#still workshopping the ship name how the hell do people do it

[terrencemcterrence]

I found out where to get the Monster Roadtrip assets and I'm about to get insufferable up in here, look at these very attractive dead[?] people hangin out

[thescarletchan]

The Good Old Days

ship: Handsome Jack x Reader tags: AU, Canon typical Violence

summary: I remember them. The good old days.When I was a simple engineer, Jack was a Programmer. We worked for Hyperion, creating the next generation of Loaders. I built them, he programmed them.But when the COV attacked Helios, the only place to turn was the now ship, Sanctuary.

word count: 3,273 

a/n: As always, I'm terrible at summaries. Essentially this is an AU where Jack never became Handsome Jack and kept on programming, causing the events of Borderlands 2, the Pre-Sequel, and Tales from the Borderlands, to never happen. But you know, Troy and Tyreen are still out there.I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it! (Oh and I could totally write a second chapter with smut, just saying.)

I remember them. The good old days.

When I was a simple engineer, Jack was a Programmer. We worked for Hyperion, creating the next generation of Loaders. I built them, he programmed them.

All was good.

Life was simple. 

We lived and worked in the Helios as it orbited the planet Pandora. 

There was always fighting down on that planet. Inescapable fighting. Fighting for territory, weapons, and power.

But there was one safe haven we knew of. Sanctuary. Run by a group called themselves the Crimson Raiders, they provided safety to almost anyone. 

Then came the transmission from Pandora, from a group calling themselves the “Children of the Vault” or the COV if you’re short on time. 

Led by the Siren twins Troy and Tyreen Calypso, they gave Helios, and by proxy, Hyperion, two choices.

Join us or die.

Tassiter chose the latter. And boy, the COV wasn’t joking when they said “Or die”.

The very next day, they launched an attack. The Cultist fucking teleported onto the Moon Base, and began killing Hyperion employee en mass. 

Jack and I were wandering around when they attacked. God, I remember it like it was yesterday.

*

“So, what’s your next project gonna be?” Jack asked, and I shrugged as we walked.

“No clue. I’ll probably just go to Tassiter, ask what he wants, and do that. Creatively, I’m a little burnt out at the moment.” I sighed.

“Oh, well if you need my help, I’m always there.” He gave me a light pat on the shoulder. The moment his hand made contact with me, alarms started blaring and red lights were flashing. There was a moment of confusion, from Jack, myself, and other Hyperion employees around us.

“Attention, we are under attack, I repeat, we are under attack!” A voice shouted over the intercoms.

“Under attack? How?” Jack asked the air, the both of us still standing in the middle of the hallway, other employees now rushing around. From down the hall, there was a bright orange glow in the shape of an orb, and a whole crowd of people appeared.

“Shit, that’s how! Jack, come on!” I grabbed him by the arm as the attackers began to open fire.

“Who are these guys?” Jack yelled as we sprinted. 

“I don’t know, why the hell would I know?” I responded as we turned a corner, only to find more of the attackers. 

“Long live God Queen Tyreen!” One of them shouted, before blowing a poor sucker's head off with a shotgun.

“Tyreen? I recognize that name!” I said as we started running the opposite direction.

“Shit! It’s Troy and Tyreen. The Children of the Vault!” He yelled, pulling me into an empty conference room and hiding below the window. He put a finger up to his lips. Screams and a stampede of footsteps passed. We waited, and all was eerily silent, save for the alarms still blaring.

“We need to get to my workshop. There are things I need to save and-” I started rumbling, and Jack put his hands on my shoulders, forcing me to face him.

“No, Y/N. We need to get the hell outta here. We need to get some guns, get to an escape pod, and get to Pandora.” He said, his heterochromatic eyes staring into mine.

“Pandora? Why? That’s where the rest of the COV is.”  I said, and Jack nodded.

“Yes, but there’s also Sanctuary. We can head there and-” Something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. It caught mine too.

A spaceship. And written on the side was the word “Sanctuary”.

“We’re fucked.” I sighed, and Jack looked back at me.

“No, no! This is good! We can have them dock here, and just hop right on!” Jack suggested, and I sighed once more.

“I mean, I suppose that could work. But how would we get their attention?” I asked, and the crackle of the intercom was heard once more.

“Attention Hyperion Employee’s, this is Commander Lilith of the Crimson Raiders. We know you are currently under attack and will be docking to take refugees onto Sanctuary. Please open up the nearest docking bay so we can help.”

“Fuck me man, why’s it gotta be everytime I speak I get proven wrong?” I grumble, and Jack smiles.

“I mean, it’s helping us! Right, so we need weapons.” He said, and I peeked out the window into the hall. Still empty.

“Yeah, um, we should go where the COV was headed. Good chance that some got killed by LOADERs and we can loot the bodies,” I said and he nodded along, “Then you head to the docking bay control room and open it up, I’ll go back to my workshop, grab my ECHO and some stuff and make a mad dash for the bay.” I go to stand up but Jack pulls me back down.

“Y/N, are you crazy? Leave it!” He nearly hissed.

“No. I worked so hard to make all that stuff. I’m not just gonna leave it and let the COV get their cultist hands all over it. Plus, it could help us out with the Raiders, you know? Get us trusted quicker.” I said, and he sighed.

“Fine. Call me as soon as you get your ECHO. I’ll hold off the COV for as long as I can but I am not leaving here without you.” He stated.

“If worst comes to worst, you might need to,” He goes to say something, but I interrupt, “But let’s not think about that alright? Right now, we need guns. Come on.” I stood up, and Jack joined me. We peeked out of the door, I looked right and he looked left.

“Found something.” He said, just loud enough to be heard over the alarms. I followed him to the left where we found some guns. Two pistols, a shotgun, and an assault rifle. We each took a pistol, with Jack grabbing a Maliwan and I got a Jakobs.

“You take the rifle. I’ll have the shotgun.” I reached for the Hyperion shotgun when Jack suddenly snatched it. 

“No, you’re the better shot, you take it.” He said, loading the shotgun.

“Jack-” I started, and he stopped me.

“Now’s not the time. Take it and go. Haul ass over there and then get back. I’m not going anywhere without you.” His eyes bored into mine. I had seen him serious before, but that was entirely different. I nodded, grabbing the rifle and loading it, before turning away. I took a few steps down the hall before stopping and turning back to Jack.

“See you in a bit.” I said, and he smiled.

“See you in Sanctuary.” He turned and began jogging down the hall, and I went the opposite way. 

It wasn’t too far to my workshop, but I tried my best to dodge any encounters with the COV. There was the occasional shout, what they were saying, I had know clue. Bodies, both COV and Hyperion littered the floors. I turned a corner, the door to my workshop in sight. 

But so were a small group of COV. They were in a fight with some Hyperion security, so I tried to sneak behind them, attempting to slip into my workshop unseen, but some crazy asshole in the group saw me.

“You’re gonna be my new meat bicycle!” He shouted at me as I scrambled through the door. I locked it behind me, and it slid in his face. I could hear his fists pound on the metal, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with that.

I fell backwards, staring at the door, panting. I could hear my heartbeat thrumming in my ears, and I forced myself to calm down. Slowly standing up, I looked around.

My ECHO. I need to find it.

I jogged over to my desk and began to sift through the mess. I found the side bag I adore and slung it over my shoulder. Inside was my ECHO, which I clipped to the waist of my pants and called up Jack.

“Y/N! You made it to your workshop.” Jack exclaimed, sounding hopeful.

“Yeah, but not before some COV fuck saw me and said I was gonna be a meat bicycle, whatever the hell that mean…” I muttered to myself, sifting through the contents of my desk, collecting anything that I would miss or needed, “How's the docking bay going?”

“Oh, uh, it’s going,” He said, and there was a gunshot, “I got in contact with that Lilith chick. They can’t bring in the ship until this area is clear, they don’t wanna risk their people.”

“Damn it,” I grabbed a thumbdrive off my desk, which contained my most recent blueprints, and pocketed it, “Listen, I’m almost done here. I think I can slip through the vents into the room next door and get out that way. Then I’ll head over to you and help clean things up.” 

“Sounds like a plan,” Another gunshot, then a grunt of effort, “Get here quick.”

“Got it.” I hung up, looking around the room. Anything else I would miss? I mean, yes, but it’s nothing I can carry. Time to move I guess. I passed the door, which that group seemed to still be distracted with, and made my way to the vent. It just went to the next room over, nothing crazy, it was five feet long at most.

I yanked on the grate, which fell off surprisingly easily. I slid my bag through, before crawling in. It was small and dusty but I didn’t care. This was life or death. I’d live with some dust on me.

I pushed on the other grate, which came off with the same ease as the first one, and pulled myself out on the other side. It was a storage room. I picked my way through it and found the door. It silently slid open, and I glanced at where the COV was. They were still focused on the other door.

I didn’t even bother closing the door to the storage room, not wanting to risk them hearing me. I slowly snuck out of that hall, and once I turned the corner, I was sprinting down the halls, jumping over corpses and avoiding puddles of blood. As I ran, the alarm turned off, and I could hear the sounds of fights all around. I kept moving, gunshots fading out as new ones faded in, until I was close enough to the Docking Bay where I could hear Jack’s fight.

“Son of a-” I heard him yell as I got to the doorway. If we weren’t in a life or death situation, the scene in front of me would almost be comical.

Jack stood at the control panel, a cultist jumping towards him, with other cultist bodies littered at his feet and all over the room. He was stepping backwards when he tripped over a corpse, and began to fall. The cultist was screaming as he jumped. I drew my pistol, and fired once. 

The bullet struck the cultist in the head, sending him limply across the room with the momentum of the shot. I gave Jack a look as I walked over, as he pushed himself up, sighing and muttering to himself.

“I could’ve handled that.” He grumbled, and I snorted.

“Sure Jackie, sure. Anyways, ready to open the docking bay?” I asked, and he wiped his hands off.

“Yeah yeah, gimme a minute.” He stood at the console and began pressing buttons. There was the whirring of machines as the Docking Bay doors opened, a barrier of energy protecting the inside from the vacuum of space, yet weak enough for people and ships loading bays to pass through. I leaned back on the console looking towards the door. 

I heard a near stampede of footsteps grow closer and closer.

“Uh, Jack?” He looked over at me, “I think we need to call Lilith.” I said, pointing to the door, where a new wave of cultists began to pour from.

“Shit!” He shouted, pressing a few more buttons before a crackling came over the small speaker embedded in the console.

“Is the Docking Bay open?” The same female voice from earlier, Lilith asked.

“Yes, but we’re not gonna be able to keep this place clear for too long, they just keep coming.” I said, shooting the first cultist that came my way.

“Who is this?” She asked and I groaned.

“Y/N, a friend of Jack’s.” I groaned, and narrowly dodged a tackle from a cultist.

“He mentioned you, listen, we can’t come in until you’re clear over there, we’re not risking our own-”

“Lilith, it’s not gonna get clear! They’re teleporting onto Helios, you don’t get your ass over here now, and there’s gonna be no one left on this base!” I shouted, shooting another cultist.

“Alright, we’re coming. It’ll take a minute, hold it down there until we dock, then get your ass and the ass of anyone else there in Sanctuary.” She said before going silent. 

“Jack, we’re on our own for a bit, but they’re coming!” I shouted to him, and watched as he leapt out of the way causing a cultist to fall out of the Docking Bay and into space. 

I slung the rifle off my back and opened fire on the cultists as they ran into the room. Many of them dropped, but a few took the shots and kept on moving. I kept getting pushed back in the room, until both Jack and myself were at the energy barrier.

“Exactly how long did Lilith say?” He shouted, the blast from his shotgun hitting a cultist right in the chest, dropping him there.

“That’s the thing, she didn’t!” I yelled back, and heard him groan. I shot another crazy masked man that was running at me, and he fell. I went to shoot another, and my gun just clicked, “Jack I’m out.” I said, and Jack turned to me.

“Me too.” He turned the shotgun around in his hands, holding it like a club, and I did the same with my rifle. 

“Let’s go motherfuckers!” I shouted, hitting the nearest cultist with the stock of my gun, knocking him down. Behind us, there was a strange sound. I half turned, seeing Sanctuary’s loading bay back through the energy field.

“Y/N, Jack, get on!” I heard the familiar voice of Lilith, and saw a red headed woman talking, and connected the dots. She had her own people fire on the cultists, giving us the time needed to get on the ship. The Loading Dock doors closed, and we were safe, we were off of Helios.

I sat down on the floor, trying to get my breathing under control. Jack sat down next to me. He leaned against me as the red headed woman, Lilith, crouched before us.

“Welcome to Sanctuary.”

*

That was three years ago. Time really flew.

I showed Lilith what I had, the blueprints I made, and that gained us some trust.

We have been fighting the COV off constantly, and both Jack and myself slowly rose up in the ranks of the Crimson Raiders. We met the Vault Hunters Lilith worked with. They were a strange but tight knit group. Multiple Sirens, Amara, Maya, and Tannis, with Lilith’s Siren powers having gotten stolen by Tyreen. 

Me and Jack were the only Hyperion employees that made it off Helios, and the Moonbase soon crashed into Pandora after that. Both Jack and I are fairly sure Tassiter died, and you know, good riddance.  

“Y/N?” I jumped slightly. 

“Uh, yeah?” I looked over, seeing Jack. 

“You alright?” He asked. “Yeah, I’m fine.” I gave him a small smile.

“Okay… You were just… Kinda staring out into nothingness.” He sat down next to me.

“Sorry I was just… reminiscing I guess.” I shrugged and he looked at me.

“About what?” He asked, opening a bag of pretzels I didn’t even notice he had.

“Life before we were here. Back on Helios. I was thinking of that day actually.” I laughed a bit.

“Why?” “I… I don’t really know. These past few years… They’ve gone by so quick, I hadn’t even noticed. Three years of my life, just, gone,” I said, leaning back, “Sorry, I’m getting weirdly deep. What’s up?” I turned to him.

“I wanted to give you this. Found it on a scouting mission with Morticai,” He digs around in his pocket, and his eyes light up when he finds what he’s searching for, “Close your eyes and open your hands.” “Jack, seriously?” I sighed, and he nodded.

“Yeah seriously. Trust me, you’re gonna love it.” He says with a sincere smile. I roll my eyes, but close them, holding a hand out.

“I swear to god, if it’s Skag shit again, I’m ejecting you.” I grumbled, and I heard him chuckle as the couch shook slightly.

“That was one time.” He shot back, and I scowled at my approximation of where he was.

“That’s far too many times to be handed Skag shit. Now just gimme what you have or I’m opening my-” I felt a small object drop into my hand.

“Look at it.” I opened my eyes, looked down at what he had put in my hand.

It was an arch on a chain. Looking at it closer, it had a clasp, and the arch was the Vault symbol. 

“A necklace?” I asked, looking back at him.

“I bought it for you a few days before everything on Helios went to shit. Lilith sent me and Mordecai to the wreckage of Helios. I found it there, still intact. I never got the chance to give it to you then, so I thought I’d give it to you now, considering we’re sort of Vault Hunters now.” As he spoke, I lifted the necklace up, the charm swinging gently with the slight shake of my hand. 

The charm, at first glance, appeared to be black, but as I peered closer at it, I saw something swirling in the darkness. I tapped it with my free hand, and the swirling lit up purple.

“Jack, this is made of eridium.” I said, looking back and forth from the charm to him. He looked down at it, watching the glowing purple fade.

“Huh. I guess it is,” He said, not at all sounding surprised, “Well, do you like it?” He asked, as I opened the clasp and put it around my neck, the Vault charm sitting just below my collar bone. I grinned down at it, then looked back at Jack.

“I love it!” I practically tackled him, enveloping him in a hug as he fell to his back on the couch. 

“Jeez you two, just fuck and get it over with.” I heard a familiar Irish accent say. I peeked up to find Zane and Amara walking into the room. Zane sat across from Jack and I, and Amara stood with her arms crossed.

“Seriously, I’ve had to watch you two dance around each other for three years. That might as well be psychological torture,” Amara said, and I felt my face heat up. I glanced down at Jack for a moment, and I saw his cheeks getting red. 

Slowly, I got off the couch, standing beside the couch. Jack sat up, giving me a strange look. Quickly, I grabbed his arm, running from the room and dragging him along with me. We ran upstairs, and into my room at the back of the ship.

The door slid shut behind us with a hydraulic hiss, and mischievous giggles filled the room. 

[o0anapher0o]

One pet peeve I have with Discovery going forward from season 3 (haven’t seen S4 yet) that has very little to do with the plot, the characters or the overall quality of the show, is how they have put next to no effort into the world building of their future. They have sent their crew 900 years into the future and almost nothing changes? Sure the political landscape shifted a little (but not to a point of being unrecognisable), the technology is a bit more advanced (barely) and everything is a little more lawless and more threatening than before, but all in all there are more differences between TOS and TNG than between Disco season two and three. They might just as well have gone fifty years into the future.

It just feels like the writers have absolutely no concept of how long 900 years are in cultural and social terms. It is very, very long. Like, nine hundred years ago we had a completely different perception of what a person was, and I’m not even talking medically. A child would have been considered a small adult and a person’s character was seen as an unchangeable fixture you were born with (character development was literally invented by the Enlightenmet) . The way society worked was fundamentally different, humanity’s place in the universe was fundamentally different, hell, even what people ate was fundamentally different.

The fact that apparently 900 years in the future Starfleet still exists is hardly less than a miracle, but it also seems to have changed so little that the crew of the Discovery can seamlessly be integrated after a mere months of welcome-to-the-future workshops and a minor technical overhaul of the ship. Fucking Marvel did a better job showing Steve Rogers’ having to integrate into the future and he was only seventy years out of his own time and none of the films really cared about that. The Disco crew even keep their old uniforms and no one ever even remarks on it. Imagine a medieval knight coming to the present and joining the police, but they keep wearing their chain mail and armour, and no one thinks it’s weird. (Yes I know they get the new ones by the end of S3, but there is no in universe reason given as to why exactly then and not earlier.)

And Starfleet is a secular institution that has apparently survived without any major changes at all for nearly a millennium. Even the world’s major religions, the most change-resistant institutions humanity has ever created, have undergone massive changes over the centuries in regards to doctrines, organisation structure, their socio-political role, how they operate, etc. None-religious organisations don’t even usually last that long. The only ones that do tend to be monarchies, which are more often then not closely interwoven with religion; and they too have changed drastically in what they mean, how they work and what they can/should do. Try and put William the Bastard on the English throne today and see what happens.

And that’s not even touching on cultural and social stuff. Like the fact that Kelpiens apparently still sing the same lullabies and eat the same food Saru remembers. Name one song that people still sing that is provably older than even just 500 years. Just one. I’ll wait. Music doesn’t last that long. The idea of what music is, how it’s made, how it’s preserved doesn’t last that long. (They get a pass for the dish because Su’Kal has never had it before so he wouldn’t know if it was weird.) It’s especially annoying that they do this with Kelpien culture with probably underwent a massive revolution after everything they knew about themselves was changed in season 2. We’re talking fall of the Roman empire levels of cultural and social change here. Kaminar should be entirely unrecognisable to Saru.

