#strongly encourage checking this stuff out on your own

[hazelune]

fun fact about heaven will be mine sfx, or "Why The Hell There Are 2 SAT Click 2 Tracks on the Samples Album":

so lots of the sounds in the game are character-specific, such as the ones when navigating the UI between missions. it's one of my favorite parts of the game -- i love how they feel connected to the characters and their associated themes. pluto's especially just feel so massive and heavy, relating to both the Gravity that she exerts/uses with the Krun Macula and also the pressure she feels as being princess of Cradle's Graces. my favorite one is the click sfx, seen below:

PL here indicates whose UI it belongs to -- PL is short for pluto. similarly, Luna-Terra's UI elements start with "LT".

i love her sounds. so glitchy and square and half of them just sound like a fucked up modem. and, once again, i bet you can guess that pattern. saturn's sfx are titled:

huh? HWBM? you might think that that's the main menu's click, but that one is "HWBM SFX - 31 Click 1 (Better)". check it out:

you can hear SFX 31 in saturn's menu when you select a menu, but it's also the same for pluto and LT mission select. and, if you check the official samples album on Alec Lambert's bandcamp (totally check it out), there are two named "SAT Click 2" and, you'll never believe it, it's the two sfx above.

so why are saturn's ui elements called hwbm in the files? my running theory is this: it's a remnant from the plans for a unified UI.

in worst girls games' tumblr, there's a post detailing the UI concepts and an earlier period in development where all the characters had the same UI, which was later scrapped to "reinforce the character’s personality". hence, differing sfx were made for each of those menus. what i believe happened is that making the SFX happened concurrently with some of that UI work and implementation. but, when the unified UI was abandoned, the SFX that were made for that were repurposed for saturn. and, even though this would've saved time, they also kinda work for her? take, for example, one of the messaging sfx:

all of these feel pretty lightweight and sleek, which i feel meshes well with her combat style and personality. plus, being a gen 3 pilot, they feel very modern (contrast with luna terra's sfx. they're so cute). so the repurposing works imo. so, when looking through the files, some of those "HWBM" audio tracks would be more general menu items, but some are saturn's.

thanks for entertaining my rambles. also the album photos are from max schwartz's sketches, they're great and you should support him. it's cheap and very worth it.

[kallie-den]

RESCUE HOUND Ch. 7

A rescue mission in the mountains takes Kione away from Sartha's side and forces her to face dark ideas, darker choices, and Handler's latest horrors

This is a Warhound story! The preceding stories can be found at this tag

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—

Midday, in the canteen of Leukon Base. The place is heaving as all the rebels who aren’t on active duty file in to pile food on their trays and stuff it into their hungry mouths. The quality of the meals is declining a little as the imperial noose closes but full bellies make for happy soldiers all the same, and by rebel standards it’s far from a doomed fight. Spirits are high. Words flow freely between comrades. All in all, it’s a normal mealtime.

But not for Kione. She sees the world with fresh eyes.

Since her most recent conversation with Sartha’s former handler, a very particular set of words have been burning bright in her mind. She turns them over, and over, and over, the same way Kione tosses and turns on her bed at night. There is something irresistible about them. They reveal something that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

Haven’t you ever moved through your life and felt like you were surrounded by nothing but dogs?

As Amynta and the others chatter around her, Kione watches. On one side of the room, as she waits for her meal, one rebel snaps at her friend over nothing at all. A random annoyance. She doesn’t know why, but she’ll justify it to herself somehow. Her conversation with her friend lapses into silent bitterness. A friendship soured—and why? Simple: because she’s hungry and irritable. They’ll probably forget their awkwardness in minutes, but they might not. Regardless, the point is proven.

The rebel is a slave to her animal needs, and she doesn’t even know it.

At the next table, a different rebel has spiked her own drink with hard liquor. Kione first noticed her doing it two weeks ago. It had seemed like nothing more than a fun little habit. Now she notices so much more. The rebel lifts her cup to her lips, drinks, tastes the booze. Self-loathing breaks across her face. Nothing fun about this habit. She detests herself for it. But then, a moment later as she sets the cup down—warmth. Relief. Gratitude, as the alcohol fills her belly and soothes what ails her.

A few seconds pass, and the pitiful cycle begins again. Addiction, tugging at her impulses and urges like a marionette’s string.

Sitting beside Kione, Vola isn’t so different. Oh, she’s no alcoholic. Instead of her drink, all her attention is on the woman sitting opposite her. Camarina, another of the pilots on Amynta’s squad. The two of them have a nascent little romance they think they’re doing a good job of keeping secret. But what’s interesting to Kione is just how deeply Vola dotes on her new flame. Hangs on her every word, practically. When Camarina laughs at a joke, Vola laughs too. Whenever Camarina looks her way, Vola smiles. She has eyes only for Camarina. To everyone else, she’s deaf and dull. It’s not so different from how Sartha’s come to look at Kione.

How easy would it be for Camarina to lead Vola around on a leash? Metaphorically—or not, who knows? To make the other woman useful to her, in whatever way she pleases. Camarina has no idea, of course. It wouldn’t occur to her to think of it that way. But still. How easy it would be.

All because Vola’s in love, and a little horny besides.

Hunger, addiction, lust. There are a hundred other strings that pull on people too, but none of them seem so very much more complex. It’s all so mechanical. So rudimentary. Is every human being so disappointingly simple?

Kione knows that she herself was, not so long ago. For her, it was money. The accumulation of things. How did she ever make the mistake of seeing a number on a ledger sheet increase and believing that it meant anything? A crude, shameful weakness. Kione has resolved to discard it. If she held all her worldly wealth in her hand as coins, she’d choose to let it slip through her fingers just to prove that she could. To herself. To the world.

And to that handler, of course.

But it’s not enough. Kione must go so much further to cleanse herself. She senses it. Now even the basic act of consumption disgusts her. To satisfy her hunger is to let it own her. A repulsive concession to her base nature. Kione picks at her food. It’s all she can bear to do. She plucks a piece of meat from her stew and begrudgingly spoons it into her mouth. The sensation of chewing it between her teeth makes her want to gag. It’s unbearable. It makes her feel weak, somehow. Like…

Like she’s nothing more than a dog.

Kione glances around the canteen once more. Everybody is eating. She shudders.

Even her disgust disgusts her. It feels childish and petulant. Surely this, too, is simply a stage she must pass through. With that thought, Kione finds herself wondering: how does that imperial handler do it? How does she eat?

It’s hard to picture it at all. Even harder to picture her picking at her food the way Kione is. She would never lower herself. She must eat the way she does everything: with infinite composure.

Kione tries to imagine how she might sit. How she might hold her cutlery. The look on her face, even. She tries to imitate it. Her mind’s eye fails her. Again, she almost gags. Anger flares within her; Kione accounts that another failure, but she can’t help it. Her knuckles turn white as she squeezes her spoon in her hand.

She needs to win. She needs to beat the handler. Kione will grind her into the dirt. She can discover all of that ghoulish woman’s secrets and make them her own. She must. It’s the only way. She has promised herself that she will steal the handler’s place in Sartha’s heart.

Ah, Sartha…

She’s sitting next to Kione. Eating, although Kione finds nothing disgusting in that. Sartha knows her place too well to elicit any feeling but pride. In a sudden flash, Kione remembers how uncomfortable Sartha seemed in the canteen when she was first rescued. Kione had noticed the look Sartha gave her knife and fork. Like she was no longer used to them.

Another flash. This one imagination, not memory. The handler at a table, taking her food delicately. Sartha, beside her—on the floor, lapping an ugly meal out of a dog bowl.

Yes. Yes, that’s how it should be.

Kione’s disgust is gone. Instead, she finds herself on the verge of giggling as she pictures Sartha like that. The great hero, eating from a bowl on the ground. She’d be so clumsy! There’s no helping it. Nobody, however heroic and graceful, is built for eating that way. The poor thing. Her face would end up slathered with it. How dreamy. How perfect.

Kione vows to check out the rebel commissary later. Surely they have a dog bowl to sell her.

“Kione?” Amynta Tet asks, snapping Kione back to the ugliness of the real world. “You sick or something? You’re hardly eating.”

The distraction from her fantasies is entirely unwelcome, but Kione refuses to let her irritation show. She will master this.

“It’s the food,” she complains with her usual brashness. “Hard to work up much of an appetite.”

“Appetite or no, you’d better eat,” Amynta admonishes. It’s hard to stay annoyed at her. She’s young, but such a mama bear when it comes to the women under her command. “Remember, we’re shipping out in sixty. We both know you don’t want to end up gnawing on field rations for sustenance.”

“Fine, fine,” Kione grumbles. It’s good advice, unfortunately. Piloting on a full stomach can go wrong for obvious reasons, but piloting on an empty one is just as dumb. Kione starts devouring her stew with gusto. At first, it’s unpleasant—but in the face of a sortie, she finds that concentrating on the utility of the act makes the food palatable. Kione is not a slave to her needs. Her body, much like her mech, is a tool. She must keep it well-honed and ready.

Yes, that works.

Now as she eats—for purpose, not for appetite—Kione can take a certain satisfaction in it.

The world is full of dogs. But she will not be one of them.

***

At first the glare off the snow keeps giving Kione a headache, but once Amynta tells her how to adjust Theaboros’s optics to compensate she’s forced to acknowledge that it’s beautiful up in the mountains. She’s never really had much time for nature. Nothing to do, nothing to buy. But now Kione finds a certain tranquility in the bleakness of the rocky peaks and perilous trails, away from the cacophony of the rebel base. No dogs out here. The rebels aren’t highly disciplined—at least, not in a manner the imperials would recognize—but when they’re suited up and on the march, their petty wants and needs collapse into something far more purposeful and infinitely more bearable.

There’s something else too. In months, this is the farthest Kione has been from Sartha Thrace.

It’s strange—good and bad. It’s a little like radio static receding. Kione hadn’t realized quite how constantly Sartha keeps her head clouded with her very presence. Here, she can breathe cleanly for once. But there’s a horrid anxiety, too; a fishhook stuck into her brain, its line drawing her inexorably back to Sartha’s side. Kione’s craving for Sartha is atrociously fierce. Already, she wants to see her again. To fall deep into those empty, wounded eyes. She’s grown so used to being Sartha’s handler, without the hero’s presence she feels somehow empty.

That need makes Kione uncomfortable. Needs are weaknesses. Needs are for dogs. Isn’t that what the imperial handler has been trying to teach her? Kione calms herself by reminding herself that, no matter what, everybody must have a reason to go on. Sartha is hers.

What better reason is there than true love?

In any case, Kione would certainly prefer to have Sartha with her now. Who wouldn’t, on a mission? There’s never been a better pilot. Unfortunately Ancyor is still in the throes of its refit, and the brass don’t much like the idea of throwing Sartha Thrace into a half-broken spare machine. Still—Kione isn’t worried. She’s handled as much without Sartha as with her. This sortie will be a piece of cake.

Now closing on last known position. Three hundred yards north-west, one hundred elevation. Eyes peeled. Weapons ready.

That’s radio girl. Four other voices besides Kione’s signal their assent, and the column of six mechs fans out into a skirmishing formation as they head up into the large hollow, nestled between two mountain peaks.

They’re here on search and rescue. Not Kione’s usual wheelhouse, but she’ll try anything once. Last night, a rebel mountain patrol failed to return to base. No mayday call, no alarm raised. They simply vanished. Not good, obviously. The worst and plainest possibility is that they were ambushed by an imperial force of some kind; if that’s the case, the mission will be to find and destroy it. That’s why rebel command has sent six machines. That’s why Kione and the others are on their guard.

But it’s just as likely that they simply lost comms. The mountains can play havoc with radio signals, and there’s a rad cloud blowing in; Kione can see it now, the layer of vapor above the snow, and the faint, blue glow of Cherenkov radiation emanating from the frozen fog hanging in the air. Even at a mere hundred yards or so, the radio signal from Amynta’s mech is degrading like crazy. And if the rebel patrol lost comms, anything could have happened.

An accident, for instance. This terrain is hell for mechs. Steep, slippery, likely to give way to avalanche at the slightest provocation. It’s a damn miracle the rebels can operate up here at all. Kione has to keep Theaboros’s wings run out, powered just enough to lighten her step as she makes the treacherous ascent. The rebels have no such assets. They know the terrain, yes, and their mechs are modified to suit it. But even so, to Kione it seems likely the people they’re looking for are buried under fifty feet of snow and rock.

Tet to control, Amynta radios in. No sign of them at last contact site. We’ll sweep the area, see if we can pick up a trail.

She’s doing it all by the book. But there’s no reply on the long-range channel except a low crackle.

Amynta clicks her tongue. Then, Vola: Kione, why don’t you fly up? Take a look around?

Kione grimaces. “Thanks, but no thanks. Maybe if we have to. My baby is quick, but she’s not subtle. I pull that, I’m putting a great big neon sign right over our position.”

Right, Amynta agrees. We’ll save that for a last resort. For the moment, Camarina, you come with me. I want to crest the ridge, get eyes on the next valley. Vola, Avin, take up defensive positions just in case. Kione, Maara, go poke into that cave.

Kione can’t help raising an eyebrow. “It’s just a crack, radio girl.”

Looks that way. But no, there’s a large cave beyond it. The kind of place our people might seek refuge in, in a bad spot.

“Right,” Kione mutters. “Remind me to figure out my caving fee when we get back.”

Laughter over the radio. Kione immediately regrets the comment, and resents the others for finding humor in it. The joke doesn’t feel like her anymore.

At the heart of the icy hollow, there’s a large crevice, tall and wide enough to accommodate a mech. It looks like nothing more than a random gash in the rock but if it’s as Amynta says, it’s worth investigating. The other rebel—Maara, Kione gathers—is already heading in. Her mech was once a Doru, probably, but it’s been stripped to the bone, leaving it diminutive enough to navigate the crevice with ease. Kione follows slowly; Theaboros is slender but tall, and its wings painfully delicate. Gods help any survivors if Kione so much as scratches the paint finding their sorry asses.

The crevice doesn’t look deep from the outside, but after a sharp turn, it opens out into a slightly larger passageway that does, indeed, become a fully fledged cave. Perhaps even a cave system; Kione makes a note to ask if anybody has thought to map it. Little tunnels lead away on all sides and overhead, and there’s no telling how deep they might go. Kione flips Theaboros’s searchlights on and sweeps them over their surroundings. She sees nothing but shadows that could conceal anything at all.

“You see anybody?” Kione calls out over the radio. “Tracks? Wreckage, maybe?”

No… nothing, Maara replies, the interference from the rock enclosing them breaking her voice into jagged fragments of noise. But… I’m getting some… heat signatures… nearby.

“People?” Kione hefts Theaboros’s railgun.

Negative. Too… big. Small for… mechs, though. Could… be… just ticking over… for warmth?

After a few more steps, Theaboros’s scanners pick them up too. Multiple, disparate signatures. Too many—they’re only looking for a patrol of three. They’re all around them, too. Above and below. Weird.

“Maybe some kind of geothermal heat source?” Kione murmurs. Does that even make sense? Do you get hot springs this high up?

That’s the last thing she thinks before they attack.

Before her, Maara is a single, sharp-edged shape, lit up in the glow of Theaboros’s lights, of a different world to the indistinct shadows and contours of the surrounding rocks. When something dark falls on her from above, Kione’s first thought is that it has to be a loose stalactite or something. For perhaps the first time in her career as a pilot, she actually freezes up when she sees the dark shape unfold murderously; four limbs, each one sharp-tipped with claws and talons, and, worst of all, a distinct, elongated snout-like head on which four pinpricks of low, red light appear.

It’s a mech suit. It has to be. But to Kione, just now, it looks like nothing more or less than a demon.

What wa-… that? Maara asks, barely audible, as her mech slumps to one knee from the impact. Something hit-… rock? Maybe we-… of here? Could-… cave-in. I don’t thi-… we sh-

There’s no scream. Just instant, dead silence when the small dog-mech clinging to her machine’s shoulder clambers into position and puts one of its claws straight through Maara’s cockpit.

Immediately, dozens more little red lights appear in the cave all around Kione.

Including four of them directly overhead, plunging toward her.

It’s only that second of forewarning that allows Kione to survive. She stumbles back in Theaboros and brings her railgun up in both hands to fend off the assault. It doesn’t work. At least, not really. The dog-mech that had been clinging to the cave roof above her, keeping its reactor at minimum output, doesn’t miss a beat. As it lands it finds a way to wrap itself around the firearm, all four limbs slashing violence and death just a few feet from Kione’s cockpit. No, not just the limbs. On its elongated head, beneath the swiveling, quad-eyed orb that mounts its optics, there is a horrid, vice-like maw that unhinges nightmarishly wide, containing actuated spikes that Kione has no doubt would rip through Theaboros’s armor like paper.

Gods. Who the fuck built these things?

Just barely, Kione manages to keep it at bay. The dog-mech keeps flailing at her for a moment—but only for a moment, before it changes tack and starts trying to tear through the railgun in Theaboros’s hands. Within seconds, the highly sophisticated precision weapon is a sparking mess of torn plates and extruded coils, and the dog-mech is clambering through its ruin.

Kione only has one choice; that saves her from the paralysis of indecision. She throws the broken railgun as hard as she can, and the dog-mech with it. Then, as the rest of the pack begins to move, she turns tail and flees, picking her way back up through the cave as quickly and desperately as she can.

It’s a small comfort when Kione glances at her reverse camera and sees that they aren’t giving chase. Less so, when she notices that the pack is instead clustered around poor Maara’s fallen machine, tearing apart its carcass with claws and teeth, sending up great sprays of hot oil and spent coolant.

Like they’re eating it.

Theaboros has never run so damn fast. By the time Kione sees sunlight again, there are a dozen gouges in the paint and the metal beneath from how heedlessly she threw herself at the exit. The glare of sun on snow is more blinding than ever, and the shock of it hitting Kione’s eyes is enough to give her pause and make her wonder: was that real? Or was it just a nightmare? It seems impossible, after all. A cave full of half-sized dog-mechs? It sounds like something that belongs in the tall tales of scared soldiers. Not reality.

And Kione’s had nightmares like that. Oh yes. More and more, lately. Dogs. A world of dogs. And all of them for her; after her, hunting, chasing, biting, clawing, slavering. Each night, it’s worse. The dogs closer and closer at her heels. Kione runs so hard in her nightmares, she wakes up sweating and exhausted. There’s no succor or safety in those dreams. Not ever. Just an eternity of baying hounds—and on the horizon, a woman in black leathers, beckoning Kione onward, her teeth, no less visible for being entirely human, gleaming disturbingly in her open-

Kione? Ki! Gods, Ki, calm down and shut up!

