checked my text messages, hoping to hear back about getting coffee with a classmate. No response, it seemed Diane was not interested aside from being my lab partner, no news to me. No word from Ron about getting a beer after work either, so I returned back inside from the smoke break to man the sandwich station. This consisted of reading about cyanobacterial blooms while waiting for any York locals in town off season who direly needed a turkey and cheese during a freak storm. It was nearing 10 PM, and I expected we’d close early due to the last-minute alert and the announcement on the radio about the severity of the weather conditions. I was about to head to the register to ask the owner Janice, who must have been watching something truly vulgar on her laptop, about leaving early when a jingle of the door signaled a customer. A man entered in a dramatic stagger, his left foot dragging in a labored trudging as though he’d limped through hell straight into our modest, seaside convenience store.

Janice greeted him, but his head just hung low, nearly out of view under a sunbleached Sou’wester hat and faded blue raincoat. Stripped by the elements of color, his PVC storm gear was flecked with crusted clumps of gray; they were barnacles. A soggy white beard spilled out from under the tipped cap, wet tendrils emerging from skin nearly as white and wrinkled by what seemed like decades of wear. A bang jolted me alert as a massive gale smacked the door fully open, slapping the wooden frame of the newsstand. A barrage of rain drummed hard and wet from the sky and a shocking gust of wind forced our eyes to squint from debris just as the man collapsed, first onto his knees and then onto his stomach on the floor. Janice rushed to his side calling “Sir? Sir, are you alright?”, but he was not responsive. I held my phone up and Janice nodded. I tried 911 and then the hospital directly, but the storm must have killed a cell tower, there was no service.

The saltwater tempest beat unmercifully upon us as Janice and I carried the older man, whom we presumed to be a fisherman, into my Explorer after confirming a pulse. The hospital was just over ten minutes away, but the toppling branches and thunderous white bullets of rain made driving with zero visibility at night an undoubtedly terrible idea. Even the streetlights of Long Beach Ave were off due to toppled power lines from the intense wind. The cold rain drenched us through to the bone, my entire body was numb and stinging by the time we hauled that far-too-heavy stranger back inside of the store. We barricaded the door as best we could from the freak weather and flipped the man on his back and I yelled in shock at the sight of his face.

He had a brutal, vertical scar straight down the center of his face and there were small thoracica barnacles on the edges of his hairline (the common type often found on rocks and boats). There were dozens of them, a few on the sides of his crooked nose and the corners of his sunken eyes. I stared in absolute shock; barnacles are arthropods like crabs, they attach their backs onto a host with their legs facing outward before building a cement wall (which looks like a shell) of armor, a process that takes days or even weeks to form. The process is extremely painful in the very rare instance they land in a human host. I was amazed that this man had let this happen, perhaps he’d been in a seaside coma? Every answer opened a string of additional, unanswerable questions. I was horrified and extremely confused but knew he needed serious help so I focused on that. I ran to fetch the electric heater and some tarps from the stockroom to help warm the poor man. When I returned from the stockroom, Janice was performing CPR, and that’s when I discovered the horrific reason the barnacles had been able to grow undisturbed.

Janice breathed into his mouth with a puzzled look on her face as we both heard that loud cracking sound. I slowly approached, seeing the dark red line form on the man’s face, dividing the eyes and nostrils as the crack extended. The man’s face split open, and what looked like a fan comprised of giant centipedes spewed out from the gory slit in his face and wrapped around Janice’s head, pulling it in. My jaw dropped in horror, but instincts drove my sprinting feet to the knives I kept at the sandwich counter. I charged back to the snaking tendrils, realizing they were actually cirri, the legs of barnacles but at an impossibly mammoth scale. A larva had somehow entered this sailor’s nasal passage or mouth and grown far larger than what I knew to be possible, a new species perhaps. I had no interest in discovering it at the moment, and my butcher’s knife sawed at those powerful, shelled snakes that were pulling her face into the cavity of the sailor’s rotted head.