They do their best job with Ni’Var, and even there it feels superficial. They’re not one culture, they’re two that barely hold together, even after what has to be eight hundred years, if we assume the reunification happened reasonably shortly after the destruction of Romulus. (That’s not even getting into me thinking Ni’Var as a concept is a stupid idea and they should have realised that at some point on those eight hundred years. Sometimes breaking up is simply the better option if your core ideals are fundamentally different.)

Nine hundred years is an insanely long time and all they do is basically pretend this is the same world we already know, just slightly different and with everyone we know conveniently removed.

I know all of this is pretty irrelevant to pretty much everything in the show (which is probably why they didn’t bother), but it bugs me so much every time I watch it it’s not even funny anymore.

[crumbledcastle28]

Chapter 6: A Jedi

Warnings: traumaaaa, lots of anxiety, like lots of anxiety, the reader really hates herself in this one, minor minor violence, references to violence, mostly just anxiety and hate.

Author’s Note: This is where the series starts to pick up, so I executed it as best as I could! I also went a little off canon with this one, so I hope it makes sense with the story. Thank you for any support!

Your journey to Sorgan was pretty smooth… but Mando was tense.

You tried your best to reassure him multiple times that this was the best choice for the kid and that you could help him with any challenge thrown at him, but he would just respond with a sigh and a solemn nod. So, you decided not to push it.

He had done even riskier missions on his own, so he can handle this one.

Once you arrived, you walked into the common house and met a woman named Cara Dune.

She introduced herself to you and she seemed very friendly, but when Mando mentioned that she was an ex shock trooper for the Republic, that is when you tensed up.

You had done things in your past that you knew would offend her. Not even offend her, but provoke her to strangle you alive. The fact that she was from Alderaan made it obvious enough that the Empire had hurt her deeply.

The only way to protect yourself was to hide who you really were, and your heart sank.

You felt like you had finally broken away from that way of life. The hiding, the anxiety, the fear. You felt like you could be yourself with Mando and the kid and not have to worry about that anymore. But the galaxy was cruel like that.

After the brief introduction, Mando proceeded to outline the plan and everything that the man on the recording (who you later found out to go by the name Greef Karga) had said, and Cara looked far from impressed.

“I don’t know, I’ve been advised to lay low,” she said, “If anyone identifies me, I’ll rot in a cell for the rest of my life.”

That makes two of us, you think.

“I thought you were a veteran,” Mando mumbled.

“I’ve been a lot of things,” Cara replied. “If I so much as book a passage on a ship registered to the New Republic-”

“I have a ship,” Mando replied, “I can bring you there and back with a handsome reward. You can live free of worry.”

“I’m already free of worry,” she said, “and I’m not in the mood to play soldier anymore. Especially fighting a local warlord.”

“He’s not a local warlord,” Mando replied, “He’s Imperial.”

You could see how Cara visibly tensed up at the word “Imperial.” If you weren’t scared of her before, you sure as hell were now.

“I’m in,” she responded, and you smiled at her.

She grinned back to you and asked, “Where do you fit in in this plan?”

You looked at the child in your arms and said, “My job is to keep the child safe. So I will protect him until he is used as the bait, and I will adapt to where he goes from there.”

“She can defend herself plenty,” Mando says, and Cara nods at you.

“I believe you,” she says, and you give her another smile.

I really hope I don’t let her down, you think.

~~*~~

Within the next hour, the four of you had arrived back at the Razor Crest.

Mando started the ship on track to Nevarro while Cara took a look at the weapon arsenal.

You watched as her eyes scanned over the array of options, and you couldn’t help but feel deep sorrow for her.

Her life was torn apart by the Empire, and now she was getting thrown right back into a fight. The fact that she wasn’t even going to join the mission before Mando mentioned that the client was Imperial made you nervous. She was not a woman you wanted to mess with, so you hoped and prayed you would stay on her good side.

The kid had somehow managed to make it to the controls and grab hold of the throttle, which made the ship veer abruptly side to side.

You ran to the child and lifted him away from the throttle while Mando stabilized the ship.

“Are you sure one set of hands is enough to watch that little beast? Worst case scenario, we made need y/n to fight with us. Maybe an extra set of hands could help,” Cara said, trying to catch her breath from running all around the ship.

Mando looked back at you and you nodded.

“She’s right. I can watch the kid as long as you need, but if you guys need me in a fight I can’t keep him with me. He could get hurt.”

Mando nodded and sat back down in the pilot’s chair.

“Looks like we are making a pit stop,” he said.

~~*~~

The Razor Crest landed on the property of a man named Kuiil. Mando said that he had helped him greatly in the past and he trusted him, and if Mando trusted somebody, you did too.

He greeted you with open arms and was incredibly nice. He led the four of you inside his humble home, and you never realized how long it had been since you stayed in an actual home.

Kuiil studied the child in your arms and said, “it hasn’t grown much.”

“What is your name,” he asked you.

“I am y/n. It is nice to meet you Kuiil,” you said and he nodded reverently to you.

“What about this one? Does she have a name,” he said, gesturing to Cara.

“This is Cara. She was a shock trooper,” Mando said.

“You were a dropper,” Kuiil said, and Cara nodded.

“Did you serve,” she asked.

“On the other side, I’m afraid. But I’m proud to say that I paid out my clan’s debt, and now I serve no one but myself,” Kuiil said.

The other side, you think. Kuiil served the Empire? And Mando had worked with him before?

You couldn’t deny the fact that this got your hopes up. Mando… working with the enemy.

If only he knew, you thought.

All of a sudden, the door behind Kuiil opened, and an IG droid stepped inside with a tray in his hands.

Mando immediately sprang to his feet and pointed his blaster at the droid. Cara joined him, and you blocked the pram the child was in with your whole body.

“Would anyone care for some tea,” the droid asked, and your eyebrows knit in confusion.

Weren’t these droids normally hunters?

“Please, lower your blasters. He will not harm you,” Kuiil said, obviously trying to diffuse the situation.

Mando, however, didn’t seem to want to go that route.

He kept his blaster pointed directly at the droid’s head and said, “That thing is programmed to kill the baby.”

You straightened your back at his words, blocking as much of the pram as you could, until Kuiil shook his head and said, “Not anymore.”

He then explained how he found the droid at a battle site and brought it back to his workshop. He decided to repair it, and then spent many days teaching the droid everything from scratch. It developed a personality, Kuiil mentioned, and it’s experiences helped the personality become unique to the droid.

“Is it still a hunter,” Mando asked.

“No, but it will protect,” he said, and Mando finally lowered his blaster.

There was no way Mando was going to let that robot anywhere near the child.

~~*~~

Later that night, you and Cara were sitting in Kuiil’s house while Mando was outside speaking with him, no doubt trying to convince him to protect the child.

“So what’s your story,” Cara asked, taking a sip of tea.

“Oh.. well… Mando picked me up on Tattooine. I worked there as a mechanic for a woman named Peli. It was a good job, but I wanted to get off that planet. I had lived there for a long time, and I wanted to explore the galaxy for once. It sounds cheesy, but I’ve always wanted to do that at some point. Mando agreed to take me with him on his missions in exchange for the child’s safety,” you say, and Cara nods.

“Nice. You made a living for yourself, and were brave enough to walk away when you knew the time was right. Most people never leave their home planet,” she says, and you nod.

“Yeah… I tried my best,” you say, and you try not to let your eyes darken. You didn’t like talking about your past. All it did was stir up old memories that you had worked to push down for years. You hated your past, and you didn’t know how well you could hide it much longer. Especially when you were being questioned by someone like Cara.

“The Empire… hurt me a lot. So, I am excited to hurt it back,” you say, and a big grin shows on Cara’s face.

She takes another sip of her tea, and looks up to find Mando walking through the door.

“Any luck,” she says to him, and he shakes his head no.

“Kuiil said that the droid can protect the child, but I don’t trust it,” he says and Cara chuckles.

“Yeah.. I think we got that,” Cara says and you smile.

Mando goes to sit down next to Cara, so she scoots over a bit to make some room for him.

You heard something hit the floor, and you realize Cara had knocked over your bag on accident. You had brought it into Kuiil’s house because you used it to store snacks for the child.

You stored other things in there too, and under no circumstance was anyone allowed to see them.

That was going pretty well, until Cara knocked the entire thing over.

“Whoops. Sorry,” she says and goes to start putting the items back in.

Your body is frozen in place and you feel like your lungs are being squeezed. Your limbs have turned to putty, and you cannot take your eyes off her hands.

If she sees it, I and dead. I am so dead

“It’s- It’s ok Cara. I’ve got it,” you say and start to stand up.

“No no it’s ok, I can-” she says, before her eyes widen.

She picks up an item and starts raising it to eye level, and you are just about ready to vomit.

Your saber.

You feel like your entire body is crumbling before her and she can’t even tell. Your breathing has become almost erratic and the sweat on your forehead starts to drip down to your eyes.

This whole experience, this whole journey with Mando and the kid could be completely undone right now. Everything you have hidden, everything you’ve buried, and everything you hoped you left behind on sandy Tattooine is staring you right in the face.

And Cara is….smiling?

“No way,” she yells excitedly, before laughing and smiling at you. 

“No wonder you were so secretive about your past! You’re a Jedi,” she says.

You take a glance at Mando, who is staring at the saber, looking confused as ever.

Ok, maybe this is good, you think to yourself, trying to relax.

I can pretend I was a Jedi. Sure. I have basically the same training as them.

But who were you kidding. You knew that wasn’t going to cut it.

“A Jedi?” Mando says, and Cara goes into a whole tangent about how amazing the Jedi were. How they fought the Empire till their dying breaths and defended the galaxy. They had been betrayed by their own clone groups, and most of them died in Order 66.

“But you didn’t!” she said and smiled at you.

You managed a smile back, but you had to have looked like a psycho. You were in so much physical and emotional pain from the amount of anxiety flowing through you. You had felt out of control before, but this was more dangerous than you knew.

You were such an idiot getting your hopes up. Thinking that a Mandalorian actually cared for someone like you. How could you have been so stupid.

“Even the colors of the sabers are legendary,” Cara said. “Aren’t they y/n?”

You nod back, but you know what’s coming.

Your truth was about to shine throughout the entire house, reflecting back at you like some sick joke. And you were screwed. You were so screwed.

“Well, let’s see it then,” Cara said and ignited the saber with both hands wrapped around the handle.

“Wait” you scream, but it was too late.

The tears hit your eyes before she even ignited the weapon.

The deep, burning red saber was ignited, and there was no going back.

It’s burning, fire like glow illuminated Cara’s face, and a sunset like tint was shining on Mando’s armor.

He always looked so beautiful when light would reflect off of him, but not like this.

The red from the saber was vibrant, but you had never seen a glow as red as the anger in Cara’s eyes.

She knew what this color meant, and your identity was revealed in all its glory.

A Sith

Tag list:

@leahkenobi @pinkninja200 @bookloverfilmoholic @farfromjustordinary

[secretgamergirl]

Dear Game Developers, I don’t want to be a rapacious colonizing blight on the world.

I like a pretty wide variety of games, but one general thing I’ve always been particularly keen on is the sort of game where I start off just kinda naked in the wilderness with nothing and have to build up a bunch of infrastructure to accomplish something. So you know, RTSes, Civ clones, survival games, sandbox-y Minecraft stuff, Dwarf Fortress and similar things, but these all have this really annoying habit of making my character the biggest existential threat to the entire world, and I would really like them to stop doing that all the time.

So, just to open up with an example of how to do this sort of thing in a way I like, Subnautica is one of my favorite games. I recently streamed the whole thing, so, links to that if you’d like: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Subnautica actively confronts my issue head on, and handles it right. I’m not slaughtering everything I see, I’m not strip mining the whole planet, I’m not leveling forests. I’m here by way of horrible tragic accident, and by the end of the game I’ve done my best to clean up the mess from that and address some other global issues to the point where I can confidently say my presence over the course of the game has made for a net positive impact on the environment in which it’s set. Plus it’s a great game in a bunch of other ways.

I’m also pretty happy with Factorio, oddly enough. In Factorio I AM strip mining the whole world, slaughtering absolutely all of the local wildlife, and any forests I’m not clear-cutting I’m choking out with industrial emissions that leave nothing but dry withered skeletons where there were once beautiful stretches of foliage. The thing of it is, between actually tracking my environmental impact as a mechanic and having such downer visuals, it at least feels like the developers and I are sharing a really dark joke about how awful you are in games like this.

Then on the other side of the coin here, we have, say, Satisfactory. A game in the same weird subgenre as Factorio (do we have a name for these yet? Convey’em Ups?) but... really gross. The player is explicitly just heading down to this really beautiful planet to extract and process all the resources they can. You’re rewarded for killing... basically all life you see despite it not generally posing any sort of real threat to you, clear cutting all the vegetation, and to keep the factory building vibes nice and chill, when you tap into a coal vein or set up an oil well, you get an endless supply of those burnable fuels to use forever, with absolutely no consequence, as you just consume all the things to make all the other things and ship them out to meet quotas. And that’s... kinda gross? Again, the fact that nothing you do has any sort of consequence despite half of it being stuff that is literally killing the world in reality makes it way worse.

Meanwhile, lately I’ve been keeping a lot of modded Minecraft videos going in the background to stave off the social isolation with the whole plague and all with some human voices, and see what cool new ideas people are testing there. One of the real popular new mods is this one called MineColonies, and you know what? It’s really neat. The idea is you find a big open plot of land somewhere, throw down blueprints for really huge multiblock structures of houses and workshops and such, get those built up a little, and NPCs start wandering in you can start giving jobs to. Here’s someone to harvest and replant trees, someone to go mining for underground resources, someone to build and upgrade the rest of these buildings, people to provide renewable food and medicine to all these other NPCs. Schools for their kids to get their stats up to good places by adulthood, a whole higher learning system to advance a tech tree, it’s cool.

But the thing is, as you probably gathered from the name, it’s DISGUSTINGLY colonialist. All these people coming in are explicitly white, with British accents, explicitly gendered and explicitly heterosexual too incidentally, and a huge part of the general infrastructure building is having to set up guard posts and barracks all over, training knights and archers to defend against the local barbarians native to the land you’re building on who wander out of the wilderness to attack everyone with some regularity. And I mean, how messed up is that? This mod is explicitly adding in native people’s just so there’s someone for you to displace and murder as you colonize some big chunk of unspoiled wilderness in the name of prosperity for your... British colony. Which of course works on an explicitly feudalist system (and then also for some reason has everyone grumbling about how you’re spending your gold, which you aren’t even doing). It totally thematically ruins what I’d otherwise be super super into. And not long after this was released, baseline Minecraft did basically the same thing. There are now roving barbarian tribes who go around trying to kill you and any villagers near you and you have to concern yourself with wiping out whole groups of them with some regularity, whereas previously the only enemies you really had to deal with were zombies and skeletons and a few other weird explicitly monstrous things. It’s gross.

My distaste for slaughtering barbarians extends to the civilization games too. Which... I mean I have put a LOT of hours into a lot of Civ games so it’s obviously not a total dealbreaker for me, but... you’re always this weird immortal dictator and even if you set your civilization up as a democracy, you sure do win every single election regardless of how unhappy people are with you, and you spend a good chunk of time slaughtering local barbarians. And increasingly, with each new game, smaller independent nations because they really keep putting more and more emphasis on military conquest being, if not the best path to victory, one you have to push pretty far no matter what you’re going for.

And it doesn’t have to work like that. My favorite game, mostly in the franchise, is still Alpha Centauri. Where the “barbarians” are brain eating space worms, not other humans, and even then, you can (and I consistently do) be a big tree-hugging hippy, enact worm-friendly social policies, make friends with them instead of killing them, and have them go devour a bunch of violent anti-science anti-environment right wing creeps, strongarm everyone else into adopting similar policies, and, like Subnautica, leave the world better than you found it by foregoing all the easier wins and doing the thing where you find a permanent solution to the local planetary superconsciousness accidentally going berserk and eating itself at periodic intervals. Happy ending for everyone! Except for Miriam. Screw Miriam.

Meanwhile, someone I know not to long ago just randomly pitched a game where there’s a big nature ravaging industrial sprawl, but you play as some sort of reclaiming embodiment of nature, strategically... I guess spreading trees to grow up through everything and have rats chew through the wiring and stuff, and yeah, I would play the hell out of that game. If nobody else gets to it before I clear my plate of all these other projects, I might even make that game.

I should stress again too that it’s not even that I don’t want games to ever put me in such a role as the player, just if you’re going to do it, acknowledge that that sort of thing isn’t cool, and either make it clear that the player character has been forced into a really unfortunate position, or that said character is just awful. Or both, both works.

What I don’t want to ever see people do is rationalize a way out of the issues. “Oh this is an infinite supply of clean-burning coal” does not fly with me. “Oh we’re establishing a colony but it’s on an alien planet” is still colonialism. The weird fetish the whole game industry seems to have with leveling forests is not made better by having those trees give you saplings that fully replace every tree cut down in like 2 minutes. If you don’t want to unpack the moral implications of something, you can just not include it to begin with. None of the stuff I’ve been laying out here is actually necessary for any of these games to work. Just... quit being weird and making me play coal-mining conquistadors already.

[joezworld]

📁

Specifically, any headcanons of the Sodor Engines interacting with the internet, or the internet in general?

For some reason, I’d imagine that podcasts and the like are popular among vehicles in general.

That is a question that I've been working on for some time - because I'm workshopping my own Tornado headcanon (and boy oh boy does she use the internet a lot) - but I have some ideas for the Sodor engines as well: 

Henry is probably the most "plugged in" engine on the island, weirdly enough. One of his drivers gave him an iPod back in the early 2000s, and kindly preloaded it with a bunch of torrented music.

 BTW, that works because all the engines are now equipped with automatic train warning systems, and the little on-board computer has a USB port - as a nice side effect it allows music players to work with the engines in the same way as bone-conducting headphones do. The computer also acts as some kind of computer interface, which I am not going to explain how that works because Jesus Christ I don’t know how it does either.  

 Henry has managed to upgrade his iPod a few times since thanks to hand-me-down units from NWR staff, so he eventually got his buffers on a wifi-enabled iPod Touch and now downloads new music from the station wifi. He does listen to podcasts, but as every other engine will tell you, you could show Henry ten thousand new and exciting songs from the best artists in the world, and his top ten played songs are still going to be Genesis, Phil Collins, and Yes. Bear considers it a win that he managed to convince Henry to regularly listen to Rush after a mere twenty years of convincing. 

 Mavis and Daisy listen to a very interesting program called The News, because as stated elsewhere, they invest a shitload of money and need to be on top of things. Thomas and Percy wish that Daisy would use headphones or something similar to that, instead of listening to Bloomberg TV at loud volumes in the middle of the night. Toby frankly doesn’t mind, as it’s very nice to be kept up-to-date on the outside world.  