It’s only then that Kione realizes she’s been screaming. At Amynta’s voice she lets the ragged sound die, but it’s a long moment before she can find the breath to speak again.

“T-they’re…” Kione gasps down her radio. “I-in the cave.”

The patrol?

“No! Or… fuck, maybe. Probably. But that’s, fuck… fuck!”

Ki, what the fuck are you talking about? Are- wait, Ki, where’s Maara?

It’s then that Kione hears them again. The scraping of taloned feet on rock and ice. The insistent buzz of all those little reactors.

“Dead,” Kione hisses. “Get ready. Hostiles coming.”

For the second time in her life, Kione is profoundly grateful for the fact that Amynta Tet doesn’t miss a beat. As soon as she registers the word ‘hostiles’ and the awful urgency in Kione’s tone she’s barking orders left and right, calling the three other surviving rebels into a loose, defensive formation, weapons trained on the crack in the rock.

Kione falls in with them. Her only remaining ranged weapons are the vulcan guns in Theaboros’s chest, so she extends her spear and drops automatically into a defensive stance.

And then—nothing.

Nothing moves. The dogs of war do not appear. Along with all the other rebels, Kione just stands there for a full minute, waiting.

The doubt creeps back in. Was it real? Was it a nightmare? Maara’s gone. That has to mean something, doesn’t it? Kione slaps herself across the face just to punish herself. She shouldn’t be guessing at this. She should be sure. It’s just that sometimes her nightmares don’t end when she wakes. Sometimes the things that she sees in her dreams wake with her and sit in the shadows in the corner of her quarters while she lies there, paralyzed.

Ki? Amynta again. The doubt in her voice fills Kione’s cheeks with dark anger. What exactly are we dealing with here?

How can Kione possibly answer that? Certainly, half-sized mechs aren’t unheard of for specialist duties, but Kione has never seen anything even remotely fucking like those beasts. The way they’d been hiding was bad enough; the way they had moved was beyond description. Ferocious, violent, downright desperate, like they felt the bloodlust in their pistons and motors, but worse than even that, there was something eerily animal and fluid about them. A kind of coordination of limb and purpose that could easily elude even the best of pilots.

Ki?

“Uh…”

Hold on. Camarina saves Kione from needing to vomit out all those fetid thoughts. I’m getting something on the seismic scanners. It’s faint, but it’s definitely movement.

How many?

Hard to say.

You get a count, Kione?

“Maybe… a dozen? Less?” In her mind’s eye, it’s already blurring into terror. “But small. Uh… I didn’t see firearms.”

Gods. She can sense their skepticism.

Heading this way! Camarina yells. Her sensor suite must be top-notch. Get ready.

They’re ready. Fear and uncertainty made Kione’s hands shake, but a stern tactical assessment stills them. The crevice is narrow. Even those dog-mechs will only be able to come single-file. The rebels are in a close skirmishing formation—near enough together to support one another, far enough apart that there’s no risk—at a good vantage point, weapons all trained on the entrance. A twelve year-old could tell you it was going to be a bloodbath.

It’s a little strange, though. If they’re heading this way, shouldn’t they be here by now? Kione knows the tunnel leading to the surface wasn’t all that long.

“Camarina,” she calls out, “how far out?”

That’s the weird part. Kione can hear the frown on her face. Signal’s bad. Kinda… fuzzy? Hard to say. But they should be right there. Almost on top of us, actually.

Kione shivers. Not what she wanted to hear. She wanted very much to simply watch her allies blast those creepy dog-mechs into scrap. The wait is dragging on, and it's murder. All she can think about is them moving around down there, scrambling, loping, growling. The more she thinks about it, the more it’s like she actually hear it; the scrap of metal on ice as they move through all those little tunnels, the ones that seemed so easy to get lost in, leading up and down, left and right, off on all sides into the mountain’s unfathomable depths…

…and under their feet.

Oh, shit.

“Move! Now!”

They do, a mere instant before everything goes white.

Kione’s first thought is that her viewscreen died as she launched herself into the air. It’s only once she hovers high enough that she sees what really happened: the ground gave way under their position, throwing up a massive spray of powder snow. More than enough to blind the retreating rebels. It confuses their thermal sights too, leaving them all but helpless as the awful dog-mechs crawl out of the tunnel and begin to hunt.

Diminutive, half-sized mechs like these are far from unheard of. As labor mechs, for one, but even in warfare they have their specialized uses. In stealth and infiltration units, for instance, or as sappers. It’s rare to see them in direct combat roles though, because it’s so damn easy to get yourself killed in one. In a world of giants, being half the size of your enemies makes you ludicrously fragile. A single kick can snap you in half. Splash damage from a half-decent cannon might be enough to do you in. You have to be one hell of a pilot to survive long enough to truly get to grips with it all. Kione’s one hell of a pilot, but she’s always thought that you’d need to be insane to climb into one of those death traps.

But here’s the thing: it’s rare because it’s so difficult and dangerous. Not because it’s not effective.

When you’re that small, there are a hundred different ways you can fight dirty. Kione’s heard of a few mercenaries who’ve developed their own styles for it. Hunter Falke, for instance, who uses hooks and anchors to clamber all over her foes. As long as she doesn’t get swatted out of the air like a fly on the approach, it’s all but impossible to stop her. How is a mech supposed to fight back against something like that? Against an enemy that can simply clamber into its blind spots and start disassembling it at her pleasure?

With the dog-mechs, it’s a little different. They don’t have hooks and grappling lines. But they’re fast, and they’ve got the rebels off-balance. Outnumbered, too. So when a dog-mech lurches out of the glowing blue, rad-tinged snow clouds, claws bared, the victim isn’t ready. They lurch back unsteadily, trying to create distance. Trying to buy a moment to come to terms with the new hell they’ve found themself in. Only, it doesn’t work.

Because there’s another one, already snapping at their heels. Another dog.

And they can’t move away in time. Not again. So they take a hit. Just a little one. Those claws aren’t big enough to bite deep. But they bite deep enough to be the first of a thousand cuts, as they find their way into all the little vulnerabilities every mech has. The joints. The rear. The underside. Each time they tear out something important. Not indispensable, but important. A power coupling. A hydraulic line. A coolant pipe. And the wounded rebel is left even more panicked than before, fighting through confusion and blaring damage reports, wheeling aimlessly back into the broken snowscape.

And then another dog appears out of the rad-mist…

From the sky, Kione sees it happen over and over again. The dogs move with preternatural pack instincts, switching effortlessly from one target to the next, a never-ending dance of predation and violence as they harry the rebels apart from one another. It’s remorseless. It’s horrifying. It’s beautiful.

It’s going to kill them all.

Kione should do something. She needs to do something. She can hear loud voices over the radio. Everyone’s screaming for help. Not even for Kione’s help—they don’t know she’s just floating there like a useless coward—but all the same, their screams claw at Kione. Why can’t she move? She should just…

What?

What can she do?

She doesn’t know. Kione keeps trying to find an angle, a tactic, an opening, anything, but she can’t. It’s all simply too much for her. The cave. The dog-mechs. The snow and the screaming. She can’t get the situation clear in her head, and worse, her tactical mind is starting to shut down as her breaths come ragged and thin. A useless, stupid, bleating voice in her head keeps telling her instead: run. Run just run. You can’t go down there, you can’t not with the dogs, the barking is driving you crazy, just let them go, just let it all go, run run run run run.

Kione laughs hysterically as it clicks. Great. She’s having a fucking panic attack.

G-gods! Everybody shut up. Amynta’s voice. She’s grunting and panting and sounds like she’s about to panic herself. She sounds very, very far away. Who’s still alive? Sound off, in sequence. From the top.

And they do, miraculously. Radio discipline slowly reasserts itself. Nobody in the rebel squad is a greenhorn. Everybody sounds pretty fucking distressed, but it seems like everybody—except poor Maara—managed to keep themselves alive.

Ki? Kione?

“Wha… uh…” Gods, embarrassment is the last emotion she has time for right now, but it really is embarrassing how dumb she sounds.

Kione! Are you good?

Suddenly, somehow, she is.

“Yes.” All business again. “I’m in the sky.”

Good, Amynta grunts. I might have something. There’s an outcrop up on that peak to the west. It’s not too far. Looks like there could be a cave up there too. Should be defensible. We can make it there and hunker down. Figure out a real plan. Understood?

A chorus of agreement. The snow in the air is clearing up. Kione can see the outcrop Amynta is referring to. It’s not a bad plan. Mostly, she’s just pathetically grateful to have Amynta’s voice in her ear at all, calling her back to herself. That’s her radio girl.

Kione. Amynta’s breathing hard. Kione picks her out of the melee below. She’s fighting well, but taking hits all the same. You’re the only one with a clear six right now. I think most of us are limping already. Need you to cut us a path.

Fear buzzes in Kione’s brain. Not down there, not with the dogs, not amid the barking and drooling and-

“You got it.” The swaggering confidence comes easily into Kione’s voice. It’s an old friend. “Just give me the word.”

Amynta laughs. She sounds just as grateful for Kione as Kione feels for her. Gods, girl, you think we’ve got time for that? Just fucking go!

Kione laughs too, and throws herself into motion.

Cut a path? That’s a tall order, especially without her railgun, but she’ll make it work. Kione glides to the edge of the melee and waits for an opportune moment. The rebels are all doing their best to pull together, to circle the wagons against the wolves. They’re in bad shape, but eventually they manage to win an inch of room for themselves.

And that’s enough.

Kione kicks up the acceleration and flies forward in Theaboros, nice and low. Instinctively, the dog-mechs shift back a pace, wary of the new threat. As Kione moves between them and the rebels she pitches over, tipping a red-hot wingtip into the snow. The heat is more than enough to vaporize it all into a curtain of hissing steam.

“Now!” Kione yells. “Go!”

A few clipped words of gratitude and the rebels are sprinting up the mountain slopes as best they can in their hobbled machines.

The screen of steam leaves the dog-mechs confused and unable to pursue—but only briefly. The steam quickly freezes to snow and falls out of the air, and the sight of their targets brings back all of their viciousness. Kione has the count now—ten of them, fanning out as a pack, moving on four limbs when needed to find purchase on ice and rock. Small but fast. Even with a head start, the rebels aren’t likely to win a running race.

Which means Kione needs to fight a rearguard.

No time for cowardice now. Kione sets herself down on firm ground, readies her spear, and sets her sights on the nearest hostile.

Fighting it is worse than Kione could prepare herself for. It’s relentless. It has no respect for the rhythm of close combat, for parry and riposte, for distance and danger. It just comes at her again, and again, and again, and again, throwing its entire body forward, heedless of the tip of Theaboros’s spear. Kione has to work at her limit just to keep up with it, let alone to keep her eyes on its pack mates skirting around the edges of their duel. She lets herself be driven back so as to keep her six open, but that doesn’t help with the knowledge that Kione is fighting death with each moment. Sure, Theaboros could take a hit—but it wouldn’t be just one hit. Once this thing makes it inside her guard, that’s probably the end.

Gods. It reminds her of the bridge, and Sartha-

No. Kione won’t let herself think that. Sartha is nothing like these monsters, not ever. Besides, they might have Hound’s ferocity—more, even—but they have none of Sartha’s skill. That’s the only reason Kione’s still alive. Why her parries work, why her light, jabbing thrusts are sufficient to keep her foe at bay.

The dog-mech comes at her again. Kione swings her spear in a broad sweep, hoping to keep it at bay, but it falls to all fours, ducking under, and then springing up straight at Theaboros’s center of mass. Kione fires off a burst from her chest-mounted vulcans, but even a half-sized mech has armor that’s proof against such a small caliber. The gunfire’s violence does drive it off, though; the dog-mech falls short, before scrambling to its feet to come at her once more.

Gods. Don’t these things ever get tired? Don’t they have any sense of self-preservation? What the fuck kind of pilots are these?

Time for questions later. For now, Kione needs to bail. She’s being encircled. As she fires her wings up again and leaps out of the reach of the baying, snapping hounds, Kione has to hope the other rebels have made it far enough.

They haven’t.

Most of them are on the outcrop, or close enough. One of them isn’t. Looks like Avin took a crippling hit to one of her machine’s legs. Amynta drops back to help her, but there’s only so much she can do. Avin’s having trouble navigating the mountain slopes. About half the pack was on Kione; the other half is hot on the rebel’s heels, gaining on her rapidly. One look from Kione, and she can tell: the poor girl isn’t going to make it.

She closes her eyes and looks away when they pounce on her, driving the rebel’s mech against the snow. The sounds of twisting steel and screaming are bad enough.

Quick as Theaboros’s wings will carry her, Kione ascends the peak and touches down on the outcrop beside Vola and Camarina. Should be a safe spot, at least for a few minutes, but Kione doesn’t allow herself to breathe easy. Not yet. The dogs. They always keep coming. Kione is immediately on lookout, sure that at any moment she’ll see a claw on a ledge, and a beast pulling itself up, barking and drooling and-

There’s nothing.

Kione is grateful—until she sees why.

Down the mountain, where Avin fell, they congregate. Drawn there, it seems, by instinct greater than the hunt; Amynta isn’t so far away, she’s within reach, but they don’t seem to care. A couple of the dogs were on her, but they’ve already broken off pursuit. Kione can only watch in mute terror as the entire pack descends on the slain machine, fighting for position like jackals around a kill, each desperate to get their claws on it. To rip, to tear, to bite, to defile their trophy beyond reason.

At least now Kione knows she hadn’t imagined it in the cave. It really is like they’re eating it.

On second thought, she wishes she had simply imagined it.

All around the dog-mechs, the snow is turning gray as soot and ash are thrown from the carcass of Avin’s mech. Then black, as they bite deep into the joints, sending great sprays of oil over the white.

Then red, as they reach the cockpit.

Kione is very glad to have eaten so little earlier as she heaves and retches in Theaboros’s cockpit.

The rest of the dwindling rebel squad is faring little better. Their sounds of disgust, or fear, or insane grief are loud over the radio. Eventually, Amynta makes it up to them and starts giving orders—mostly, Kione thinks, because making them each do something trivial is better than letting them watch their friend’s corpse get stripped.

Camarina, watch our flanks. Vola, check out that cave. Looks small, but I don’t want any more nasty surprises. Kione, can you find a vantage point higher up? Maybe find us a way down?

Nobody says anything, but they obey. Kione takes wing and glides up a little higher. Finds a ledge to perch on. She doesn’t bother looking for another route down. Not really. She very much doubts there is one. She’s just glad for a moment of quiet. Glad that up here, the wind whips away all the sounds of crushing, eating and gnawing.

What the fuck are those dogs? What the fuck have they walked into?

Then—a sound. A radio hail, in fact. Kione makes the mistake of letting herself hope that the rebels at Leukon Base have found a way to punch through the interference, even though only the imperials have tech like that. Then she takes note of the frequency, and feels something else altogether.

She should have known. She really should have known.

And she knows she shouldn’t answer. There couldn’t be a worse time to let somebody fuck with her head.

Hello, Kione. How are you finding the mutts?

This time Kione can’t see her, but she can picture perfectly those cold, thin, immaculate lips, their edges pulled up into the faintest of smiles, so close to her ears they practically kiss her as the handler speaks. Kione breathes out, and as she breathes in she swells her lungs with hatred. It’s as cold as the snow outside her mech; its bite as sharp, as clear. She’s grateful, in a way, to have the handler speaking to her. It’s clarifying.

“You,” Kione growls. “This is all you, isn’t it? Those… things.”

That’s right.

Kione is so ready to be angry, but something she hears in the handler’s voice surprises her so much she forgets all that. The woman sounds almost… pained?

“You don’t sound too pleased about it,” Kione probes.

My participation in their creation is somewhat regrettable.

“Yeah?” Despite everything, Kione smiles viciously. She’s never met a knife she didn’t want to twist. “Even you have your limits, huh. Get squeamish all of a sudden?”

Not at all. But I do disapprove. My hand was forced.

Kione can barely believe what she’s hearing. It’s bizarre, on so many fronts. To be talking to the handler at all like this, up a mountain, a pack of dogs still hunting for them, is ridiculous. The fact that the handler is sharing her troubles like they’re coworkers around a water cooler is an absurdity beyond even that.

“Guess even you have to answer to somebody,” Kione mutters.

I answer to the empire. But politics is ever an obstacle, and I have enemies. General Kynilandre, for instance. This is her latest petty gambit—to force me to waste my time with mutts. The project was too appealing to high command for them to refuse, I imagine. It speaks to one of their greatest obsessions.

Her voice weaves a spell over Kione. She’s greedy for each secret that passes the handler’s lips. “And what’s that?”

Mass production.

Kione sucks in a sharp breath. That’s what those monstrosities are? Gods.

I’m sure she will have advised them that the merits of my work—such as those are, in her eyes—are wasted on the cultivation of specific individuals. They are inclined to favor the development of a template instead. A method that can be easily reproduced at scale, to furnish the military’s ranks.

“That’s…” Kione can scarcely summon the word for it. She sees it already; a waking nightmare. A thousand thousand dogs crawling across the face of the world, leaving ruin behind them. “Disgusting.”

And foolhardy. They cannot fathom what we know intimately, Kione.

Kione’s skin crawls—but there’s something else too, a kernel of pleasure at being acknowledged a peer. “And that is?”

That battles are not won by armies. They are won by heroes. There are individuals that stride the battlefield like titans. Warriors that the gods love as their own. They are the world’s fulcrum. The kind of men and women who would be entered into song in any age. Be it with boldness, inspiration or simple skill, they turn every tide. They matter, and they alone. Not the throng.

Kione doesn’t need to ask. She already knows it in her bones.

The handler’s talking about Sartha.

How many times has Kione seen it? Sartha Thrace and her Ancyor at the speartip of the rebellion, winning battles nobody else would dare to fight. Whenever she appeared, a kind of magic would settle across the field. Logistics, numbers, equipment, reserves, terrain—material facts such as those seemed to melt away, until all that mattered was Sartha. Her story. Her rebellion. Her victory.

Who could blame Kione for falling in love with her?

But already, the wheels of Kione’s mind are turning. Since Sartha was taken, the rebellion has suffered greatly. Defeat on so many fronts. Is… it all because of her? Did they lose more than just a good pilot? More than just a pretty face on the propaganda posters? And what did the empire gain when they hollowed her out and replaced her soul? More than a pilot, perhaps. Her light. Her mandate of heaven.

