#she just senses winter's extremely fucked up big sister energy and is like 'GONNA GET ME SOME OF THAT'

[theseerasures]

obviously the oceanic gulf of material and social privilege separating Winter and Cinder’s respective backstories cannot and should not be overlooked, but the other, just as important (if not more so, from a narrative and affective standpoint) factor that made their paths diverge is that, well.

Winter didn’t have stepsisters. she had Weiss and Whitley instead.

and that IS crucial, because it shifts and deepens the moral arc of what the show is trying to say: it’s not JUST the kindness you receive that shapes you into the person you are. it’s also about the opportunities you get to BE kind in turn.

i’ve bolded and italicized “opportunities you get” above to empathize that i’m not talking about some victim-blaming “ohhhhh but did Cinder try being NICE” bullshit. she didn’t need to turn the other cheek to her abusers, but she DID need someone to show her what being kind to other, similarly vulnerable people looked like before she could be kind herself. and that’s not what Rhodes, who blithely waltzed in and out of a no-Faunus establishment on a regular basis, did for her. what Rhodes taught her instead was how to be the exception--that if you’re lucky enough, special enough, if you claw your way through enough “competition,” then maybe you’ll have earned the right to be chosen by the distant, powerful figure who asks for nothing in return except your absolute service. not because they need it, mind. they don’t need you. it’s just the debt you have to repay.

(it’s not an accident that Rhodes’ Semblance made him untouchable, invulnerable--that is to say, unreachable on any level that would convey intimacy. and it’s not an accident that the moment he dropped his shield was the moment Cinder killed him; by that point, it was too late, and he was just another thing to claw through.)

Winter is horribly, painfully flawed, both in ways that echo Cinder and in ways that are diametrically opposite to Cinder, but it’s hard to deny that she’s in many ways “better” off than Cinder, and more poised to become a healthier person. that began with Weiss and Whitley: no matter how faltering and imperfect her attempts to protect her siblings actually were, no matter the toll it took on her and on them, she formed bonds with them that can’t be reduced to bondage. even now there’s a part of Winter that’s left open and vulnerable, which lets others take care of her, and lets her take care of others--just look at the way she’s tied herself inexorably to Penny. Winter understands that service can stem from love, not just debt, and that is simultaneously what is fucking her up in the present and what is going to save her in the end. Cinder, on the other hand, never learned this; not as a child brutalized by her wicked stepfamily, and not as an adult brutalizing Emerald, the closest thing to family she has.

if Cinder had gotten siblings who required protection of them, rather than protection against them, would she have protected them and become a kinder person in the present? i think a show like RWBY, which so steadfastly insists on the inherent generosity of people, on actively making the world better, would demand that we say “yes,” just as it would, as a corollary, demand that it is not too late--that given the right opportunities, the right environment, Cinder can still learn how to be kind.

[valeriannnn]

if youve ever wanted to think about what almost every major RWBY character would main in professional overwatch, then today is your lucky day! brought to you by hiatus, return of owl, and 3am delirium

RUBY - Star DPS.  Extremely flashy, always on the highlight reel.  Will play whatever is needed to pound the enemies into dirt, but also the type to say "fuck it ok guys trust me im gonna pop off" and swap to her signature widow/tracer to Pop Off.  Works unfailingly.  Team captain and emotional core.  Prefers mobile heroes and an unpredictable playstyle.

WhiteSnow - Flex Support/Flex DPS.  Put her on any sniper (including and especially Ana) and watch all hell rain down.  Methodical playstyle, favors high-utility heroes.  Aside from snipers, can often be found on Baptiste/Mei/Symmetra.  Enables teammates to make big plays, but often sacrifices her own presence in the killfeed for the benefit of the team as a whole.  Loves to maker opponents' lives a living hell with CC.  Line em up, knock em down.

Belladonna - Offtank.  Extremely attentive to her backline, constantly running interference and peeling for allies.  Impossible to catch off-guard.  Delights in thwarting the enemy team's plans and preventing them from making the plays they want to.  Excellent map awareness and always the one to touch point to preserve overtime.  Shotcaller.  Struggled with committing to risky/aggressive plays, but being on a reliable team has made her more comfortable performing her role and trusting her teammates to have her back.  Prefers mobile heroes but will adapt to any situation to work in perfect tandem with...