In a move that surprises no-one, Bill and Ben have a podcast where they talk about whatever they think about at that moment - usually horse-racing, investing, and clay mining. As such, they have a wide audience, almost none of whom know that they’re that Bill and Ben, as their podcast is audio-only.  

 In an also unsurprising move, Edward and BoCo have been made very much aware that Bill and Ben have a podcast, but are still unsure as to what the hell a podcast is, despite being frequent guests on it.  

Of the main line diesels, only Bear has shown any real interest in the internet, and was immediately put in charge of the Amazon Alexa when a unit was installed in the diesel shed. He also has an iPod that he got for Christmas a few years back. (The NWR has a very good personal  electronics recycling program called give it to Henry, he’ll make use it.)  

Bear does listen to podcasts as well as music, but his choices are so insufferably boring that even Henry refuses to listen to them. (I don’t really listen to podcasts - despite making one - so insert the most boring podcast you can think of here.) 

 As for other internet uses... 

Gordon is very up-to-date on the newest social media trends - somehow - but only really cares when he is involved. He won’t admit it, but he’s been trying to figure out how to work a camera/selfie stick for some time so he can start up his own Instagram account. So far he has been unsuccessful, but one day he will manage it. 

 James has had an ongoing feud with his own Wikipedia page for about a decade now. The article sourced most of its information about his construction off of some out-of-print book about the L&Y. The book in question is accurate about James’ class, but not James himself - as he was a prototype engine. There’s no other primary sources available, so the very dedicated Wikipedia mod who created the page won’t change it - no matter how much James complains that he was there! He knows what happened! 

Every now and again a TTTE fan blog/tumblr will make a post about hypothetical “ships” of the Sodor engines. Most of the time it’s shipping the core characters like Gordon and Henry, much to Gordon’s bafflement and Henry’s amusement! 

Only one blog (a ttte fan tumblr by the curious name of @mean-scarlet-deceiver  ) has gotten it right. Henry actually reached out to congratulate this blogger, but was unfortunately mistaken for a very dedicated roleplay account.  

James is very annoyed by these blogs, as they have never once correctly guessed who he is “shipped” with! He has tried several times to be seen in public with Delta, but these events have never gone as planned - the “best” instance is when Edward rolled by at exactly the wrong moment, leading to months of speculation that JamesxEdward was the ship to look out for! 

Thomas, being a generally oblivious sort of engine, was totally unaware of the online fan community around the TV show until he started getting actively harassed by vloggers and Instagrammers in the early 2010s. He’s fine with it now, but it was a deeply unusual experience for most of 2012.  

Toby has developed an unexpectedly popular following on social media following his collab with Stormzy. His official twitter is huge now, with over a million followers, even if he has no idea what to do with it. He posts rarely, but usually manages to make an incredible post when he does.

No-one is sure who told Oliver what a “fan-production” is, but if you manage to get ahold of him for any period of time and ask him nicely, he will lend his voice to your TTTE fan-project, so long as it isn’t about [INSERT TERRIBLE SOCIAL/POLITICAL VIEW(S) HERE]. This means that he has 100% voiced dramatic readings of NSFW Fanfics before, which is always an absolute riot to spring on people unannounced.

There is a series of slice-of-life TTTE fanfics on Ao3 that have been written with such accuracy and innate railway knowledge that people are sure it was written by a Sodor engine, but nobody knows which one.

The Culdee Fell Railway has very active Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts, with all of the engines and coaches showing up regularly. It’s about the closest any of the railways on Sodor have come to what those outside the UK would call “normal locomotive social media”.

The Skarloey Railway has social media accounts too, but they don’t really feature the engines in any meaningful way, instead being used as a normal service announcements page.  

 The SR is a real working railway that doesn’t rely on tourism money as much as the others do, so they get a bit of a pass here.  

 The Arlesdale Railway has Twitter and YouTube, which didn’t usually get a lot of hits until 2020, when Ivan and Amanda Farrier started badgering the staff to make some videos just to alleviate some boredom. So far the most popular videos on the channel are a front-mounted camera video of the entire line slow-tv style, Bert explaining how steam engines work, and a video of Mike complaining about Justin Bieber for a solid half-hour.  

 That’s about it as far as Sodor goes, but before we’re done, I want to take a moment to talk about Tornado, because I have some fun ideas for her... 

First of all, we need to establish that Tornado is very young. Her construction only started in late 90′s, and she was steamed to life in 2000, putting her firmly into the “Zoomer” category. Add in the fact that she was built by a bunch of old men who didn’t really know how to treat a new engine, and she was raised much more like a human than a locomotive - I’ll get to this much more in the proper Tornado Headcanon post, but what this means here is that when social media started being a thing in the mid-to-late 2000′s, the people at the A1 Trust decided that they needed a young person to run things like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace... and, well, Tornado was the youngest person in the trust by a large margin.

I should state here that in the rest of the world, locomotives are on the internet at roughly the same level as humans are, so there’s plenty of equipment to connect a phone/computer/camera to an engine - being English, the A1 Trust didn’t know how common it was, but they managed to get it up and running just the same.

 So Tornado has very quickly become attuned to the internet, just like any other teenager would. (yes, let’s let that settle into our minds for a moment - Tornado is barely old enough to drink in the US!) Quite naturally that means that she knows social media inside and out, and is actually quite a proficient social media manager for the trust, managing all of their social pages. More than one person who has complained about the trust on twitter has unknowingly been complaining to Tornado herself! 

 “On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog Engine”. 

 Tornado has her own personal social media accounts too, but most/all of the time she gets mistaken for a very dedicated role-player, as the general perception of British Locomotives is that they don’t tweet. This has resulted in some amazing reactions from podcast hosts (because, as you might expect, Tornado is very knowledgeable about steam traction in the 21st century, and tweets about it often, so train podcasts want to talk to her) when she gets invited onto video calls, turns on her webcam, and is met with screams from people who suddenly realize that her profile picture is accurate.  

 By far the best instance of this is when she was invited onto a video call with a railfan podcast. She was at the NRM at the time and managed to convince them to let her use their Skype setup. A wide-angle lens was needed because she was on the turntable in the Great Hall, so that podcast quickly got sidetracked when her webcam was turned on and revealed Tornado, with Mallard, Evening Star, City of Truro, and Green Arrow visible behind her. Whatever the original topic was quickly got thrown out in favor of a 2-hour Q&A with some of the most famous engines in the UK. 

[st-just]

A Setting: The City of Sethennai

Because I’ve spent long enough tinkering on this that I might as well share it with a population of more than a half-dozen potential players. Also it could almost certainly use an editing pass, and I don’t want to lose it all next time my computer dies.

So, a collection of densely packed plot hooks in the shape of a city

City History

The City of Sethennai is quite possibly the oldest city in the world, or at least the oldest still inhabited. When the first Dwarfs and Goliaths fled the Titans for the coast, they found ziggurats already rising from the water and tunnels dug beneath their feet, ruined by some already ancient cataclysm. Supported by fertile soil and full waters, they built their own city over it, and welcomed their own gods to it, a center of resistance to the Titanomarchy that became an empire in its own right.

Centuries passed and power drifted inland, to the mountain palaces of the Titans’ Giant heirs and the divinely appointed heroes who sometimes overthrew them. The City was rich, but peaceful, its soldiers only raised when one princess or another took it as a capital during a civil war. Such was the case when the first ships appeared from the East.

The adventurers from the League of Free Cities had been spurred across the sea by visions of fortune and glory, overwhelming the defenders with armies of goblin slaves and the ability to evoke demons far beyond what they could deal with. Their leader Sethennai proclaimed himself Emperor and renamed the city in his honour, taking it as his capital. After his assassination some years later the ‘empire’ fell into an anarchy it has never quite recovered from, but the name has stuck, and for the two hundred years since wonders and riches have flowed across the eastern ocean while mercenaries and adventurers have poured west in ever greater numbers.

The city’s ruler for the last fifteen years has been Prince Cael, an adventurer universally believed to be supported by the League’s political rivals back East. If so, they got what they paid for – experts and financiers have been imported and sponsored, and trade opened to anyone capable of paying the reasonable import duties.

Until two years ago, he had been the picture of brutal decadence, rousing himself from luxurious hedonism only to brutally deal with any threats to his power. Recently though, he changed – sponsoring vast expeditions into the ancient palaces of the interior and the ruins buried on the city’s outskirts, and installing a self-proclaimed Hierophant whose heresies had earned her a death warrant back East in the city’s grandest temples (violently banishing the cults which had held them since the Conquest in the process).

One week ago, at exactly noon, the sun vanished from the sky for one minute, and the entire city was filled with a deafening scream. Since then, the Prince’s grand palace has been sealed tight, with ingeniously horrifying magical defences ensuring that anyone who tries to force a door or window isn’t around to try again. Everything’s very rapidly falling apart, and the city’s traditional power brokers are reacting like so many rabid weasels in too small a cage.

It is, then, a perfect opportunity for people with the will to seize it.

Districts

The Palantine

If Sethennai is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world, the vast palace complex which crowns its central hill is probably likewise the oldest building still in use. Its foundation is burrowed deep into the hill on which it stands, to the point that some delvers and historians have theorized that it was once a truly massive pyramid now mostly buried by the ages. Rising out of it are two great peaks - impressive ziggurats in their own right - of obvious dwarven make, fashioned to house their ancient Ancestors-Kings and gods in suitable splendor, and since renovated and built over to house the city’s rulers and most favored priesthoods. Surrounding them are a dozen smaller peaks, each the estate of one of the city’s foremost patrician families, teeming with retainers and servants. The land around them is pristine and perfectly manicured, full of wondrous botanical gardens and menageries for the amusement of Sethennai’s greatest citizens.

Location of Interest: The Throne 

A palace built on the ruins of a palace built on the ruins of a palace. The grand ziggurat which the city’s rulers have called home since time immemorial is built into and sits at the peak of its highest hill, the highest point in the sky for dozens of miles in every direction. Its labyrinthine apartments, kitchens, vaults, galleries and corridors house the Prince and his family, dozens of favorites and notables, and hundreds of guards, servants, retainers and entertainers. 

Or, well, housed. 

One week ago, the sun vanished from the sky, and a scream echoed through the city. Since then, the palace complex has proven impenetrable. Every door and window is closed, and attempts to open them by force have fared...poorly. In a ‘never going to walk again’ sort of way. Scrying and other means of magical surveillance so far attempted have simply failed. No one has tried to escape, and no noises have been heard - the whole complex is simply silent. 

Of course, that means that all its secrets and riches are there for the taking. Or that’s the growing consensus - at least three separate groups have camped out near various gates and major entrances, each preparing their own scheme to break in and seize everything within. There’s no fighting between them. Yet. 

Faction of Note: The Hierophant 

    Yri Cenred is many things. A self-proclaimed ‘experimental theologian’. One of shockingly few mortal humans to piss off the Illyrin clergy enough to be specifically declared Anathema. A member of the Commonwealth’s very exclusive list of ‘Enemies of Reason’. Empirically immune to thunderbolts from cloudless skies and most other signs of divine disfavor. Easily one of the most powerful mages in the city. And, for most of the last two years, its High Priestess and Hierophant. 

    No one knows quite how her first meeting with Prince Cael went, and whether she was responsible for her change in personality or if he sought her out because of it. All anyone knows is that shortly after she arrived in the city a few days ahead of Imperial Witch-Hunters looking for her head on a pike, Cael forcibly expelled the Khasali cults which had occupied the Palantine’s grand temples since the Conquest, and installed her in their place with the newly minted title of Hierophant for the city. Since then she and her growing coterie of acolytes (bright-eyed, motivated and young, though you can flip a coin as to whether their hands are stained with ink or blood) have been extremely busy, though no one can say exactly what with. Certainly they haven’t held any public rituals or services. Despite the costs - both political and monetary - in protecting and sponsoring her, Cael never seemed to question whether it was worthwhile. 

    The general opinion on the streets is that she’s probably to blame for anything and everything worth complaining about. The only real divide is between those who think she bewitched the Prince and turned him into her puppet, those who think she’s the one who killed him, and the moderates who think the correct answer is probably ‘both’.

Foundrytown

The New World is absolutely full of exotic reagents, fuel sources, and materials to craft and invent with. It is also absolutely full of people who will pay in your currency of choice for finished goods, armor, weaponry, and whatever nasty alchemical tricks you can keep from blowing up in their face until they want them to. Foundrytown is the sprawling mass of smokestacks, workshops, factories and markets that has spilled to the north of Sethennai’s walls, exploiting both opportunities to the fullest while limiting the chance that some idiot will burn half the city down (again). Robber barons, militant workers, loose fraternities of tinkerers and half-trainer artificers, and the occasional rogue clockwork or alchemical monstrosity all jostle for space and control of the beating heart of Sethennai’s economy. 

Faction of Note: The Grand Bazaar 

    Official Imperial theology accords true dragons a place of honour - the Princes of the Earth, entrusted by Heaven with containing the fury of the elements within themselves so as to render the world peaceful enough for cultivation by the younger races - and forbids very few things to wyrms willing to play the part. (Principally, do not become undead, a god in your own right, or an archdemon of the elements. Though some justification can usually be found for how any sufficiently problematic dragon is actually doing one of those). 

    And Tyramara the Magnificent, the Fire of the Deeps has not technically done any of those things. Still, the ancient wyrm has little interest in allowing the wasting disease which has crippled her continue to spread, and her solution is unorthodox enough that she thought it prudent to abandon her palace-lair in Imir and relocate to the New World, six treasure galleons worth of her hoard in tow. 

    One of the city’s wealthiest residents from the moment she landed, she has bought a plaza in Foundrytown and offered her sponsorship to nearly every tinker and engineer who cares to set up shop there, provided they help sustain and improve the mechanical and hydraulic prosthetics that supplement and replace her dying organs. She has promised a full half of her hoard to any who can permanently deal with her condition, a fortune men have killed for in the past, and certainly will again. 

Faction of Note: The Hellworks 

They’re not officially called the Hellworks - there are, in fact, absolutely no devils involved. Still, between the billowing clouds of soot and steam pouring from their chimneys at all hours of the day, the severe architecture, and the bound spirits who keep the looms running at all hours of the day and eagerly take any opportunity to leave anyone who gets too close crippled or maimed to vent their anger - well, the name stuck. 

One of the most obvious consequences of Prince Cael’s turn towards the esoteric these last years, the ' ‘Royal Sethennai Weaver’s Trust” is the brainchild and absolute domain of the Lady Binder Katerine sol Dalme sol Telrin ir’Paimon. An Illyrin magister with heterodox opinions on the proper uses of magic, popular opinion is divided on whether it’s more accurate to say Cael invited her to reside in the city, or just offered her asylum before her elders had a chance to properly condemn her. 

Regardless, after six months of operation she - and her half-dozen strictly bound and extremely unhappy ifrit, and several hundred eminently replaceable more mundane workers - are already well on their way to supplying all the clothing and textiles Sethennai’s teeming masses require single-handedly, produced at a scale and speed far beyond what any traditional artisans guild could hope to compete with. 

Crossroads

Dominating the Old City - synonymous with it, really - that the district is called the ‘Crossroads’ is often considered something of a cruel joke by new arrivals. The ‘Labyrinth’ is usually offered instead. Ancient stone tenements and storehouses are basic facts of geography, surviving through conquest and fire, and over and around and through them are generations of newer building - mansions of imported oak and marble, shantytowns of cannibalized carts and derelict ships built on rooftops, and nondescript inns and stores conveniently built on top of trap doors and tunnels leading to much more exciting locales. Natives of a neighborhood who know all the secret passages and blind alleys can quickly get to anywhere they like. New arrivals are strongly advised to pay well for a reliable guide. 

Faction of Note: The Dreamers 

    There’s something under the harbor. There always has been. There probably always will be. Most people can go their whole lives without noticing it, but a certain few find living in the Old City a haunting experience, their nights spent dreaming of drowned palaces and impossible angles, their days spent lost in alleys and markets that have never existed. Inevitably, they come out of a daze and find themselves perched on the waters edge, staring into the filthy, polluted depths with an intense sense of longing. 

    Called the Dreamers, they’re an eclectic and informal fraternity, living in makeshift houseboats or the cheapest tenements that press against the water. Quite a few simply sleep on the streets. They’re something like a religion, and something like a guild - the most personable and talkative are merchants, selling the fish that others catch, the strange relics and minor treasures that their divers retrieve from the harbor, and the often beautiful - if always uncanny - art they produce. They take care of each other and, though no one has ever seen a dreamer raise a hand in anger, every attempt by syndicates or rival cults to extort or expel them has ended with their opponents going mad, screaming and clawing at their flesh in the middle of the night, or found poised in some elaborate and improbable suicide. After the third time, everyone more or less got the idea. 

    No one knows who leads them - if anyone does. Insofar as they have a public face, Zoe Alvane is it - a street urchin who ‘found the sea’ before she had hit puberty, for the last few years she has been the one who spends seemingly every hour of the day ensuring her ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ have food and shelter, and looking after the other beggars and poor in the neighborhood while she can as well. She’s also the one outsiders deal with when they come looking to buy information - it’s a disquieting fact of life in Sethennai that the Dreamers’ know almost everything there is to know about almost everyone. They are generally content to be left alone, and Zoe is very sympathetic and willing to offer personal advice and play the part of fortune teller to anyone desperate and willing to trade or do a favor - but it’s generally agreed that trying to force information from them is a bad idea. 

Faction of Note: Ironfang Mercenary Company 

    When Prince Cael seized the throne, he didn’t do so single handedly. He needed trained, disciplined soldiers to seize the Palantine and coastal forts, ensure no one escaped the palace, and keep order on the streets while the messy business of extinguishing the previous dynasty was carried out. For all this and more, he relied on the professional expertise of the Ironfang Company. 

    Formed around a core of hardened hobgoblin veterans of various border wars and colonial filibusters in the Free Cities, the Company has for the last fifteen years been the Prince’s favorite tool for securing his interests, keeping order, and bloodily making examples of any threats to his rule. For their trouble, they’ve grown fat and happy - a steady paycheck and yearly bonuses have left every officer with a townhouse, and most common soldiers with coin for families and apartments for them to live in. 

    Despite the lack of real combat - and the need to take on locals as new recruits, as more and more soldiers retire or die over the years - Captain Azaersi is a leathery old warehouse who has never let her troops grow soft. Even week the grand parade ground in Crossroads echoes with screaming drill sergeants and the crack of muskets, and it’s an open secret that the Prince paid to import stocks of grenades and munitions from Quepta for her arsenal. No one knows quite how she plans to deal with the sudden disappearance of her patron and employer, but for the moment the Ironfang seem content to keep order in the corner of Crossroads around the arsenal and parade ground that they call home. 