The mammoth, snaking cirri wrapped around my wrist, squeezing my flesh and difficult to cut into, but I eventually sawed through them to free Janice, who was bleeding from her head and clearly in shock. The long, curling legs retreated into the dead sailor’s face, which snapped closed as his skull was pulled shut by the mammoth parasite inside. I dragged Janice away from that host of a man and tried to wrap my head around the nightmare. I knew of deep-sea gigantism, or abyssal gigantism, which occurs at great depths, but this was beyond what I’d thought possible. This seemed to be a symbiotic relationship that kept the barnacle and the sailor alive long after he should have died. I stared at his still body briefly before running back to it, dragging it by the feet outside of the store.

I felt the knobbed barnacles on his ankles reaching forth cirri onto my hands as I pulled him, pinching me and wrapping around my fingers. I got him about 20 feet from the store when I had to let go. The freezing rain beat me mercilessly, and I ran indoors as quickly as possible, nearly losing my bearings and my snapback cap due to the severity of the storm and encompassing darkness of the night. Janice was shaking, and I wrapped the tarp around her and tried to comfort her, but her gaze was distant. I wiped blood from her lacerated forehead and applied pressure to the gashes on her neck and the back of her head, thinking of how deep sea creatures get stranded in shallow waters due to rising temperatures and water pollution. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) polluting the Mariana and other oceanic trenches have been theorized to lead to the surfacing of some rarely seen species, in addition to tectonic disturbances and glacial melting, but this was something entirely unknown. I tried to process what I’d seen while cleaning the red gouges of Janice’s wounds when I heard the horrific scream of a woman outside.

I ran to the door, cracking it slightly to see the neighbor, Ms Berthold, emerge from her house, swatting at her drenched and moving sweater. The corpse of the sailor was gone, the beating rain having washed any trace of from which direction away from the sidewalk and street. I shouted to the woman, but she collapsed, and I realized I might join her fate if I intervened. She was covered in small moving things. I was retreating back to the door of the shop when I saw the head, dragging itself from those long, jointed legs spilling from the split face of the sailor’s corpse. A horrifically long tentacle extended from the split in the man’s skull, snaking upward like a mammoth worm. I remembered reading Darwin in class last semester, and I finally vomited on the rain-slicked asphalt. Barnacles have the largest “member” of the animal kingdom, a solid “Hell no” filled the air before I realized I’d even said it. Another round of screaming behind me alerted me again to the woman, who was sprinting towards me from two houses down with a horrific wail, crawling with hundreds of living things.

I was about to be pinned, and I watched the woman in horror, her pink-streaked skin covered with holes as she ran towards me, holes from which climbed sacculina larva the size of lima beans. My eyes widened in the nightmarish realization of what was going to happen to her. Sacculina are a parasitic barnacle that castrates crabs and uses them as a host for their own eggs in their genital region. To put it bluntly, they destroy their host’s genitals and become a giant egg sac there, a giant saltwater nope. I screamed at this point, running sideways to avoid the nightmares in front of and behind me that were approaching, darting off inland and praying Janice would know to lock the doors. To try and reach her now was not only impossible, it would lead to a fate far worse than death.

I ran blind in the consuming darkness further inshore, as nearly horizontal darts of icy rain beat into my gore-tex jacket and into my face. My mind was spinning, there was no way to get to my car without being overtaken so I ran away from the lighthouse, deep inland to try and get to my only friend who lived near the store, my bud Ron. Thunder flashed the sky white, illuminating horrible things each time I looked back as I ran from them. I saw what appeared to be giant isopods the size of Labradors crawling from the ocean and hundreds of tiny larva covering the streets and the sides of house. There were multiple corpses being dragged by their faces from the segmented legs spilling from within, some of the bodies long rotted and bloated from saltwater, others missing extremities or their lower half entirely. I ran nearly blind from the storm, but somehow made it to Ron’s, pounding on the door with a fist and praying for a miracle. I looked back to see what appeared to be the friendly Mr. Beckhart charging towards me, his face skinless, pulpy and split spilling chunks of flesh and outwardly clawing cirri. In the last second, the door marked by a tarnished, brass “26” opened and I slid inside, slamming and locking it behind my drenched, shivering body.