It sounds childish. But it feels true.

That’s why I’ve contacted you, Kione. To wish you success. I would hate for the high command to learn the wrong lessons.

That raises Kione’s bile again. “Wish me success? Fuck you. You want me to beat them? Tell me how to beat them.”

I’m confident in your abilities. You will find victory. And if not, then perhaps you’re not the woman I had hoped. I would have to content myself with winning our wager.

And winning back Sartha? No. Kione promised she will not let that happen. That promise, above all, is unbreakable. She forged it of steel within herself. But thinking of their wager calls to mind another detail of their previous conversation.

“You mentioned some kind of lesson, last time,” Kione spits. “What kind of deluded lesson is this, huh? I’m not playing the eager student. Just tell me.”

This is merely the beginning. You will find the true lesson in their ruin. I look forward to its fruits. Don’t disappoint me, Kione. You haven’t yet.

And before Kione can swear at her again the transmission cuts off, leaving Kione alone once more with the howling wind and the dogs.

From this up high they’re little more than black shapes, details indistinct but their presence all the clearer for being cast against the snow. They seem to still be gathered around Avin’s carcass. Not much left of it now, judging from the way they’re crowding tight and jockeying for position. As Kione watches, the crack of Amynta’s long gun shakes the snow from nearby rocks. Its shell pierces the fog and lands square in its target. One of the dog-mechs twitches and slumps, all but snapped in half by the high-caliber round.

Nice one, radio girl.

Only, with their grisly feast all but over, the shot seems to remind them of their purpose. As one, the dog-mechs look up. They begin to move, fanning out across the snow, slowly picking their way up the peak the rebels are stuck up. Their sudden patience is even creepier than their earlier ferocity. This isn’t the hunt’s frenzied climax. It’s the early stages. Driving the prey. Tightening the net. Deceptively calm, but inexorable. And when Amynta’s firearm sounds again her target sidesteps in a swift burst of motion, and then simply keeps walking up the mountain.

Fuck.

Nine of them now. But with three rebels plus Kione, that makes the odds worse than two to one. Laughably slim.

Kione. Amynta, on the rebels’ comms channel. This time, her voice isn’t so reassuring. It’s pitifully obvious that she’s asking from sheer desperation. Almost as panicked as Kione was earlier. Got anything for us?

“Negative,” Kione replies. Heading up the peak had been a good idea at the time, but now the rebels are stuck. On every other side, the mountain falls away into escarpments so steep they couldn’t possibly navigate them.

Then… Camarina, this time. What do we do?

There’s no reply.

Amynta. She tries again, even though everybody else wishes she wouldn’t. What’s the plan?

I… Her voice cracks. It’s the sound of a woman at her limits. I don’t know. Then it gets worse. The head of Amynta’s mech tilts up. She’s looking at Kione. She’s surrendering. Kione, what do we do?

That pause that follows is brutal.

“Just… give me a minute,” Kione replies. “I’ll think of something.”

Kione turns her radio off.

Her fist slams forward. The reinforced glass of her viewscreen doesn’t crack, but the skin on her knuckles sure does. Kione doesn’t care. Barely feels it. No, that’s a lie. She feels it, and she wants more. Another punch. And another. And another. And then she loses track, and she’s simply screaming again as she beats against the inside of Theaboros’s cockpit.

Fuck.

It’s not panic this time. It’s all anger. With each blow, Kione imagines that the viewscreen is lit up with the face of the imperial handler. It’s infinitely satisfying to imagine that the pain she feels is hers, that the blood trickling down the screen is hers, that the brutal crack as a hairline fracture finally appears in the glass is the sound of her pale, perfect nose being crushed to a pulp by Kione’s fist.

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

She’s screaming it, her voice and thoughts growing darker with each repetition until eventually, all the strength deserts Kione’s body and she slumps forward, limp as a child’s rag doll.

Kione is a hundred clicks from Sartha, up a forsaken fucking mountain, in the middle of a fight for her life, and still the handler makes her feel like she’s playing some twisted fucking game she can’t possibly understand.

There’s only one way Kione has ever known to respond to a taunt like that.

She has to win.

But how the fuck is she supposed to win this? According to the handler all this is barely a prelude, but to Kione the situation seems beyond doomed. They’re outnumbered, with no support and no option for retreat. A bad start. Kione’s fought against superior numbers a hundred times, but to win out you need an edge. Firepower. Planning. Terrain. Hell, even the simple ability to trade space for time.

They have nothing.

The dog-mechs are closer to a pack of animals than a conventional enemy. A swarm. How do you fight a swarm? Kione calms herself and brings herself to bear on the problem. Obvious answer: swarms are dumb. You lure them, get them clumped, and blow them away with ordnance. So, what ordnance do they have?

Nothing.

No heavy weapons on any of the rebel mechs. The rebellion is wanting for them in the first place, and in any case it’s not the kind of thing you’d choose to bring on a rescue mission in the mountains. Kione’s railgun might have served, but that’s broken and discarded.

OK. She’ll circle back to that. How do you get them to clump up?

Lure them into a chokepoint. Perhaps there’s a cave around here. Only, then they’d be even more like trapped rats. The way the dog-mechs are moving now—slow, prowling, methodical—suggests they aren’t quite as dumb as Kione needs them to be. For that reason, triggering an avalanche is also a dim prospect. They’d be more likely to kill themselves than the dogs.

But Kione has seen them clump up entirely of their own volition.

That’s something. Maybe.

Of course, there is one obvious option that Kione is pointedly ignoring. She could hit the bricks. Fly away. Leave Amynta and the rest. The other rebels would never even know. Kione allows herself a small, rueful smile as she considers it. High time for her to stop pretending she’s ever going to play that card. For a dozen reasons—but most of all, because running is not winning.

Kione needs to win.

Another possibility comes to mind: set her antimatter reactor to go supercritical and throw herself down the mountain, into the dog-mechs’ waiting jaws. Blow them all to hell, and half the mountain with it. That might actually work. The dogs’ ghoulish feeding response strikes Kione as all but compulsive. Unfortunately, killing herself probably doesn’t count as winning either. Besides: Sartha needs her. Sartha needs her so very, very much. That matters almost as much as winning.

No. There’ll be no self-sacrifice for her.

What, then? There has to be something. Think, Ki. What do you have? Your spear? That’s no good. Your wings? Kione almost cut her own head off with those a dozen times when she was still getting the hang of Theaboros. Maybe that’s something, if she cranks the reactor output to suicidal levels. Maybe that’s something, if the dog-mechs all agree to stand in a nice, helpful conga line.

Kione punches her cracked viewscreen once more, for good measure. There really is something there. An answer, lurking just out of sight. Kione was never good with problems like that. Always a lazy student. Always quick to give up. But this time, that’s not an option.

Then it comes to her. Not the answer. Not right away. But another question. The right question.

What would the handler do?

Kione thinks about all the resources she has at her disposal. Instantly, she perceives: it’s enough. It’s not about ordnance or terrain. Not about time or space. It’s about people. It’s about rebels. What would they do? Anything? Almost. That’s the good thing about rebels. They’ll do anything—for each other. Which is the bad part. They’re not focused. Not like the handler is. Not like Hound is.

Not like Kione needs to be.

So find the crack, Ki. Who has the least to lose?

No, wrong question.

Who has the most to give?

Kione thinks back to earlier, to the canteen. The answer comes. Beautiful in its simplicity. It’ll work. She knows that even before she opens her mouth, and so despite the awful task ahead, a nasty grin comes to Kione’s face as she switches her radio back on.

“I’ve got something,” she whispers. “I… I think I can pull it off.”

Kione keeps a tight rein on her own voice. Wouldn’t do for them to hear that grin she’s wearing. Instead, she makes sure she sounds nervous—but excited. That’s what they want to hear.

Yeah? Amynta answers—pathetically grateful, and pathetic is good. She won’t have the authority to gainsay this. What’s the move?

“No time to explain,” Kione assures her. She lets them pick up on a little of her confidence. They’re hooked immediately, she can just sense it. But here comes the hard part. “But… I need somebody to take point. To get their attention.”

Sudden silence. Some of the rebels are young, but they’ve all seen enough action to know a bullshit euphemism when they hear one. ‘Get their attention’ is about as blatant as they come. They pick up what Kione’s putting down.

She’s asking for a sacrifice.

The rebellion is desperate enough that nobody is a stranger to those. That’s part of the problem. Given half a chance, they’ll all volunteer. And that means discussion, and arguing, and how long before one of them gets the inevitable bright idea: ‘there has to be a better way’?

Kione can’t let that happen. She needs to win. Which means she needs to pick. And she has her girl.

“Vola,” Kione says heavily. “You can do it, right?”

More appalled silence. But within that silence, Kione senses compliance. She’s put it all on Vola’s shoulders. The rebel won’t allow herself to shift or shed that burden.

Yes, Vola replies ardently, eventually. Whatever it takes.

Because she’s in love.

No! A raw shriek across the radio channel. That’s Camarina, right on cue. Vola, you can’t!

Good. Argue with her. Not with Kione.

I have to, Vola replies calmly. It’s the only way we’re making it down from this mountain, and you know it.

Kione all but purrs with satisfaction. They’re all so quick to accept the framing Kione offered. All it took was a certain efficiency of language and voice. The mercenary is beginning to understand the power of that. Of playing to their psychology; from the moment they join up, each and every rebel believes themself a martyr in the making. When somebody provides the opportunity, it feels like nothing more or less than destiny.

But-

There’s no time, Cam. Vola is gentle with her now. I wish we had more time. A lot more time. But you will, OK? Promise me.

Camarina promises—time and faith and love and many more things. She’s still fighting what’s happening with every breath, every whispered denial stained by tears and panic, but she’s losing the battle. Vola is determined, and quick to steady her. Their two breathless voices melt together as they begin to say things they had always meant to say, some day.

Kione, Amynta pleads quietly, above their affections. Don’t do this.

She doesn’t want this. She’s angry, but her anger hasn’t had the time to crystallize. She’s out of focus. She couldn’t find the answer, so nobody is listening to her. They’re listening to Kione.

“I’m sorry.” Kione lets a little banked-up sorrow out. It’ll keep her from interfering. “This is how it has to be.”

She sounds sure enough that her certainty sweeps away the three others. She has them.

What do you need me to do? Vola asks above Camarina’s sobs.

All business now. Get everything in motion. “Head down there while I get in position. Get them on you. All of them. Buy me as much time as you can. That’s all.”

Got it.

Vola steps forward, her mech planting one foot on the edge of the outcrop. Kione feels herself a player, advancing a piece on the chessboard. It’s a new kind of euphoria.

But there’s no time to indulge in it. She has work to do. As Vola throws herself from her perch, Kione throws Theaboros into the air and flies.

Up. Straight up. As high as she can. The altitude is the point. It’s not the distance, nor the speed she’ll pick up on the descent—although both are valuable. It’s the cold. Up in the sky, the air would freeze a person to the bone in an instant. Not a mech, though. Mechs run hot. All of them, but Theaboros especially. Heat is a resource. A budget. An overhead. The more she can cool her baby down, the better Kione’s odds of actually pulling this off.

Kione reaches up and punches a few large, analog switches. There’s a whir as, all over Theaboros, cooling vents and hydraulic flaps yawn as wide as they can. Kione’s beloved mech suit exhales steam and coolant, bathing itself in a strange halo that turns to crystalline snow at the next gust of arctic wind. Then it inhales, drinking deep of the mountain air, drowning its profane reactor in it. Kione watches as the temp dials plummet, and frost begins to form on the inside walls of the cockpit.

She’s ready.

Kione has to crank Theaboros’s optics all the way up to see what’s going on at ground level. Her IFF readout helpfully picks out Vola for her—just one of several specks, at this point. She’s giving the dog-mechs one hell of a chase. But in the end, there’s simply no hope. Nine against one. The beasts have all the time in the world to chase her this way and that, pinning her against the edge of a great ravine while the pack unfurls and blocks off her escape.

Giddy though she is, Kione’s glad she’s so far away she can’t actually see it when they bring her down.

And in any case, there’s no time to dwell on the grisly spectacle. This is Kione’s moment. Her triumph—but only if she can thread a hundred needles at once. Kione takes one deep breath, bringing herself in sync with Theaboros’s cooling cycle. Once she’s ready, she pitches her entire mech suit forward and begins to fall.

Vertical, Theaboros is a knife through the air. The wind is loud but it’s far louder, a dreadful trumpet-howl as the mech’s aerodynamic frame slices a path straight down. The instant she points the machine’s head at the ground, Kione redlines the antimatter reactor. She’s used to making gravity her bitch, but the vicious kick as Theaboros’s boosters kick in and the numbers on the altimeter become a blur is something else entirely. This isn’t flying. This is turning Kione’s precious Theaboros into a ballistic missile.

Kione howls with laughter at the sheer insanity of what she’s attempting. What else can she do?

The world outside the viewing port starts narrowing as Theaboros picks up speed. There are no longer three dimensions. There are two. Up, down. Kione’s vision distorts. Everything stretches; a line, a warpath taking her back toward the merciless earth. Distantly, Kione realizes she’s passing out. That’s no good. She reaches down for one of her little emergency measures. Imperial combat stims. Kione jams the tip of the needle into her neck and lets the autoinjector do the rest. An instant later, she’s more awake than she’s ever been. She can think so fast, Theaboros starts to seem slow.

Kione laughs again. Fuck, maybe she’s actually going to survive this.

But not at this rate. Not fast enough. Not hot enough. She reaches up to the array of switches you really, really don’t want to mess with and, one by one, flips off all the safeties and limiters. At once, Theaboros’s cockpit explodes with alarms and warning lights. Kione curses briefly before finding the switch to disable those too.

Sorry, babygirl. If it’s any consolation: we’re in this together.

Theaboros, ever-faithful, rises magnificently to meet her every unreasonable demand. The antimatter reactor gives more than it ever has. The entire cockpit around Kione starts shaking and shuddering with alarming violence as every part of the machine is flooded with power and subjected to subatomic forces mankind can barely comprehend, let alone harness. Kione can imagine what kind of damage she’s doing to the internals.

But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is her wings.

Out of the viewport, Kione can see them. All six, fully extended—and, oh, how they’re shining! Whenever Theaboros is in flight they’re surrounded by antimatter. A layer, one subatomic particle thick, barely visible but burning a rich, deep red as it annihilates with the air. But now, as the reactor output keeps spiraling upward, shunting more and more power into the antimatter arrays, it becomes something much more.

It becomes a miracle.

As Kione watches, the glow of annihilation grows and grows. It extends to fully cover each of the wings and then pushes beyond; an inch, then a yard, then more, much more, as reality is kept at bay by Kione’s sheer, hysterical, bloody-minded refusal to know her limits. More and more, conviction is sweeping her away. She can do this. Nothing is more real than your own will.

The handler taught her that.

This is real. This is godhood.

As the antimatter sheathes on each of the six wings meld together, becoming two vast, glowing, sweeping pinions, the heat coming off Theaboros is impossibly fierce. Inside, Kione is cooking in her own skin. If not for the combat drugs, she’d have passed out a hundred times over. Outside, the falling snow is vaporized as it approaches, becoming a vast halo of hissing steam. Kione’s grin is a jagged thing, tearing her face in two. The world cannot touch her. She will rend it apart. She will make it her own. Theaboros, the handler, Sartha, the rebels, the dogs, the sky, the-

-ground.

Oh, gods.

Kione wrenches back on the controls a heartbeat before it’s too late. Theaboros’s wings shift, suddenly catching the air instead of slicing it. The sheer violence of the maneuver almost rips the mech into a thousand pieces, but its vast antimatter wings work their magic, protecting her from even that. The air annihilates before it can beat against Theaboros’s metal shell.

Untouchable.

Theaboros pulls horizontal in a great, swooping glide. That’s one death avoided. It dips so low the tips of its feet are practically scraping the snow. That’s another death avoided. This could still go horribly wrong, Kione knows—only she doesn’t, because now her belly is fully with the confidence of kings. She knows exactly what to do. She’s got this.

The pack of dog-mechs lurches into motion at the sound of the approaching death-scream, but Kione is already threading the needle. It’s far, far too late for the mutts. Kione is supersonic. She’s an unstoppable force. She picks her path, straight through the center of the pack, directly above the spot where Vola fell, and then she carves a jagged scar of herself into the world with her passage.

On either side, her wings cut through the dogs like they aren’t even there.

Kione doesn’t feel the impact. Not even a little bit. The heat coming off her wings is unimaginable. It simply melts straight through them. In her wake, each dog-mech is nothing more than a bisected pair of superheated slag heaps collapsing under their own weight. As she savors her triumph, Kione is quick to SCRAM her reactor, fire her airbrakes and reverse burners, open every possible cooling manifold Theaboros has got, and then plant her victorious angel in the snow as it comes to a screeching halt.

One last death avoided.

Holy shit. She did it. She actually did it.

Kione opens her hatch. With Theaboros flat on the ground she crawls out of the cockpit and presses her face against the snow. She sees blood drip from her nose to stain the white, and she does not care. The bitter, piercing cold is the reminder she needs.

She is alive.

She won.

It’s a shame the others don’t seem to agree.

Once Kione clambers back into Theaboros—still in running condition, by some miracle—she heads back over to Amynta and Camarina. She expects awe. She expects adulation. Instead she finds silence and grief. The two of them have made their way down the mountain in their mechs and are huddled around what remains of Vola’s machine, picking through the wreckage. They say nothing as Kione approaches.

“Hope you got that on camera,” Kione radios, prodding them for the praise she so richly deserves. “Cause otherwise, I’m not sure anyone back at Leukon is gonna believe me.”

More silence. They aren’t even looking at her. Just at what’s left of Vola.

Kione. Amynta, eventually. Give us a minute. Please.

That’s all it takes to make Kione’s euphoria run cold. She’s still high from the combat stims; the emotional whiplash bites far harder than it usually would. Already stewing with bitter recriminations, Kione stalks off into the snow.

Fine. They can have their minute. Kione is a merciful god.

Without really meaning to, Kione comes upon the remains of one of those creepy fucking dog-mechs. The sight of its impotent upper half, mechanical innards spilling out and melted into sludge, fills her with no small amount of smug glee.

Not so scary now, huh? Not such a predator now, huh?

Curiosity strikes. The torso is relatively intact. Cockpit practically peeling open from how the heat of Theaboros’s wings warped it. It seems unlikely that the pilot is still in one piece—but you never know.

The handler’s words come back to her, unbidden. You will find the true lesson in their ruin.