The Ruins

The ruins are not, legally, part of Sethanni, and absolutely no one with anything resembling sense would ever actually choose to live there. No one actually knows where the eponymous ruins come from - or at least, no one can agree which section is from where. Shantytowns of the most despised and desperate and built on top of their predecessors, which are built on top of battered and broken pre-Conquest ziggurats and homes, which are built on top of - well, some of it is just a natural cave system, and no one is sure about the rest. Or ever found just how deep it goes. Aside from the casualties of the Prince’s attempts to map it, the Ruins are inhabited exclusively by those that would be strung up or burned alive if they tried to live anywhere else, or those sufficiently dedicated to their greed or ambition that they’re absolutely certain they alone can unlock the secrets and find whatever wonders are buried beneath all the traps and monsters. Not great company, either way. 

Faction of Note: The Weavers’ Masquerade 

    Sethennai never really followed its ‘sister cities’ in the League in religion, with a sort of tolerant anarchy of different gods and sects almost always predominating over the gleefully blasphemously sublime demon-cults that the conquerors originally brought with them. But the small cultists that did exist at least enjoyed a luxurious, privileged irrelevance, with sanctums in the city’s grand temple. That finally changed when Cael seized the temples for his new Hierophant - and every relic and sacred text in them, as bloodily as necessary. Which with demon worshippers meant a massacre - letting one escape and beseech their patron for aid in crafting some horrible vengeance being generally agreed to be a terrible idea. 

    Not that that actually worked, of course. One acolyte managed to escape - no one’s quite sure how, but then, probably best not to ask unless you’ve got a particularly strong stomach. Well, that’s one of her stories, anyway - she goes by Maia Dayal, Beloved of the Architect, Wearer of Ten Thousand Faces, and sometimes she prefers to say she’s a recently arrived priestess from Celmy, or a street urchin who found enlightenment entirely on her own. As might be expected by the self-proclaimed title, she also changes her face (and build, age, species…) about as often as everyone else bathes. 

    While she has shown no interest in actually taking bloody revenge on the Prince, Dayal has done plenty to earn the price on her head. The Masquerade that has grown around her is a carnival of wonders and horrors, where all manner of temptations are offered to the truly desperate, debauched and vile. Skinweavers and facetakers always need raw material, and secrets and deaths can both be easily bought for the right price - though in keeping with their patron, the Masquerade is hardly a safe or stable place to do business, and offending the wrong cultist can easily lead to a shift from ‘visitor’ to ‘canvas for artistic expression’. 

Faction of Note: The Keendream Expedition

    Over the last two centuries, the actual facts about the pre-Conquest city has (with few exceptions) been buried under the weight of legends, rumors and (when necessary) several tons of rock. Despite this (or because of it) whenever things get bad (...worse) for the original population of goliaths and dwarves who can trace their lineage back to that time, stories about some hidden savior or buried relic that will free them spread like wildfire. This is just such a time. 

Ilidak Keendream Kathu-Viano is an explorer from a family with some grounds for its claim of being pre-conquest nobility. For the last year he has worked on commission for the Prince, leading a large and incredibly well-armed expedition into the ruins across the water from the Old City, digging into them in search of..something. No one who knows the goal has been willing to talk, but certainly it has involved hiring every historian and scholar with anything like knowledge of the city before it was Sethennai (not to mention half the charlatans and rumor mongers who might know something). 

Once news of the Prince’s disappearance reached Kathu-Viano, work shifted from its previous sedate pace to something much more determined. Certain paranoid minds have said it’s almost like he was waiting for this. Other, moderately less paranoid ones have pointed out it’s a bit odd that the government-sponsored expedition is so short on patricians and city notables and so high on mercenaries form the interior and goliath clans with far more reason to listen to Kathu-Viano than the Prince, should some conflict break out. 

The Stacks

Museums, exhibitions, satellite campuses, mystical archives, storehouses of eldritch knowledge, and one actual wizard tower - if the faint taste of ozone in the air doesn’t warn you what you’re getting in for leaving the city’s eastern gates, then the architecture certainly will. Wedged between variously reputable bookstores and inquisitives, different formalized and longstanding campuses are dedicated to the arts of conjuration, enchantment, sparkcraft, and practical cosmology. Competition for new discoveries and to fully unlock ancient secrets are good natured and nonviolent - at least, that’s all you can get out of anyone left standing once the smoke clears. 

Faction of Note: The Bookhounds 

    The Bookhounds aren’t any sort of formal organization - and at least half of them would roll their eyes at the name - but rather a loose network of gutter mages, disreputable academics, private inquisitives and researchers for hire, and people with a little talent or cash to burn and far too much curiosity for their own good. They act as a sort of volunteer police force in the Stacks, passing each other clues and leads and doing each other favors to track down stolen (or escaped) relics and curses, stop idiots from unleashing anything really dramatic, and generally help people and save the day. Not to mention accumulate really impressive bags of tricks and rare books themselves in the process. 

    While they don’t have anything like a real leader, the group’s beating heart is Nikos Roth, an Esheri academic who arrived in the city as a fresh-faced student on a three month expedition a decade back and who never intends to leave. Running a small, incredibly ramshackle-looking secondhand book store wedged between two tenements, he nonetheless has one of the more impressive collections of occult lore in the city, and is more than happy to trade for more of it, or connect anyone in need with a specialist who can help them. As more than one would-be thief has discovered, he’s also a fairly talented mage, and for all that being entirely self-taught has left him with some obvious holes in his training, it’s also left him with some tricks that basically no one comes prepared to counter. 

Redgate

Once, Redgate Prison stood alone, a fearsome warning of the Prince’s power to anyone looking south from the city center. Eighty-some years of steady urban sprawl later, most of its inmates would probably just need a running start from the prison walls to land back home. Filled mostly with those whose dreams of a new world fell flat, but with too little cash or too many enemies to get home, the slums of Redgate are a natural habitat for street gangs, drug peddlers, flesh traders, and everyone else looking to take advantage of the desperate and vulnerable. The prison itself - and its infamous and heavily armed wardens - has stumbled into being the center of law writ large, dealing out summary justice for criminals that are (correctly) assumed to be beneath the Prince’s notice. 

Faction of Note: Regate Prison 

    Sitting on a steep hill across the water from the Old City, Redgate prison was at one point a fortress, but for generations has been put to use housing the city’s worst, most dangerous, and most profitable criminals. Given the sprawling, crime-ridden slums that now surround it, its wardens also work as a sort of brutal police force, keeping the pretence of order on the street and preserving the Prince’s Peace. Usually. 

    The problems with discipline start at the top, really. The Prison’s infamously brutal First Warden is also its oldest and most dangerous prisoner. Before the Conquest, Vrocdruk was one of the city’s lesser gods, enthroned in one of the Palantine’s grand temples. When Sethennai - the man - defeated him, he chose to pull his demons away before they could tear the god into so much bloody aether. Instead he was crippled, lessened, and bound to a new home in the fortress and a new purpose; defending the city and its rulers. Later, less skillful, princes altered the binding, making him responsible for most crime and punishment and hoping that his sacred nature would make the native dwarves and goliaths more obedient. 

    Vrocdruk is still crippled, still bound to the prison, still forced to obey the orders of the city’s acclaimed ruler, and still extremely unhappy about it. He takes any excuse to work out his unhappiness on criminals or troublemakers with the incredible bad luck to catch his direct attention. His wardens largely follow his example, often acting less like agents of justice and more like a particularly well armed gang - to the point of semi-officially collecting fees for ‘security’ from nearby businesses, supplementing the cash extorted from prisoners and their families for both necessities and luxuries while incarcerated.

Sootcliff

Trailing south of Foundrytown, on and under the steep slope beneath the city’s western walls, the densely packed tenements of Sootcliff are certainly stained grey enough to earn the name. Existing primarily as a source of blood and sweat to feed into the ever-hungry foundries and assembly lines to the north, The buildings are cheap, massive, and constructed at the lowest possible cost, with all the consequences you would expect from that. With easy access to weapons and alchemical supplies from Foundrytown and (literally) beneath the notice of the Old City, Sootcliff is famous as the home of militant bands, revolutionary conspiracies, disgraced artificers, and generally anyone who has a dream for a new world and a plan that will require a lot of explosions to get there. 

Faction of Note: The Painted Doctors

    Less a single organization and more an extraordinarily loose confederation of - often feuding - crimelords, the Painted Doctors are a fraternity of (largely half- or self-) taught alchemists who have over the last year grown to be the dominant criminal guild in Sootcliff. The name sometimes refers to the incredibly distinctive tattoos each ‘Doctor’ has covering much of their body, universally agreed to be somehow enchanted or cursed. Otherwise it refers to the incredibly alien and vibrant skin tones that their test subjects and muscle develop after repeatedly ingesting their ‘miraculous’ potions and tonics. 

    While possessing remarkably little actual magical talent among them, the Doctors have perfected the recipes for several extremely useful potions - several incredibly addictive drugs, a half dozen forms of acids and grenades, and a dizzying variety of enhancing tonics to improve themselves and distribute to their thugs - and have managed to keep both the recipes and their sources for the necessary reagents entirely secret. This has left them in the enviable position of being able to promise anyone signing on with them that they’ll be able to more or less become a regenerating ogre for an hour whenever they need to fight, while their opposition has had to settle with advising their men to stock up on fire and acid. 

    The leading light of the Doctors is one ‘Dr’ Fadre - almost certainly not his real name - an alchemical savant whose ‘miracle cures’ are bought and resold across the city. A flashy and well dressed sort whose patronage has turned several of Sootcliff’s most prominent dens of vice into something close to palaces for those who can afford it, he’s said to be far less interested in the nuts and bolts of running a criminal empire than enjoying its fruits and indulging his passion for the Sciences. It doesn’t hurt his reputation that he doesn’t look a day over thirty, and has for as long as anyone has known him. 

Chance

Facing Oldport from across the river’s mouth, the docks of Chance are significantly new, cheaper, and altogether more ramshackle. Not really a part of any conscious design, Chance grew organically as the city sprawled beyond its original walls, essentially smuggling docks so successful it was easier to legitimize and start taxing them than it was to hang everyone involved. They now provide the city with a constant infusion of nerdowells and fortune seekers, and the district around them takes great pride in fleecing new arrivals of every penny to their name by the end of their first night on land. Hostels and boarding houses are usually safe, traditional vice dealers less so, and anyone selling treasure maps or magical amulets not at all. Still, they’re probably more harmless than the various mercenary recruiters and ‘exiled princes’ promising to give new arrivals exactly the thrill and fortune they came searching for. 

Faction of Note: The Red Ocean Trading Company

    What is now the Red Ocean Trading Company has gone through several dramatic changes over it’s eighty years of existence. First a privateer fleet hired by the Free City of Celmy during the First Armada War. Then eventually growing strong enough to seize several islands as an independent pirate state, before being crushed by the Esheri Navy during the Second Armada War. It’s remnants learned a bit of humility from that, and it is now seemingly content with its existence as either (depending on who you ask) a obscenely profitable shipping firm, or one of the most widespread criminal syndicates in the world. 

The Company’s significant interests in Sethennai - nearly half the docks in Chance, guides and guards for anyone heading into the Interior, and fingers in quite a few less legitimate pies as well - are ably represented by Captain Arun Prem, a(n in)famous adventurer and scoundrel in his own right, apparently enjoying his semi-retirement behind a desk by getting outrageously drunk with his favorite mercenaries and criminals every night and swapping incredible (and implausible) old war stories. 

There’s plenty of rumors, of course - that he’s here in de facto exile after angering the Company’s mysterious senior leadership. That he’s a thousand-year-old vampire and is the Company’s mysterious senior leadership. That he ate a kraken’s heart, and is immortal as long as he doesn’t lose sight of the water. That he’s biding his time to prepare an army before heading inland to carve a new kingdom for himself. That he’s only in the city for as long as it takes to carry out some truly spectacular heist. That he killed Prince Cael in a secret duel and trapped his soul in the pocketwatch he wears at all times. And so on. Of course, other rumours say that he started all of those himself to preserve his mystique as he grows fat in his old age.

Oldport

Facing out to the harbour but safely ensconced within the city walls, Oldpot is, as the name implies, one of the oldest ports in the new world - and certainly one of the busiest. Fully loaded merchant ships arrive daily, their cargoes emptied and replaced with the plunder of the New World almost overnight so they can return home on the next turn of the wind. Beyond the grand ports themselves, this district is home to all the most respectable shipping companies, merchant banks, hotels, and townhouses and apartments, as well as all the official consulates and embassies that Sethennai plays host to. 

Faction of Note: First Bank of Sethennai

    Despite only being as old as Prince Cael’s reign, the Bank already feels like an eternal and irreplaceable part of Sethennai. This isn’t something people are necessarily happy about, but its leadership had done a truly amazing job at keeping dissent to grumbling and resentment of the inevitable, and not actual resistance. They’re good at that sort of thing, even when they used Prince Cael’s (and, thus, the City’s) massive debts to his foreign benefactors as justification for taking control of the city’s tariffs and tolls, and began rigorously enforcing them, possibly for the first time ever. 

    Combined with a legal monopoly on the ability to mint coins, this has of course made the Bank incredibly wealthy. But not to the degree that might be assumed - the riches collected are to a large degree shipped back east to foreign creditors. Of the remaining, quite a bit is invested with as much an eye for politics as strict profit. 

    Executive Director Salman Ticaret, like most of his staff, is a Sethennai native who sought education in the Commonwealth (like most, he took a new name on gaining citizenship). Along with modern accounting and investing techniques, he came home with a firm grasp of political economy - and so for the last decade and a half has been more than happy to offer favorable rates to well positioned patrician and merchant houses, in exchange for their own favors and consideration in turn. The result is that the bank’s marble halls and adamant vaults house information as much as money. And Ticaret is perfectly willing to invest both, if the opportunity is promising enough. 

Foreign Interests

The League of Free Cities

The League of Free Cities is not so much a single power as a collection of fiercely independent deomcratic city-states held together by the intertwined private empires of their leading citizens, deep and interdependent trading relationships, and a common religion that the rest of the world calls demon-worship - they view this as deeply offensive. Also they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years and they’re not all dead yet, so clearly everyone else is just doing demonology wrong. Politics are a mess of knives in the dark and openly bribing the voting populace with feasts and spectacles, with glory and riches to anyone who can hold the mob’s favor for long. 

Demonic evocation - and the arts learned as a result of it, like fleshweaving, orienomarchy , breaking reality down into elemental chaos and shaping it to your whims, and so on - are in the rest of the world generally met with very thorough execution, making the freethinkers of the League the world’s bleeding edge in magical innovation. The entire culture of the League is also nearly custom-made to produce bold idiots willing to do what it takes to get rich or die trying, and the various Free City’s Adventurers Guilds are (in)famous the world over. 

Until recently, the Free Cities considered Sethennai, if not one of them, then at least a younger sibling or benevolent dependency. Prince Cael’s coup has been taken as something of a wound, and the merchant interests who have lost out as he opened trade have made sure that in the decades since his name has become synonymous with bloody-handed tyranny. The first broadsheets celebrating his death will sell out in moments, and the acclaimed merchant adventurer Vyas Asraya, said to be en route to the city, is said to be very optimistic about future trading opportunities. 

Holy Illyric Empire

Technically speaking a vast and sprawling feudal state unified only in the person of the Sovereign (Empress of Illyrin, Queen of Belthaya, Defender of the Hierophant of Imir, Grand Duchess of Abhari, etc, and so on, and so forth), the Empire dominates the better part of two continents, and in terms of size and prestige is unquestionably the foremost state on the globe. It is also a bureaucrat’s nightmare, its aristocracy distracted from their internal feuds only when they need to defend their ancestral rights from central overreach. 

Ancient controls and long established relationships make Imperial binders the most fearsome conjurers and thaumaturges in the known world, a process not at all hurt by the wholesale incorporation of any powerful spirits or terrestrial god who will sign on the dotted line into the official pantheon. Illyrin Paladins are also easily the most storied heavy cavalry the world has ever seen, and Abharic necromancers are generally held to be the heirs (or direct pupils) of the inventors of the craft. 

Illyric interests have prospered under Prince Cael’s reign, but the last years have seen Sethennai become a haven for heretical priests and radical binders, something Ambassador Konrad Reingard has been rumored to be increasingly frustrated with, though no one heard a word from his Oldport estate since the chaos began.

The Sublime Esheri Commonwealth

A thoroughly modern and enlightened state, the Commonwealth is history’s gift to the cartographer, an empire with firmly delineated borders and clear, rationally determined administrative divisions. Governed by a Janissary Corps educated and conditioned from childhood to put principle above self interest and the good of the Commonwealth above friends or (nonexistent) family, the Esheri control far less land than the Illyrin Empire, but has been able to fight it to a standstill and even force it to abandon certain far flung dependencies over a series of wars across the last century. 

Beyond a ruthlessly efficient system for taxation and conscription, the Commonwealth’s military might is credited to two sources - on the one hand, its marines are the finest and most disciplined line infantry anyone is likely to ever see, experts in the use of gas and artillery and famously cool under fire. One the other, their heavy automata are an answer to any conjured devil or bound beast, enlightened clockwork providing enough force to cleave through scales and enchanted plate without missing a beat. But the Janissaries are as happy as their enemies to admit that they prefer unfair fights - though they credit their infamous spy network to the fruits of their scientific studies of society and history, while their enemies instead blame the corrupting effects of gold, blackmail, and a complete indifference to the morals of those they work with. 

While the Commonwealth does have an embassy in the city, it mostly exists as an appendage of the First Sethennai Bank, the private institution responsible for printing and guarding the solvency of the city’s currency, its entire upper rung staffed by experts trained in the Commonwealth and generally considered Prince Cael’s way of paying back their support for his coup. More recently, it has been rumored that the Secretariat has taken an interest in the struggles in the interior. Coincidentally, an ‘Academic’ has been seen floating around various less than reputable bars in Chance, ostensibly as part of a project to record the city’s myths and folklore. 

The Warlord States

For the last two hundred years, the interior has been an evershifting patchwork of successor kingdoms, native revolts, monstrous empires, released horrors, and stranger things besides, the unending tide of weapons and adventurers ensuring that no single player was ever able to secure dominance (and the various rulers of Sethennai have certainly played their part in keeping things that way). At the moment the foremost powers are a giantblooded kingdom led by a messaniac priest-king claiming to be the reincarnation of a Titan, a personal union enforced at sword point between a Khasli pirate queen and a goliath ‘emperor’, a red dragon who has claimed an old giant palace and forced the dwarves living in the mountains around it to provide tribute and worship, and several dozen more minor principalities. It should go without saying that war is the natural state of being, and soldiers are sucked up like ships in a whirlpool.

Adventurers are the lifeblood of Sethennai, and they don’t only flow one way. A constant stream of veterans - either enriched or embittered - skulk, limp or run back once they’ve had their fill of the wonders of the new world, usually missing something important or carrying something priceless - sometimes both. The courts and inner circles of every powerful warlord are composed exclusively of this sort of hard, tricky and generally insufferable type of rogue, and they’re often the only agents trusted enough to be dispatched on delicate missions. The line between warlord and criminal kingpin or pirate magnate is also extremely thin - sometimes nonexistent - as smuggling, sabotage and assassinations are simply basic tools of statecraft in the ruthless arena of the interior. More than once, an ambitious Prince of Sethennai has attempted to recreate their ancestor’s short lived empire, only to be found butchered in their bed but the agents of one warlord or another.