YangXiaoLong - Main Tank.  Could have been a DPS main but early on committed to tank role to enable her duo parter (and little sister) to pop off (and have shorter queue times).  Developed a real knack for controlling space and being a brick goddamn wall between her squishies and the enemy team.  Extremely aggressive playstyle, but has cooled down in recent years to be more of a team player.  Still loves to thrash about when given the opportunity.  Known for bold plays and phatty shatties.

Arc - Main Support.  Tried for years to be a DPS hotshot but was determinedly mediocre and got hard stuck in plat.  Persuaded by Pyrrha to pocket her for a few games, and discovered the depth and fulfillment of playing support to a well-coordinated team.  Nurtured his aptitude for assisting from the backline and quickly rose through the ranks.  Will play whatever is meta but will always be a Mercy main at heart.  Played Brig during GOATS.  Shotcaller.

Valkyrie - Doomfist.

Nikos - Main Tank.  Extremely methodical player, reknowned for big brain cerebral plays and unflappability.  Can be slow to push advantages, but never makes mistakes.  Loves the mind games in a Rein v Rein matchup, and unfailingly blocks the enemy shatter (delights in cucking the enemy Rein).  Will play Orisa For The Good Of The Team but takes no joy in it.  Terrifying on defense; takes a strong position and allows time pressure to force enemies into missteps.  When you make a mistake, she will be there.  Strategic backbone of the team.

RenLie - Flex Support.  Bloodthirsty support.  Likes the balance of damage potential and support capacity in Zenyatta, but puts forth strong showings on Moira and Ana as well.  First priority is of course keeping his team alive, but flankers trying to dive him in the back line tend to get sent home in tears.  Big Jjonak energies. :uwuknife: Can be susceptible to tunnel vision/desperation, and occasionally needs teammates to re-ground him.  Always nanos Nora.

PPolen - Offtank.  D.Va one-trick.  Absolutely notorious for eating ults; absolutely infuriating to play hitscan into.  Flawless mechanical skill.  Occasionally struggles with communication, but honestly so on-the-ball that it doesn't usually come back to bite her.  Always has gold objective time.

Qrow - True flex.  Exclusively solo-queues on ladder, just plays the leaderboards.  Played just about every role at some point (except main tank, fuck that), but currently on a flex support kick.  Holds world records for gravs/blizzards/immortality feels clipping through the geometry and falling out of the map.  The sort of Ana who will singlehandedly take out both enemy DPS when beset by flankers only to immediately die to an errant Moira orb.  Gamers can we get an F in chat.  Accustomed to playing on 200+ ping and is deeply unsettled when he moves somewhere with good internet and has to re-learn all his timings.

RWBY+JNPR+P All form a single 9-man roster.  Sub out roles with redundant players for map set strategies and for flexible plays.  Probably called the Beacon Huntsmen or something generic like that, who cares

Winter - Main Tank and Offtank.  Excellent mechanical skill.  Unparalleled when allowed to execute her set strategy, but struggles with adaptability.  Extremely self-sacrificial, and knows exactly how to leverage her health pool to buy time and/or space for her allies to make the plays they need to.  Will unflinchingly act upon callouts, good or bad, because the worst outcome is a split decision.  Especially fond of a quick reset.

Whitley - Doesn't play Overwatch, but holds several championship trophies in international Pokemon tournaments.  Minecraft youtuber.

Adam - Widow one-trick.  Highly overrated, inexplicably popular streamer.  Mechanically talented but poison in a team environment.  Picked up and quickly dropped from several professional teams.  Teabags.  Looks impressive on stream but crumbles against opponents with any semblance of coordination.  Eventually blacklisted from professional environments after one too many scandals in his personal life.

Ozpin -Franchise owner.  Has never actually touched Overwatch, but used to be a respected Starcraft player back in the day.  Took on a coaching role for a time, but now largely manages from afar.  Has a sparse and cryptic social media presence.  Makes business decisions largely at random, unbeknownst to all his subordinates.

Salem - Hates videogames. Will unplug the router if you piss her off.

Ace Ops - High profile roster hand-picked for perfectly complementary hero pools.  Hyped to fuck in the preseason.  Unparalleled individual play but poor communication, incompatible playstyles, and truly abysmal coaching staff keep them from being a top-tier team.  Widely considered a disappointment considering the talent and money backing them.