It’ll give Kione something to do while Amynta’s being maudlin, if nothing else. At Kione’s command Theaboros kneels and cups its hands around the dog-mech’s corpse, sheltering it against the cold and the wind. Kione dismounts with the ease of long practice and clambers up the machine’s ruined hull. The hatch is loose, but still emits a tortured, metallic scream as Kione levers it open with both arms.

Then she sees the pilot. And she really, really wishes she hadn’t.

Like any ace, Kione has seen more pilots die than she cares to remember. Once it starts going down, a mech suit is little more than a very expensive death trap to the one piloting it. For that reason, just about every pilot spends a little time rehearsing how to bail out in case it ever comes to that. Survival comes first, always, and well-designed mechs go to great lengths to facilitate it. Eject capsules, quick-release hatches—whatever it takes. Theaboros is packed as full of contingencies as its slender frame will allow. Kione has always been convinced that even if there are causes worth fighting for, there aren’t ones worth dying for.

Perhaps that’s why the first thing that makes her retch is that this machine’s pilot was living dead from the moment she was first sealed into it.

The poor pilot is, quite literally, strapped into their seat, wrists and ankles bound by leather straps to keep them in position. There’s no sign of any way for them to even open the hatch. It’s like the cockpit was only ever meant to be opened or closed from the outside. Kione gingerly climbs inside and as she does, it only gets worse. Now she can see that the pilot’s head, too, is bound, kept fixed in place and directed forwards by an awful, metal brace.

And she’s muzzled. Of course she is.

Already, this is a thing of nightmares. But there are fresh horrors yet to come, and the first of them is these: she is still alive.

Only just. A huge, jagged piece of spall ripped through her side as her mech melted down; there’s so much blood, Kione assumed she was already a goner. As she senses Kione’s presence, though, the wretch rouses herself to one last fit of wounded consciousness. Kione’s heart stops as her eyes open. There’s no awareness in them, no true sentience, just a frenzied shadow even deeper than the one Kione has seen in Hound’s. The pilot’s lips draw back as she tries to growl, froth pouring forth from between her teeth. Kione jumps back, terrified, leaving the pilot to snap impotently at the intruder with what little strength she has left in her body.

At once, Kione perceives that the muzzle is more than merely symbolic. There are appalling marks all over the pilot’s arms and hands. Even over her lips. It’s like she’s been gnawing at herself. At anything that comes too close, probably.

Kione has never wanted to run so far, or so fast.

It’s a mercy for Kione and the pilot both that her last gasp doesn’t last long. After just a few seconds of barking and growling, her eyelids slump again. The life goes from her. A mutt, put out of its misery. Kione is quietly grateful she doesn’t have to do the deed herself.

“Gods,” Kione breathes quietly, to herself. “What did they do to you?”

Better that she had said nothing at all. She isn’t expecting an answer—but all the same, one comes. A radio in the cockpit, half broken, spits back to life and lights up as a fresh transmission comes in. Even before she hears it, Kione knows whose voice is coming. Even here, there’s no escaping her.

Well done, Kione. Magnificently fought. You have my admiration.

Hands into fists. Knuckles white. “Shut up!” Kione yells.

The imperial handler laughs a little, the sound distorted by the near-broken radio into something even more sinister.

I thought you wanted answers.

She shouldn’t. Kione knows that. If she was a good person, she’d be too horrified to care. But Kione’s never considered herself one of those. The handler takes her silence for acquiescence.

I advise you to take a good look. Behind the head, assuming enough of that is intact. Perhaps you can grasp my intentions.

“I advise you to kill yourself,” Kione mutters—but all the same, she clambers even further into the dog-mech’s maw and peers at the equipment surrounding the deceased pilot’s head.

Fresh horrors. How does it keep getting worse?

The pilot has undergone some form of experimental surgery. At least, Kione certainly hopes this was done in an operating theater—not that it would ever pass muster as safe or restorative. A circular opening has been carved into the back of the pilot’s head, just above the neck, and a section of skull simply removed, leaving the brain itself—gods!—exposed but for a delicate, metal mesh that has been placed over it. Into the open port, a long, thin, arm-like appendage has been inserted. It’s covered in wires; some of them are attached to the surface of the pilot’s brain by electrodes whilst others pierce and knot into the gray matter as if pilot and mech have been woven together on a fundamental level.

Kione cannot imagine how the assembly could ever be removed without simply killing the victim.

There’s more. Those long tubes running into the pilot’s brain stem aren’t all wires. Some of them are IV lines hooked up to hanging bags of saline, of antiemetic and anti-inflammatory medications, and of another drug that Kione doesn’t recognize; a foul, green substance within which something twinkles faintly. It’s like starlight in liquid form, if the cosmos itself was as diseased as the mind who conceived this butchery.

Kione has seen enough. She knows what this is. It’s an attempt at something that, to her knowledge, has never before been successfully achieved. The sick dream of mad geniuses ever since the first days mech suits walked forth on the world’s surface.

“Neural link,” she whispers.

Very good. I am not proud of the mutts, but even a misconceived project can prove occasion for a breakthrough.

Kione shakes her head numbly. What she’s seeing is impossible. Inconceivable.

Neural links don’t work.

That’s what she and everybody else with half a brain has concluded, after reading up on the grisly outcomes of all previous efforts. Kione has always had an interest in cutting-edge mech tech, and she once found neural links alluring—until she educated herself. The idea is seductive in its simplicity: what if you could control a mech as easily as you control your own body?

Well, too bad. You can’t. Doesn’t work. A mech is not a body. It doesn’t move or work like a living thing. The way a human mind moves a human body is instinctive, anchored to blood and muscle and meat. You force those instincts to bear on a sixty-foot colossus with hydraulic limbs and mechanical joints, there’s only one outcome: incompatibility. Rejection. Damage.

They call it the interoception barrier. The frontier of the self. The fundamental inability of the human ego to transcend the anchor of its individual, physical body. It cannot be crossed. It has never been crossed.

Until now, it seems.

Kione has a million questions. But the first of them is this:

“Who was she?”

A prisoner. I did not acquaint myself with the specifics. Suffice it to say: nobody of consequence.

There’s an emotional part of Kione that rises, red and furious, eager to scream at her that she is a living atrocity. But there’s another part, nodding thoughtfully, because it makes sense. Prisoners, naturally disposable. Stray dogs, unworthy of her notice.

Kione’s stomach churns. She turns to her next question.

“How?”

My research concerns itself with neuroablation and reconditioning. How to alter thought patterns. How to reconfigure a subject’s sense of self. Even bifurcate it, if necessary. You have enjoyed the results for yourself.

Gods, this awful woman sounds so damn proud of herself.

Once I turned my attention to the problem, the solution presented itself clearly. Could I not simply apply the same techniques? Induce the pilot to conceive of the mech as their authentic self—just as Sartha conceives of her auxiliary ego as hers? As you can see, my approach has been highly successful.

Sartha. It all comes back to Sartha. Why is it that every evil Kione encounters seems to well up from the depths of her soul?

Answers beget more questions. Kione thinks of the distinct, canine physicality of these monstrosities. What sense does that make? Is it simply to torment her?

“But why-“

Why dogs? Initial prototyping suggested the value of a non-human mammalian reference point. A kind of intermediary. Our minds can more easily conceive of a dog’s locomotion than a mech’s—but it’s still inexact. The conceptual gulf there is useful. It helps the pilot’s mind grapple with what they experience as unfamiliar, without rejecting it entirely.

And so they learn to be a dog, instead of a person. Ghoulish. Ingenious. And Kione is certain that the symbolic associations—servility, loyalty, ferocity—are only assets to the handler’s cause.

Although…

“They’re defective.” Kione means it as a taunt. It doesn’t come out as one. To her horror she sounds more like a student angling for extra credit—but she can’t stop. “They’re… they’re hungry. They try to eat things. Can’t help themselves.”

Ah, yes. The feeding response. A simple case of overidentification. The mutts forget themselves. They forget they have steel bellies that cannot be filled. Dialing back on some of the integration protocols should resolve that. The calibration will require great care, however. Provided they can keep it under control, their hunger makes them so very effective, don’t you think?

“Fuck you,” Kione spits, but she’s scorning herself as much as the handler.

She hates that she finds all of this so utterly hypnotic. She hates that she can feel herself joining dots and making conjectures. Like everything the handler tells her, it’s an infection. An idea that cannot be unthought. She sees in this—in all this—the awful face of all mankind’s future. A muzzle on every raised head. A firm hand on every leash.

A world of dogs.

It disgusts her, of course. It would disgust anyone clinging to even a tattered shred of their humanity.

But she can see it. She can see the nuts and bolts, the levers and gears that would make it tick and spin and work.

It’s hell.

It’s coming.

I have something for you. The promised lesson. A gift, too. Something you’ll need.

“What?” Kione growls. She’s had enough of this. Of all of it. She’s at her limit. She craves home and Hound.

Do you see that green bag, suspended above the pilot’s head? That’s gift and lesson both. Take it with you. It should be easy enough to unhook and store.

She’s talking about that liquid starlight shit. It gives Kione the creeps. “Why would I do that?” Kione demands, although she’s already reaching up to disconnect the IV lines.

Because you will need to put it to good use. Therein lies the lesson.

“What is it?”

The handler laughs again, just once, before she terminates the transmission.

It’s Sartha’s medicine.

***

Nothing but grim looks on the faces of the hangar crew as Kione and the others haul in. That makes sense, Kione supposes. The rebels were probably hoping they’d return home with the missing patrol in tow. Instead, only half of the rescue mission made it back. A bad result by any measure.

Still, it irks Kione that she’s yet to receive any recognition for the insane feat of piloting she pulled off. It’s the only reason there’s three of them instead of zero. She deserves a fucking parade for that.

Instead, it was all silence on the way home. Amynta wasn’t in the mood. Camarina was nursing her grief. And Kione, for her part, had her head all wrapped up in the things the handler told her. Still though—mission accomplished. They aren’t all dead, and it’s pretty clear what must have happened to the missing rebel patrol. That’s gotta be worth something.

Guess not. As soon as Kione dismounts her Theaboros—burnt and blackened on the outside but still, somehow, in one piece—she sees Amynta heading down the berth toward her, fists clenched, face of rage.

So much for her parade.

“I need to talk to you.” Amynta demands, as soon as she’s within earshot. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Everybody turns to look. Oh boy. This isn’t going to be pretty.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Kione shrugs, stretches out languidly, even though her aching muscles scream at her for it. She doesn’t let it show. She needs her armor.

“Cut the shit,” Amynta snaps. Come on, girl, Kione thinks. Didn’t we have a good thing going? “I’m talking about that stunt you pulled up there. You might as well have just killed Vola yourself.”

A hundred or so paces behind her, Camarina is slumped on the ground, bawling her eyes out. As soon as she clambered out of her mech, it hit her. She went down like a sack of potatoes. Friends are rushing to her from all sides, offering comfort. Once word spreads of Vola, their faces turn ashen.

Kione feels bad for her. Really, she does. She liked Vola. But why are they pretending?

“That stunt I pulled,” Kione replies dangerously, “is the only reason you’ve still got the breath to bark at me like that, radio girl.”

To her credit, Amynta doesn’t back down. “Not the point, Ki,” she shoots back furiously. “You knew exactly what would happen. Admit it. You sent her down that slope to die. You used her as bait.”

“So what if I did?” Kione explodes. Doesn’t she get it? You don’t win a game of chess without trading away a few pieces. “This is war, Amynta. Or did you forget that? What I did wasn’t nice, I know. But it was the only way.”

“You don’t know that!” Amynta cries, exasperated beyond reason. She’s tearing up too. “Gods, Kione. Do you really think I’m so stupid I don’t understand we were in a rough spot? That’s not what this is about!”

Kione rolls her eyes. She’s so, so tired. Enough grandstanding. A this point she’d sooner take the imperial handler’s sinister candor. “Then what is it about, huh?”

“It’s that you didn’t even try!”

Something about that completely short-circuits Kione. What? She tried. Didn’t she? She must have. She remembers wracking her brains. She tried everything. Didn’t she?

“That’s not…”

That’s not fair. Is it?

“Save it.” Amynta sounds appalled. Kione knows she’s probably just getting it out of her system. She’s tired. Overtaxed. Guilty, too, from the way she ran dry of ideas in the heat of the moment. Maybe Kione will get a half-hearted apology later. But that won’t change the fact that Amynta means every word of this. “I heard you. You were so fucking… so fucking excited with yourself. And you sold it so well too, didn’t you? Were you as proud of yourself as you sounded? Did it feel as good as it seemed? I hope so.”

The venom in her voice is too much for Kione. She’s unsteady on her feet. She just wants to be gone.

“Maybe you don’t understand this.” Amynta slows down. Wobbles a little. They’re both beyond exhausted. “But we don’t fight that way. Understand? We don’t use each other like that. We’re not disposable. Maybe it’d have always gone the same way, in the end. But I’d sooner have laid down my life trying to get every single one of us off that mountain. Understand me? That’s how we fight.”

There’s only one thing Kione can think of to say to that—even if the words damn her, even if there might never be a way to mend the wedge they hammer home.

“Then I suppose I’m simply not one of you after all.”

Amynta’s anger vanishes as quickly as it appeared. In its wake, she looks exactly as tired and sad as Kione feels. It’s enough to bring Kione to the verge of apologizing. Amynta looks like she’s about to do the same.

Then her gaze shifts. She’s looking up, over Kione’s shoulder and beyond.

Kione turns to look at whatever caught her attention.

And sees Sartha.

Sartha, rushing towards her. Sartha, throwing herself into Kione’s arms. The mercenary barely manages to catch her without toppling over. Then Sartha’s scent washes over her, and all is right again.

“Ki,” Sartha whispers gratefully. “You made it back. When I heard that only three… gods, I’m so glad.”

Kione squeezes around her, tight as can be. Then, all of a sudden, she becomes aware of her own fragility. Of just how close she is to collapsing to the floor, a sobbing wreck. It’s too much, it’s all too much. The dogs, everywhere, and all around her. The mechs, up in the mountains. The handler, and her dark words. Kione knows it won’t end, but maybe it can stop for a moment. Maybe there’s a way for her to stop thinking, just for a short time.

Maybe, with Sartha, she can build a private, fleeting little world of nothing but the two of them.

Because she’s not sure she can take her own useless fragility a moment longer, Kione puts her lips to Sartha’s ear and gives her exactly what she always wants, even though there are dozens of people watching.

“Sartha,” Kione whispers. “Off The Leash.”

She can’t see Sartha’s eyes while they’re embracing, but she can feel the change. She can feel Sartha go limp against her for the briefest of moments as her spirit exits her body, allowing something simple and crude and artificial to fill the vacuum. Base, instinctive, canine—but not merely a dog, no, no, no, nothing like those awful beasts. This thing is the product of precise craftsmanship. It is loving and precious and beautiful—and inside and out, it is Kione’s.

The fragility recedes. Instead, Kione feels smug. Powerful. Everyone’s watching, but none of them know what Sartha truly is. They think they’re simply seeing two lovers lean into each other. Nobody else knows. Only her.

“I need to sleep,” Kione whispers, holding Hound tight against her. “With you. Take me to my room.”

Hound doesn’t reply. She just squeezes Kione again, and then allows the mercenary to lean on her heavily as they two of them walk away, heading for the pilots’ quarters, while Amynta and many others watch silently.

Kione is entirely content with the judgment in their eyes. Now that she’s spoken it, the truth has petrified within her heart.

She isn’t one of them. She never will be.

But that’s OK. Sartha isn’t one of them either.

They’re in love. They have each other.

That’s enough.

That’s everything.

—

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[spnfanficpond]

Weekly Pond Newsletter

This week is #SPNWEEK over on that bird app formerly known as Twitter! Tag us over there (same name as here) and we'll RT your tweets!

Old Business:

New Member Spotlight - The post for August is up and you can click here to meet a new friend!

Angel Fish Awards - The post (finally) went up for the August Angel Fish Awards! Click here for some awesome fic recs!

New Signup Form - We have put into place a new way to join the Pond! Instead of contacting an admin, potential new members can now simply fill out a form. The form includes our Conduct Rules, explanations of our different membership types, and some questions so we can get to know these new people better! At the end of the form are important links like an invite to our Discord server, our FAQ, and links to our sister blogs. If you or someone you know is interested in joining the Pond, click here to see the form!

Fishing For Treasures - This week the @fanficocean is celebrating SPN fics! Head on over there to a LOT of awesome SPN fics! In two weeks, we will be celebrating non-SPN fics for our FFT weekend. If you write for other fandoms and would like to participate, click here for all the details!

Last week's #TweetFicTues prompts -

New Business:

NaNoWriMo - November is National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. In the past year, the official NaNoWriMo organization has had some scandals, and most recently has made a startling decision regarding the use of AI. (Spoiler alert - They're all for it, possibly because one of their sponsors this year is an AI company.) Admin Michelle feels really strongly about encouraging every writer to do NaNoWriMo, even without using the official site for tracking or community purposes. We feel that the Pond has the community, so all we need is tracking capabilities and we can do this thing on our own. We are testing out some possible ways to do this, but we would LOVE your feedback! Do you want tools you can use privately for tracking, or would you like to publicly update your word count for the world to see? Would you like to see a roster of Pond writers and their word counts so you can race each other, or would seeing someone writing faster than you discourage you? Do you prefer Google Sheets for tracking, or would a message thread in a Discord channel be better? All opinions and suggestions are welcome! To keep things all in one place, please reply to this post here with your feelings!

Competitive Writing Sprints - On Thursday, Manta Ray Arthur will be hosting a session of writing sprints for prizes in our Discord server! Add words to your WIP and win fabulous prizes!

SPN Rewatch: FanFic Edition - Next weekend, we will be discussing the next two episodes in our rewatch: 3.01 The Magnificent Seven and 3.02 The Kids Are Alright. For more information on how the rewatch works, click here to view The Archive!

Manta Ray chat in the Discord server - After the Rewatch chat next weekend, and a break for lunch and a nap, Admin Michelle will be hanging around to chat with everyone! Have questions about the Pond? Want to chat about this NaNoWriMo thing? Want to do low-pressure writing sprints to force her to get stuff done? Hop into the server on Saturday and we'll do it!

Writer Hangout with Manta Ray Laili - Laili wants to try something new that we think is awesome! We have never used our voice channels in the Discord server for anything, and she'd like to change that. So, on Sunday next weekend, head into the General voice channel and have a hangout with your fellow writers! Encourage your fellow writers, talk about hangups, or chat about anything else that comes to mind. Since this is new, anything can happen, so be there to experience the first one!