The Warlord States view Sethennai as a vital artery for supplies and funding, and for manpower to refill their armies with disposable bodies for their constant border wars. On a grander scale, those with ambition view it as either a crown jewel and future capital, or a bleeding ulcer on the land which needs to be razed to its foundations. In either case, few are interested in a strong, stable government for it. Regardless of their opinions, sending emissaries and embassies to the city is the first (and often only) diplomatic initiative of every new warlord state - though in truth their role is often closer to mercenary recruiter and fundraiser.

[stargatelov3r]

Hmm… We'll see, anonymity and all that.🧡

If you do write some I would love to read it. Can’t stop thinking about these funny scifi characters. <3 I completely understand and I cannot wait to see said reactions. 

It’s kinda cool with those ships where you need to think about it more. I like to analyze why that happens, like as you were saying with Sam/ Elizabeth (Which I will be getting too!) and how the ship was off for you because of the actors. It can reveal our personal biases in a way. In a good way, I think.

Hmm… More Chuck/ Radek headcanons? Why the hell not.

Chuck has no idea he is about to become smitten with the Czech scientist, he only goes to the infirmary because of his guilt. Because Radek deserves an apology. He comes out of the interaction buzzing and tingly, the entirety of it lingering in his mind. Chuck tries to push it away expecting everything to go back to normal. But, no. Radek starts shooting him smiles and being extra friendly. 

When Radek realizes Chuck has a crush on him he is surprised but ecstatic. He tries to maintain a semblance of calm during the work day but his face keeps breaking out into a mischievous smile. The sight of which has Rodney on edge all day.

Hobbies hmm… I’d be worried about them doing Archery. I could see them both painting, I bet they would take lessons from Lorne. You know what, and Pottery, they definitely do pottery. Heck, all the characters do pottery, because doing pottery together is one of the sexiest of hobbies, I’m pretty sure that’s a fact. (Not a Fact.)

Hmm… Radek mentions he had racing pigeons, this gets Chuck interested in birdwatching. Because of this they start to do nature hikes every week on the mainland. Eventually, at the request of Dr. Baxter, they start collecting/photographing insects on the hike as well. I assume Atlantis probably has a small nature identification community and the two of them become quite prominent within it. (Dr. Baxter and his interest in insects is canon. I believe they mention him offhandedly during Tabula Rasa.) 

They always host the winter holiday party and even though it’s unnecessary they still send out physical holiday cards. The front of which always has a picture of the two of them wearing matching sweaters. The sweaters, of course, change every year.

That anon is right, Atlantis is quite stressful for Radek. He can’t even swim! Could you imagine? The terror he must experience just being there, especially at first. But don't worry, Chuck will teach him how to swim.

I love that others are joining in on the Chuck/ Radek! All of these headcanons are just so lovely.

*Side headcanon: Aiden tried to name a ton of stuff on Atlantis, most people shook their heads and laughed at the time. But since Aiden’s disappearance, many Atlantis personnel have taken to using the names he’d suggested.

I love all these headcanons, they are absolutely adorable

I headcanon that atlantis has a lot of pools, both indoor and outdoor, and now that you mentioned Chuck teaching Radek how to swim i can’t shake the image of them at one of the more shallow outdoor pools and Chuck trying to encourage Radek to join him in the water. He probably bribes him with kisses or backrubs or his favorite snacks/food. Very soft

I love the idea of them painting, too, but i feel like Chuck would get a lot more out of it than Radek, who just wouldn’t feel it. Or maybe he would feel it but his paintings would be… interesting.

I feel like as time progresses on Atlantis and they all get settled in and are still cut off from earth a lot of people come forth and start offering workshops for things they are good in. Those range from all sorts of sports to all sorts of arts, and music too. Let’s get the Athosians in here as well, they have art and music and all that stuff as well and they all learn from each other!

Gosh, I love the Atlantis we (and probably a billion fic writers before us) are creating <3

[lovely-necromancy]

A Cure for Insomnia CH.4

WARNING OF DEPICTION OF A PANIC ATTACK and mentions of drugging. 

////////

The rest of the day went by pretty uneventfully. That is after Nate lectured you about stranger danger and how you couldn't just walk forty miles in two hours. You really have no clue how you messed up the math that bad or how calling Nate for a ride never crossed your mind. Nate made you promise not to get into another stranger's car, especially without knowing their fucking names.

“I mean seriously YN, you just hopped in their car because they had a dog?! That's literally the first thing they tell you not to do when you learn about stranger danger!” he said munching on a boston cream donut. It was a good thing you'd brought donuts because you caused this man to stress eat...or was that a bad thing?

After you agreed to having better stranger danger instincts, Nate told you things would be run a little differently around the shop. Apparently the camera out back had died on Sunday, which although weird could be explained away as a camera that hasn't been updated or switched out since the shop was opened, maybe even before then too. So unfortunately Big Jo and Nate still didn't know who broke into your car or if they had been looking for anything. But Big Jo still wants to take precautions like the two of you leaving together and in the morning one of you waiting in their car with the doors locked for the other to come and then entering the building together.

Nate also mentioned a few other things, shipping and inventory related, that wouldn't really pertain to you or change any of your current tasks. It's really just to limit the amount of people coming through the back room. The back room was the emptiest you've ever seen when you went to check on your deer skull. You wonder if you hadn't been hired who would've gotten this position and how long they'd be able to keep their mouth shut about the obviously illegal activity going on. But you remember the person who had this position before you had been Bambi, a sweet if not oblivious girl. So, had you not come along the Cowells would have probably found someone else who didn't have an ounce of perception for their surroundings.

The week goes by slowly and with no further incidents. The deer skull has been completed and you plan on taking it to Maddie's Workshop next week to get a mount for it. In the time that you were bleaching and polishing the bones Nate took it upon himself to clean around the shop. Even though he's made it clear you just have to do your task list here, which takes about an hour maybe two depending on the tasks, he's always working on something.

Nate's the type of guy who's never content to just chill he needs to keep moving always chasing that high you get from accomplishing a goal, whatever he's made his that day. He's probably just substituting whatever he did daily with these new deep cleans of his.

Even with the lack of incidents following your car's break in the two of you have kept to the new precautions. Nate even going so far as to remind you tonight that on Monday if you arrive before him you'll need to stay in the car. At this point you think it's less about safety and more about the security of the store's extra curricular activities. Either way you don't really mind.

Things seemed to return to normal, you were back to driving yesterday and after you rearranged furniture in your house you felt a little less on edge. And every night this week you'd been able to get a good night's sleep, which although not too strange did stand out to you. Maybe another thing that had kept you on edge this week, because it meant when you saw a shadow pass by you during the day you couldn't write it off as quickly as you normally would.

But tonight it seemed your luck had run out. You sat on your bed with your sketch book in hand just doodling strange squiggles till your eyes were so tired they couldn't focus. Putting the book down to rest your eyes and crack your wrist, you sigh not feeling tired at all. The thought of a hike isn't really appealing right now, plus if you made a run into the mini mart you'd probably see either Ronnie or even Tim working behind the counter, that thought set your ears a flame. While the night life in Kepler was decent especially for a Friday night in summer, you just felt the need to be alone.

A drive was the best answer you had. You'd just choose a random lane on the interstate and take a random exit till you found a diner or something, order a tea and a slice of pie. Like you were a background character in someone else's story longingly staring out the window as your dreams slowly slipped through your fingers in this cold cruel world. Ok, you'd been joking about that because you saw a TikTok saying that, but your melodramatic ass actually thinks that sounds fun.

Throwing on some jeans and a flannel over you muscle tee, you were out the door. When you were checking the lock you'd heard rustling coming from around the house where your bins were. Worse case it's a stalker, best case just some raccoons. Either way you decided to calmly but briskly walk to your car, locking the doors immediately. Once in you drove around the side of your house, luckily, you assume, you spot the chonkiest raccoon you've ever seen digging through the bins. His tiny little person hands drawing an awww from you even though his demonic gleaming eyes should send a chill down your spine.

Hissing at the car Chonk returns to dig through your garbage. Weird how he only comes on your pizza weeks. Probably has a thing for Leo's homemade pizzas. You sure as hell do, as much as you love it you do save a slice for this little guy. You haven't put it out yet though, eh you'll do it tomorrow.

Having solved that mystery you sit in your car and link up your phone so you can have your driving playlist. It's mainly Folk Punk and Sea Shanties and while most might say it's a weird combination you say it's the same genre just different fonts. You could drive hundreds of miles into the middle of no where listening to this playlist and you'd be just fine...maybe have an emotional break down or two but expressing your emotions is suppose to be good for you. Mouthing along to Jim Bogart as it comes through the stereo you set off on your little excursion.

Just like when you have the urge to hike at night the urge to drive is nearly one in the same. Momentum taking you forward and not looking back as you do, needing to just go forward with no real destination in mind. Tonight however would be a little different you'd stop at the first diner you see that's out of Kepler bounds. Or turn right back around at one in case you hadn't found anything. There've been times that you kept driving straight through morning and didn't know where the hell you ended up. Not to mention you rarely remember the ways to get back after going for so long, and gps can only get you so far in some of the towns that also border the Monongahela Forest. You'd just have to rely on dumb luck tonight.

Unlike hiking, which gives you a burst of adrenaline as you push your body to its limits to move as far as you can and as much as you can. Driving gives a much more relaxed feeling, it's a feeling a weightlessness that gets lighter and lighter the further you get from home. Some may describe that feeling as a wanderlust or nomadic calling, but you've never cared for either of those things. You've only ever wanted to stay in one place for as long as you could remember. Moving around so much in your youth really messed you up, and you promised yourself this would be the last time you uprooted your life. And you've really come to love Kepler in these past few months. You can't imagine how you'll feel next year after getting to know the community more, but so far it's been really compassionate and understanding, a few rocky spots here and there but nothing like your hometown.

Without realizing it you've picked up your speed, you're doing 75 in a 55 zone. Even with no other vehicles around you slow down to just above the speed limit. While there might not be any cops around looking for easy tickets you don't want to risk dissociating at 75MPH or more. That could only end horribly. Though dissociating behind the wheel at all would be horrible. In the middle of shaking yourself from these thoughts you catch sight of an exit sign, which holds the logo for Denny's on it, and the exit is coming up in five miles. Switching lanes you cross over and get ready to hop off on the next exit.

You're pretty sure the only pie Denny's has is the dry apple with a scoop of ice cream. That isn't very appetizing to you, but then again you aren't really a fan of pie, a fact you seemed to gloss over when you made the decision to drive out here this late at night. Not too bothered by the fact, you remember Denny's has a salted caramel and banana pancake which should work in place of pie.

Pulling into the parking lot there are only three other cars, peering into the diner you don't really see anyone so the cars must belong to the skeleton night crew. Entering the Denny's you see there actually is one other patron, you only see the back of his head as he makes no move to look at the new arrival.

“Hun, seat yourself, I'll be out in a bit.” is the motherly voice that rings out from the kitchen, truly something you've only experienced in the south. Walking into a diner in the dead of night and  being treated like a daytime regular.

Seating yourself near the TV mounted to the wall you let the sounds of the soap opera playing drown out any buzzing you feel in your head. The waitress is out within minutes and though she startles at your masked face she regains her composure very quickly.

“I'd like the salted caramel pancakes if it's alright.” you say declining the offered menu.

“Just the pancakes?”

“Ah, yes please. And water's fine too.” it really pays to know the menu prior to coming in. Gives you ample time to run scripts over in your head.

Viv, the name on her name tag, nods and gives you a smile as she spins right round to the kitchen. Probably happy she won't have to run out so many times for just one order or maybe to spend time with the cooks in the back. You remember working food service sucked but the line cooks made it so much better at the end of the day. Even if they said you were too quiet and called you 'mouse'.

It might not have been exactly what you set out to do but this little midnight self date was really nice, you should do this more often.

Pancakes finished and mask back on you waited for Viv to bring out your check,  then you notice the other patron also making his moves to leave. You're sat facing the door so when he turns and comes closer dread fills your veins like burning cold dry ice. It's David, a local from Kepler you briefly met when you first moved. He gave you really bad vibes and over all was just a very skeevy dude.

What made you feel worse about him was when he left town to “help his sister” right after Bambi disappeared. Those in your circle told you she always talked about leaving Kepler one day but you trusted your gut in saying she didn't leave by her own choice. It got made for her, and David leaving just furthered your theory. You look away hoping he hadn't noticed you but unfortunately you could hear his footsteps falter and then pick back up by passing the door completely.

“Hey...YN, right?” fuck he remembers you, alarm bells are ringing at this fact. Why would he remember someone he briefly met months ago?

“It really is you, still as quiet as I remember.” what did he mean the two of you only met a handful of times and that had been because of your mutual friendship with Bambi.

Where is Viv with the check? You'd really like if she saved you from this painful situation right now. But you aren't sure what's worse having to sit here and listen to David tell you everything he's been up to these past few months, like you even care. Or the thought of leaving with David having him follow you and maybe doing whatever he did to Bambi to you.

“Yea so my sister's better now, I should be seeing you around soon. We should catch up maybe do Saturday Night Dead. Does the Crypt still do that?” great a fucking rhetorical question, he knows the Cryptonomica still does it's weekly movie nights, it's only been two months he's been gone. Not to mention it's a big hit and a huge source of revenue for the shop.

You haven't said anything this whole time, fuck being polite to a potential killer, and fuck being polite to this creep. He's just been talking nearly nonstop for the last few minutes. He must really love the sound of his own voice or thinks he's the most charming person to ever grace the Earth with his presence. Since he's not really caring that you aren't proving to be a stimulating partner in this conversation. He really does love hearing himself talk. By the time he's said his own goodbyes Viv finally makes it out from the back.

She apologizes for the wait, had to go on her break sometime you supposed. You take your time finding your wallet, it's in your back pocket but you wanted to stall for time since you could still see David's car out there, you were also keeping an eye on your own car. Only relaxing when you saw him pull off from the corner of your eye. Oh look you've “found” your wallet,  handing Viv your credit card you just want to get out of here quickly now.

You pay and leave a nice tip for Viv, while she didn't save you from that creep it's not like she could've known. You sit in your car for a moment or two just breathing in and out in the glow of the diner lights. Almost meditating before you begin your long drive back to Kepler with all these thoughts of David, Bambi's disappearance, and how it can't be coincidence that David is coming back at the same time that you have a break in. Could you be his next target? Were you just over thinking things? Just blaming this poor guy because you didn't like him? But you've always been intuitive and bad vibes aren't something to ignore. David appearing now meant something.

Just that thought alone put you on edge as your skin begins to crawl. With a few calming breaths you go to start the car and sync your radio when you notice the glow of the lights changed from the slight yellow to a sterile blueish white. Looking up where the diner should be you see the mini mart back at Kepler...how on earth did you get here? You didn't drive! You couldn't have dissociated while driving, you never even turned the car on and you can barely take a hike dissociating let alone do something as complex as drive a car.

It happens before you can register it, on shaky legs that move on their own you are passing the threshold of the convenience store and catching the tail end of a conversation.

“ppened to not feeding into delus...” the voice cuts off as the door shuts behind you. You know that voice why is it so hard to focus?

Something warm brushes your hand and you see someone in front of you. Who is that? You can't see their face, they've got a mask covering their face. Like you but that person is not you. You might know them...Tobais?

“Yea? You good there?” confusion, you blink hard and see you are standing in the mini mart now, Connor standing under your hand, Toby hovering close by and both Brian and Tim watch with unease over by the register.

“...I don't know how I...how I got here.” you register movement in the background but not consciously.

It's the shifting of Brian's head as he looks out the front windows and spots your Kia.

“You drove.” shaking your head, “Maybe...I don't...I dissociated?” in your confusion you can register Toby stiffen in front of you.

Fear, fear, uneasy, breath....are you breathing? Your head's so jumbled right now.

You scan the shop trying to look for answers that may help you but you find none. The more confused you get the more worked up you get, chest rising and falling rapidly. You take a step back or try to and end up falling on your butt. It's starting to get hard to breathe with your throat constricting, you bring a hand up to your larynx.

“..re.....have..attack......”

        “could be o...me..”

“.....pressure...”

Is all you can make out with your fuzzy consciousness before a heavy pressure is piling on your chest and knocking you fully on your back. The pressure is actually pretty lifting as contradictory as it may seem. Instead of restricting your breathing more it seems to be kick starting your lungs to exhale and inhale. With oxygen coming back into your body you can feel your toes and the tingle behind them. You can feel your fingers and the fur under them. Fur?

Taking in a big breath you move your head and come face to muzzle with Connor.  You give a nod of recognition to the dog before lying flat again and staring up at the ceiling. After about ten minutes you're thinking more clearly than before, which isn't saying much.

“Thanks.” you aren't sure who it's directed at but you still mean it.

It's silent until Toby breaks it, “I'm taking you home.”

“Car.” it's all you can manage to say but the message though distorted got through.

“I'll drive it, Brian follow behind.” there is no room for arguing, driving under any influence must be a touchy subject for Toby. Or maybe you're really fucked up right now and just can't comprehend how bad.

You use Connor to get up, he seems ready and no one else makes a move to you. Toby pushes past and holds the door open as Connor guides you, still holding onto his vest with one hand, and Brian murmurs something to Tim before following you three.

Outside Toby already has your keys in his hand, when did he get those? Did you give them to him? Your hand is risen, you must of...how on earth did you even drive like this. Had you really driven? There's a lump in your throat again and you're breathing's gone shaky, god you hope you didn't hurt anyone. You must have been zoning out for too long, not only is Connor pushing your legs but Toby has a grasp on your forearm coaxing you forward.

His grip isn't suffocating, honestly even seeing it there you still don't feel it. Maybe it's because you're so numb, or maybe it's because he's genuinely helping you but you can't feel the pain that  usually comes with being touched. The sharp jab that feels like you've been struck with a fire poker where ever someone laid their hands on you. After he's pushed you into the backseat, more like nudged you, even making sure you didn't bump your head, he buckles you in then snaps and Connor jumps into the car and lays across your lap.

You're shaking, actually trembling as you look at Toby. What's going on? Why can't you figure out what's happening? The brunette doesn't say a thing as he gets into the driver's seat and buckles in to drive you home. That's strange you think, how does he know where to go? You told him right, just follow the road...or maybe he guessed from the other day. What happened to you? Why the mini mart? You were at Denny's.

“This town doesn't have a Denny's.” did you say that out loud?

“I...I went for a drive, a town over...up...no.. north I think...” you start blinking barely able to keep your eyes open before your eyes lock shut. It's sending you over the edge even more in your confusion.