Harriet - DPS.  Exclusively plays flankers and extremely mobile DPS.  Tries to solo-carry; in her defense, it often works.  Unironically brags/complains about having gold medals.  Quick to tilt but often uses the negative energy to pop off even harder.  Overtime clutch god.

Marrow - Flex DPS.  Cautious player, often hesitant to commit to risky strats.  Flawless positioning, both personally and for thrown abilities.  Talent for projectile DPS; probably contributed not-insignificantly to scatter arrow being removed from the game.  Prefers to understand the enemy's strategy before acting.  Shotcaller.  Nobody listens.

Elm - Main Tanks (Except Reinhardt), Zarya.  Aggressive tank player, frequently found with gold damage.  Generally good natured but vulnerable to tilt if on a losing streak.  Highly momentum-based.  Makes tutorial videos on strategy and positioning for her youtube channel.  Wants to see the competitive scene develop and flourish, but sensitive to feeling threatened by new talent.  Helps them anyway.

Vine - Flex Tanks (except Zarya), Reinhardt.  Unflappable, regardless of quality of games or recent performance.  Good at reading enemy team and tracking ults.  Generally calls enemy plays before they happen.  Always sticks with Elm, largely out of obligation to bail her out when her aggression puts her in a dicey position.  Understated player, rarely in highlight compilations, but extremely consistent performance.  Plays off-meta in scrims so as not to reveal strats.

Clover - Main Healer. Can play any support, but Lucio main through and through.  Suffers from Reddit Lucio syndrome, but usually good enough (or lucky enough) to get away with it.  Loves to deny enemy followup.  Peel master, boop god.  PMA to a borderline-irritating degree.  Gives great pep talks at half time.  Tends to overcommit to strategies that are dead in the water; sometimes it's better to call it and switch comps while you still have time on the clock. Despite this, is opportunistic in the moment-to-moment sense and quick to capitalize on enemy vulnerabilities.

Flynt Coal - Lucio one-trick.  I mean, come on.

Wukong - ???  Exclusively plays off-meta heroes and weird shit.  Talented but remains on ladder because he doesn’t like the rigid structure of tournament play.  Refuses to be confined to a single role.  Hates role lock cause he can’t swap mid game anymore.  Despite all this, somehow tends to be more of an asset than a detriment.  Definitely a team player.  PMA king.  Occasionally finds legitimately competitive strata for underutilized heroes.  Nutty with hammond movement, godawful with mines.  Has the Winston skin equipped, of course.

Ilia - DPS.  Popular streamer.  Tried going pro for a bit, but didn’t like the schedule and retired shortly.  Frequently plays with the community and does weird custom game modes for a laugh.  Loves Daddy Rein Chases Tiny Torblets.  Refuses to open loot boxes, much to the dismay of her stream.  Plays Golfing Over It during long queues.  Draws all her own custom emotes.

Watts - DPS.  Mains Widow, Sombra; plays anything that lets him avoid ever actually engaging the enemy at close range.  Thinks the game stopped being good when Sombra GOATS stopped being a thing.  Spends all day on twitter heckling pro players and declaring Overwatch a dead game.  Suspected of cheating.  Considers himself a shotcaller but isn't very good at it.

Tyrian - Plays Junkrat and Roadhog exclusively.  Thinks it's bullshit that the game doesn't have friendly fire.  Thinks it's bullshit that Junkrat doesn't deal self-inflicted damage anymore.  Master of the bounce shot.  Tends to treat the game like a TDM and forget the objective in favor fragging out.  Targets a single enemy player and tries to get them to tilt.  Uses voice chat but only laughs.  Never makes callouts.  Trash talks in all-chat.  Considers it a personal victory if he gets someone to rage quit.

Hazel - No Role.  Doesn't really get the idea of the metagame; knows it's generally good to have a balanced team but thats about as deep as he chooses to go.  Was one of the old guards of PC gaming but now that it's a mainstream hobby has to refuses to confront that he's hot garbage at them.  Can't really parse everything that's happening onscreen in a fast-paced game like overwatch, so he just picks Torb (regardless of map or attacking/defending status) and uses the turret as a security blanket.  Godawful turret placement.  Still has a good time somehow.