(Divider by @glygriffe!)

That’s all for this week! To see all Pond events, and also other SPN-related things like conventions and online concerts, check out our Google calendar! Click here for a static view in Eastern US/Canada time (desktop only, no mobile app access, sadly), and click here to add our calendar to your own Google calendar! We try to keep it as up-to-date as possible. If there’s something you want to see on the calendar that’s not there (maybe a convention we missed, cast birthdays, or something similar), send us an ASK and let us know!

Hope you have a great week! - From your Admins and Manta Rays, @manawhaat, @mrswhozeewhatsis, @mariekoukie6661, @thoughtslikeaminefield, @heavenssexiestangel, and @spn-fanfic-reblog-writes!

[an0ldworld]

Hello hello :)

I hope you're having a good day!

May I request Hobie and Spider-Noir with a s/o who cries a lot?

Not only out of sadness, but out of everything. They're happy? They cry. They're frustrated? They cry. It's just their body's natural reaction to any intense emotion. Even like, if they're listening to a song that itches their brain just right, boom, tears (talking of personal experience, me? Absolutely.)

I'm just kinda insecure about my crying habits lol, I need reassurance. (I cried to System Of A Down and Slipknot, send help)

Thank you and sending lotsa love :)

hobie brown and spider-noir with an s/o that cries a lot !

ok, first i wanna stress that you should never feel insecure about your natural bodily functions- ever. crying is completely natural and a normal way to express any type of feeling, so i hope you gain a little confidence in your ability to feel so strongly :] it’s a beautiful thing

second, you should check out demon slayer in you haven’t, there’s this character that always cries at everything and he’s the strongest ! gyomei my love

third, these are kinda short and i’m very sorry, i struggled w noir

separate scenarios

warnings: crying ?? insecurity ?

pairing: hobie brown x gn!reader, spider-noir x gn!reader

requests: refer to this bad boy

★⋆ ⋆☆⋆ ☠︎︎ ⋆☆⋆⋆★✧

i bet hobie’s one of them guys that gives out great advice about mental health or just in general and doesn’t take his own advice

he’s too cool to cry, he claims

but suddenly it’s not cool for everyone else to NOT cry

also uses common sense and figures that crying is a completely natural reaction when you feel any type of emotion, won’t be embarrassed by you if you start bawling your eyes out in public if you happen to feel happy to be spending time together

he just smiles and rubs your back, shaking his head but in a playful way since this is a common occurrence

does one of those side hug things where he hooks his arm around your neck and squeezes you to his side a few times, talking about “let it out”

it’s nice in a way, he knows that you’re crying cause you’re happy to be spending time with him

he’s close buddies with pav who i can also see crying at a lot of things, man’s not judgemental

and he can of course understand crying at sad things ! if you two are kicked back one day and you’re violently bawling at a movie that’s meant to be a tear jerker, he’s not gonna shame you

he’s probably thinking about how accomplished the movie directors must be/feel while simultaneously shaming the big company who produced it

it’s nothing new and he’d rather not address it directly by asking you each time if you’re okay when you cry, he imagined it would get irritating and make you feel like it’s wrong

so he probably does something to show he’s there, an arm around your shoulder, maybe he ruffles your hair or something if you’re excited crying (i do this w my special interests, there’s no shame)

overall, hobie just wants you to feel comfortable enough to cry at all- this stuff should be normalised after all, no reason to even justify it to begin with

he may even encourage you to cry, get it out your system

he definitely understands frustrated crying, i imagine he’s a man who’s had his fair share of frustrations and sometimes crying is the only way to cope

if it bothers you so much, he might try introducing you to other coping mechanisms that he personally does

encourages you to get into music, play an instrument, do something spontaneous with your appearance

if he ever catches you crying over one of his own creations, the man’s floored with this appreciation

the last fucking thing he’ll do is ever make you feel guilty for crying, he’s having none of that and he’ll silently scowl in such disgust at the people that do

it’s not cool to shame peoples emotions, no invalidation here

if he’s in the right mood and you’re crying for something, happily he might just hype you up honestly

go bestie go, cry your eyes out

noir

someone else who sees nothing wrong with crying- he admittedly associates it most with grief so definitively panics the first few times he sees you crying at anything

but explain how crying is your response to everything and he’ll relax

he’s probably envious of your ability to feel so strongly about everything, since he struggles to feel a thing

the man literally lets matches burn to his fingertips out of hopes of feeling anything

that being said, he doesn’t want you to think like you now get to feel ungrateful for your tendencies to cry at everything since he envies it- crying is still taxing as fuck and you’re entitled to your own functions, he just wished he could take a page or two from your book

nine times outta ten he will probably assume each time that you’re crying out of sadness, he’s horrible at reading the room

it’s a pretty instant reaction from him to ask what’s wrong and assume the worst, man’s is instantly ready to start a fight if you’re crying for something bad that’s happened

makes a really big deal out of hugging you and dramatically wrapping his coat around you before suspiciously listing all of your enemies

he’s more of a “cheer up, sport” kinda guy and is a lot more insistent about talking to him about your feelings

partly because he want to understand the feelings, mostly because he wants to help you

probably cites some old 30’s techniques on how to make your face less puffy after crying if it bothers you- a really bizarre remedy

he’s also heard some more modern techniques, like chewing gum when cutting onions

he assumes that works for crying as a whole

happy crying takes him some time to wrap around his head, but he’ll get it

it’s a little surprising to him at first that you cry at every little thing, but that’s okay

he cant imagine that he’ll ever get over that initial surprise, seeing you cry at all immediately catches his attention - he’ll eventually stop assuming it’s bad, but he does attempt to comfort you each time without fail

you could be crying in such joy and he’ll fail to read the room, strokes your head while talking to you like you’re a dog that’s just had their paw stepped on

thinks he’s helping an incredible amount, has a small ego boost when he does successfully comfort you

he really does embrace it instead of trying to avoid it, which he imagined would be arrogant anyway

he’s envious, overall

good for you for being so in touch with your emotions

★⋆ ⋆☆⋆ ☠︎︎ ⋆☆⋆⋆★✧

IM SORRY THIS KINDA SUCKS IM BAD AT CRYING

[thynisia-pac-readings]

PAC - What brings joy to you? How to bring joy to yourself?

[please do not copy or reproduce any part of this reading, thank you]

This reading is meant to assist you in connecting with the vibration and experience of joy. While this is for guidance, it is also meant to be fun. These groups are collectives, so take what resonates only!

I'm happy you chose to read this pick-a-pile, and may it bring you closer to the light within you. 🌻

Now slowly take 3 deep breaths. Ask your guardian angel to help you find the relevant pile for you and let your intuition guide you throughout this reading. Enjoy!

---

Pile 1

Signs: pay attention to yourself. apple. justice served. I love you. India, US.

Pile 1!!!! Pile 1, pile 1, pile 1. As I shuffled the cards, I found myself singing. I can bet most of you find joy in singing freely, and even a card fell, backing this up.

I'm also getting that to find joy is to find bliss, and to find bliss is to find joy. That is what joy means to you, pile 1. For you, bliss can be found in your peace and quiet, it can be felt through the divine and experienced during meditations. Being by yourself and not talking, is healing for you. It also helps you to get in touch with yourself as well as your divine team. Again very healing, centering, and therefore it's easier for you to feel that bliss and joy.

Someone here could have a bird or parrot, I think your bird is funny AF and makes you laugh a lot.

Some of you may be close to a grandparent, and so the advice here is to spend time with them as it is a very good way for you to bring joy to yourself (and them!).

We've got the romance card so some of you may feel most joyful when you're in a relationship. But mostly, what I'm getting is that being there for people and supporting them is what brings you joy, always - whatever kind of relationship that is! I feel like you bring out the light within people, the angelic aspect they didn't know they had. That tells a lot about you too, pile 1.

Back to the singing, I also feel like it helps you release a ton of heavy stuff (feelings, painful memories...) that you don't want trapped in you or that you don't want to carry anymore. It also helps you to unleash your true self. There's definitely an element of transformational healing there with singing or songwriting, and the divine is strongly encouraging you to keep doing that.

Some of you could be singing with your own family members. For some, singing is a key characteristic of a side of your family since many generations! How cool is that!!

If you want to purchase a reading from me check my masterlist or go straight to my Etsy listings here. discount code: TUMBLR

---

Pile 2

signs: having fun adventures, taking joy in learning, living freely and passionately (see moon & mars in Aries and Sagittarius). Brazil, India, NZ, South Pacific, UK. 44.

I saw deep blue as I was shuffling the cards (in my mind's eye), and sure enough most of the cards had a deep blue in them. I also sensed some sadness from this collective. This deep blue could mean something to you, or it could just represent this sadness of yours.

For this Pile, the divine is asking to bring forth your patience in things, as joy will definitely find you. It seems like you really struggle with it at the moment, so this reading is a welcome guidance for you and I am happy that you chose to read it. :)

For your collective, the divine seems to highlight the importance of patience and growth. They are asking you to cultivate yourself, cultivate discipline/persistence and cultivate patience as good things are headed your way while you practice this cultivation. You could find it useful to listen to monks' wisdom and how they cultivate themselves on patience, discipline, persistence, as well as how they face challenging experiences. Preferably, find books written by them on the subject, as they can freely explain everything. YouTube videos cut many parts out and are nowhere as comprehensive/rich as the monks' own books.

Finally, you are asked to trust yourself as you navigate through the difficult path you are walking on. It is not easy and sometimes you may feel like you are losing balance, but listen; even the whole universe is in a constant fight for balance. Complete balance between the light and the shadow does not exist and that's what makes the universe alive! You are the universe too, you are a spark of God/Creator, and hence it is perfectly normal for you, like all of us, to continually try to find a balance. It's all part of the experience, you beautiful wise soul. And what can be more amazing than knowing that we are alive, that we are all experiencing joys and pains, just like the universe is both made of light and dark..!!

If you want to purchase a reading from me check my masterlist or go straight to my Etsy listings here. discount code: TUMBLR

---

Pile 3

signs: someone is named Grace and it's for a reason - maybe your mother named like this on purpose, Pile 3 you could have a very gentle voice that soothes people, there's a lot of kindness in your voice as I have myself talking this way throughout your reading (yes I talk out loud during my readings). traveling could be a source of joy. US, Australia, UK.

A lot to unpack here (in a good way) but it's also pretty clear to me. It feels like you are Earth angels or Starseeds, I mean to everyone you're literally like a light sent on Earth. You yourself feel like you have a lot of love and care to give to people, so much so that you want to make of it your career. So take it as a sign if that's what you've been thinking about.

The divine are really highlighting that you have a strong connection to your intuition and that a major purpose of it is to be used in service to others. You are divinely guided, and you definitely have your own mission or purpose in this life on Earth, which is to assist and guide others towards their inner light, their inner spark of Creator/Source.

You may be hesitating at the moment but trust your intuition, you will find joy on the path that the divine accompanies you on. Worry not, whatever path you chooses, the divine will always support you. However this reading is about what brings you joy and how you can bring joy to you. ;)

Now that's out of the way, let me indulge in the feeling I got from you Pile 3! It's a secret shh, but you're my favourite pile of the 3! xD

I got this really sweet, caring and loving energy from your collective, it's beautiful! Your spark is really focused on assisting others, which makes me think you're more likely an angelic aspect than a starseed. You love others but you also let others love you - and by letting them love you, you are helping them to nurture and express these energies more! In other words, people feel safe to express these caring energies towards you as well.

In terms of vibration, love and joy are not so far off from each other and they are actually interconnected, aren't they? :)

So there you go Pile 3, keep true to yourself and your values, keep shining your light (love) inside out, keep hugging others within your angel wings ~

If you want to purchase a reading from me check my masterlist or go straight to my Etsy listings here. discount code: TUMBLR

---

Obviously, this type of reading is amazing to do because you're bathing in the energy you're reading about! Amazing. Again I hope you enjoyed. Let me know what piles you got and what your thoughts are~

Thynisia <3

This reading was done partly through cartomancy, divine channeling and my personally made paper note signs. I thank Source, Gaia, and all of our higher selves and guardian angels for supporting and blessing this reading. 🙏🏼

[funhouse-mirror-barbie]

Response to a reply that was originally on my post here. Reply below:

I appreciate your reply, and wanted to take a moment to respond—I wanted to reply here, because I don’t really like having long conversations on posts I make for a specific purpose. I also believe that your reply isn’t really relevant to the point of my post, and I deleted your original comments due to this, since this is an important topic, and I don’t want people to start arguing or discussion irrelevant things in the comments. So:

—First, thank you for explaining the context behind WHY some fans feel justified in their behavior. It is helpful to know, but in this case, the reasons people justify their behavior here really don’t matter. The entire point of my post was that if we are going to support all survivors, in ANY community, not just fandoms, we have to commit to it. We need to ACTUALLY respect ALL survivor’s opinions, even if we don’t agree with them.

I don’t think it was your intent to actually excuse the harassment, I’m assuming you just wanted to share your thoughts and let me know the explanation for why some people react so strongly. Again, I do appreciate the sentiment, but this is pretty irrelevant to the point of my post.

—Second, I’m not sure if you’re saying that *I* claimed or alleged the entirety of the Hazbin fandom was toxic, or if you meant it was something people say in general that’s inaccurate. Either way, I never intended to imply this was the case. If I did, I apologize--I could only find one instance where it looked like I may have generalized, and corrected it.

My assumption when writing the post though, was that most people would understand that I was not stating that *every single individual* in the Hazbin fandom is a toxic bully. I think that’s a pretty extreme conclusion to jump to. That said, I probably could have made my intent clearer—I did try to specify any individuals, regardless of their opinions or if they are a fan or critic, should not be harassing people.

That said, me pointing out toxic fans and critics within a fandom is not the same as “reinforcing negative stereotypes” about a group. To my knowledge there’s no like. “Stereotypical Hazbin Fan”. At least not that I’m aware of.

I don’t know what negative stereotype I’d be reinforcing by talking about this issue? Saying “this happened in X fandom” is not the same as saying “every member of X fandom did Y”.

I’ll check again, but I really don’t think I ever said at any point “the entire Hazbin fandom is like X” or “everyone who criticizes Hazbin is Y” or anything like that. I really don’t know where you got that from, not trying to be argumentative I’m mostly just confused.

Third—So, as I’ve made clear before, questioning and dismissing SA survivors, sending death threats, bullying and harassment is absolutely unacceptable behavior from ANYONE regardless of their personal justification. That was the entire point of my original post—that there has been a history of hypocrisy among many individuals in these spaces about what it means to support all survivors of sexual assault. The point is that we need to be better about respecting ALL survivor’s opinions on this stuff, regardless of our own opinions, and that hasn’t been happening.

In the case of the individuals you mentioned, if they actually have encouraged people to bully fans of the show like you alleged, yeah, that’s absolutely unacceptable too.

But, what you said previously, about only SOME of the fans being toxic applies to fans who are more critical as well. Just because there are fans who view some people as “bad faith critics” does not make it okay for them to harass and belittle anyone who happens to critique the show. Just because there are “toxic fans” in the fandom does not make it okay for any critic to harass or bully them for what they like.

I understand these parties may THINK they are justified in this behavior. But there is no justification I can possibly think of for harassing people who disagree with your opinion on a CARTOON.

Again, I really don’t think you were saying any of this was justified, and that you do understand that when people react this way to others it’s not okay.

I replied here to address what you said, since I wasn’t sure if I was misunderstanding you or your intentions, and wanted to talk about some of the points you brought up. Thank you again and I hope you have a good day.

Final note—I’m not tagging the person who commented this on my post because, while I don’t think anyone would harass them after how clear I’ve been about my feelings on bullying over this kind of thing, I don’t want to take that chance. It’s incredibly frustrating wanting to talk about how harassment of any kind from anyone in a fandom is wrong, and then having to worry about further harassment that comes from the conversation. Idk if that makes sense. Anyway, thank you for readings

[loominggaia]

niittinaatti Well if we're allowed to brag, I'm still the only person to significanly contribute to the tv tropes pages (you guys can help me any time you know) and made the fandom's only fanvideos that I can find (even if they're just stupid memes) But it's cool that other people enjoy this series too, nobody has to do anything for that. Razzek's fanart is really cool, and kid-az and pinkfeststudent came up with some cool concepts.

-----

Niittinaatti, you are an absolute beast in this fandom and I appreciate the hell out of you. Everyone should check out Nii's videos, they're amazing! You can find them all under the video tag.

Also don't forget about the TV Tropes page that Nii has been meticulously managing all by themselves! It's full of great info, a nicely organized characters page, and even a drinking game. Give it a look and add to it if you want! I'm not too familiar with TvTropes myself, but I know it's a really popular site, so I assume at least some people here have accounts.

The TVTropes page is so well-organized, I admit that I sometimes pop over there to find information instead of my own blog! It's that good!

I don't know how to tell all of you how much I appreciate your support and contributions over the years. It just blows me away! Ultimately Looming Gaia started as a personal project, and the fact that it got any attention at all is crazy to me. I'm so glad you have found joy in it, and I want you all to know that you have brought me more joy than I can say. You guys have really gotten me through some rough times.

To find more fan content, check out the following tags:

Fanfic

Fanart

Video

Fan OC

There is some seriously awesome stuff in there, it's worth a look whether you're a Looming Gaia fan or not!

I strongly encourage all contributors to brag away and highlight all the stuff they made! And if I missed your contribution, I apologize and assure you that it was not intentional. Feel free to link me to your LG content, I'd love to highlight it to this blog!

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

Read the Series

[afatlotofchance]

Speaking of Otha and the Master... Fat sorcerers or wizards is actually something quite recurring in fantasy. There is a page on TV Tropes and Idioms called "Squishy Wizards" which highlights how wizards in fantasy typically do not have a fighting body - they are too old or too young, skinny or chubby. To have a muscular, fit, warrior-built wizard was seen for a time as a subversion of the traditional wizard (see for example The Kingkiller Chronicles, which was praised at the time for having a warrior-wizard as a protagonist).

While fat wizards do not typically lead the archetype, they're still recurring. In another 80s classics of fantasy, the Riftwar books by Raymond E. Feist (in France they're better known as the adventures of Pug the wizard), the protagonist is first tutored in magic by a Gandalf copy (elderly bearded wizard who likes to smoke a pipe), but with a few differences - he has a tiny pet dragon, he is a human court wizard instead of an otherwordly wanderer, and... he is noted to be a large and fat man with a round belly. Name's Kulgan by the way. Don't ask me more about him, because I couldn't even finish the first book of the series (while I don't mind some "cliche fantasy", there's some stereotypical fantasy that just doesn't work with me, and the Riftwar books do not click for now. Maybe if someone encourages me to read them or has positive things to say about them... But for now, nah).