“Hey, hey just focus on the Denny's. What'd you do once you got there?” is he trying to distract you? Calm you down? Or is he trying to piece together what happened like you are? You can remember Denny's just fine, the dull yellow glow of the inside the skeleton crew murmuring in the back, the pancakes you had, and the “conversation” with David. Did David do this, had he put something in your water glass? Did you even touch your water glass after he left? Breathe. You need to breathe. Toby's waiting.

“Pancakes...I had pancakes. Then that creep came over...and he started talking. Didn't like. We aren't friends, I don't know him. I don't understand why he'd talk to me. Didn't like. Didn't like.” finger back to pressing down on your larynx and the weight of Connor preventing your legs from striking out at the seat in front of you.

“Wait, were you drugged?” Eyes flash to the rear view to lock with your own teary stare.

“No, maybe...I don't think so.” you barely feel the pain in your throat right now, this is all so overwhelming. “He left, I...I watched him drive off before getting in my car... I had an episode while the car was off then..” then you were at the mini mart. You never touched the ignition.

“I didn't drive, I never started the car. Didn't, didn't, didn't” Your attack is probably stressing even Connor out now, but this is all so confusing.

You're so focused on the fuzzy events you don't notice Toby bristle. Or how he grips the steering wheel tighter until his knuckles grow white despite his already translucent skin. He might not be able to feel or see it in the mirror through his mask but he's probably gnawing off more of his face. He'd deal with it after he dealt with you.

You've made it to your house and he's waiting for the headlights from Brian. When he sees them in the rear view he gets out but not before telling you, or maybe Connor, to stay put.

It's a few long moments before he comes back. But in the silence and darkness of your car, growing colder by the moment, you start to ground yourself. You aren't calm by any means and you're still very unfocused. But you aren't crying as the numbness overtakes you, you don't even jump when the door beside you opens. With a snap Connor is out of the car and soon you're being pulled from the car, that same weightless touch gripping your forearm. Toby guides you into your own home, and walks towards the hallway looking into the bathroom, the only other door, before finding your room.

Seemingly understanding your catatonic state he sits you on the bed and gives some order to Connor before he leaves the room. And you just sit on the bed staring into dead air as a silent guard sits in wait. You aren't sure what he's waiting for or why he's still there but the numbness has taken over too much and you can't find it in you to give a single fuck.

[franeridart]

Anon said: i dont know what blue lock is but that art you just posted is making me interested lol

AHHHHH please getting people interested in it is all my life is about lately hahahaha it’s a sports manga about soccer! Kind of!! Definitely has all the good sides of sports manga, but it’s also different enough from the usual sports manga that I know people who aren’t huge sports manga fan who loved every second of it, please do give it a try if you find yourself with the time for it! It’s such a cool manga!!!

Anon said: I don't even like BNHA anymore, haven't for more than a year, but your blog still has me shipping the characters somehow. I live for your KiriBaku content (and your KamiJirou stuff, when you post it!)

Gosh, I’m glad I can make you like them still!! It’s such a compliment, honestly ;A; <3

Anon said: so i was looking through your art and stuff and was wondering "hey i wonder if theyve ever drawn voltron stuff" and tbh, i didnt expect you to have

To be fair, if you checked it means that at least a little you thought it was possible lol I haven’t watched anything past s1 of it though, so the chances of me ever picking it up again are less than zero

Anon said: You... are one of the loves of my life... and also the main reason I check tumblr everyday lol.

Anon!!! You’re gonna make me blush here!!!!! ;;;; thank you so much!

Anon said: i started reading bluelock because of u and now im obsessed soooo,,,,, thanks!❤️😭

SO HAPPY TO HEAR THAT!!!!!

Anon said: Hii, do you have a Spotify account? If you do, can you share it? I really like the songs u use on your arts, and I would love to see your Playlists Sorry if it's already on your FAQ, I didn't find it And sorry for my bad English ps. I LOVE YOUR KIRIBAKU ARTS THANK YOU

I don’t! I listen to all my music from youtube, because I’m that kind of person lmao happy to hear we share music tastes, though! And thank you so much!!! <3

Anon said: What's your favorite arc of ToG both story wise and art wise?

SCREAMS I don’t know!!!! I’ve been thinking about this ask since getting it I have genuinely zero clue I love all arcs so much for so many different reasons!!!!! The first that comes to mind when I think about it is the workshop battle arc, because I love Viole with everything I have and the whole arc (plus the build up to it too!!) hurts in the most wonderful way, but then I keep thinking about it and I realize there’s so many character I live for that don’t appear in it - I love the floor of death arc SO MUCH cause for one, there’s nearly all my favorite characters in it, and also because it’s such a good, dynamic arc?? everything that happens is so much fun and interesting?? also Hockney is there, and Urek is there, and Garam is there, and the Hell Train gang is all there, so!! AH and the hell train as a whole is so damn good (the dallar show???? my whole soul rests in there, Khun’s trust in Bam!! the coin flip with rachel!! Bam’s whole everything!!!!!!!! GAH) but my fav part of it has to be the hidden floor?? because!!!!!! it’s perfect from start to end, everyone in it is wonderful, Bam’s growth in it!!! GODS! My favorite scene in the whole webtoon is in the hidden floor arc, it’s how much I love it - THEN THERE’S YAMA and the whole arc there is so so SO good too, and the latest arc!! how good is the latest arc!!!!!

so yeah I can’t pick - art wise I think it goes without saying that SIU’s art has only gotten better, so the closest to the newest update you go the more I like the art.... though, my favorite Bam is still the short haired one from the Hell Train arc haha

Anon said: Oh, wow, how stupid of me. Like 2 months ago, I sent you a message telling you how much I loved your work... and I didn’t see it on your page, or anywhere else. Finally today, I discovered I had an inbox where you answered me... 🤦‍♀️... I still love your work, by the way...

AHHH yeah I always answer off-anon asks privately! And thank you so much for still liking my things!!

Anon said: Have you read the last haikyuu chapter? How did you feel about it?

I’ve reread it at least twenty times and then I went and reread the whole of the last game again and it’s been three weeks and I’m still thinking about it more or less constantly and feeling giddy happy about everything that manga has ended up being, genuinely one of the best manga I’ve ever had the pleasure of following till the very end - that’s how I feel about it <3

Anon said: I really like looking at your art it’s so therapeutic it’s wonderful please keep drawing I want to support you on Kofi and patreon and yet I am broke please just know I love u very much ok bye

Ahhhh it’s okay anon! I try to keep as little completely unavailable for my followers as I can, and I’ll do my best to keep drawing! Can’t promise the fandoms will always be stuff you care about though haha

Anon said: This is my FAVORITE art blog. Is blog even a word that ppl use anymore?? Idk but anyways your kiribaku gives me life and cures my depression so ily and thank u

I’m so so happy to hear that! Thank you so much!!! TTATT <3

Anon said: just now realizing your oc looks like the human version of kamakiri

To be fair the only thing they have in common is the green mohawk, but I get where you’re coming from! I was very happy when Kamakiri’s official colors came out exactly cause he makes me think about my boy, after all xD my love for Kamakiri is definitely biased, in that sense haha

Anon said: Just wanted to let u know im very gay for ur oc giulia that is all thanks

Anon I’m gonna cry I’m so glad you like her!!!!!!!!!! She’s one of my oldest OCs out of that group, it’s always so thrilling to know people like her ;A; <3

Anon said: I really like how you draw kirishima’s hair

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!! I have a lot of fun with it, though it does mean it ends up being kinda off canon more often than not haha

Anon said: hi! just a random question but how’d you come up with your name?

Fran is my name! Erid comes from Eridan from homestuck! Art is what I try to do! And that’s the incredibly interesting story behind my screen name haha

Anon said: Heya, so i sent the ask about the person who i suspect either heavily referenced or traced your art (i sent another ask about this tho im not sure if it went through) anyway, it was posted by ****************** you'll know it when you see it i think

Ahhhhhh sorry for how long this took me to answer, I went to check and it’s!!! fine, I mean, would have preferred if they had credited but I don’t think it was completely traced so I don’t mind too much, I used to copy art of people I liked too back when I was first starting, after all haha

[areiton]

three days - stony

Read on AO3 | Mind the AO3 warnings, friends. 

~*~ 

The day begins like this:  

Tony is cursing, and Steve is laughing.  

It’s how they’ve woken up for years now, Steve’s hands cool and familiar against Tony’s belly as he crawls back into bed with his husband, and Tony’s rasping complaints just as familiar.  

“There’s coffee, sweetheart,” Steve murmurs, hair wet where it falls into his eyes and Tony peers up at him through his good eye.  

It’s been decades since Thanos, since he gave his right arm and his eye and almost his life—since Extremis reversed the damage and so much of his aging and slowed down the remains.  

“We could stay in bed,” Tony bargains, and Steve grins at him, rolls them in the sheets until Tony is straddling his hips and drags him down for a kiss, hands skating over his sides.  

~*~  

The day begins like this:  

There is silence. Cool sheets and bright sunlight. He hasn’t slept. He can’t sleep in the utter silence, and can’t bring himself to leave their bedroom either.  

There’s the scent of familiar cologne and motor oil in the air, and he can’t bring himself to leave, isn’t sure it’ll be there, if he does.  

There’s a tap on the door, and Harley comes in, trailed by Peter.  

“Hey, Pops,” Harley murmurs, hands shoved in his pockets. He’s wearing his suit, already. It’s not that strange, seeing him in a suit—Harley has been CEO long enough that seeing him wearing a suit as trim and fitted as Tony’s is familiar and comforting.  

Peter is too, though, and his eyes are wet and red-rimmed and he looks-- 

He looks like Tony did. Grey streaks his hair and his eyes are tired, his smile weaker than it used to be.  

He looks younger than Harley, and Steve wonders if that’s a curse or a blessing. Tony worried about it, about how he’d handle a long life, extended by his mutation, when his husband was gone.  

Steve blinks hard, because Tony had never considered that for them. Not when Extremis and the serum evened the playing field for them, not for decades now.  

“It’s time,” Harley says, softly.  

~*~  

The day begins like this:  

An alarm is blaring, beyond the walls of his room, and Steve jerks upright. “Report?” he barks, and there’s a brief moment of silence cut only by the klaxon.  

“Commander, they’ve asked you stay behind,” FRIDAY says.  

He snorts, and moves, all efficiency as he slips into the stealth suit.  

It needs a bit of work, but it’ll do, at least until he can get to the city.  

“What’s the situation, FRI?” he asks.  

She feeds it to the comm he never goes without, and he reaches for his shield before leaving the small, unadorned room behind.  

The halls of SHIELD are crowded, bustling with agents scurrying to answer the still screaming alarm, but they all give way, something he notes with only the barest kind of interest.  

His hair falls in his eyes and he scrapes it back impatiently, securing it at the nape of his neck.  

“Need to cut that, Stevie,” Bucky says, falling into step beside him.  

“Think you should sit this one out,” Director Bishop says as they stride into command center. Her eyes are worried and her mouth is tight and Steve smiles at her, sharply.  

“Now you know that’s not gonna happen, Katie Kate,” Bucky drawls, and because he’s looking for, Steve sees her tiny flinch.  

Even now.  

“Stark,” she says, and Steve straightens.  

“What’s the mission, Director,” he asks, implacable.  

She sighs and drags up a holoscreen. “We know he’s harnessing electricity,” she begins and he settles in.  

“This might be the one,” FRIDAY murmurs and Steve closes his eyes, and hopes. 

~*~  

The morning goes like this:  

Tony leans against him, half asleep against his back while Steve makes eggs. The house is quiet today—just the two of them, the team confined to the Compound. He thinks about spending a little time in his studio, after breakfast.  

“I need to do some work on the prototypes Peter sent over,” Tony mumbles against his back and Steve mentally rearranges his plans. Sketching in the workshop and going over SHIELD mission reports it was.  

There were days, of course there were, when they retreated from each other, spent in their own separate corners of the house, days Tony spent in the city because even now, years after Pepper’s retirement and handing the reins to Harley and Peter, he’s active at SI. There are days when Steve goes on a mission for SHIELD with Bucky, and they don’t see each other for a week or more.  

But mostly, when they can, they spend their time together.  

“Too many years apart,” Steve murmured, when Tony asked him about it, right after they got married.  

Now, it’s habit, and comfortable, and Steve smiles does at the eggs while Tony snores against his back, and thinks about the long empty day stretching ahead of them.  

~*~  

The day goes like this:  

They drive together, Steve and the boys who are not boys, the men who have been his sons. Morgan is waiting, with her children, and theirs, and Steve resents them, just for a moment, resents everyone here—the remains of their family and their team, Bucky and Sam, everyone standing around him and the fucking urn waiting.  

Peter speaks first.  

Because Steve—Steve loved him, loves him still, with every breath that is in him, he thinks he will love Tony until he’s dust and faded memories—but Peter was part of Tony’s soul, all his genius and sacrifice and kindness wrapped up in a boy without a speck of his blood. Peter was the son he chose, and it’s fitting, that Peter is the one speaking first, the one saying goodbye while Steve stands over an urn that feels too heavy and too light and all wrong.  

It wasn’t supposed to end like this.  

There was Extremis and the serum, there was every villain and battle they survived and all the years they fought and all the love they built despite it.  

There was a century between them and secrets and so much love he can’t quite breath through it.  

It wasn’t supposed to end like this.  

But then, he supposes. It wasn’t supposed to end at all.  

~*~  

The day goes like this:  

The quinnjet is quiet. FRIDAY has fallen silent, but Steve knows she’s running all the information she can find, and after all the years she’s spent growing, there’s nothing she can’t find.  

Bucky sits next to him, silent, because there’s nothing to say anymore.  

The SHIELD agents and Avengers—there are Avengers, new ones, people whose names he can’t remember or doesn't want to learn, a Captain America that Sam chose that he doesn’t want to know—are quiet, a low murmur of voices and spike of laughter, but it’s been long enough that no one disturbs him and Bucky, until they’re coming up on the drop site and Scarlet Witch—not Wanda, not his team, they’re all gone now—says, “Eyes up. Everyone comes home safe.”  

There’s a chorus of voices, and Bucky leans briefly into his side, and Steve’s eyes cut to his brother.  

FRIDAY is quiet in his ear and the wind whistles as the fliers take to the sky. There’s a lightening storm, just beyond the quinnjet.  

He smiles.  

“Commander Stark,” he hears, shouted, a moment before he throws himself from the jet, and Bucky follows.  

~*~  

The day goes like this:  

The alarm comes in while Tony is scolding DUM-E, and Steve is laughing, and he grins at Steve, bright and beautiful. “Wanna save the world, honey?”  

“We’re retired,” Steve says, dryly.  

“FRIDAY, what is it?  

“A new threat, Boss. Something in space.”  

Steve shifts, uneasy, because space has never meant anything good for them, but Tony is grinning, bright eyes and eager, and he already knows how it’ll end.  

“Get your suit,” he sighs, “FRIDAY, let Hill know we’re coming in.”  

“Sure thing, Commander.”  

~*~  

The day goes like this:  

After they scatter the ashes.  

After the family gathers and leaves-- 

After the house has gone silent, but for DUM-E's sad lonely beeping, when the lights are off and the curtains are drawn and the studio has been closed off-- 

He sits in the dark with a gun in his hand and only the thought of Tony’s disappointment in him keeps him from pulling the trigger.  

~*~  

The day goes like this:  

The fight is brutal. The Avengers are falling in around him and Bucky, but there’s rain and the air is thick with electricity.  

Hawkeye goes down under an electric bolt from the wizard wielding it and Scarlet Witch screams his name.  

“Cap,” FRIDAY murmurs. “Wait.” 

It’s going to hell, fast, the rain and the electricity working together to blind and ground their fliers, to slow the fighters on the ground. An EMP brings down Iron Patriot with a clattering roar that almost throws him back to that fucking fight in Germany, a lifetime ago, but he grits his teeth,  tenses-- 

And waits.  

It comes in waves, pulses where the wizard gather’s his power, before it’s thrown in a scattering arc, in a sharp concentrated bolt, devastating their ranks.  

“Now,” Friday snaps, and he throws himself forward.  

The last thing he hears is Bucky’s scream.  

~*~  

The day ends like this:  

They should have stayed home.  

Where Tony was warm and grumbling and their forever stretched endless in front of them.  

They should have stayed home.  

It goes to hell, fast, faster than he can parse. The villain is an alien they’ve never faced before, and Tony’s voice is sharp and worried over the comm. 

“Cap, he’s pulling the energy of a fucking star,” Tony says.  

“A star?” Steve echoes.  

“Stars are a form of energy—that's what he’s pulling.”  

“Ours?”  

Tony’s silent and Steve almost laughs, because of course they’re on a throwaway mission with a villain who wants to drain the power of their damn sun.  

“What can we do to stop him?”  

Tony is quiet, a long moment, and then--”FRIDAY, take care of him, would you? Ferryman Protocol, code echo alpha zeta tango niner.”  

The ship jerks a little, and FRIDAY says, apologetic, “Sorry, Cap. Orders.”  

“Tony,” Steve starts, but he’s flying already, the boosters on his suit bright as stars as he slams into the alien. Giant tentacles as black as the space around them snake around the suit and Tony says, softly. “I’m so sorry, beloved.”  

“Tony, come back here,” Steve begs. “Please--” 

“I wanted so badly to grow old with you, Steve,” Tony says. The suit is flying again, pulling the alien with him, and Steve can’t breathe, it’s flying. “FRIDAY--don’t let him watch.”  

He screams when the ships monitor’s go black.  

He screams when an explosion rocks the ship.  

He screams when FRIDAY reports, her voice shaking with tears, “I’ve lost contact with the suit.”  

He screams and he screams, and Tony never responds.  

~*~ 

The day ends like this:  

He catches sight of himself in a mirror in the dark. It’s been almost a year since that day in space, a year of searching space and scanning for lifesigns and Peter frantically building tech to go search for Tony.  

It’s been a year of unending grief and wild baseless hope and silence that’s never answered.  

He catches sight of himself and he breaks, shatters the mirror and then the table, so furious suddenly he doesn’t check himself. He finds himself in his studio, shattered easels and canvases, his pencils broken and sketchbooks torn apart, chest heaving and sobs trapped in his throat.  

He’s destroyed it, the place that Tony built for him, the place where he would sleep, while Steve sketched.  

He trembles, and says, softly, “FRIDAY. I can’t stay here.”  

“I’ll inform SHIELD you’re moving back to headquarters,” she says, and he nods.  

He takes his suit, the one that Tony made him, his shield, and a picture of Tony, saved from the ruined studio, and leaves.  

~*~  

The day ends like this:  

Bucky carries him.  

He can’t breath, and there’s a panicky fear in his gut, shades from a boy that he hasn’t been in a lifetime.  

He can’t breath and there’s peace in it, because FRIDAY is almost purring in his ear, and Bucky is carrying him and crying and there’s a smile, strange and familiar, on his brother’s face. 

He waited.  

Even now, almost a decade after Sam’s death, Bucky waited.  

“End of the line,” Steve rasps and Bucky laughs, lowers him in the quinnjet that is dark and still.  