Cinder - Main Tank.  Likes the importance of the role, and especially the way her team has to follow her calls for any chance of success.  A nice balance of aggression and craftiness, she makes a fearsome opponent.  Callouts could be more frequent/detailed, but her directions are always good when given.  Very susceptible to emotional ups and downs, and often takes out frustration on teammates.  Takes losses very hard, gloats about wins.  Happiest with an Ana pocket.

Emerald - Offtank.  Would be much happier on DPS or Support, but desperate to show off and live up to Cinder's expectations.  Sticks with her main tank except when it's absolutely necessary to peel for the back line.  Tends to be overcautious with ults; she's good enough mechanically to earn them relatively quickly, but fear of whiffing one makes her reticent to spend them.  Flawless bubble timing on Zarya.

Mercury - Support.  Still considers Symmetra a support.  Quick to whip out the blaster and try to fight off flankers instead of calling for assistance.  Knows all the angles for a narsty biotic grenade.  Plays as though he's got better positioning and backup than he does; frequently gets opponents to back off just by winning the mental game.  Will let allies die on ladder if they piss him off.

[booksummarieswithkatz]

Winter Wolf by R.J. Blain, a summary

Okay, first we need the basic terms for this world. Also, sorry I messed up and spelled Fenerec as Feneric, my bad.

Fenerec: Werewolves, they’re weak to silver and must constantly keep their animal selves under control. There are three types of Fenerec separated into four social stratas.

TYPES

-Born Fenerec: the children who are born Fenerec to Fenerec parents.

-Made Fenerec: Humans who became Fenerec through a special ritual, this usually requires the person’s consent but it can be forced upon them.

-True Fenerec: Fenerec born under one of two circumstances- a human baby born to wolves, or a wolf pup born to human parents- they are extremely rare, valuable, and powerful Fenerec

STRATAS

-Alphas: Protectors of the pack, they are the strongest and most dominant in their packs.

-Dominants: Fenerec that have instincts pushing them to take control of their surroundings and protect those they see as reliant on them.

-Submissives: Fenerec who do not feel the need to be in charge, they are valued in their packs because dominant wolves are soothed by their presence, since they don’t see them as rivals.

-Omegas: Fenerec who do not feel the need to be in charge yet still have all the same protective instincts of dominants; they are the rarest and can play any role necessary to stabilize their pack.

Witches: Humans who have connection to a specific element of nature; fire, water, air, or earth. They gain powers based on that element as well as boosted health and lifespan. They can also form a pact with Fenerec to help preserve their humanity.

Wizards: Humans who can basically break most of the laws of magic so long as they are able to afford the price. They are killed by other supernatural beings on sight.

Sorcerers: A human whose magic is powered by harming others, in order to become more powerful they must rape, murder, and torture others. Needless to say, they are killed on sight.

The Plague: A disease that only affects Fenerec. It is magic and quasi-intelligent, manipulating other illnesses into infecting the host. The host’s fever then gives the proper breeding ground for the plague, and when the host shifts, they become trapped in a half state – that is to say – their bodies rip themselves apart and don’t coalesce into their wolf form. There is no cure, and only true born Fenerec are immune.

The Inquisition: A shadowy group that is part of most modern government and was born from the Catholic Church. They “protect” normal people from the supernatural. They often demand witches join them and wolf packs register themselves in exchange for the lives. They kill almost all other supernatural beings on sight, and offer massive bounties for same, as well as “rogue” witches and wolves.

The Shadow Pope: this person with a dumb-ass name is the head of the Inquisition, below him are the Archeons and below them are the Cardinals.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with the story.

Just so you know, this is technically a prequel to Inquisitor.

Meet Nicole Thomas, real name Nicolina Desmond, an actress living in L.A. struggling to make a living because her body is covered in huge scars and she has chronic laryngitis (turns out directors don’t give speaking roles to many women with sandpaper for a voice). She is currently living under a falsified identity for three important reasons; one: Nicolina Desmond was a big time singer before she lost her voice and she’s too ashamed to live in the shadow of her past self, two: her parents and her twin sister are Fenerec and she’s terrified/hates all Fenerec after an incident scarred her severely and put her in a coma for a year, and three: she’s a wizard and if anyone catches on she’s a dead woman.