A different fantasy series, but one I quite enjoyed and fully read (unlike the Riftwar one) is the 70s classic "The Fionavar Tapestry", which is basically "What if Lord of the Rings crossed over with Narnia, and was even more epic and even more mythological as we sprinkle in Cybele, and Irish mythology, and Arthuriana, and other stuff?". You have book series that pastiche and imitate in obvious ways Lord of the Rings (Shannara). You have book serie that take back, reinvent, subvert Lord of the Rings (Belgariad). And you have the Fionavar tapestry, which was actually written by one of the men who worked on compiling and studying Tolkien's works and notes to re-create things like the Silmarillion and other books, and thus literaly pays homage and soars from the world created by Tolkien to do its own thing (though if you do not enjoy hyper-intellectual, hyper-poetic, hyper-mythical fantasy this series is not for you). There's three wizards in this series. One is you Saruman ; another is your Gandalf (but with the bonus point that he is in a gay relationship with a dwarf king) ; and the third, more unique to the series, is described a curvy, bellied fat man. And when we finally get a bit of background info on him (in the third book of the trilogy) we learn that he was always the weakest of the three wizards, and mostly was into the wizard business to enjoy the comfortable life, high position and material pleasures it brought with it - hence why he is quite a fat man today. In the third book he even complains at one point that due to being involved in war activty he has lost a lot of weight, only for other characters to mention he is still quite plump and far from thin.

Technically, when it comes to the "fat wizard" archetype we can go back to the first of the Earthsea books, "A Wizard of Earthsea", with the character of Vetch. Fellow student at the wizard-school with the protagonist, later becoming his own local sorcerer in his village, and described as a stout, large boy than man with a healthy appetite and a love for food... Fan-art today does regularly depict him as a big beautiful man he is strongly implied to be - though he might fall rather into the "large sidekick/fat bestfriend/chubby companion" archetype that I evoked in an earlier post. [Note: if you ever want to check out Earthsea, don't hesitate, because not only is it one of the foundations of the genre, which influenced all the later classics, but it was also one of the early attempts at doing a non-cliche fantasy - first exploration of a wizard school in fiction, first time having a wizard as a main protagonist in a fantasy story, with an archipelago setting specifically designed to not feel European in the slightest, AND with a non-white cast! You couldn't guess it due to all the illustrations and adaptations white-washing the hell out of the books, but Earthsea was all about black-skinned and copper-skinned and distinctively non-white people, and Ursula Le Guin was always very sad and mad each time the cover-artist or movie-makers made all of her cast whiter than bread dough. There's white people in Earthsea indeed, but they are the barbarian foreign minority serving evil gods, which was quite a perspective switch for a 60s fantasy series]

More generally, the "fat wizard" idea is often used to subvert or counter the "Gandalf archetype". One of the most famous examples is the wizard Bayaz, from Abercrombie's "The First Law" trilogy. Not to be confused with "The Wizard's First Law" by Terry Goodkind, a "regular" fantasy book that opened a quite... unfamous fantasy series, but which deserves a mention because it reuses and mixes the "fat counterpart/fat is evil" fantasy elements, by having the brother of the main protagonist (Michael Cypher) being described as "smaller, heavier and softer" than his brother, and ultimately falling for the lies and tricks of the main villain leading him to oppose his brother... But back to Abercrombie's The First Law, the entire point of this trilogy is to take back the archetypal epic fantasy story, but present it in a dark, cynical, morbid light. Bayaz is here the subversion and caricature of the typical "wizard mentor", Gandalf-type - he is the main wizard of the story, the patron of the protagonists, the one who leads them in their quest... But he is also a deceiving brute, a power-hungry war-mongerer, and a shady, amoral and selfish man. And this subversion of his Gandalf type is marked in his appearance, as he is described as a butcher-like man, large and thick, built with a mix of muscle and fat (and people who compare the statues once sculpted for him to his current state do point out how since his glory days he grew a gut).

And of course, no need to tell you that the "fat wizard" archetype blooms in works where the fatness of sorcerers and magic-users is systematized - ranging from Robin Hobb's The Soldier Son, to Terry Pratchett's Discworld, two universes where being fat is basically a pre-requisite to be a wizard...

[fereldanwench]

Hi, I'm Wench! ♡ This is a personal and multi-fandom blog that predominantly features original and reblogged posts about Cyberpunk 2077, The X-Files, and whatever cursed shit makes me laugh. For the full scope of what I post and who I am, check out my tags and about pages.

Virtual photography in Cyberpunk is my main creative hobby, but I am very much a jane-of-all-trades, master-of-none. Here are some tags where you can find a lot of my stuff:

🎨 ART | 📚 FIC & COMICS | 📸 EDITS | 🎭 COSPLAY | ⚙️ MODS

✧˖°. Other Accounts

If you'd like to connect elsewhere, I'm fereldanwench in most fandom spaces. Here are a few other accounts* I frequently use:

AO3 | PILLOWFORT | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | PINTEREST | KO-FI

*Additional accounts are also listed on my Carrd.

✧˖°. OTP: Goro & Valerie

Goro Takemura Master Post

Valerie Powell Master Post

Goro + Valerie AU Master Post

Featured Goro x Valerie Posts

✧˖°. Under the Cut

Before You Follow

FAQ

✧˖°. Before You Follow

🔞 NSFW & Adult Content Warning This is not a minor-friendly space, and I strongly discourage anyone under 18 from following me.

I tag all visual content with the "nsft" tag; explicit text is not tagged. (I try to use the Community Labels feature when appropriate, but it's often very glitchy for me, so I would advise filtering that tag if you really want to avoid boobas.)

⛔ On Blocking & Filtering I typically only block bots, trolls, and, if I notice, anyone who has blocked me. However, I extensively use content and tag filters in conjunction with XKit to hide filtered posts entirely. This occasionally means "false positives" will be caught in the filter, and I might miss posts and notifications as a result.

💌 On Following Back I honestly don't follow new blogs often, and I won't follow blogs at all if they don't meet these two criteria at minimum:

The blogger must be over 18 years old, although I typically prefer following folks who are at least in their late 20s.

A basic and consistently used tagging system must be in place (e.g., at least tagging the title for a piece of media or the name of a character).

💔 On Unfollowing I will sometimes unfollow blogs (including mutuals) under certain conditions, namely:

If they've been inactive for over 6 months

If our interests have dramatically shifted

If their posts make me uncomfortable for any reason (drama-mongering or guilt-tripping are the most common reasons)

Also, I encourage anyone who no longer enjoys my blog to do the same! Keep your dash a fun and happy place for yourself.

💬 On Asks and DMs My ask box is open with a few stipulations:

Anonymous messages are prohibited. Similarly, messages I suspect are being sent from a sock puppet account will not be published.

I default to replying publicly, but if you include a "PM" in your message, I'm more than happy to reply privately.

I don't participate in or publicly post any sort of "chain mail" messages (e.g. "send this message to 10 blogs you love")--I very much appreciate the thought behind them, but they tend to overwhelm me.

📃 Miscellaneous A few other personal policies of note:

I'm a big advocate for reblogging your own posts! I frequently do it myself. Self-reblogs are usually about 6-8 hours apart, but if you find they're clogging your dash, you can blacklist the "srb" tag.

I queue a lot of my original posts and reblogs, and my queue can be as long as a month out.

I typically only use likes to acknowledge personal posts, and I wipe them completely a couple of times a year.

✧˖°. FAQ

❓ What tools do you use for your Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots? For poses and expressions for both V and NPCs, I use these mods:

Appearance Menu Mod (AMM)

Photo Mode Unlocker (PMU)

Nibbles to NPCs 2.0

For spawning decor, SFX, and lights, I use:

Appearance Menu Mod (AMM)

CharLi Character Lighting Suite

And for enhanced photomode tools, I use:

ReShade The two shaders I mostly use are Cinematic DOF (which creates a nicer blur than the vanilla DOF) and RealLongExposure (which reduces hair pixelization).

Otis Injectible Camera I predominantly use this for hot-sampling and hiding the game menus for making GIFs, but it is also a more powerful flycam and includes another lighting tool (CyberLit). This is a paid mod.

All color-editing, levels-adjusting, clip-fixing, etc. is done in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

❓ What other Cyberpunk 2077 mods do you recommend? I have a list that I update every few months that links all the publicly available mods I use in my game and a general mod tag for any mods that look interesting/useful. I’ve also dabbled in making mods (mostly pose packs that are kind of obsolete at this point and alternate clothes for Goro) that are available for free at my Ko-fi shop.

❓ Is your V's preset or NPV publicly available? Nope! I rarely share Valerie, and when I do, it's only with close friends who I know will take good care of her.

❓ Do you take commissions? I currently don’t take commissions of any kind, although I am sometimes open to art trades with mutuals (art for art, VP for VP, or VP for art). I can’t guarantee my schedule will always permit it, but if you’re interested, feel free to DM me!

❓ Would you be interested in taking shots for my mod? There's a good chance I would be, yes! Generally, the only times I'd say no are if 1) I don't have enough time to take and edit shots (usually a week's notice is enough) or 2) it's a fashion/cosmetic mod I just don't think is Valerie's style. Otherwise, I'm probably game--Send me a message with the deets!

[findroleplay]

Hi, hi, welcome to my begging hour.

I strongly encourage everyone who is interested to check my pinned on my page! It includes a writing sample and more (probably helpful) info!

I will not respond through likes/interaction on the post. Instructions on how to contact me are at the end.

|CanonxOc|Doubles|Fandom|

Fandoms I'm Seeking:

Spiderverse

Nitty gritty (tweaked but largely copy and pasted) details below!

Same copy and pasted intro ehehe:

Hello! I am Chainsaw or Fami, whatever you preferrrrrr.

|20|She/Her|EST|

I write, MxF, M//, F//

I prefer to write on Discord, I also primarily dabble in Canon/OC (doubles ehehe). I also prefer that anyone I write with is 18+ for my own comfort.

I’m currently in college, my semester has started! So activity varies but, largely I'll be in ooc if needed. I don't shut up if given the room. I will say that my posting time may be boiled down to once a week/twice a week, it all depends on my assignments and workload.

I do adore ooc and getting to know my partners. I do play a few games so I’m happy to add anyone to my friends list. I love making fan art of our characters + ships, chatting about head canons, playlets, etc ,etc. I don’t shut up! I love babbling about stupid stuff, I am insane!

I am okay with AUs, love em'! Canon divergence too, which is something I do frequently hahaha. Throw your ideas at me, happy to do almost anything for your side.

Fandom Info + Interests

Spiderverse

God this shit lives in my brain rent free, RENT FREE. I love Spider-Man!! ATSV being on streaming sites now is making me go crazy, I need to write it immediately!

Characters I'm seeking: Miguel O'Hara, Peter B Parker

Characters I can write: Gwen Stacy (selective), Miles Morales, Hobie Brown, Spot (Jonathan Ohnn) Pavitr Prabhakar, Lyla, Peter B Parker. A lot more, just ask!

I will no longer be writing Miguel O'hara at this current moment, I've written him too many times, a girl is getting burnt out!

Can do poly if asked! Of course, I might ask for it too if that's the case lmao.

I have interest in wanting to write Hobie (really want to practice his muse), Lyla and Pav the most, mostly because all those little fics and comics I write are rotting my brain. But seriously, I'm happy to write anyone, I want to better my muses!!

If this has interested you:

Shoot me a DM!

Just DM me, I hate cold calling people.

-

[findyourrp]

Same shit as always.

Instructions with how to contact me are at the end of the post, I do not respond to interactions lol.

🪐

I strongly encourage you to check my page! I have my rules and preferences listed there in a much more detailed fashion. It also includes a writing sample so you know what you're getting into!

|CanonxOc|Doubles|Fandom|

Fandoms I'm Seeking:

Spiderverse

Hello! I am Chainsaw or Fami, whatever you preferrrrrr.

|20|She/Her|EST|

I write, MxF, M//, F//

I prefer to write on Discord, I also primarily dabble in Canon/OC (doubles ehehe). I also prefer that anyone I write with is 18+ for my own comfort.

I’m currently in college, my semester has started so my activity will get funky. Expect a respond either once or twice a week, at least (hopefully, praying, fingers crossed) Will be available for ooc tho!

I do adore ooc and getting to know my partners. I do play a few games so I’m happy to add anyone to my friends list . I love making fan art of our characters + ships, chatting about head canons, playlets, etc ,etc. I don’t shut up! I love babbling about stupid stuff, I am insane!

I am okay with AUs, love em'! Canon divergence too, which is something I do frequently hahaha. Throw your ideas at me, happy to do almost anything for your side.

Reply Times (& Expectations)

Typically my reply times vary, sometimes it could be once a day, others it could be once a week, and sometimes it’s once every once in awhile. It all depends, but I hope my partners are mindful of this.

Due to me currently being in college, expect at least 1-2 responses per week. 

My expectations for you in that subject is…nothing, you can launch a response once a month and I’d be chill with it. I welcome a partner who isn’t a stickler for reply times in general. I’m happy to wait!

I am very ghosting friendly.

My only real 'expectation’ is that I politely ask that you do not bump/nudge/poke me, at least at a frequent rate. I will leave immediately due to previous bad experiences. It’s a zero tolerance thing yk?

Fandom Info`

Spiderverse

God this shit lives in my brain rent free, RENT FREE. I love Spider-Man!! ATSV being on streaming sites now is making me go crazy, I need to write it immediately!

Characters I'm seeking: Miguel O'Hara, Peter B Parker

Characters I can write: Gwen Stacy (selective), Miles Morales, Hobie Brown, Spot (Jonathan Ohnn) Pavitr Prabhakar, Lyla, Peter B Parker. A lot more, just ask!

I am currently not looking to write Miguel O'hara, written his muse too many times I'm getting burnt out lol.

I have interest in wanting to write Hobie, Lyla and Pav the most, mostly because all those little fics and comics I write are rotting my brain. But seriously, I'm happy to write anyone, I want to better my muses!!

If this has interested you:

Shoot me a DM! I will only answer through that rather than a like! We'll chat a bit here and then I'll give you my discord!

.

[daisys-reality]

ʀᴇᴀʟɪᴛʏ ꜱʜɪꜰᴛɪɴɢ

𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐨 𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬

hello guys this is for my reality shifters <3 This reading is for making us more aware about our hidden desires and true intentions especially on our shifting journey.

how to choose a picture: try to calm down, take deep breaths & use your intuition to select. Take you time and chose the picture you feel the most drawn to. (You can choose more than one picture.)

𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝟏

Hello pile one :D You are my eagle children. You guys are truly strongly independent! You are definitely both physically and spiritually very strong. Fire and earth could be also strong in your natal chart if you're into astrology. I feel like when people mess with you they are hit with karma (as they should ofc). Your past seems kinda heavy and I think you went through many (internal) transformations throughout your life. You always look forward, seeking the truth and your freedom in this world. You might like strong and bright colors (yellow, blue, green) as well as black. Your energy is confident, you know what you want and you know how to take care of yourself. When going forth with your actions, you do it boldly and fearlessly. You work hard and always push yourself because you truly want to become the best and the brightest version of yourself. (I can tell you already shine really bright <3) I feel like because you are such a strong force, you won’t stop at nothing until you reach your personal goal- being at peace with yourself and enjoying your freedom. The people in your life come and go, they don’t seem to keep your company for too long because they often can’t keep up with you. And that’s not bad because those people are not the people you need! You might sometimes feel lonely on this path but soon it will be all worth it.

You are a lone wolf, usually enjoying your own solitude. You like challenges and stepping into the unknown. The possibility of shifting to other realities gives you so much freedom. It fuels your desire to experience and learn more and it helps ultimately to find yourself and getting closer to your own truth. You went through lots of pain and heartbreak but it encouraged you to use your pain as a lesson learned. Now, you want to heal, to release all this past pain and to let go - and reality shifting helps you heal your inner child.

I think you hated being denied things or not being able to stuff because of this society and their dull way of thinking. You might hate conservatism and superficiality. You don’t want to follow what you’re being told or follow trends. You have a rebellious side to you and you also seem a bit greedy - you’ve been starved of so many things in your life till now and you just want to have it all - you are tired of lack and restrictions. Reality shifting is like an opportunity - not your destiny. You are an opportunist and you’d take all of the things that seem advantages to you.

You are intelligent and have so much creativity. And you just wanna make use of all those ideas you have and try them out - you are the type who enjoys learning by doing or by watching other people cuz you’re so smart ;) You don’t want a boring standard life - it would never satisfy you. You want to escape the ordinary and live a magical and adventurous life - and reality shifting brings you closer to this kind of life you desire.

Lots of blessings to you!

-> check out my other pac readings

𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝟐

Hello my pile two sweethearts <3 You bring light into this world, tbh you are a blessing. I feel like you are my spiritual pile. You’re innately intelligent like your way of thinking is so different - your gifts are beyond what the normal human mind can grasp. You may be drawn to the healing arts, as you are sensitive to the subtle and enjoy working on the level of spirit(s). Though I feel like you are the type to underestimate the impact you make in the world. Oh, and setting personal boundaries might also be something you struggle with. You’re probably more extroverted and really friendly, caring and empathetic. Coming in contact with you inspires people and triggers their desire to change - it like … changes their life lmao. If you’re not into spirituality yet - I think you should get into it, cuz I feel like you’d connect really well with it and you could find like-minded people/spirits :) (I love your energy <3)

I think you also really enjoy art, beauty, love and creative expression. And that is surely represented in the type of desired realites you’re shifting to. You have an idealistic, playful side to you and I think you just want to enjoy yourself - especially in your DRs. YOu might be a bit scatter-brained and easily feel bored which could lead to you often changing your script or being indecisive about certain things - I just wanna tell that you don’t need to script that much, like… trust your subconsciousness because it’s also you and it knows how you are and what you want - and it will be represented in your DRs, so don’t worry too much.

Your shifting ideas might be quite abstract or unusual - I feel like you really enjoy the fantasy genre and like fairy tales and stuff like that. It’s all about pleasure with you guys. I feel like you also romantice material wealth and drama (you know those princess/duchess stories) in your Drs. You want to experience unconditional love and luxus and to follow your heart and passion. Overall, you are more the type to put heart over head. You want to start exploring and putting your dreams and passion to action. Tho, I feel like you also enjoy that aspect of using your mind (head) for scripting and not just act out of compassion (heart).