Ron seemed confused but I shook him to convey the urgency of the situation and asking him for duct tape to cover the mail slot and all possible gaps in the doors and windows. He seemed vacant and detached as if he’d just woken from a nap, but I explained everything to him as I raced to secure his small house on Pine street. His face was clammy and pale, an odd milky white as he slowly spoke, “I moved here because I love the saltwater, the sea, the fish”, in a monotone voice that didn’t sit right, his eyes turning to the floor. I then saw the fishing cooler in the living room, lid ajar with a wet trail spilling outward and leading over to a red puddle in the middle of the floor. His sad, tearful eyes drooped in harsh juxtaposition to the smile spreading across his face, dripping thick strands of saliva from parting, quivering lips. I saw the little bumps of grey clustered on his temples and in his thinning hair that framed his tormented eyes, and I ran. I sprinted to Ron’s bathroom with him nearly on my heels. I quickly locked the pounding door, shoving towels into the gap and duct taping them as quickly as my shaking hands would permit.

Horrific sounds now click, scratch and clatter in addition to an occasional scream from outside the barricaded window along with the hammering rain and cracking thunder of the storm. Ron stopped banging on the door, now merely scraping with thin, crustacean limbs on the wood between us, his mind likely gone. I can’t get the image of his twisted, smiling face out of my mind, and I feel that madness is perhaps setting in as I chuckle to myself in his small bathroom. People often seem to fear invasions from the stars, rarely concerned about our own planet which is over 70% ocean. All I know is if I get out of here alive, I’m changing fields to focus on becoming a chef far inland in the Midwest, at a restaurant that doesn’t serve any form of seafood.

[ncscope-archived-blog]

“Grandma’s Got A Gun” (aka: my favourite Ana TV Tropes according to this website)

Action Mom: Mother to Fareeha (aka Pharah), Ana's returned to the fight to protect her daughter and her closest allies.

Animal Motif: Birds, like her daughter, though in her case it's more subtle. The white hair emerging from her hood resembles a hooked beak in her concept art and most of her victory poses.

Archenemy: Widowmaker. Widowmaker is responsible for Ana's missing eye and decision to fake her death. If the two meet each other again, Widowmaker taunts the aged and weathered Ana, and Ana snipes at her by saying Gerard was a fool to love her. If Widowmaker eliminates Pharah, she mocks "Like Mother, like daughter" and if Ana eliminates her, Ana throws back her "One shot, one kill" line.

Badass Longcoat: She wears a tattered gray hooded sniper's coat that helps her blend in with the environment and shield her from enemy sight (and fire). Her Origins skin gives her a blue trench coat that she used to wear when Overwatch was still active.

Badass Family: Together with her daughter Pharah.

Brought Down to Badass: Lost her cybernetic eye during her last mission with Overwatch and has refused to get it replaced by either a new prosthetic or through Mercy growing her a new one. The lack of it only slowed her down a tad.

Brutal Honesty: When Reaper tries to say that teaming up with her is like old times, she says that it is..."except for the part where [he] became a homocidal murderer".

Chameleon Camouflage: As seen in her character trailer, her sniper's cloak helps her blend in with her surroundings as realistically as a real-life sniper can do. When put in the Anubis map, her cloak adopts traces of brown to fit in with the desert color scheme.

The Chick: Despite her skills as an elite sniper and later becoming Morrison's Number Two after Overwatch was established, Ana remained acutely aware that she was a killer, albeit one which had a better reputation than most. This weighed on her as time went on.

Cold Sniper: She used to be one in her prime, but later came to regret all of the lives she had taken. Has moved into Friendly Sniper territory since.

Cool Old Lady: To the younger Overwatch members. Winston mentions to Pharah that her mother was a hero to him and "all of us". Hell, even McCree calls her "ma'am", with respect.

Combat Medic: More ranged than Mercy, as Ana fights from afar.

Deadpan Snarker: Several of her lines and interactions have her as this.

