#then no thank you. personally :). it depends on what angle a story goes for anyway but if it's w the same unseriousness them fuckin is made

[cacaitos]

the thing abt KS is that like, the fact that it is a thriller does not necessarilly mean it's de facto not an lgbt story bc a criteria like that would just limt the range those kinds of stories can have

however, the amout itself of the story you can quantify as a lgbt or just 'gay' certainly is far less important than how much is structured strictly as a psyhorror, like you wouldnt precisely advetise it as treating in a great manner lgbt issues themselves lol

AND THEN, it's foolish to pretend the intent of the author, deep down, is even trying to appeal honesly to any of the previous points bc at the very core almost every aspects of the dynamic, the storylines, visual framing, situations etc are subservient to the fact that this is just a genre BL lol, in the derogatory sense. so a lot of the momentum of the layers above get stumped abruptly whenever it talks abt homosexuality bc it doesnt kno how to act normal lol.

AND THEN at the, actual, thematic core is deeply heterosexual admitedly for not completely unintentional reasons. in broad strokes it does center around the reproduction of family dynamics, trauma etc. now the thing is that that both fuels the BL fantasy aspect, and yet the BL aspect does not really awknowledge it wholly, it´s even sometimes contradictory.

[seventeenlovesthree]

Has the new zero two movie changed your mind or added anything in a positive light to any of the zero two ships?

Oh, that is an interesting question, thank you for asking!

Though I think I have already kinda hinted at it during my last analysis posts regarding the movie and recent dramas: There wasn't (a lot of) actual "romantic" ship portrayal in my opinion. Which is actually a good thing in my book, but let's see what we got there. Putting my thoughts under a cut, because there are still a lot of people who haven't watched the movie!

First of all, let's name the few significant - or at least implied - interactions that are displayed in the movie:

Daisuke & Ken. Daisuke & Miyako. Ken & Miyako. Daisuke & Ken & Miyako. Daisuke & Rui (& Ken). Takeru & Hikari.

And that's basically it. As mentioned before, the movie itself only has roughly 90 minutes, due to pacing and plot, there isn't a lot of interpersonal interaction that goes beyond the general display of "friendship". The dramas are WAY better at showing off the dynamics between the characters, but we're not talking about that right now. But yeah, the Jogress combinations besides Daiken don't have significant interactions, Iori gets the shortest end of the stick ever, they don't have a single moment of Daisuke fawning over Hikari. So let's focus on the few relationships I mentioned above:

Daisuke & Ken: They're already one of the aspects that save 02 for me personally, which sounds more grim than it actually is, but I've always loved their dynamics a lot. You can feel the fondness (and admiration) they have for each other, their characters contrast and complement each other still beautifully. And even if the display of their bond could have been even deeper - Miyako calling them out for "flirting" will always be my favourite part of the movie. Someone recently pointed out to me how there might even be an underlying codependency between these two, which is an interesting angle to focus on as well, but I'd say the movie hasn't made me love them more or less than I did before. They're just great, I've shipped them before and I will keep shipping them!

Daisuke & Miyako: They're more of a comic relief combination than anything else, which hasn't changed much since they had been children after all. Personally, I've always seen them more as siblings than romantically compatible and the movie kiiiiinda proved my point in that? It depends on how you want to interpret certain framings. Especially because Miyako is particularly framed with someone else...

Ken & Miyako: ... And that is Ken. I already mentioned in my big post-watch analysis that, while you can definitely read every interaction between the characters as platonic, they were REALLY keen to put emphasis on Miyako focusing on Ken. There were several moments where she approached Ken on her own account, encouraged him, exchanged glances... And yes, her words can be taken as flirting (especially by the end of it!) and the snowball fight may have made a lot of Kenyako fans ecstatic! Understandably so! It's interesting, because they definitely have NOT put that much emphasis on a blooming relationship on a certain other future-canon ship, but I digress... Long story short, they definitely showed Miyako being interested in Ken, directing speeches towards him that you would usually expect from Daisuke. Ken on the other hand still seemed rather baffled at her behaviour, but it was a start. An interesting start! They have not really been a ship for me so far, and the one-sidedness is still something they need to work on, but I would say the movie did a decent job with them.