Now, unfortunately we will have to digress from the story to talk about what a wizard’s abilities are, because they are kinda complicated. Wizard powers are focused entirely on the manipulation of energy. The simplest applications of this are the control of electricity and heat. A wizard does not produce their own power, it needs to be absorbed from other sources. This means that wizards have a set of senses attuned to the most easily acquired energy: the electricity used by normal humans. Coupled with a wizards ability to sense and control electric current and the devices they follow, the energy they absorb can be used for basically anything the wizard can fathom. A simple rule of thumb is: if some one else can do it, then a wizard can do it, and if no one else can do it, then a wizard can probably do it anyway but someone might die to make it happen.

Okay, now we can get on with it. The book begins with Nicole entering a mall because her agent, Dominic, told her to buy a bestselling zombie apocalypse novel for “homework.” So she as she makes her way into the mall, she begins opening as many battery destroying apps on her phone as she can, since her magic’s need to control the electricity around her can be channeled into keeping her phone topped up rather than causing catastrophic power failures. After a nerve-wracking (for her, not the reader) walk to the book store, she approaches a woman whose phone is dying and “accidentally” bumps into her to give the battery a boost. Oddly enough the woman recognizes her from her movies despite the fact she’s always an extra. They talk briefly before the woman get a phone call and when she answers we find out her name is Laura, before she excuses herself to talk to whoever called her. After seeing Laura off, Nicole asks a friendly employee named Scott for help finding the novel. As they  chat they grab the book and head towards the registers to check out, however, nothing gets to be simple in this sort of book so when she’s at the register and talking to Scott and another employee the power goes out. Now Nicole already knows that power outages are usually her losing control of her powers and begins to panic, and then as she thinks about the Inquisition finding her she starts bordering on a panic attack as Scott starts screaming like a banshee. SPLAT! The power comes back on it’s own to reveal that where Scott once stood is a twisted mess of flesh and there is blood everywhere. So this whole store is just staring in shock until the police appear, that’s when the vomiting and the screaming starts.

So the Police rounds everybody up and questions them about the events of the evening, Nicole in particular is questioned by the lead investigator, Detective Harding, as she was standing right next to Scott when the incident occurred. Detective Harding proves to be a pretty swell guy, and he offers to drive Nicole back to the mall from the station to pick up her car. Unfortunately it only get more complicated by the fact that on return, the pair find Nicole’s car to have been broken into, with the windows smashed, the seats slashed to pieces, and the only thing she left in their, the car manual, ripped up and strewn about the interior. It is then that Nicole gets a call from an unknown number, at Harding’s request she answers on speaker phone, only to have the caller say they have a message for Nicolina Desmond, to which Nicole responds with a not at all suspicious “nope. Wrong number. No one by that name here. Definitely not. Bye.” before handing her cell over to Detective Harding as evidence of this odd series of coincidences. It’s just a shame that her car getting fucked up serves no purpose in the story except to give the detective a reason to request Nicole to enter witness protection. Of course, someone who is trying to hide from the Inquisition would certainly go into a program they designed, right? Nicole gives a rousing but polite “Not on my life motherfucker” and asks for a ride home.

The next day she goes to a storage container she rents and picks up some stuff to investigate what happened to Scott. Because trying to find out what happened to someone you knew for all of five fucking minutes is definitely worth risking discovery (and death) by doing some serious wizardry right? So Nicole grabs a a silver mirror, a bronze celtic knot, some candles, ancient Egyption coins called debens she stole from a museum, rocks- I mean- focus stones, and a little book that just so happens to talk and tricked Nicole into becoming a wizard after stealing her voice, as one does. Our good ol’ main character uses all the blood Scott so kindly sprayed all over her to send her mind back in time to the moment of his death. Of course, the book tells her that you can’t be in two places at once so instead of free floating as a spirit or watching through her own eyes, she has to live the moment as Scott himself, which offered some interesting insights. Scott was actually stalking Nicole through the store, turns out he was a Fenerec whose wolf decided it wanted her as a mate the moment he laid eyes on her, so when the lights went out and he could smell her adrenaline and panic, his wolf freaked out and forced him to shift to protect her. This was a really big problem because Scott was infected with the plague, and thus he exploded into a shower of viscera all over her. Good job Scott. Really made her feel safe there. Dipshit.