Dented Iron: While she's still fighting in the present day, she's no longer a crackshot like she was in her prime, due to having had her dominant eye shot out. As such, she became a supporting hero.

Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She's not evil herself, but in the comic that was released after she was added to the game, after giving a rundown of her team and their families, she acknowledges that her enemies most likely have people that care about them too.

Eye Scream: She lost her right eye during a moment of hesitation via Scope Snipe thanks to Widowmaker. While she knows that she can probably get it fixed (especially since it was already a cybernetic implant to begin with), she decided to leave her wound as it is as a personal reminder.

Faking the Dead: She was content to let many people believe she died after her failed mission hospitalized her. She most probably received help from her medical team regarding the cover-up.

Follow in My Footsteps: Subverted. Despite what her former co-workers assumed, Ana never wanted her daughter to join Overwatch, since Pharah would be exposed to the same violence and death as she had been and forced to make the same difficult decisions as she had done.

Friendly Sniper: Her shots heal allies. You can't get more friendly than that.

Gone Horribly Right: A non-negative example, except from Ana's personal perspective. Ana's main motivation in the old days of Overwatch was to create a better future for her daughter and to set an example that taught her to stand up for what's right. That's why she made it so that Fareeha would grow up in the presence of heroic role models. It worked — but to Ana's horror, it worked too well. Fareeha didn't just look up to those heroes, she wanted to join them.

Handicapped Badass: You'd think that the loss of an eye would be a detriment to a sniper, but Ana makes it work.

Hypocritical Humor: Ana, who faked her death for years, a very close friend of Jack Morrison, who also faked his death for years, has an unlockable "Everybody dies." voiceline.

I Did What I Had to Do: She didn't like the horrible things she did in her career, but she justified it as Just Following Orders. That, and killing her foes was a much better option than letting innocents die.

I Was Quite a Looker: She looked like a long-haired Pharah when she was younger. Now, her hair has gone completely white, and she shows visible signs of aging. She knows she's still hot though.Ana: [Upon killing a young opponent] Age before Beauty, and I've got you on both.

Knight in Sour Armor: Ana will still do the correct thing, but like Mercy, she's not too sold on the idea of Overwatch coming back.

Like Mother, Like Daughter: Double Subverted. Ana and Pharah are very different types of people, in terms of personality. And Ana never wanted her daughter to experience the horrors of war, and tried to discourage her from joining the military. Subverted because Pharah still inherited her mother's ideals of courage and justice, and although Pharah went against her wishes, Ana is very proud of her. When Pharah gets a kill, Ana proudly states, "Like mother, like daughter".

Mama Bear: She is called this by her teammates in the Legacy comic. When they were attacked by two snipers she ignored the retreat orders and went after them. It didn't end well.

Missing Mom: Pharah tells Winston that he "probably" knew her mother better than she did. In hindsight, it was Pharah putting Winston down gently as she realised that he idolised Ana, without knowing what truly happened to her.

Military Superhero: A member of a legendary strike team that became the foundation of Overwatch.

Moe Greene Special: Years ago in Egypt, she was on the receiving end of this courtesy of Widowmaker, as shown in Legacy. Miraculously, she survived and is now back in the fight once again, now sporting an Eyepatch of Power.

A Mother to Her Men: She was this to her soldiers back in the days of Overwatch. One even called her "Mama Bear."

My Greatest Failure: She still regrets the moment of hesitation she suffered when she had Widowmaker in her sights, giving Widowmaker the opportunity to take the first shot. It's implied that Ana's mistake led to the failure of the mission and the deaths of many innocent people. Despite offers to have her blown-out eye restored, she chooses to keep it the way it is, as a personal reminder of her life-ending blunder.

Never Mess with Granny: Ana is in her 60s by the time of the game. She was in combat operations as late as her 50s.

Not So Different: In the comic short "Old Soldiers", because he was also kept in the dark about what really happened on that failed mission, Reaper believed that Ana was also screwed over by Overwatch, left to die by Morrison and her comrades after she was injured by Widowmaker. When they meet up again some years later, Reaper invokes this trope in hopes it'll earn him an ally.