Daisuke & Ken & Miyako: Take everything I have outlined above and just make them a poly ship, THAT would be interesting. It may actually be the most satisfying conclusion in a timeline where Kenyako will turn out to be endgame anyway, even though the chemistry between Daiken is undeniably there! All jokes aside, it was amusing to witness the bickering between them, there was quite the chemistry (and jealousy?) between them.

Daisuke & Rui (& Ken): What can I say? Daisuke has a thing for "boys who suffer (tm)" and thanks to his irresistible positivity, he will ALWAYS pull them. Always. While Rui is still a different brand from Ken and Wallace, it really is not surprising that the lone wolf is visibly impressed by Daisuke (with Ken watching over them carefully, as the voice of reason). Considering the fact that I still prefer Daiken, I can still appreciate the dynamic, even though it wasn't the first time they pulled that trope.

Takeru & Hikari: Long story short - they held BACK with these two. They did in the movie, they did in the dramas. Which, again, is not a bad thing, since I personally enjoy how casual and comfortable they are with each other. Them being in each other's spheres is just natural - and I was DELIGHTED to listen to them writing fanfiction about their brothers and friends while being out for drinks in their drama. But if you were looking for romantic implications, you may get disappointed. While they DID get their own snowball fight scene (breadcrumbs!) and had a few softer interactions, there could have been more. While I did prefer them platonic myself for the majority of my life, I have generally grown more fond of them romantically in the past few months - so I am fine with either of their readings. But the movie hasn't had an effect on my perception of them.

Long story short - in sum, the movie didn't provide enough interpersonal interaction to change my perception of the ships in the grand scheme of things. Daisuke/Rui was a new addition, so it doesn't really count, but I WAS surprised to see them put emphasis on Miyako subtly woo-ing Ken, which was an interesting idea that was decently executed - even if it was still one-sided and didn't disrupt the true love-line (no, not a triangle!) of the movie:

Miyako loves: Ken. Ken loves: Daisuke. Daisuke loves: Ramen

[pyrrhocorax]

okay @jamtland Meant to reply to this waaaay sooner but I had a lot going on this past week and I truly apologize for that because I don’t want to make it seem like I’ve left you on read/ignored what you said (I've actually been thinking about it every day lol). so doing it this way to keep everything organized since different messages in different place and prefer things being more organized/streamlined (I hope that’s okay!!! I'm still getting back into using tumblr on a social level so i am not. quite sure what the culture is with replying now/how one goes about it. so if you're like pyrr fuck off get rid of this shit i can take it down)

I like Björn a lot!! Olsson less so (only because I have a very weird slight personal gripe with that surname unrelated to anything hetalia-related that is hard to explain in a public space publicly), but using a -son name was probably going to to be my angle anyway if I changed it. As a blanket statement, I am very very very interested getting perspective from people from the actual countries they come from, so Yes I would love to talk to Finns/Estonians/you (about Swedish stuff)/Anybody really who wants to give their thoughts. In addition, I do take suggestions for things to write about/explore so I have a general open policy towards "please educate/inform me" and what attracted me to hetalia to begin with as a teen was the opportunity to gain understanding about the world/history/culture/language in ways I wouldn't be exposed to otherwise. so if idk a bunch of Latvians slide into my DMs I am gonna be like HELL yeah. tell me EVERYTHING about Latvia and how people get Latvia wrong, both inside the context of hetalia and outside of it. I know I will not get it perfect all the time depending on the Intent of Art (i do like shitposting too) and my own limited perspectives as 1. an american 2. a biologist (i.e. not a historian, cultural expert, etc.), but I do Genuinely Care. I realistically cannot digest everything and will never know/understand enough but I want to try to, at least. I just worry about being TOO annoying about it because I have a bazillion ultra-specific questions. 😬

thanks! it's very weird to. come back here and be Known for this story when I basically wrote it and left hetalia immediately soon after, and I didn't realize How much people liked it/had read it until I started getting messages like these. I'm not sure how to take it being "an honor" because I am just some guy and I am not that important. but it is nice to be recognized. :>

following them immediately and going to definitely read that post! will also probably reach out to them later this week with some other estonia questions when i have a bit more free time.