I think you sometimes get tired of this ‘gray’ world we’re living in - the news are full of politics, wars, crime, climate change etc and it really drains you and your spirit. The energy is too heavy for you and you just wanna escape - even though escapism can be unhealthy, I feel like your spirit/soul is so precious it needs this kind of escapism to survive. Before getting to know about reality shifting, you might have daydreamed often as a coping mechanism. I hope you develop a healthy approach to reality shifting. Don’t feel bad for ‘escaping’ because it feeds your soul and inner child. But please ground yourself in each reality and don’t get unhealthily attached <3

To me it seems you are also very romantic and you love those stories where a love couple endures a lot of hardships but survive and end up in their own paradise - love that last endlessly long. You might have scripts of this kind of magical love - relationships build on respect, harmony and support. It inspires you and gives you that emotional fulfillment. Tho, if it is not about romantic relationships it could also signify non-romantic partners. Like those types of friendship where you go on an adventure together - it’s about bonding with like-minded people, feeling understood and appreciated - feeling like you belong to somewhere.

Another reason for shifting could also be that sometimes you feel stuck and can’t make a decision, so you shift somewhere else (like to your waiting room) to find time to think and reflect and get a change of view and then come back. It’s like cheating lmao…(I’d do that too). Does time stress you out sometimes? You probably script it that way so that no time passes when you go back to your main reality/current reality. Also, I feel like there is cruelty around you that you want to escape or you suffer through anxiety and/or fears from time to time and you want to escape that? Although, I think you sometimes tend to worry about certain situations a little too much, when in reality it isn’t as bad as you think it is. That’s why it’s important to ground yourself in each reality even in your main reality.

Your energy reminds me of lots of warm pastel colors - baby pink, baby blue, light yellow - it’s very comfortable. Lots of blessings to you!

-> check out my other pac readings

𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝟑

Hello pile three~ Puh, your eyes/energy is intense… I just heard “intelligence is the sexiest attribute” lmao okkk you guys are the intense and intelligent ones (any scorpios here? lol). You are very private and mysterious individuals and you are very protective of yourself. I feel like you are the type to experience the most crazy stuff while shifting but like no one knows about it… like I got “if you commit the perfect heist, make sure you don’t brag about it.” … Are you like… killing people in your DRs?? oh my gosh this is so crazy. You definitely have the mindset of - if you share your personal life, it’s not personal. You enjoy leaving other people oblivious. You feel powerful because of that. Having more knowledge and experience than others makes you feel superior. Ngl that’s attractive… ok I gotta stop simping. It seems like you are more the introverted type and prefer retreating and being in solitude but when provoked you might get aggressive lol and you don’t fear looking someone straight into their eyes. There is a side of you that is kinda cold-hearted and you might generally shove people away from you. You don’t mind waiting or pausing and watching how things solve themselves. You are always present but just prefer observing others from a slight distance. So, you might shift to your favorite series/anime/movies and I am sure you would not turn the story and make it about yourself but you would just want to be there and see the story for yourself with your own eyes. You don’t want to intervene or change something, you want to see the raw and original including all its dark sides.

Even though you might seem cold at first there is a deep-loving side beneath that facade you wear. And I feel like you only have that strong and cold facade because you yourself are very fragile in a way and you might have strong emotions - like almost overwhelmingly. You are deep and introspective and I think you’d make a great teacher and leader - helping others finding their path in life. But you are also a ‘student of life’ and eager for knowledge. Overall it seems like you are quite humble and wise. But in your dark times, you might act a bit know-it-all and egocentric - I think learning something new in those times might help you ground yourself again.

Anyways, so… as another reason you’re shifting to other realities could also be about experiencing being on top, in a powerful position and exercising authority… like an emperor/empress. You have high ambitions and you want to provide for others and experiencing stuff like that (being in a powerful position and taking responsibility) creates a solid foundation for you. Also, being in control, creating structures exercising law and order are things that you really enjoy - you kinda want to be like a father figure to others. Make sure not to let your need for control get to your head <3

You might also enjoy being in a strange place/world and feeling lost and confused …idk. It’s something about your subconsciousness or surreal worlds (DRs)... Do you have many fears? There is a theme of projecting your own fears into your external environment. But also breaking illusions … sorry for being so vague, the energy is hard to identify. But please don’t do yourself any harm in your DRs </3

Moving on, you also like shifting to other realities to spend some time replenishing your strength and to refresh your mind in a calm space. It’s like… not always having to be present in your main reality/current reality and enjoying taking on a passive role without feeling bad about it. I think you do that in stressful times or when you’re almost having a burn out.

I think you also are very attached to memories and you like making new memories and reflecting back on them from time to time. It’s like something that only belongs to you… your own world/reality and those realities get more and more important to you the more time you spend in them. It’s a very nostalgic and innocent energy. Did you perhaps shift back to your childhood times? To reunite with past people?

Last but not least, you also like the aspect of limitlessness and resourcefulness, you have all you need (your mind) to experience anything you want. And you enjoy utilizing your mind to create what you want in life. You’re in charge of your reality and that gives you the power you crave! You’re are very creative and have many unique ideas - so make use of them! :)

Lots of blessings to you!

-> check out my other pac readings

© daisys-reality

[solarcal]

@amity206 i wrote out and organized the world building a long time ago, so it’s not exactly up to date with the newer seasons and season area’s but i guess if someone’s interested i should maybe look into updating it? hm something to think about ig lol either way, here’s my whole world building sheet its veryyy long so uh take your time reading it, im totally willing to answer any questions you have too :3

Isle of Dawn-Binial

where all moths are born

Moths are Megabird shaking off their feathers

those feathers fall to isle in a meteor type fashion and when they land, they are a ball of Megabird’s light which soon reforms into a classic moth with no cape, the basic moth hair, pants and mask

this happens at random which is why sky kids must keep constant watch over the beach for new arrivals

its rare for more than one moth to be born at a time but it can still happen

they are usually considered siblings more than most and its strongly encouraged not to separate them

they can leave each other when they are old if they so wish but most dont

Moths are called Mids, the species of sky kids are called Skids, and butterfly sky kids, so someone between moth and vet are called Butids

Caretakers-a whole “job”(i say job very loosely) you can have as a vet where you simply wait at the beach in isle for moths to be born to then help them adjust to their new bodies and take them to one of the various house in isle to grow up and either get adopted or picked up by a guider or just get old enough to choose to set out on their own

Guiders-more similar to mentors than a parent

they wont adopt the moth into their family but simply help them learn how sky works and take them through the realms til either they reach Empyrean or find a place they want to live or an apprenticeship learning sometime of art or craft

they can take more than one moth too where people adopting rarely do

they usually are either near the end of their lives or they are simply bored for a while, sometimes they do it just to be nice, it depends on the guider

Guiders and sky kids come to adopt moths here

Some stay for the community feeling because its like a suburban neighborhood with many moths and elder skids sticking around

Others like it for the quiet they can find by the shores as mids are typically contained to the center of Binial for their safety

houses above ground and houses built into caves and buried in the ground

Cave of prophecy

It's more like a fun training ground! Or an obstacle course

They don’t actually die, the prophet just laughs and helps them back onto the course

They're more like a referee than a prophet

Daylight Prairie-Digarem

Fisherman type region

Everyone here fishes or builds the various types of boats, water or air

They can also train mantas for various jobs

Some people are butterfly breeders/keepers

Other don't have an area specific job but like the peace and quiet

Sanctuary Isle

A beach type resort place

People commonly go to just relax and play with the flock of mantas and swim in the water

Hidden Forest-Hirthlim

Mainly filled with artisans and researchers

only place in this world you can die unnaturally is from the deadly rain of Hirthlim

Very dangerous which is why younger skids are rarely wandering alone and if they are, everyone will constantly check up on them and ask if they need help

Wood carvers, painters, jewelers, metal workers, forgers, etc etc

They just carve out like mini statues and then plop them down, scattered everywhere across the forest. You can just find one hidden away a little bit as you’re walking/flying your way through the forest

there's hand crafted stuff everywhere in forest, various sculptures littered along side the paths, crystal garlands hung from branch to branch etc

at night you see the reflection of flittering fireflies in the rivers and lakes that make them look like the stars in the sky that is actually hidden behind the leaves and branches above

The cave in the tree has gems, metals and stone that they mine to use for decorations

Treehouse

A big commune basically

People go there if they need to hide from someone or they simply need to get away from it all

It's also where mids who’s guiders/family have died or the mids who got lost in Hirthlim are taken to

Sometimes the mid isn’t a good fit for the family either they are brought back to Binial or brought to treehouse to be readopted or if they are old enough, to simply figure out if they want another family or if they wanna go off on their own for a while

the mids take a while to show their personality and sometimes the family either cant properly take care of them for some reason or its detrimental to the family itself and the mids are well taken care of and due to being so young, they quickly forget the past family and harbor no sadness or trauma from the parting

skids who work/live here commonly go searching through Hirthlim looking for lost moths

Flight

The mail center

Also a huge manta training grounds but only for riding or helping with pulling carts

Also used as training grounds for flying in tight spaces or with really strong winds

the mail is carried by the wind currents and birds pass messages between the spirits and skids that work there

like the big current that takes you all the way around flight but hundreds of tiny ones

mail leaving flight is either put on a cart dragged by a big manta or given to mail skids who have a specific section of each realm that they deliver to

they ride smaller mantas to travel around quicker and deliver the mail

the skids do the sorting and taking them out of flight

The widespread corruption and the fall of King Resh and of Sky has not happened yet

Its is starting to though, with small infrequent dark plants sprouting in Hirthlim and the corruption of the first manta in Gaial

The draining rain is not caused by the corruption, it is part of the natural Sky world that people have come to live with

Valley of Triumph-Valem

Large bustling city, think new york and street fairs

Valem + Empyrean hold like 70% of all skids permanent homes

It has many markets and schools and overall is just a huge culture landmark due to its size and population

Anything you can think of, they have have

A lot of mids stay here a long time before making the journey to Empyrean and some just never leave

Super big on competition and flying

Many sports and they hold a ton of games and celebrations

Village of Dreams

Moth epicenter

Basically the suburbs

Many many families have their permanent homes here

Huge houses

Where ice skating lessons are held :3

Hermit Valley

Where a lot engineers and inventors and scientist and researchers live

many move up to hermit valley because no one else lives up there so they dont have to worry about bother anyone with their creations and since everyone is a researcher, they are used to dangerous stuff

They are the ones making the flying boats and looking into the dark plants and the power crystals

There’s also the normal types of researchers like how the world works and there’s a lot of researchers investigating the old murals and trying to write of of sky’s history and religion down

There’s also a lot of people looking into helping disabled sky kids and making better gear for various jobs + mantas

They’re looking into creating fake wings for skids that can’t fly but so far are unsuccessful

They mainly focused on saddles for service mantas as well as other needed aids such as googles to improve eyesight

at the peaks of this giant mountain range where it snows and is giant enough to fit whole villages and a city

Along side all the birds you fly up to the top to Valem and suddenly you burst through the blanket of clouds and you’re soaring above them

You can either take a boat or manta up or fly up a wind tunnel/highway to get up

Golden Wastelands-Gaial

mainly farming fields before the big border wall for Empyrean

inside that wall are smaller villages

basically like the midwest, farms for miles and miles

a canyon is in the west but people rarely venture that way due to being so far out of the way (where the first corruption of a manta, the first step towards krill and the person who has semi control over it)

a small town/castle thing lies on that coast

Forgotten Ark

there's no ark there

its just another farm but since its an island, they have different crops and such

very floral and such, think tropics

Abyss

very veryyyyyyy small fishing village

its very hidden and people rarely go there

the fishers there venture out sometimes to sell their catches but its mainly made up of 2-3 large found families that dont want to interact with other sky kids nowadays so they just stay in their village

Vault of Knowledge-the library

its filled with researchers and scribes

all of the kingdoms history is recorded here

this is where the “priests” live too

priests arent actually priests but more the high level scribes, because they know a lot of information and can offer good advice

no one can actually talk to Megabird obviously but they have studied the memory cubes for most of their life so they know more than anyone else which is why people go to them for advice

this is like home base for all researchers

any researches elsewhere come from the library and will return there if their research is finished

they also send all their reports there

Starlight Desert

the childrens library!

this is where moths can learn about the history or just hear stories

sometimes older sky kid will leave their moths here for a while like a daycare

there’s people who live in eden that are like school teachers basically that work in starlight

Eden-Empyrean

this is like a huge spiraling city

i saw someone compare it to the tower of babel so i’m strongly referencing that

there’s multiple levels, getting smaller as they go up

the very top level is where King Resh and his advisors live and work

lower level down is where they hold meeting with the elders and just general important stuff idk

floors 1-4 are split in half basically

one half is purely the library and the other is normal house and stores and workshops and such

spirit mantas are used to move large groups of people around like buses or to travel around on one floor if they dont want to fly or have a large package or something

spirit mantas are also used in the library to reach the memory cubes higher up because that way the scribe would be stable instead of having to flap up and down

spirit mantas are used instead of regular mantas because they are calmer and easier to train

they also grow up quicker and can fly stationary in the air which is great for the confined space of eden

that’s all the like physical world, the rest is the culture and society of my world

Culture/Lore

Families are called flocks and some flocks have a bird as their emblem kinda thing

Memory cubes

the things that line the walls of vault, you can record information in it like a book, you can either record a little hologram like a video or your voice reading out words like an audiobook

they are how sky stores all its information and how they send information thats too much to fit in a letter

King Resh

the King of sky (he’s also the one that caused its downfall but that hasnt happened yet in this world and won’t for a while)

the ruler chosen by Megabird and he oversees all of sky

lives in eden and mainly is in charge of big transportation projects like new boat systems like in dreams and hermit valley

theres a lot more of them in this world due to the fall not happening yet

he also can request the researchers/scribes to look into certain topics like the darkstone/power crystals and such

also gonna have a huge religious role but i have to finish the religion first

Geography

the world is one big island surrounded by ocean

its just a straight line from one realm to the next

Binial is a flat beach

Digarem is rolling hills with lots of rivers and both sides are by the ocean

it gently slopes up as you get further from Binial but you can still reach the ocean easily

Hirthlim is a big forest that starts to slope up more rapidly

there are streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes formed from the water run off from Valem and the constant rain

at the beginning it doesn't rain and you could still kinda reach the ocean below but there's no beach anymore

as you get higher, on the ocean sides is a sheer cliff face with no beach below, just like rocks

Valem is the mountain range that separates Hirthlim and Gaial from each other

you pass through the clouds to reach the snowy peaks of Valem

then there's a kinda steep slope down to Gaial which is closer to the ocean

the sides near the ocean slope down to meet it so fishing can occur here too but rarely does due to most people farming here

then there's the border wall to Empyrean

the villages inside with smaller farms and then the circular city rising up

Darkstone

a mysterious stone that is mined from the mountains

Power crystals-darkstone is refined into a power crystal which is used to power machines like the boats and doors

Powered by light, either the skids natural light or the sun

Theres a job of just refining darkstone

Gives a connection between life and their machines

sky kids bodies are made of light and as they grow up their light get stronger

thats how you gain your cape and more flaps

you gain a lot when you’re younger and then it slows down as you get older til you start losing it

then eventually you lose all your light become extinguished and you turn to ash and scatter in the wind

so its very common for families to take them to their favorite spot so their ashes can be scattered where they love most

basically the rain leeches away your light and so you are slowly drained and if you get extinguished here you just die

Megabird

basically god and the universe and light

its where all things come from and all things go

it created all of sky, people and everything and is a being of pure light

its also semi the sun?

it doesn’t really dictate what people do but is part of sky’s natural rebirth cycle where when anything light dies, their light/soul returns to Megabird to then later be sent back down to sky

its the deity that the spirits and sky kids worship

its who appointed Resh as king

its commonly depicted as a bird in all the murals in sky which is why ive just made it a bird

Megabird is like straight vibing, making the universe but at the same time is the universe but is also traveling through it

its complicated

Megabird is the very fabric of the universe and each atom and plant and animal is made up and created by Megabird

but Megabird is also just a giant bird thing made up of pure light and stars gliding across the galaxies

but like at the same time the trail left behind it is what makes stars and planets and comets and everything

Logic behind why Days of Rainbow and Lights exist is because Megabird is a semi physical being

it cares deeply about all of its creations which is why it returns to check up on Sky twice a year

Rainbow being a brief pass by on its way elsewhere and Lights is Megabird checking in more closely on everything, that its all going well and nothing is horribly corrupted or anything

Jobs

the whole thing about sky is there is no “jobs”

no one is forced to work

you can quit or change jobs because everything is basically an art or a genuine love for what they are doing

some sky kids dont have a profession at all, they are simply wanderers or just like vibing and exploring or staying home with their flock or whatever

Death and Rebirth

you dont die in eden

basically your light returns to Megabird and for a while you are one with it until your feather falls down to sky again

reborn as a new moth; people reborn wont remember their past life nor will people from their past life recognize them but they will have similar characteristics to their past life and sometimes feel deja vu from their past life

skids are rarely reborn while their surviving family is still alive as it takes a while for their feather to be shaken off again so past family and reborn moths rarely exist at the same time and even rarer do they meet

skids dont remember what it was like to be one with Megabird but they know that it is nice and Megabird is kind so people dont fear natural death

when someone dies its a happy sadness because their family knows they are “whole” again and they will return to sky as well as when the family dies, they will meet up with their loved one in Megabird

Moths learn about the rebirth cycle from a young age but in a soft happy way

Spirits-??? still unnamed

arent actually spirits, cause they arent dead yet

basically they were the species Megabird sent down before the sky kids

they've lived in sky a long time before sky kids

they have a very long life span so when we arrive they are tired from their long life which is why they rarely move from the area theyre in

a year to sky kids is like a day to them so they are content to watch us enjoy ourselves and be so lively and free

they still give us the cosmetics and such but its like kinda a spell

like your body is made of light and they are teaching you how to manipulate that light into that specific hair or clothing style

The first time they help guide your light into the right shape so you know how it feels and then you can recreate it