The Avengers that he doesn’t know, never let himself know, are behind him, silent and grim and he thinks maybe they are crying.  

He wants to tell them not to.  

He wants to tell them this is his choice.  

Bucky knows, and that is enough. FRIDAY knows, his faithful companion for all the long empty years since Tony died.  

He closes his eyes and his heartbeat falters.  

~*~  

The day begins like this:  

He wakes and there’s a warmth, familiar and comforting, against him, and he twists.  

Tony smiles at him, impossibly young and heartbreakingly perfect, his eyes bright, and his right hand trembling as it pushes back Steve’s hair.  

“You kept me waiting a while, beloved,” he murmurs.  

Steve curls close, and Tony hums, soft and soothing and comforting, as he holds him.  

[tisfan]

Problem Child

Title Problem Child Collaborator(s) @tisfan Link https://tisfan.tumblr.com/post/626280669066182656/problem-child Square Filled B5: Through a Scope Ship/Main Pairing Bucky/Tony Rating Teen and Up Major Tags/Triggers/Warnings: temporary character death, steve rogers is an idiot, bucky barnes saves the day, again, and again, and again Summary Steve Rogers went back in time to live in the 1940s. He didn’t know he was going to send Steve-sized ripples through the future. 

Bucky is there to correct them. Word Count 1095  For @buckybarnesbingo

I'm a problem child I'm a problem child, yes I am I'm a problem child And I'm wild - AC/DC, Problem Child

Bucky checked his file one last time. The numbers scrawled themselves out through the chronotube, updated with every mission. He shoved the tube -- showing the date/time/location stamp -- into his case. 

June 12, 1985 - Tony Stark, age 15, 172 Madison Avenue, main room, playing piano

He squinted through the scope again, locating his target. Tony hadn’t taken his place on the piano bench yet. He was still in the bedroom he’d turned into a workshop, poking at a disassembled piece of machinery. His tongue was stuck out in the corner of his mouth and his goggles were perched messily in his hair.

“But mom,” he protested.

Bucky had some of the best tech available; his sniper rifle’s scope was fully capable of picking up sound. Luckily, Tony’s workshop and the main room were on the same side of the mansion. Well, condo, really, but it was half the floor on the 170th through the 173rd storey, and had eleven bedrooms, so really, it counted as a mansion, even if there weren’t any lawns.

Lawns were overrated.

Maria Stark came into the room. She was beautiful; Bucky’d only seen her once before, so he took a moment to look at her. Look and really feel the weight of what he’d done. It was another life, another time, but it was the same woman.

“If you get your practice done now,” Maria said, “then I will let go out to Edwards with Jim.”

Tony put his soldering iron down carefully. “You mean it?”

“Yes. It’s only a week, but I want one hour of practice now, and every day until you leave.”

Tony whooped and unplugged his equipment. “That’s great, Mom! Thanks!” 

“Wash your hands, first,” Maria chided, following him out of the workshop. 

Things were right on schedule for everything to go exactly wrong. He pondered his options. 

If Tony -- and for that matter, the young James Rhodes -- went out to Edwards Air Force base to watch the Challenger launch, they were going to cause trouble. They wouldn’t mean to, but trouble was going to happen. Sneaking around to get a closer look, they were going to run into the bodyguards of Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, a payload specialist and a member of the Royal Family.

The problem was, both boys were going to be detained by USAF, and certain members of Hydra who were already implanted there at the airbase were going to take advantage of the situation to kidnap the Stark heir and attempt to extort concessions from Howard Stark.

Howard did not deal with terrorists, and this time--

(more under the cut)

Tony wasn’t going to come home. 

The first pass through, Tony hadn’t been able to go to the shuttle launch because he’d been on one of Howard’s stupid missions searching for Steve’s body in the Arctic. It was the last time Tony had gone on a mission; five years later Howard would be killed and the missions would stop entirely.

Bucky waited until Tony finished practicing, listening. He wasn’t a prodigy, but he was good. Music was like math, Tony had told him. Or would tell him. Some day in the future.

If Bucky could ever finish these missions and go home.

Maria had drifted off to finish writing her letters, smiling from time to time as she listened to Tony’s practice.

Bucky took out the phone, punched in the numbers. Tony walked right by on his way back to the shop just as it rang. “Hello?”

“Anthony Stark,” Bucky said, lowering his voice and keeping it bland and emotionless. 

“Speaking,” Tony said with a huff for the formal name.

“This is White Wolf,” Bucky said. “Do you remember me?”

Tony went frozen with shock. “I-- haven’t spoken to you since I was ten.”

“You remember.”

“Of course I remember,” Tony said, looking around as if he thought he’d be able to see Bucky. Or to see if his mother was listening.

“Good. I want you to listen to me very carefully,” Bucky said. “This trip your mother has planned for you. You can’t go.”

“But--”

“I told you,” Bucky said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Some day you’d really need me to listen to you, and--”

“It’s very dangerous for you at Edwards Air Force Base right now.”

“What am I supposed to tell my mom?”

“Get on the plane. I’ll have a car waiting for you,” Bucky promised. “You and Jim can spend the week at Disney.”

“That’s baby stuff,” Tony whined.

“And better than a coffin,” Bucky said. He sighed. “Or I can shoot you now. Your mother won’t let you leave the house with a broken leg.”

“Do you always threaten people that you like?”

“Do I like you?”

“Pretty sure you do,” Tony teased, his sultry bedroom voice nothing quite like it would grow to become, but at the same time, Bucky’s body reacted to it. This young man would grow up to be the love of Bucky’s life. Provided Bucky could keep him alive long enough to grow up.

“You’ll go to Disney?”

“I won’t go to Edwards,” Tony said, instead. It would have to do.

“Thank you,” Bucky said.

“When will I see you again?”

“Soon.”

Bucky hung up.

He didn’t know how soon. Well, for him, it would be in the next few hours. For Tony, it could be weeks, or months. Years. When Tony was four, Bucky had seen him every few days. And then a long break until Tony almost forgot Bucky existed.

More than half the visits, Tony didn’t even know Bucky was involved. He’d show up, deflect a threat, and disappear before he even caught sight of his target.

He needed to prevent this temporal impact before he’d know where the next one was. How Tony Stark had managed to live to grow up the first time was amazing. But Steve had jumped into the past, into 1948, and he’d changed… everything.

Little ripples in the timeline had started from him throwing a Steve-sized rock into the timestream, and those ripples were trying like hell to kill Tony Stark.

Bucky didn’t understand it, but the Time Variance Authority had dozens of agents trying to correct the timestream.

Bucky was a volunteer.

The chronotube beeped. The temporal impact had been calculated. Next terminal date: September 21, 1985.

 Bucky peered through his scope one more time, watching Tony stand by the phone, looking stunned. Almost frightened.

“See you soon, kid,” Bucky said. 

[brandyllyn]

In our own image... (07)

Chapter 07

(Poe Dameron x OFC)

Other chapters...  My Masterlist

Word count: 1500. Read it on AO3.

Rating: Teen & Up (PG)  Warnings: None.

Finn had the night off. In fact, he had the next several nights off because after a week of crawling around in the underground tunnels with beetles the size of his head and glowing worms the size of a Wookie that liked to spit stinking gunk at you - Finn had finally said enough was enough and gotten himself pulled from cavern duty.

It turned out, he outlasted everyone else on the assignment by three days. If he’d known that, he’d have quit several days sooner. And had several more shirts that he could still wear without smelling like lokka worm spit.

He was really going to kill Poe.

He could make it look like an accident. The man was constantly trying to pull off aerial maneuvers that no one in their right mind would ever attempt. Surely if he pulled the right wire his X-Wing would explode in mid air. He’d have to be sure BB-8 wasn’t onboard of course. The little droid was his friend.

Alternatively, he could just shoot Poe the next time they were out on a mission. It wasn’t like he didn’t have plenty of opportunities. He could shoot Poe in the back and claim someone in the First Order had done it. Or a criminal. Or anyone really. He wouldn’t even need to cite friendly fire, just that Poe had winked at the wrong person and next thing - pfft, blaster bolt to the back.

Caught up in his fratricidal fantasies, it took a minute for Finn to realize that there was no response when he called out Poe’s name. The pilot hadn’t been at dinner so he’d gone to Poe’s sleeping quarters near the flight line, hoping to have some choice words with him. He tried calling out again, checking for the privacy flag, then pushed the door aside and poked his head cautiously around the tarp.

"Poe?"

The hammock was empty.

Grunting, he let the door fall back into place, thinking to himself. He climbed the ladder next to the X-Wing, not bothering to push it over to the ship. From that height he’d be able to see whether or not Poe was in there.

The X-Wing was empty as well.

"Damn," he muttered, slowly lowering himself back to the ground. Well, if Poe was doing something else tonight he could just go find Rey to commiserate with.

Ten minutes later Finn was annoyed. He couldn’t find anyone. Rey wasn’t on the Falcon, or anywhere else he’d looked. He had ducked his head into Command but the only person working this late was Rose.

"Hey, have you seen Rey? Or Poe?"

Rose shook her head, eyes on the radar map in front of her. She pointed to a spot on it and the Lieutenant next to her made a notation. "No, I haven’t."

Finn sighed. "Thanks."

"Have you checked over by the new droidsmith? I’ve seen Rey that way a few times."

"The droidsmith?" he asked and then remembered. "By the Mu shuttle?"

"That’s the one."

Finn stepped out of command, waving at Lieutenant Kaydel as she passed from the Commons back to wherever her bunk was.

Now where the hell was the shuttle?

When he finally found it the workshop looked empty. The slant of the roof tarp was aglow, so obviously there were lights on inside - a lot of them in fact - but there was no one in sight. As he got closer, he noticed he could see a leg, up high, inside the tent. A leg attached to a shoe he recognized.

"Rey!" He called out and she turned to look at him. She was in a hammock, above a wall of crates and boxes. She’d been looking down to the other side but smiled when she saw him.

"Finn!" She called back and waved. She turned away, talking to someone on the other side of the wall, "Hey, Finn���s here." She gestured at him and he walked around the wall, seeing that it opened up into a larger area, surrounded on all sides by makeshift walls. Lights hung from almost every available surface, making it bright as day despite the close quarters. There were three people there: Rey, Poe, and a woman he didn’t recognize.

"What is this, some secret club without me?" he grumped.

Above him, Rey twisted in her hammock, pulling her feet in and looking down at him cross-legged. Poe didn’t even acknowledge his presence. He was sitting next to the woman, on a stool pulled up so close that Poe’s body was pressed from calf to shoulder against her. They were both leaning over a worktable, looking into one of BB-8’s tool bay disks.

The droid at least acknowledged him. Trilling at him and flashing his lights.

"Nice to see you too Beebs," he called out.

"It’s not a secret club, Finn," Rey said from above, "of course you’re welcome."

The woman next to Poe turned to him, a smile on her face. She was quite pretty and had a series of spots, framing her face and running down the sides of her neck into her shirt, the only break where they disappeared under the collar she was wearing. He’d never seen the like before. She got up, whistling and clicking her tongue. He heard BB-8 do the same.

He took the hand the woman proffered, shaking it. "I’m Finn." He gestured at Rey and Poe, "These two used to be my friends."

"Ah, we’re still your friends Finn," Poe said, getting up to stand with them. Finn noted he was standing a little closer to the woman than was strictly necessary.

The woman whistled and clicked again, BB-8 doing the same. Then she looked at him. A long silence stretched and Finn darted a glance awkwardly from her to Poe and back. "Uh…"

"Oh shit," Poe suddenly exclaimed. "Finn doesn’t know Binary."

The woman blinked and then bit her lip, giving him an apologetic look.

"Where’s K-0?" Poe asked her.

It was Rey who replied, "I think he’s off sulking again."

The woman snorted and then tapped Poe on the shoulder, pointing at Finn and then herself, whistling softly. Poe smiled at her and then turned to Finn. "Kina wants me to introduce you two. Kina, Finn already told you his name. Finn, this is Kina - she’s the new droidsmith."

"I figured that part out," Finn said and then turned to her and smiled "It’s a pleasure to meet you Kina."

She gave a long series of whistles and clicks. Finn noticed that Poe waited for BB-8 to repeat them again before he responded. "Kina welcomes you to her workshop and wants to know if there is anything you need."

"No, I was just… trying to figure out where everyone went," Finn replied.

"Well, we’re here," Poe said, spreading his hands wide and then throwing an arm over Finn’s shoulder. "Let me give you the tour." Kina rolled her eyes and settled back on her stool, tapping for BB-8 to open his tool bay disk again.

"This is the build shop. It’s where all the major work goes on. Out front, the other tables? That’s for minor work, quick fixes that people bring by." Poe gestured as he talked, pointing to a far corner, "Over there is Kina’s private quarters. Rey had made herself a home away from home over by the entrance."

Rey waved and motioned for Finn to climb up. He did, sitting on top of the crates, legs swinging over the side. Rey was sitting in her hammock which swung about a foot above the crates.

"I’m glad you’re here," Rey said, leaning over and touching his shoulder for a moment. "I’ve missed you."

Finn flushed, feeling his face warm, thankful that it wouldn’t show. "I missed you guys too."

"Where have you been?" She asked, using one foot to set her hammock rocking.

"Poe didn’t tell you?" At her confused look he cursed. "Poe! You got me put on stink worm night shifts and didn’t even tell anyone? Cold man. Real cold."

Poe was back on his stool, snug against Kina. He waved a hand at Finn without turning around, their heads close together as they perused BB-8’s insides.

"How long has that been going on?" Finn asked Rey in a low voice.

Rey shrugged, "About a week I think? I’m not sure."

"Really?" Finn felt his eyebrows rise, looking at the couple. "Interesting." He hesitated before asking, "And she doesn’t talk?"

"She talks," Rey corrected, "she just can’t speak Basic. The whistling, it’s a form of Binary. Poe and I, we can both catch words but we need a droid to translate it into standard Binary."

"Oh, is it a… species? Thing? Another language?" He awkwardly asked.

"I don’t think so," Rey shrugged, "And she’s not speaking another language, she’s speaking Binary."

"Binary is another language," Finn pointed out.

"I guess," Rey replied, chewing her lip in thought. She turned to lean back into her hammock, laying so she could see Finn. "Tell me about these worms."

"Oh man," Finn groaned, "they were so gross."

=

Chpt 8

[letarasstuff]

I like it

A/N: Ok ok, this is like my first Poe Fic (and Star Wars tho) ever, so please don’t be mean to me :c Also, English isn’t my first language

Summary: After having your whole family slaughtered by the First Order, Poe takes you in. Suddenly the base gets attacked by them, when he is not there. How will he react?

Warnings: Language, mentions of death, anxiety, panic attack and bad grammar

father figure!Poe Dameron x Teen!Reader

On your homeplanet there weren't many options to make money. You are either good with mechanics and motors or you look good enough, that the greasy men like you. As one can say, you were lucky.

Your parents owned a workshop. This isn't anything unusual, given the fact there is one at every corner in the bigger cities. But yours was the best. You don't wanna sound cocky, it's just the truth.

So your mother and father taught you the inside of every thing, that has a motor. Before you were even able to form a proper sentence, you could repair any ship on the planet. Still you had a nice childhood, playing with the kids in the neighborhood, going to school and learning new stuff. You are happy to say, that your parents did a damn good job at giving you the best memories a kid can ever have.

But anything good comes to an end, so does this. You were 14 years old, when the First Order came down to your homeplanet. Even though your leaders weren't that nice people, they still refused to be in an alliance with them. Initially they wanted to stay neutral in the war, but as soon as they declined the offer, they tried to get into contact with the Resistance.

Unfortunately, they were too late. When they got their pilots on your ground, nearly everything was burnt down. They swarmed out to look after survivors. Even though they did their best, they couldn't find anyone, who has a beating heart. The sight was heartbreaking. This once living planet was now the aftermath of the First Order's wrath.

The pilots gave up eventually. Nobody agreed to it, but they didn't have many options. The last one to leave the planet was a man, who is known as the golden boy of the Resistance. Poe Dameron. Especially to him it was unacceptable to leave this planet with bare hands. 

So he started a last desperate attempt and looked into one of the most destroyed buildings. He shoved a bit of rubble to the side, when he saw a leg. Hope began to rise inside of him. Quickly he put another rather big piece of rubbish to the side to expose a face. It was a young kid, their eyes are closed.

Poe rushed to their side and checked the wrist for a pulse. The sigh he let out, when he felt a light one, has to be the loudest the galaxy ever witnessed. Happy to be the messenger of good news, the pilot told his squadron about his found. All of them cheered, it was kind of a miracle for them.

Now they have to act fast. Poe picked the kid up and rushed them to his own ship. He knew, that a team of nurses would take too long to get to the both of them. So he put them on a seat and secured them with the belt. He was quick to make his way back to base. He told the ground team about the only survivor and let them prepare a team of doctors and nurses to help the kid.

Luckily the kid made it. Just a few broken ribs, a concussion and a few bruises were what they got as a punishment for their leader's decision.

You are a lucky kid.

You spent a few days unconscious in the medical wing, before you woke up to a steady beeping. To be honest, this noise really got on your nerves. So you opened your eyes to be met by blinding lights. After shutting and re-opening them you got used to it. Then you had the time to take your surroundings in. There were a some machines, that monitor your vitals. Seemed like you were still alive. But why were you here?

Out of all sudden it hit you. The First Order attacked your homeplanet. Your parents, who tried to bring you into safety. Then another missile hit the building and everything goes black. What happened to them? What about all your friends, neighbors? Where were you?

Your breath began to quicken. The beeping got faster. This added to your panic and made you more and more frantic. Your throat tightened as did your chest. Everything seemed to break over you and you don't know what to do.

Then you feel another presence. The person put their hands on your shoulders and spoke in a calm and warm voice:"Hey, hey. Breath, ok? Just take a long breath in, hold it and let it out slowly. Try to feel the way it enters your body and leaves it again. We can get through it, but you have to work with me here, buddy."

You do as the someone told you and mimicked their breathing as they showed you the exercise. Your breathing steadied again as did the beeping. Finally you were able to face them. The person, who talked you through your mini panic attack, has dark brown locks and brown eyes. There were also the shadow of a beard on his jaw.

"Better?", he asked you and gave you a glass of water. After savouring every last drop of it, you answered:"Yes, thank you..?" "Poe, Poe Dameron. The Resistance's best pilot." Well, this is an introduction only he can do.

"Then hello Mr Dameron. I'm (Y/N), the best mechanic my age you can find in the whole galaxy." Actually, you were never the person to be cocky around strangers, but with this Poe guy it felt right at an instance.

"Hello (Y/N), just call me Poe and if you want to address me by my last name, do it right. It's Commander Dameron." "Thank you for this information. Where are my parents though? Why are you here, not them? Also no offence, but it seems pretty weird to wait for  a random teenager to wake up."

The first answer were a sigh. He explained the whole situation to you, even though he didn't want to be the one to bring the bad news. Your only reaction was crying. You felt so many things at once and this was your only way to let it out.