[fantroll-purgatory]

This is her picture! I made it with that farragofiction troll maker. Can I please get a redesign/design help?

…Fuck it if MCR can drop their first new song in nearly a decade on a Thursday night with zero preamble I can get back into reviewing fantrolls after a two-year break with similar aplomb.

World: Alternia

Name: Luvdaa Dorset (I honestly forgot what Luvdaa meant, and whether it was scrambled or not, but I do remember that a Dorset is a type of sheep-)

T b h I like it anyway. Luvdaa sounds like something I would’ve called a doll when I was younger it tracks. Also it sounds a little like baa.

Age: Flipping between 5 sweeps and 5.54 (first one would make her technically 10 in human years, the latter would make her 12)

Whelp it’s been 2 years since I last did a review for this blog so she’s five and a half now.

Theme/Story: Luvdaa is sort of supposed to be a childish/doll-themed as well as sheep themed character? I hate to water her down, but the angle I was going for was ‘naive and overall sweet’ child to sort of go against the common attitude for Purple Bloods (murderous, scheming, etc…) and make something genuinely good (until I mess it up, because I plan on writing a story with her and a few other of my fantrolls) She’s supposed to be that light in the darkness for my other characters, basically! 

I also like the idea of using a sheep as a way to define a person’s relationship to their religion, since you mentioned in a later ask that she follows the purpleblood religion with a more positive bent. In a lot of cultures, sheep are seen as valuable, even holy, because of what they provide a community. Not to mention the idea of a religious figure being a shepherd and their followers a flock, indicating that as thanks for their following they will guard them from harm.

Review Goals: I’d love a review of everything, please! But if you don’t have the time, just some design help/personality help would be alright! 

Strife Specibus: I honestly have no idea what to put here. I was originally thinking of a toy theme, something like hoop/ringtype (hula hoops-) or needletype (to go with her love for making dolls-) 

Needlekind appeals to me as well, especially since we can also tie back to the sheep theme with knitting needles and wool!

Fetch Modus: A shapes puzzle!

Hmm. I want to tie in to something you said a little later, in that Luvdaa follows the juggalo religion but with little understanding of its true intent. I want to tie this in to her childish nature and give her a Clap-O-Meter Modus that ejects items if she shows sufficient enthusiasm for receiving it. Clap your hands in excitement! Clap if you believe!

…of course, most clap-o-meters are a sham. There is someone manually adjusting the knob depending on what they perceive as the response. Similarly, the modus isn’t actually ejecting captcha cards based on her reaction, but based on whether she thinks she was hype enough. This is also a good modus for a hope-based character, which Luvdaa appears to be.

Blood Color: Purple

Lunar Sway: Prospit!Luvdaa is optimistic and goes with the flow- although, it’s probably a lot easier to do that when she’s so high on the spectrum. She doesn’t struggle against the hard parts of living on Alternia, she adapts and looks for a happy conclusion, or a happy little lie. 

I think it also makes sense for someone so dedicated to a religion like the juggalo cult; within the text of Pesterchum it’s pretty clear that it has ties to the flow of a story on a metatextual level, and while a more seasoned member may recognize this influence to be one worth learning to manipulate, a follower like Luvdaa may be simply along for the ride.

Title: I was thinking of Witch Of Hope or Maid Of Hope. Witch seems to be more active than Maid, and Luvdaa’s going to be creating a lot of hope, but she could also manipulate it? I’m pretty stuck here.

I actually wonder…if a Mage of Hope might be more appropriate here? Someone who is optimistic because they see, so clearly, what there is to be optimistic about, and in doing so clues others in to the possibilities while altering or dismissing others’ doubts when they don’t fit into the path she sees.

Symbol and Meaning: Caprinius, The Credulous!