After this set of revelations, Nicole has an important meeting with her toilet about the contents of her stomach deciding they wanted to exit the way they came, and then she goes to meet with her agent. Dominic is your standard metrosexual whose main form of humor is sass, and he informs Nicole that he has gotten her a closed audition at Silver Moon Studios (real subtle there) the next day. This basically means that they are gonna ask her to try a scene and as long as she doesn’t fuck it up really bad she will be handed a contract. Seeing this as a much needed opportunity, Nicole gets an early rest before heading to the studio.

At the studio they strip her down and the make up lady goes “not enough scars bro” which is pretty weird overall but Nicole runs with it since the scars covering her everything are not being used as a reason to mock her, which is pretty cool I guess. Then they put her in some clothes, hand her a live rifle (with blanks in it) and say that this will be her new best friend, along with her two co-stars: the biggest canines she’s ever seen. After she witnesses everyone in the studio act like these absolutely massive “German shepherds” (cough werewolves cough) are a bunch of terrifying monsters, she slaps the handler upside the head and calls him a disgrace. The dogs (lol) get along with her like a house on fire and they do a quick scene before the director says they need some action shots of them all with another actress named Marie. Then the entirety of the rigging falls down on top of them. Luckily the dogs (lol) make a quick save and the two ladies are just fine. But Nicole finds something suspicious with her electronics-senses: someone forcefully bypassed the breaker, and all the wires surrounding them are still live and fatally dangerous. But wizards are wizards and wizards are op as hell so she shorts the entire system with her mind and all is good. Until the cops come bursting in cuz they had been watching Nicole to see if anyone was  targeting her. Nicole asks Dominic to take care of the dogs (lol) and goes to the station again. Low and behold, the cops come ‘round again to see if she’s really sure she doesn’t want to go into witness protection and, now thoroughly convinced she’s surrounded by idiots, she politely says “even if I was going to burst into flames and be chewed on by Satan I would not do that shit bro, the fuck’s wrong with you?” So later she goes out to a… new age herbal store… and a woman with an Eastern European accent dressed up like a Roma traveler sells her three semi-precious stones of luck and protection- citrine, rhodonite, and a moonstone old enough and powerful enough to give her the good ol’ telepathic “fuck you”. She considers this to be the friendliest greeting a magic rock has ever given her.

As she treks back to her apartment, Nicole realizes that someone was watching her, and decides to fuck with them; she takes a cab, walks a mile, takes another cab, gets out, gets another cab, and finally goes to an all-night movie theater just to be sure. After waiting around in the bathroom to lull the watcher into a false sense of security, she exits and checks around for any persons of interest. The only people worth noting was a pair of super hot, definitely not Fenerec, brothers who walk out of the men’s room as she exits the women’s. Because literary irony is always the right way to hint at someone being super important instead of just, you know… introducing them so we can get some real and interesting character interactions.

When she finally makes it back to her apartment, she finds one the dogs (lol), Rocky, is waiting outside for her. Her agent “lost” them. So after spending the entire night trying to find the second dog (lol), Silver, they go back and have a nice five minutes of sleep before bullshit plot convenience rolls around for another protagonist potshot. And who would’ve guessed it, Nicole decides that the dogs (lol) can’t just shit in her bathroom like people, so she walks with them to a nearby dog park. She uses her magic to open the locked gate and as the dogs (lol) go scampering around the totally empty park some guys appear behind Nicole, taze the shit out of her, and tosses her into a waiting vehicle after shooting at the dogs (lol). Oh, and just in case you were wondering, that thing with the falling set pieces at the studio, it has no bearing in the rest of the story and was, despite the fact they mentioned someone tampered with the electronics, a totally random event.

So Nicole gets tossed into this car and they start driving her off towards Vegas for some reason (it’s never explained why). After a rousing game of one of her kidnappers groping her and getting shot and thrown in the trunk as punishment (he was fine after a few minutes), an oncoming car swerves out of nowhere and causes the kidnapper behind the wheel to flip the car trying to get out of the way. It’s then that we get to see Nicole have a full-blown panic attack as she is trapped in the vehicle and fucks up her hand repeatedly smashing the window to get out. Once she escapes, the kidnappers grab her and pretend like she’s the leader’s girlfriend to move suspicion away from them as they talk to the guys from the other car. And guess what? It’s those super attractive guys from the movie theater the night before, and they are reeeeaaaally insistent on waiting to for the tow-truck with Nicole and her captors. So the leader of the Brady bunch goes to pull out a gun when Nicole flips her shit and goes for a mad scramble for the weapon. Upon her success she aims for the leader’s head and “abducts” the hot guys, and takes them and their sports-car to Vegas to stay at their penthouse sweet in the Venetian. Since hot boys with lots of money apparently aren’t super great with subtlety, Nicole tricks them into admitting that they were following her and they reveal that they are Fenerec from Canada who are helping her because she looks like someone else. This someone else is her twin sister, Lisa. Shocker.