Kinda like this

the spirits having the skykids just sit down while they give like a magic lesson lol. One spirit standing with a bunch of lil skykids sitting around them on the ground staring up at them with awe. It’s dark out, and you can clearly see that they are a spirit. The stars are twinkling up in the sky and then they start to demonstrate how to make their hairstyle. The spirit is like “now follow my hand movements” and then they do like a twirly thing with their hands and lights are sparkling around their hands and poof! Wow suddenly a hairstyle! “Now let us go through the movements together. Picture [insert cosmetic here]. Feel your light magic flow through you. Feel it building in between your hands.” The little skykids follow and mimic what the spirit showed them

you can get all the cosmetics, including seasonal cosmetics and past ults

ults are more rare as they are only given by quest givers to those they like or gain their favor

some give out ults more easily than other, everyone has flight ults as Ms Flight gives them out freely but Prophecy or Gratitude’s ults are harder to obtain due to them being more picky/higher standards

Clothing/Cosmetics

because the cosmetics are the spirits teaching you how to manipulate your light, theres no physical object you obtain

if you buy clothes or a mask that another sky kid made, that would be physical and you would have to pick it up and put it on, to replace the spell you’re wearing

if you are wearing a sky kid made cosmetic, you have to take it off like actual clothes

the only cosmetic a sky kid cant make is a new style of hair due to that being pure light and you cant cut that

some of the older sky kids can combine two or three hairs to make a new style, but that takes a lot of discipline and concentration to achieve which is why only older kids can do it

researchers are looking into making new hair style spells but unsuccessful so far

Skids can talk and emotes and calls arent a thing, you can see and talk to people without lighting or friending them

Bc of this you have to actually learn to dance and do the various emotes, you cant just perfectly copy it

Economy

There isnt rlly any

money doesnt exist

usually sky kids will just give things away for free or trade things

like if youre a seamstress and you want a special wood carving you can offer an outfit or something in exchange

people are incredibly kind and if you give them something for free, they will remember it and be sure to pay it back later

Bc of this its next to impossible to be poor

you dont have to buy or pay for a house

if youre down on your luck, people will just help you out, giving you clothes and food, a place to stay for a while so you can look for your own house comfortably

Housing

since sky kids are so nomadic almost? many families will have more than one house in different areas

they have their permanent house which is where they live most of the time and have most of their stuff in

sky kids will have extra, usually smaller houses, in other areas to vacation in or move to if they want a change of scenery for a while or if they travel a lot

they can stay in their extra house while passing through, like a large family could have a big house in village of dreams but then have a beach house in Binial for when they want to adopt a moth or one in Hirthlim to stay in while passing through or maybe they’ll get a house just cause it looks pretty while passing by

houses are free

there are sky kids that just build them for fun and as long as its structurally sound, they can build it however they want

so theres many different types and colors and shapes of houses and lots of empty free ones

if you want a house, you simply need to hang a wreath of flowers on the door to show its claimed and that no one else can have it

every house has basic furniture which is needed because if you a wandering sky kid, you can stay in an empty unclaimed house for a day or two instead of sleeping outside, though some still do that

theres not rlly any hotels, well there is a couple in Valem and Empyrean but you mainly go there as a vacation, to relax and not have to cook your own food or make your own bed or anything

Army

sky doesnt have an army, cause theres nothing to fight

there are people who like spar for fun, like boxing or martial arts or like archery and fencing

most sky kids are trained in basic survival like climbing and fishing, just in case for when they are out exploring or wandering

most people are nice but there are a very very small amount of sky kids that others might need to defend themselves against

Calendar

Normal january to december, 24 hours, monday to sunday system

they have clocks to keep track but nobody really bothers with them

they go off of the sun or moon in the sky and its always a vague time

if they do use a clock, like two friends could agree to meet at like 3 pm and it wouldn't be uncommon for them to actually meet at 3:30-4 pm

scribes in the library are the ones keeping track of the years and major events and such

Holidays

each holiday lasts a month, so there are 12 major holidays

people dont celebrate every single day of the month obviously but it makes it easier to meet far away friends and family and making time for everyone, plus the mood and festivities can continue for longer

most of the holidays are based off of ones already in the game but theres two ive added and ive changed the others to fit better

Days of Fortune-Fortune

January, specifically the first as the big celebration day obvi

theres fireworks and wishing everyone happiness and success

its incredibly popular time to change professions or try something new

moths come down more often in isle as well

Days of Love-Love

February, specifically mid feb

this is when you just let people you know you love them

adoptions and confessions are very common during Love

its a very soft emotional month

Days of Prayer-Prayer

March

this is when everyone thanks Megabird for all its done and wishes it well in it’s journey through the universe

usually they ask for advice or wishes during this month as its rude to do it any other month

this is also generally the month when moths learn more about Megabird and the religion

Days of Bloom-Bloom

April

celebrating the start of spring

the flowers are blooming and the air is sweet

everyone is energized for the coming months

moths born during this time are more playful than most

Days of Nature-Nature

May

everyone takes a little time to appreciate the world they live in and how well it takes care of them and they take care of it

people visit their favorite locations and enjoy the scenery

photo taking and painting/sketching rises dramatically in this month as everyone wants a memory of where they’ve been

Days of Rainbow-Rainbow

June

rainbows appear frequently around the world of sky

due to the fact that Megabird flies in front of the sun and the rainbows are a sliver of its brilliance reflected on the world

Days of Sovereign-Sovereign

July

this was the month that either Resh was born or made king, depending who you ask

generally people send gifts to him as thanks or be grateful for the services he provides such as the boat transportation system and the researchers

Days of Summer-Summer

August

the crops are growing and being harvested food is plentiful

it's a time for long days of hard rewarding work and storing the food away for feast

sky kids that arent farmers come to help them with either temporary labor or taking care of them after the long days in the fields

Days of Lights-Lights

September

Megabird draws closer to Sky so everyone’s light grows brighter so for this month people start glow

the glow starts at the beginning of sept grows brighter and then mid month starts to dim so by the end of sept everyone is normal again

moths born in this month naturally glow a little year round and is the brightest sky kids during lights, makes them very easy to spot

Days of Mischief-Mischief

October

time for funny pranks and tricks

everyone can dress up and be a little crazy

it's a giggley time and people are relaxing after the harvest

Days of Remembrance-Remembrance

November

this is when people remember those who are gone

its days of the dead type thing

its a sad kind of happy, cause they know their loved ones are safe and well and theyll see them again and it isnt forever, theyll return to sky one day

they cooked their favorite foods and visit their favorite places and tell stories and memories about them

its a very mellow time

Days of Feast-Feast

December

they've celebrated their lost family now time to celebrate their current family

huge huge meals

people coming from all over to meet up, gifts are given and merry times are had

Basically you have Remembrance with remembering your dead family and friends, then Feast with appreciating your living family and friends and then Fortune where you look forward to new family and friends to come

Realm specific holidays

Binial- they celebrate every time a new moth is born of, they make sure to mark down the exact date and time so the moth can always know when to celebrate; they also celebrate fortune extra hard

Digarem- celebrates when a group of mantas completes training or there is a particularly big catch of fish

Hirthlim doesnt have many forest specific celebrations, sometimes flight will have a “theres no mail for a few days lets chill” celebration

sometimes older vets will go out and dance in particularly heavy rainfalls

some specific artisan groups will celebrate the completion of a big project or a particularly good mine from the caves

but the only forest wide celebration seems to be the quiet mourning that comes with finding someone turned to ash too early

Valem has so many celebrations that people physically can't celebrate them all so they just celebrate what's important to them, there's sports celebrations and arts celebrations and family ones

Gaial also doesn’t have many celebrations just the first planting, first harvest, end of growing, last harvest, everything stored til feast

Empyrean has a random assortment of celebrations, most of them religious or related to the researchers/scribes, i never finished the religion so maybe i should do that lol

Food

basically there's a lot of fish and crab dishes

there's food crabs and pet crabs but pet crabs get a distinct marking painted on their back so people know not to eat it

Crabs aren't corrupted yet and thus are passive

but those are the only meats in sky, so its mostly vegetarian foods and such

they do have eggs from birds but they grow like corn and sugar and wheat and rice and such

how it works

basically everything is made/grown with light from the sun which is Megabird so food is what helps grow and maintain your light

when sky kids are younger the effects are more obvious, they gain more stars on their back and cape strength

when they get older and this slows down, food helps maintain the amount of light u have and basically like slows the aging process

because aging is just losing your stars and food makes that happen slower so food is vital to growth and maintaining a sky kids light

people also tend to eat a lot more often in forest to survive the draining rain and replenish their light so it's less likely they'll die and can stand out in the rain longer

Arts

Every art is revered

Everyone plays their part and enjoys what they do and its incredibly important because it’s what people fill their lives with

Theres no job to do, no money to worry about, no school that you must attend so people have time to fill with whatever arts they chose

Spirits do still hand out music sheets to those who ask but they don’t make new ones

Sky kids can and do create new sheets to share with others

i am only now realizing how long this, oh god. i should have split the world and the culture into two posts or something, im really sorry Amity (is that your name? i just guessed from ur username) but heyyy uh if u manage to read all this, good job! and also im dying to talk about this again so yea just reblog this with whatever questions or comments or anything u got

[bylersecretsanta]

Bylers thank you so much for your interest on this event, because our interest check has reached a total of 111 SUBMISSIONS!! 🎉🥳 YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING!

With that said, we're more than ready to move on to the next step!

Moving forward, an official application form will be sent out in this blog, which will be very similar to the interest check. It will just include more stuff to fill out, like your own request as a giftee and rules and regulations to consider. It will also give you an opportunity to ask questions or have any concerns if you have any.

And with that said, we strongly encourage you to follow this blog moving forward, so you may ask your questions via inbox and keep out for certain updates.

The application form will be sent out later in the day at November 5. Just like the interest check, this will be reblogged constantly and promoted in a number of days.

Thank you so much again, and let's make this a great event everyone can enjoy! ❤️💚

[could-have-beens]

miss maam,,, could i ask for some gin n tonic headcanons of yours??? could be from tlocc or just in general. i just love the way you capture and portray their dynamics haha

im prev anon (about gin n tonic) i just realized i didnt know your pronouns!!! sorry that i presumed it!! aaa so sorry about the miss maam part

Thank you so much! I'm happy to hear you like their dynamic in TLOCC! Ginny and Tom's relationship is such a joy to write, and it means a lot that you enjoy reading about them. And no worries, I use she/her 😊

As for headcanons, that's pretty much most of the fic. Why and how Tom opened the Chamber, his dynamic with the other students, how his fear of death began, Ginny dealing with the aftermath of COS, what her interactions with the diary was like, to name a few.

Here are some other headcanons I haven't had the chance to include in TLOCC:

Ginny is a foot shorter than Tom. It was the first thing she noticed about him. Height difference, my beloved ❤️

She's also the shortest person in their year. When Tom found out she was actually older than him, he almost made a joke about her height

But he didn't, because he knew she'd immediately retaliate and roast him without hesitation. While he doesn't mind how tall he is, he can't stand it when people point it out. No, he's not insecure, what the hell are you talking about

Ginny knows more about Tom than she realizes. The diary was honest with her about the little things, like his favorite drink, his fondness for Transfiguration, how much he dislikes the cold, stuff like that. But after everything that went down in COS, Ginny naturally assumed everything the diary told her was a lie and tried to forget about it. For her, Tom's most humanizing moments are seeing those half-forgotten details with her own eyes

Tom covers up his accent by imitating Alphard's. No one knows this but Margot, who only noticed it when she became seatmates with Alphard

Tom dislikes Quidditch, but he likes flying. If it wasn't for Abraxas, Tom would have tried out, if only to see if he was any good at it

Ginny and the diary bonded over their love of flying (and inability to afford their own broom) and magical creatures

Her experience with the diary made her resistant to Legilimency and the Imperius Curse. If you pit her against a more experienced wizard than Tom, she'd have a harder time fighting them, but it's not unlikely she'll be able to throw them off with enough practice

Tom is a natural Legilimens. Not like Queenie in FB (which isn't how I imagine Legilimency at all btw), but in that he's more sensitive to what people are thinking/feeling. It's why he's able to learn how to read people's minds relatively quickly, and why he reacts to Ginny the way he does when they first met

He's surprisingly good with animals, but only with snakes and magical creatures. Ginny strongly suspects Fawkes likes him better than her, and it irks her to no end

Their duel in the Chamber is Tom's first actual duel. The closest he'd ever come to dueling is his practice runs with Margot

He hasn't found his fighting style yet, so he just throws every spell he knows while trying to imitate Dumbledore, Ginny, and other people he admires looks up to tolerates

Remember the whole love triangle story Tom came up with? He got the idea from Margot, who made an offhand joke about Alphard possibly liking Ginny because he stared at her so much after they met. Tom encouraged the idea primarily to mess with Alphard, not Ginny.

Because Tom knows Alphard isn't romantically interested in her. He knows that. But Walburga? Abraxas? Briseis? They sure don't, and Tom knows Alphard isn't going to tell them. Joke's on him though, because look how that turned out

What Tom finds most frustrating about Ginny is how oblivious she is to the impact she has, how little she cares about the image she projects. On the flipside, his hyperawareness about his image, how much he cares about the impact he has on people, is what Ginny hates most about him (besides the whole, you know, Voldemort thing)

Not saying this is going to happen in the story, but assuming they're all alive and getting along post-Hogwarts (aka fics of my fic that I'll never write lol):

Tom briefly works for Borgin and Burkes. Ginny, jobless and not sure what to do with herself, goes and bugs him during his shifts. He pretends to hate it

She never calls him Tom, but she called him Thomas for a whole month, in retaliation for that one time he tried to call her Ginevra

He'll never admit it on the pain of death, but Tom goes to Dumbledore for Ginny-related advice

Ginny and Alphard meet up and get drunk every other weekend, with Tom tagging along as the designated sober friend (boyfriend? chaperone? Alphard knows better than to ask whatever the hell is going on with Ginny and Tom)

At some point, Alphard complains about his family's matchmaking attempts and half-seriously goes fuck it, I'm gonna travel the world to get them off my back. Ginny points out that it won't solve anything, they're still going to badger him about getting married. Alphard, drunk out of his mind, realizes that yes, you're right, we should get married right now, that'll show 'em. Ginny, also drunk out of her mind, agrees. Tom, wishing he was drunk out of his mind, is too busy fuming to convincingly talk them out of it

"What do you mean this is a bad idea? Name one good reason why we shouldn't — why're you twitching?"

Eventually, Ginny remembers that she's supposed to be a half-blood, and that the Blacks would rather have their line die out than marry anyone who wasn't pure-blood. Tom is livid that this, THIS is what stops her from Apparating with Alphard to the altar

Ginny and Alphard laugh about the whole thing the next day. Tom doesn't talk to them for a week

Alphard ends up going on his world tour and signs his letters to Ginny with stuff like "to my dearest bride" "from your handsome fiancee." Tom threatens to murder him every time

The last letter Alphard ever sends to Ginny is signed "my beloved widow"

Ginny also decides to travel, but not with Tom or Alphard or anyone. She checks in on them regularly, sends them souvenirs, but she never asks them to go with her. Tom isn't bitter about it, of course not, why would you even suggest —

Dumbledore insists on monthly family dinners with Ginny, Tom, and Aberforth. It's the most mortifying thing, but Ginny grows to love it, as much as she acts otherwise. Tom has . . . conflicted feelings about it all

Ginny goes to therapy. Tom also goes to therapy. They all go to therapy

[wanderingwomanwondering]

Here are my initial thoughts on ep 502:

The helicopter rescue has the heart transplant at its emotional core. I love the team effort to save the pilot and medic, and especially the heart. We know that the heart/transplant is parallel to Eddie’s storyline. He needs to connect with his own heart/feelings. The way the rescue went down lends fuel to my theory that Bobby and of course Buck will be important to that process. I originally talked about that here.

This episode takes place in a blackout. The metaphor basically indicates that there are things the audience and/or the characters can’t see very clearly. I think it’s meaningful that in that context, Buck (and Eddie) go fix the generators at the hospital (so that the transplant surgery can get started), and Buck is the “Power Czar”. Seems to me that Buck is going to be instrumental in shining light on matters of the heart for Eddie throughout the season (and we see the start of that in this very episode when Buck calls Eddie out for “pretending” and initiates the conversation with Eddie about the panic attack.

When Ana and Chris came to the firehouse and we all saw what we saw, I expired. I mean just wow. Eddie and Buck both greet/give Chris big hugs, smiling from ear to ear as each has his turn hugging their son. Ana is background noise for both of them in this scene! Buck barely looks at her during the scene, his eyes are glued to Eddie, especially when his mini-panic attack starts over Ravi mistaking Ana for his wife. Then, bonus round: Ravi was conscripted into Ana Management while Eddie literally ran for the hills with Buck looking on with that Confused Husband Needs Answers Now headline of a face.

The firetruck zoo conversation was beautiful. It felt like (further) confirmation that they have a life together already. Eddie explained that Buck takes Chris to the zoo so much that he has the animals memorized. Eddie is beaming! Absolutely radiant while explaining this to the team. Where everyone else looks mildly annoyed with Buck, Eddie’s joyful and really in sync with Buck. We also can’t ignore the fact that 501 did a small callback to the tsunami via the false text notification that Buck received AND in 303 (the end of the tsunami arc) Eddie suggested Buck take Chris to the zoo. The zoo stuff in this opening s5 arc is a callback to that. Again linking Eddie Buck and Chris strongly and emotionally. Buck took the zoo rec to heart and now we know those boys practically live there, and whether Eddie goes with them every time or not, i just know that he hears all about the zoo from both Buck and Chris after every trip. Y’all that fire truck zoo convo warmed my cold dead heart and I’m alive because of that scene.

Then we have the panic attack heart to heart between Buck and Eddie. Send help immediately bc I’m ending rn. Y’all…Eddie pretending loudly, Buck’s persistence, Eddie’s initial resistance and then opening up abt Ana and the panic attack, Buck’s hard truths for Eddie encouraging him to be honest with himself AND Ana bc he knows what it’s like to be emotionally abandoned in a seemingly committed relationship. Then he wraps it all up with The Line: “well, go to sleep. You don’t need to decide right now. It’s not like we’re going home anytime soon”. That screamed subtext and hopefully foreshadowing to me! It’s like “fine then ignore your feelings for now but the longer you take to choose me the longer we have to wait to be an official romantic couple”

Also Home is a whole ass theme for Buddie. In 303 we get a whole song (Photograph) and voiceover (from Buck) about it. I talked abt that among other things here. It’s also mentioned or implied in other episodes with those two. 408 comes to mind on that front.

It really does look more and more like we will get canon Buddie. I’m trying to keep my hopes in check but it’s not working. At this point if tptb drop me on my stupid clown head I’m writing Tim a strongly worded letter.