Handle: candiedCadaver 

Quirk: !!she types wike this!! Replaces most Ls with Ws, puts double exclamation points at the end and beginning of her sentences (unless unhappy, when she’ll turn to putting double periods at the beginnings and ends) And uses two As (!!This is baad! Reawwy baad!!)

Special Abilities: If applicable. Take into mind your Troll’s Blood Color.

Huh. What if she can animate her dolls ones they’re done? Not with any degree of precision, but playing house with your dolls becomes so much easier when you can move a bunch around at once. You mention later in the bio that she uses troll bones to make her dolls, so maybe they retain some aspect of the “donor's” personality?

Lusus/Guardian: A typical Sheep/Baabeast, although her sheep can unhinge it’s jaw and is an omnivore opposed to being a herbivore like most sheep- Named Hlopka (bell)

We’ve seen that Gamzee’s lusus is water-based and that purplebloods’ lusii at least need to be near the ocean, so how do you feel about a jellysheep? Top half sheep, bottom half jellyfish, billowing about like a doll’s skirt. Still keeps the name relevant, too!

Interests: Doll-making, Exploring the world outside her Hive, Trying myriads of new things everyday, Playing pretend/playing with dolls, Bone collecting

Ah. If I had kept her as a Witch she would be a bone-stealing witch. Pity I missed the opportunity.

Appearance: The sprites there, i just wanted to say that I was thinking of having Luvdaa wear a little collar with a bell on it? Going along with her sheep theme, but also, the term ‘putting a bell on someone’ because she’s so spacey and won’t stay in one place, so you’ll have to hear her tell-tale bell jingles to find her

Personality: Luvdaa’s a bubbly, overly friendly, and energetic sort, seemingly never running out of energy or things to say and do. She’s the typical child-archetype, added that she’s sort of air-headed and more mature than she lets on, as well as prone to being over-violent for the sake of protecting her companions, jumping into action the moment they’re in trouble, even if they don’t ask. It’s true that she seems content to live her life floating along like a little butterfly (or grazing along like a little lamb, I should say-) but it’s somewhat of a cover up- she covers her eyes and refuses to take in the ugly parts of the world she lives in, and honestly might throw a tantrum if you try to rip her out of her little bubble. Her peppy and ‘we can do it if we keep hoping!!“ attitude might get annoying after awhile, but Luvdaa truly just wants to live a happy life.

EDIT: Oh my goodness, i forgot to add something to Luvdaa’s personality/bio, sorry about that! I know it’s not a requirement, but Luvdaa does follow the typical Purpleblood religion (but is very, VERY misguided in what it actually is and entails, thinking that it’s about hope and togetherness, praying for the exact opposite of what those who worship that religion want- how she came to conclude this is a different story that i havent thought of yet, though-)

I think hope and togetherness can still fall under the eaves of the juggalo religion if taken in a certain way! After all, every purpleblood is united in servitude to the same master, and all will meet the same inevitable end. How wonderful to have such certainty of the future, so you may have the space to play in the present!

Land: I’m pretty much stuck here? I like the sound of “Land Of Fleece and Dollskin” kind of showcasing her more morbid side? (that I haven’t really gone into detail about, but she uh- she puts the bones of dead trolls into her dolls- I still haven’t thought of an explanation, but something needed to be messed up about her- maybe she should make some of her dolls out of corpses, now that I think about it…?)

I think you can still incorporate this into the character-theming you already have; she collects the bones of the deceased and puts them into dolls as a tribute to their lives, extending them through play. Sure, literally nobody asked her to do that, but that’s because they never thought to do so! She’s simply anticipating a need they didn’t know they had. Everyone wants to be immortal.

In terms of the Land name itself, what about String and Bridges? The Land could have a number of canyons and rivers to cross with enough wool/thread/string etc that you could repair a bridge, but you need to do the work to actually get places!

In the meantime I see you sent us a new sprite to review so redesign top to bottom let's go FIRST OFF, the original image you sent in was a JPEG so this is all reconstructed from the ground up. If y'all can, please send your images in as PNGs; it makes editing go twice as fast.