It seems that Lisa works as an Inquisition wolf and acts as an investigator and executioner for them. Surprisingly, this means that lots of people don’t like her and given that Nicole is pretty much close enough to be mistaken as her, people that don’t like Lisa might just take it out on Nicole without even realizing that they are even related. Also Lisa has been missing for months and everyone’s got the plague. So Nicole is all like “my families wolves and you saved me from kidnappers and you’re wolves so I guess if I can save y’all with my OP wizard powers I will.” Nicole tells the two hotties (their names are Richard and Alex, Dick’s the alpha and Alex is his brother) that she needs them to grab her wizard shit from her apartment and they tell her she has to call her dad.

So Mr. Desmond (henceforth Big Daddy D) has a rousing chat with Nicole about “WHERE HAVE BEEN FOR FIVE YEARS- hey dad I kidnapped some Fenerec what’s up with the plag- FIVE. YEARS. -C’MON DAD, PLAAAAAAGUE” and it is found that only one person has ever cured the plague, they were called the Winter Wolf and they disappeared over a hundred years ago so nobody knows how they did it. Nice work immortal werewolves, you had one job. So from this we learned basically nothing except that the plague should have a cure, and that Big Daddy D is 300 years old, for some reason.

After their nice conversation, a witch friend who works for Ricky and Alex shows up and BAM it’s Laura (remember her?)! Turns out Laura’s name is Amber and she works for the Inquisition, but that’s fine because they pay her an obscene amount of hush money so she doesn’t blab about Nicole being a wizard. Amber and Nicole have a heart to heart about magic and then Amber kidnaps her for three days to teach her how to use guns at the nearby Inquisition gun range, using the excuse of “she’s a normal who looks like Lisa Desmond and we want to keep her safe.” So after three days of non-stop gun training, they hand Nicole a berretta and a carry license and say “go help us catch a magic rapist and serial killer running around Vegas.” Nicole says okay and the intrepid duo go and make some magic rocks. Nicole puts enchantments on the citrine and rhodonite to taze the shit out of the killer, and then have a heart to heart with the moonstone, which agrees to the enchantment so long as it can blast the killer into oblivion.

The girls get gussied up for a night on the town and it’s about five minutes of shopping before they meet the guy. After they agree to hang with him for a while, the magic talking book (remember them?) tells Nicole that he’s a sorcerer and is eating Amber’s will to resist him through touch. So Nicole lures him up to their suite by virtue of Amber being magically ruffied and then interrogates him. He squeals that he was hired to gather power from fucking people up for someone in L.A. and he was raping and killing wealthy women specifically because he liked it. The moonstone says that’s all it needed to hear, and drains Nicole of all her magic to turn the sorcerer into a fine layer of ash coating the floor.

The two Fenerec show up and get pissed that they put themselves in danger like that, before deciding to head back to L.A.. Once back in L.A. Amber brings Nicole to get samples of some diseases that infect Fenerec once they get the plague, and also a sample of the plague itself. So they try teaching Nicole how to sense the plague in order to teach a disease that follows the plague to kill it. This does not work at all, and they call in Big Daddy D to study his immunity as a true born Fenerec instead. While Amber goes to pick Big Daddy D up from the airport, Nicole has to meet up with Dominic to talk about the contract from that movie from way back.

So at Dominic’s house, Nicole meets Dominic’s friend Patrick, who creeps on her hardcore and his touch makes her skin crawl. Dominic asks Nicole and Patrick’s help in finding a prop gun for Nicole to practice with for the movie, which is weird since the director insisted on her holding a real rifle but whatever. So after exploring the basement, Nicole find a door to another room, and inside is OH SHIT! IT’S A FENEREC BOIS! So Nicole is like “wtf?!” and Dominic is like “Patrick get her” and Patrick is all like “ima sorcerer guys!” and everyone comes to a standstill in front of the cage. Nicole gets the feeling this female wolf is not actually Dominic’s lover as he claims, and slams open the cage.