Number Two: Was Strike Commander Morrison's second-in-command, according to her profile.

Parents as People: While Ana tried to raise her daughter as best as she can, training her in both martial arts and raising her alongside the greatest heroes of their time, some of Pharah's lines in-game when interacting with former Overwatch members seem to indicate that she may not have been the best mother to Pharah. Following her playable reveal, it's shown not to be as bad as previously thought: she was an alright parent, but simply didn't like the idea of Pharah joining Overwatch, trying to prevent her daughter from suffering the same moral dilemmas and tragedy that she did.

Retired Badass: She briefly retired from hero work after nearly being killed by Widowmaker, but eventually returned to her old line of work when she could no longer ignore the state the world was in.

Seen It All: Part of her snarky demeanor comes from the fact that she's seen the worst the world can offer and has survived it. While healing her teammates, she'll tell them things like "I've seen worse. You're going to live" and when respawning, she states "I've come back from worse". One pre-fight line she has also goes, "There's nothing I haven't seen before. Stick together — we will complete our mission."

Shell-Shocked Veteran: Time and war had not been kind to Ana. First, the reason why she got heavily injured was the realization that it was her former friend (Amelie/Widowmaker) who's the villain, causing her to hesitate and get gravely injured (she couldn't even know about how Talon modified her to be like that). Then, not only did she had to deal with Overwatch's fall and the separation of her former friends (with one of them performing a Face–Heel Turn), but the things she did in her career constantly plague her conscience. Despite what her co-workers believed, she hoped that Pharah (who idolized Overwatch) would never become an Overwatch agent so she wouldn't experience the same horrors she had to go through. Her guilt and regret was to the point where she even believed that people assuming she was killed by Widowmaker was for the best.

The Snark Knight: Ana is one of the snarkiest characters in the entire game, with many of her lines, emotes, and highlight intros have her behaving in a mocking, humorous tone.

So Proud of You: Although Pharah doesn't believe it to be the case, Ana does show that she's proud of what her daughter has become. Most notably, if she witnesses Pharah get a kill, she'll state, "Like mother, like daughter".

Stepford Snarker: Ana is deeply troubled, conflicted, and haunted by her past — both the people she's failed to save and those she killed herself. She never fully recovered from the horrors of war. In the years since she faked her death, however, she's developed a very snarky attitude and penchant for trolling. The majority of her lines in-game are either motherly words of encouragement or one-liners mocking her opponents. Or, in the case of Pharah...Both.

Team Mom: She is very protective of her team and often tries to calm down injured allies while she heals them.

10-Minute Retirement: Her defeat at the hands of Widowmaker took her out of the game for only a few years at most; Old Soldiers establishes that she was operating in the shadows even before her official reappearance, much like Soldier 76.

Troll: In her elderly years, Ana has developed a knack for jokes and quips specifically designed to mock opponents or get under their skin. Glimpses of Ana in her youth have shown her as serious and focused. The current Ana, however, does things like throw her enemies' catchphrases back at them after a kill, feign motherly concern for them while putting them to sleep, brush off their own insults with sarcastic quips, and specifically insult them or people they once cared about to get under their skin.

Unwitting Instigator of Doom: We're not given the exact sequence of events, but it was entirely possible that Reinhardt's forced retirement was due to the fallout from that fateful mission (whereby Ana's age was blamed for its failure). Without her and Reinhardt around, it seemed inevitable that Reyes and Morrison will come to blows that day at the Swiss HQ. in Old Soldiers, Reyes flat out believed that Ana was left behind to die after that mission, without knowing (or caring) that she deliberately hid her survival from the world.

You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Although she presumably never let McCree know about it, she already considers him worthy of being mentioned as one of the heroes in Overwatch whom Pharah grew up with. Mind you, Mac was only a few years older than Pharah and at the time, his days as an outlaw were not that far behind him yet.

You Fight Like a Cow: Ana's lines typically mock her opponents. In particular, for one Bond One-Liner, she asks: "Who taught you to fight like that?!"