Hair – Edited from a fan-troll template. I wanted her to look sheepy and doll-like, and the combo of fluffy hair and headband felt like it hit that sweet spot.

Horns – I looked up Dorset sheep and they've got some pretty bonkers horns! Wouldn't wanna waste a design opportunity like that. These horns are edited from a naphal sprite sheet.

Face – First, the troll face paint covers up the eye bags, so you don't need both in one image! I wanted to give her doll-like “lashes” on the bottom as well as a cheek marking like an antique blushed doll. I also gave her a little lip definition for the same reason.

Dress – This is edited from fixingfubardfantrolls, which I think preserves the ruffly doll dress from your original while giving the skirt a more bell curve.

Symbol – I made it into a belt buckle, both to stand out against the dress and to give her that bit of glitz!

Shoes – Also from a fan-troll template.

I didn’t end up giving her the bell around her neck because the sprite is already pretty visually busy and I didn’t want to sacrifice coherence for it.

I hope this helped, late as it is!

- TR

[concerningwolves]

Question for you! I see Fae show up a lot in the fantasy genre, and I really love it and want to play with those ideas in some of my own works, but I was wondering — is this something that can be mishandled? I’ve seen some discussion on things to look out for in terms of insensitive portrayal of neurodivergence, but I’ve also just been mulling over the fact that there is a lot of very rich folklore that varies depending on what culture you’re looking at, and that there is potential to disrespect that out of simple fascination for the trope. Being extremely American with no cultural ties to the folklore, I’m just not sure. Is there harm that can be done by sicking solely to the tried and true tropes, or alternatively, by trying to put a new creative spin on those ideas? So sorry if this doesn’t make very much sense, this was harder to put into words that I expected. I was just wondering if you might have any thoughts or advice on this

Oh, this is a nice question for me. Thank you, Nonny :3

Full disclaimer: folklore and mythology, particularly relating to the fae, is my special interest. That doesn't mean I'm an expert in myths and folklore (or the linked history/anthropology). I'm just a person who spends inordinate amounts of time thinking about these things and am exceedingly happy to infodump on the drop of a hat. So, my word isn't law, I'm always happy to hear other opinions, please correct me if I make a mistake etc etc.

"Can you mishandle writing the fae?" is something i have many thoughts on. If you'd asked me this a few years ago, I'd have been all "yes you can, the fae have been appropriated and butchered by popular culture blah blah blah" because I was insufferably anal about things being Correct. But lately, I've come to really love just how vast this – I guess you could call it the popular culture faerie mythos – is. So much of it isn't what a folklore purist would consider correct, but I'm fascinated by how these folkloric figments have evolved and become ingrained in the general psyche nonetheless.

I think writing the fae can become harmful if writers use Welsh/Irish/Scottish folklore as their base without properly researching or without an awareness of the historical context. There's this trend of ignoring centuries of actual history from these countries and instead creating a very warped idealistic fiction. For example, if a writer presents a fantasy world with faeries and says "This is based on Welsh mythology" and then goes on to perpetuate such bunkum as "they all worship a mystical moon goddess" then that's Very Not Good. Similarly, if a writer says "here is my fantasy faery race, they're based on Celtic [Irish] mythology" then I'm going to have some Problems with that, because Celtic mythology and Irish mythology aren't the same thing. (The Celts were an Indo-European people comprised of many cultures and tribes, spread from Ireland to central Europe. While their influence in Ireland is clear, not everything Irish is Celtic and vice versa).

Irish, Welsh and Scottish cultures have historically been persecuted by the English, and that shows in how the English retconned their respective folkloric beliefs to create the British fairy mythos. It's something writers ought to be mindful of but generally aren't imho. This "British" faerie mythos is actually a melting pot of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Nordic folklore with a healthy dose of medieval romanticism. It's what gave us the popular images of the Seelie and Unseelie ("good" and "bad") faerie courts, wherein the fae are generally more "civilised" (read: like Proper British Victorians) and have humanoid appearances. I don't think that any story which uses this bastardised fairy mythology is automatically bad, but I do get wary when writers plunge into it without giving any thought to why the British fairy image is Like That.