Now, here’s the lowdown on the situation. This wolf is a woman Dominic stuck in his basement until she agreed to be his lover, she was infected with the plague and to save herself, decided to stay in wolf form so the need to shift wouldn’t explode her. Dominic, seeing that she was still dying anyways, hired a bunch of sorcerers to gather power and perform a ritual to swap Nicole and the woman’s souls, leaving Nicole a dying werewolf and the woman free to be his... whether she wanted to be or not.

So the wolf bursts from the cage and seeing that Patrick has started the ritual, decides to kill Nicole so it can’t be completed, she fails, Patrick succeeds, and Nicole wakes up sometime later in the wolf’s body, alone. Nicole finds out two interesting points, one: she is immune to the silver lining of the cage, and two: her wizard powers now manifest as ice and snow instead to invisible energy. So she opens the lock with her magic and heads upstairs to find her stuff. Luckily nobody was watching it and she grabs her gun, the magic book, and the moonstone. The gun in its holster goes around her neck like a collar, and the moonstone decides that it likes her now that she’s a Fenerec. The book says “freeee” as soon as she touches it and crumbles to dust, and now instead of the book talking in her head there is a wolf spirit… somehow...?

So Nicole circles the outside of the building and realizes she’s dying of plague, so the moonstone is like “naw girl you got dis” and teaches her how to kill the plague, since being a Fenerec wizard give a +∞ modifier to the Diplomacy check to change the moonstone from “Hostile” to “Helpful.” And then Nicole whips out her gun using magic and shoots Dominic and Patrick dead through a window. Good climax author, real suspenseful. So it turns out that when Amber and Big Daddy D showed up and couldn’t get in they called the cops, and the gunshots from Nicole killing the two villains gave them probable cause to enter, they see Nicole in wolf form whining and putting on a pitiful puppy act. They bring her outside and leave her with Alex, who is dying of the plague, and Richard – who is immune btw – goes in to look for Nicole (dropped the ball there dickhead). Nicole cures Alex of the plague and they go in to find that – surprise – the woman who swapped bodies with Nicole is actually her sister Lisa!

So here we find out some stupid outta nowhere bullshit. Nicole is a true born Fenerec, but her twin Lisa was not. This meant that the two would have to be separated or Nicole would try to turn Lisa, killing her. However, Nicole would freak out if they were separated so her parents chose to use forbidden witch magic to kill Nicole’s wolf spirit. Rendering Nicole human. Also, Nicole and Lisa visited Richard and Alex’s pack a few years ago; Lisa and Alex fell in love, got married, became Fenerec, and tried to get Nicole to become one as well. Three problems though, Nicole did not want to be a Fenerec, Nicole and Richard apparently hated each other, and also Nicole was already a Fenerec so the ritual just could not work in the first place. So some pack-members got it into their heads that she was a racist and that their alpha hated her, and took it into their own hands to “deal with the problem.” Needless to say, Nicole got super fucked up, stole Richard’s car, and got in an accident so bad she was covered in scars and was in a coma for over a year. When she woke up, she tried to make a career out of singing when she met the book and lost her voice. So I guess the book was actually her wolf spirit and when she got a wolf body the two could become one again… or something?

Anyways, everybody goes home after falsifying some evidence and they decide that what just happened to Nicole was super damaging and trying to force her to turn back now what probably fatal. So the next day Amber and Nicole head to a Nuclear power plant and Nicole siphons a metric fuck-ton of power from it to cause an enormous snowstorm that carried her power to kill the plague, and unleashed it on the city to save all the Fenerec that lived there. Yay.

But the two are trapped in Amber’s car during the blizzard, so they get Nicole to become human shaped again and Amber hands her a bunch of records that reveals something kinda important I guess: Richard and Nicole had everyone fooled and they got Nicole’s mom to forge her father’s consent and got married and were all in love and shit, unfortunately the incident that left Nicole in a coma involved severe cranial trauma so she forgot basically all of that. Nice.

Once the blizzard let’s up, Nicole meets up with Richard and reveals what she now knows, retrieving their marriage rings and being all-like “werewolf healing is helping me get my memory back so let’s figure out how to restart this whole relationship thing, okay?” Aaaaaaaand that’s the end. Just right there. Kinda abrupt.