While holding your crying form, Poe promised himself to take care of you from now on. He partly did it, because he felt like it was his fault, that your family was dead. If he was there earlier, he could have saved them. But the other part was you. Even though he only knew you for a few minutes, he felt a connection. Now it's upon him to protect you.

And he does keep his promise until the very day. The both of you share a room, you and BB-8 get super good along, he helps you to make yourself a name as the best mechanic the Resistance has to offer. Hell, he even teaches you how to fly an X-Wing. To say he is impressed by the skill you already have is an understatement. But neither he nor Leia allow you to tag along missions until you old enough. This also counts for training and wearing a blaster.

One time you ask Poe which age this should be. He answers with:”It’s the same age you are allowed to kiss somebody.” It is this moment, when you realize, that you will never be old enough.

It is another rather calm day on the base, which is quite suspicious. The First Order hasn't pulled any stunts recently. Still everybody has something to do, except for the majority of pilots. There aren't many missions for them now, That's why Poe sits next to you, while you repair an astromech. "And then I saved the whole galaxy", ends the older man yet another of his heroic stories. "Again", you add with an eye roll. He nudges your shoulder with his own and exclaimes: "Well, somebody has to do it!" Laughing you tighten another screw and knock gently on the astromech's head.

"Now you are all done, buddy. But be more careful next time while playing with the others tag, ok?", you speak softly to BB-031. Happily she nods and drives off to her pilot. You turn back to Poe. "When do you have to leave?" "Not in another two hours, that means we can grab lunch together. It's just an abandoned outpost with new activities. I don't even think that this has something to do with the First Order", he reassures you. 

You sigh. "I know, but still. So many things can go wrong and I don't wanna be alone again." The both of you walk towards the mess hall. The brown haired man throws an arm around your shoulder. "We are soldiers, as sad as it may sound, it's the truth. We have to keep in our mind that death is always right beside our side. But as long as you are on this base, you will never be alone. Leia is going to take care of you. Always."

You look up to him and smile, a warm and fuzzy feeling bubbling inside of you. The last time you felt like this was with your parents at home.

Before he boards his X-Wing, Poe gives you a last hug and says:"Be good for Leia, ok buddy?" "This sounds like I am four!" "Well, when I think about it, you are like a four year old!", he jokes. With a pout you punch his arm. "Good luck out there and come back in one piece or else I hunt your dead ass down!"

When the Black Squadron left the hangar, you turn back to your own work and get totally engrossed into it. It's just you, your tools and the project infront of you.

That is until a blaring alarm sounds over the speakers. Confused you look up, only to see everyone in the hangar running around like chickens in panic. People throw stuff into bags, others finish their work up hastily and the remaining just run out. And you don't have a kriffing clue what's happening.

You try to stop one of the other mechanics. But to no avail. Nobody wants to explain the situation to you. But then you see the reason for all the commotion:

Outside at the sky are countless TIE-Fighters and it won't take long until the first one reaches the ground. 

You begin to scramble and run, but get pushed into a cart with tools on it. With a loud yelp you land on it and get pocked and cut by wrenches and such. Again, nobody pays attention at you. The own safety is the only present thing at the moment. 

When you hear the TIE touches the ground, you get up as quickly as possible. Even though your legs hurt from the fall, you run like your life depends on it. And it does.

The hangar is deserted. No pilots, no mechanics, no one is there. Expect for you. You can hear the stormtrooper enter the building, while you dash for the gateaway. Their steps are getting closer and closer. It doesn't take long for the enemies to spot you. Sooner as you want, you have to dodge shots from behind. But this isn't your only problem.

As a kind of safety guard the gateaway closes. You run faster than you ever did before. A quick look behind you tells you, that there is a stormtrooper too close for your liking. So you reach into your utility belt and throw the first thing you can grasp at him. Turns out it's one of your favorite wrenches, but it's not the time to mourn the loss. Saving your own life is way more important right now.

When you are close enough at the gate, you throw yourself on the floor and slide under it before is closes completely. But there is no time to catch your breath. You make your way through what feels like the whole base to get to the safety ships.

When you finally reach them, there's only one left. Leia stands at the entrance, looking for someone. As soon as her eyes set on your form, she seems relieved. The General grabs you by your arm and drag you inside the ship. Once you left the base, she pulls you into a hug while scolding you: "Never ever scare me like this again, (Y/N)!"

The Black Squadron is already on the new base. The news of the attack were spread fast to them, so they were quick to react. After your ship's landing the hatch opens. You emerge out of it into a crowd of nervous, scared and clamouring people. But there is one voice shouting, that stands out.

"Where is my kid? Where are they? Has anyone seen my kid? (Y/N)?!" 

It's Poe, who is looking for you. You try to make the direction out from where he shouts. Finally, after what feels like an eternity, you see his dark locks. You push your way over to him and so does he, when he catches a glimpse of you. As soon as he is able to he pulls you in for a hug.

Poe strokes through your hair and makes it a mess, but you can't care less. "I was so scared, that I lost you, kiddo." "I'm fine. I'm fine", you assures him. "I don't care, let us get you to the medical wing, kid." "Ok, Dad."

"Did you just call me Dad?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well, I like that. Love you, kid."

"Love you, too, Dad."

[poetrusicperry]

hi!! if you’re still up for writing them, i’d love a platonic pairing with one of the dps gang. i’ve really enjoyed reading the ones you’ve written so far.

i identify as nonbinary and go by she/they pronouns. i’ve also recently found out that i’m autistic. i don’t know exactly how i’d label my aesthetic but i tend to dress like a colourful punk. i’m currently studying drama, literature and film.

i spend my spare time writing (poems, songs and plays) and have quite a vivid imagination. i don’t really have too many friends as i’m not very good at reaching out to people and i’ve only recently developed the confidence to be myself when talking to people i don’t know very well. i’d say i’m rather bubbly when I’m with my friends but i have a tendency to bottle up my emotions because i feel as though i have to be happy for the sake of other people. i laugh at my own jokes a lot and like to dance around my kitchen at night. i listen to a lot of music (i like a lot of alternative stuff from the 90s) and love to make playlists based on literally anything. i’m also in the process of teaching myself how to play guitar. i love art and visiting art galleries and i’m also really passionate about history! i’ve spent most of my life doing theatre but i’ve recently realised that i’d probably rather write for stage than perform (i still really love acting though). i love poetry and literature and own far too many plushies. i also love going on walks in the countryside and nature makes me so so happy!! my mental health isn’t great but i’m surviving (mostly by taking time to sit and cry to sufjan stevens).

thank you so much, friend!!! i hope you’re well. have a fantastic day <3

hi lovely anon, my deepest apologies for how long this has taken !! i hope you like it and thank you for the request <3 (:

shipping you (platonically) with neil and pitts !! (:

you and neil would obviously bond over theatre, but while you grew out of acting to focus on writing, he’d still employ your help with running lines

also neil would totally love to workshop the plays/scenes you write as a way of helping you see what kinds of improvements could be made, etc.

he’d really love taking you to museums; you both found art very therapeutic and would escape to galleries/exhibits during or after finals to destress

the amount of movies you guys watch together is innumerable; you pick a new one every weekend (either sneaking out to the theater or sneaking into a classroom with a vcr)

on bad days, neil would just want to help, but he wouldn’t know how, so he would keep a reasonable distance, but always let you know that he was there if you needed him (“and just for the record, i don’t think any less of you when you’re sad”)

you and pitts would bond over music, 100% omg

endless trips to the record store to browse the new vinyls that just came in

pittsie would occasionally tag along with you and neil to the museum even though he never really… understood art very well (he just liked to be included (: )

on pitts’ bad days, you found that taking him on walks around campus or down by the lake were really good for him; he’d get pretty quiet and just admire the things around him. his nonchalance at the walks always worried you because you thought he might think they were lame, but he appreciated them more than you ever knew (and even went on walks to clear his head after you guys left for college)

on your bad days (if neil was busy), he’d take you up to the roof and you guys would listen to angry music and just SCREAM the lyrics to help you feel better. nursing completely raw throats the next couple days, lots of tea/warm water with lemon would be given to you by neil because “that’ll help”

during one october, you and all the poets would go to a fair and you’d win yourself a couple stuffed animals playing various games. when charlie asked about them, you proudly told them that the tall, speckled giraffe was named “neil” and the elephant was “pitts” (making them both blush)

overall, you guys wouldn’t be super close as a trio, but your friendships with both of them are what got you through hell-ton (:

[summahsunlight]

Perhaps It’s Fate, Part 18

Rating: T, to be safe

Word Count: 2031

Summary: After joining the Resistance as a mechanic, you were happy to keep to yourself, until a little orange and white bb unit and his master wander into your workshop one day.

Pairings: Poe Dameron x Mechanic!Reader

Taglist: @ms-dont-care​, @starless-eyes-remain​, @elmoakepoke​, @marvelobsessiononastick​, @kiaralein​, @softly-sad​, @totalpoedameron, @ordinarymom1​, @sevvysaurus​, @spider-starry​, @liadamerondjarin​, @jingyuhearteu​, @dream-alittlebiggerdarling​

It’s here! The next part! Hope you enjoy it. I didn’t get to proof read this too much before posting, I’m too excited for you to be able to read it!🥰 Remember if you want to be added to the taglist, just let me know!

Finn left you in the med bay with the medics and promised to go find Poe. You were concerned that he hadn’t showed up to hover over you and make sure that the medics were taking good care of you. Finn figured that Poe was busy, after all the Raddus was now attempting to outrun the First Order fleet--he was surprised to find Poe tucked away in an abandoned part of the ship. 

Poe’s head was cast downward, his shoulders slumped, with his face buried his hands. BB-8 was sitting by his side, every once and while beeping sounds of what Finn interpreted as comfort. “Poe?”

When the commander looked up at him, Finn was taken aback by his appearance. There was a dull looking in his brown eyes, he’d obviously been crying and he just looked--defeated. “Hey, you’re awake. How... how are you feeling?”

“It’s sore... but I supposed it could have been worse,” Finn replied.

“I dunno, buddy; you’re trapped on a ship being pursued by the First Order,” Poe said, tightly. “Seems like it is worse; we’d probably all be better off dead anyways. at this point.”

BB-8 moaned, sadly, his photoreceptor looking over at Finn. 

Finn stood there, dumbstruck. It was like the fire and passion had been sucked right out of Poe. “Are you okay, Poe?”

Poe chuckled, angrily. “No. I took that dreadnaught out to protect us, to save the people on this ship--and it didn’t matter. The First Order managed to track us, they killed my friends.” He sucked in a large breath, trying to stifle a sob, “they killed her. I just wanted to keep her safe... keep her away from anymore pain they could inflict upon her. I failed her.”

It took Finn a few seconds to realize that Poe was talking about you. No wonder he hadn’t come by the med bay to find you--he thought you had been in the hanger--he thought you were dead. “Poe-”

“Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. I’ve heard that enough already.”

“But Poe...”

“Finn, I know you think you’re helping...” “Dameron! Shut up for a second! She’s fine.”

BB-8 rolled back and forth in excitement, wildly twilling and beeping at Poe--who sat there looking at Finn with wide, shocked eyes. “But she was working in the hanger--the First Order blew the hanger up.”

Finn shook his head. “She wasn’t in the hanger. They couldn’t find you when I woke up, so they called her. She came to see me. We were going back to the hanger when the ship was hit. Poe--she’s in the med bay wondering where the hell you are.”

Poe scrambled to his feet, wiping at the tears in his eyes. “I didn’t... I didn’t know--I thought she was dead, Finn. I thought I had lost her.”

“She’s a little banged up, but she’ll live.”

“Banged up?”

“Yeah, she hit her head--but like I said--she’s fine, Poe.”

BB-8 nudged Poe in the legs. He couldn’t figure out why the pilot was still standing there--the little droid wanted to go see you. He had been sad just like Poe when he thought you had died. 

Poe suddenly snapped back to life, pushing passed Finn and heading towards the med bay with both BB-8 and Finn trailing behind him. You were alive; you were alive and suddenly the galaxy was aligned again--suddenly Poe realized the dire situation they were in.  If they didn’t figure out a plan soon, they were all going to be dead in just a few hours. 

Heart racing, he burst into the med bay, startling the medics and calling for you. Poe could worry about the Resistance in a minute--he just needed to see you first, needed to see you with his own eyes. When he came around a corner and saw you, sitting on a cot, asleep, his heart leapt into his throat. 

Gently he went to cup your neck and ease you into a comfortable sleeping position. The movement stirred you and you looked at him, sleepily with a smile. “There you are. I thought you forgot about me,” you teased him. 

“Never,” Poe sighed, tears springing to his eyes. “I could never forget.”

“Poe?” you questioned, seeing the tears. “What’s wrong?”

His arms were around you, drawing you towards him and holding onto you tightly. “I thought I lost you,” Poe cried, “I thought you were in the hanger when it was blown up and...my world crumbled, Y/N. There was nothing left for me to fight for, to care about--I love you.”

You pressed your face into his neck and let him hold you, your heart breaking at the grief he must have endured for the last couple of hours. If only you had known... you would have sent Finn to find Poe much sooner. 

BB-8 rolled into your room then, happy to see you. Looking down at him over Poe’s shoulder, you smiled. 

Poe pulled back, taking your face between his hands. He inspected the cut on your head, that the medics had done a nice job stitching up, and then he kissed you, tenderly. “Don’t scare me like that again, sweetheart.” 

“I’ll try not too.”

“Guess I know how it feels to be you now--whenever I leave.”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

He stroked his thumbs over your cheeks. “Yeah... a lot.”

You smiled, lovingly. “I’ll try not to scare you again.”

Poe pulled you into his arms once again, burying his face into your hair and taking a deep breath. He knew he loved you, he just never knew how much until he thought he’d lost you. The cool metal of his mother’s ring pressed against his chest while he pressed you against him. He was going to give it to you, when this whole thing was over--when they had found away to get to the new base safely. 

Finn cleared his throat; BB-8 beeped, reminding you that you were not alone. Softly pressing a kiss to your forehead, Poe pulled away from you. 

“General Organa is looking for you,” Finn announced. 

“Are you going to be okay, sweetheart?” Poe asked you.

“I’ll be fine,” you insisted. “It’s just a bump on the head.”

“Hey, Bee, stay with her okay?”

“Poe...”

“I’ll check in on you later.”

Finn smiled at you, awkwardly, and then leaving BB-8 behind to watch over you, he followed after Poe. Once they were out of the med bay and on their way to the bridge, he spoke. “You said that the First Order tracked us?”

Poe nodded. “Yeah... some kind of light speed tracker. When...when I left the bridge before you found me... one of our top mechanics was working on finding a way to disable it. But first, we need to get access codes and a shuttle to get on to the Supremacy.” 

His eyes went wide. “Supreme Leader Snoke’s ship?” Finn sputtered. This was very, very serious if Snoke had shown up. 

The pilot grimly nodded. “Yep. We learned that the tracker is generating from that ship, it’s only tracking the Raddus, which means the rest of the fleet made it to the next base safely. But we can’t jump to light speed and join them without the First Order following us.”

“Can you warn them?”

“Leia’s nervous that a transmission to them might be traced as well--I don’t blame her.”

“So... what’s the plan?”

“Once we know how to disable the tracker, we’re sneaking onboard that ship.”

Finn stopped walking. “You’re insane!”

Poe turned on his heel. “My dad jokes that’s my middle name.”

Shaking his head, Finn sighed, “Do you know what will happen to any of you if you sneak onboard that ship? Poe, you’d be executed. It would probably be broadcast for public display to scare the reset of the galaxy into submission.”

Placing his hands on his hips, Poe set his jaw. “I know that, Finn. It’s a risk I’m willing to take--it’s a risk a lot of us are willing to take. We might be the galaxy’s last hope at freedom, at restoring the Republic. There are a lot of lives depending on us.” He saw the fear flash in Finn’s eyes and dropped his hands. “Listen, I understand why you’re nervous. They took your identify from you--your life from you--but you’re here with us now, where you belong.”

-----

You wanted to get up; BB-8 ratted you out every time and the medics made you stay in bed. You were seriously cursing Poe for having his droid stay by your side while he went to speak to Leia. “BeeBee, I’m fine. Please, I need to get out of here. I’m bored.”

BB-8 firmly blurted no. You wondered if the little droid had ever said no to Poe a day in his life. You hated to just sit idly around--BB-8 probably knew that better than anyone. Of course, there wasn’t like there was much for you to do around the ship. The hanger was gone--all those people were gone. You feel the panic begin to bubble up inside of you as that familiar feeling of survivor’s guilt washed over you. 

Slamming your eyes shut you did the breathing exercises that Poe had taught you for when he was away on missions. Deep breath in, count to ten, deep breath out. Repeat. You did this several times before you finally felt some what calm. When you opened your eyes, you saw that BB-8 was still standing loyally by you, watching you closely. “Okay, since you’re insisting on staying here--why not tell me a story, Bee?”

“No time for stories, Bee,” Poe said, sweeping into your room. 

“What’s going on?” you asked, noticing that Finn wasn’t with him.

“We figured out how to disable that tracker.”

“Tracker?”

Poe recalled that you had not been present when he told Finn about the First Order tracking the ship at light speed. “Somehow, General Hux is tracking us even through light speed.”

You nodded. “Yeah, they can easily install one through a spy I’m sure--disabling them is the hard part--usually they’re heavily encrypted and can only be disabled from the Supreme Leader’s ship. The codes are incredibly difficult to decipher--when the First Order took over my planet I was forced to work on creating those codes.”

He smiled at you, his eyes filling with affection. “I told Leia you were the one.”

Confused, you looked at BB-8. “The one for what?”

“Our codebreaker.”

“Me? You want me to be the codebreaker?”

“Yes. Leia’s contacting Maz Kanata now--to see if she knows someone that can get us on the Supreme Leader’s ship.”

BB-8 whistled, lowly. You swallowed--you’d never left the safety of the base before getting on the Raddus, now Poe was asking you to go on a mission.

Poe saw the anxiety that ran through your eyes. He sat down on the cot with you and took your chin in his hand, forcing you to look at him. “Y/N, I trust you with my life--you can do this. And I’ll be right there. I won’t let them hurt you. I promise.”

Leaning into his touch, you closed your eyes. You had no doubt that Poe would protect you--with his life if he had too--but that didn’t make you any less terrified of the potential of sneaking on board the Supreme Leader’s ship to disable that tracker. And if you couldn’t disable it? The people on the Raddus were doomed. 

You felt Poe’s lips brush against your temple. “Darling, you can do this. I know you can. You’re braver than you give yourself credit for, you know that?”

“Do you really think so?”

“I do; you fled the First Order with nothing but the clothes on your back to join the Resistance. That takes guts, sweetheart.”

“This is our only chance, right?”

“We have a back-up plan, but yes, this could be our only chance.”

Opening your eyes, you set your jaw. “Then I’ll do it, Poe. I’ll crack that code to save the Raddus.”