I recently listened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and I was absolutely enthralled. Clarke's fairies are based on the medieval romantic image of them, particularly medieval children's tales. They exist in the realm of Fairy, which is near to Hell, and have a society that falls somewhere between feudalism and the Victorian. What gripped me was how Clarke used the Bastardised British Fairy Lore to create this... almost satirical criticism of "Englishness" and what the English identity actually means (without tiptoeing around xenophobia, arrogance and racism). It's very much based on this bastardised British "folklore" but it works because that's the whole point. I found it thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable and basically haven't stopped thinking about it for a month.

I do get very excited when writers take a new angle with faeries, too! Like, Eoin Colfer's faries in the Artemis Fowl books were so cool. (Bearing in mind it's been ten years since I picked up an Artemis Fowl book, and I never read the whole series so most of what I know I've absorbed via late night Wiki reads and Tumblr osmosis, but anyway—) They live underground, which is a very neat take on the Irish Aos Sí. Irish fae folklore has the faeries living in mounds, as in, every mound in Ireland is its own faerie "court". Colfer's faeries call themselves the People, again, a play on the Irish because their name means People of the Mounds. I think what Colfer did was an extremely neat way of calling on Irish mythology to create a cool new fairy concept.

What you say about being American is an intriguing point in itself, too. I've said before that the American cryptid culture is simply delightful, because although it isn't what one would think of when you talk about folklore, that's exactly what it is. American culture is a melting pot. Which is to say, yes, as an American you won't have a lived cultural experience of, say, Irish folklore and how it impacts modern day life there, but there are elements of it all around you! Think about how in states where it's common to see vast fields of corn, it's also common for tales of corn demons. Sure, maybe that sounds like a weird tale some kids tell to scare one another, but to me it sounds a lot like the feldgiester of Germanic folklore.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman explores this concept that immigrants and settlers brought their own gods and mythological/folkloric creatures with them. I often think about this part of the book that talks about a faerie man who followed an Irishwoman to America because she always left out cream for him. I found that really heartwarming in this way that I can't quite explain. If you're into contemporary fantasy epics, I definitely recommend American Gods!

Sorry, I know this answer is getting quite rambly but I guess I... don't have a solid answer. Like I said, this is very much in my special interest wheelhouse BUT I'm not an expert. When I started out reading more about faeries and their various mythos I consumed a lot of nonsense, and I'm slowly sifting back through and unlearning much of what I took as gospel fact. I don't want to sound like I'm telling you what you can or can't do because that isn't my place (nor is it anyone else's). Really all you can do is listen to people from the cultures you're drawing from and research carefully and critically.

Happy writing! (*^▽^*)

[bigskydreaming]

A few people have asked me about whether its okay to reblog the post I wrote yesterday about the utter pointlessness and grossness of pitting male and female survivors against each other and why. 

Yes, go ahead, absolutely. I’m always okay with people reblogging any post I make except for anything I specifically tag as do not reblog, which is extremely rare. To be perfectly honest, the only reason I started posting about my experiences with rape and abuse at all was because when I was younger and really could have used having male survivors that I could look to even just to maintain the awareness that they were out there and others had gone through what I did....like, I couldn’t find anything like that. Not online at least, so I’d rather at least be a resource to people in the ways I wished there was someone talking about this stuff when I was younger.

Its not fun to talk about. I don’t know what people think I get out of these kinds of posts, but they’re the least reblogged and engaged with posts out of any that I make, by a LARGE margin. They don’t get me street cred or whatever, I get tons of anon hate I never post about my so-called agenda and shit, when like....literally my only stance in all the years I’ve been posting about this stuff is it really really bugs that in so many fandoms you can see a clear focus on stories about rape and abuse that get passed around and boosted like crazy, but survivors ask for signal boosts so that the people writing these stories can at the very least have more viewpoints on these matters to inform them and consider, even if they’re survivors themselves....and its crickets. Like the post I wrote yesterday? Not the first post I’ve written about that specific topic and point. Not by a long shot. But I’ve never gotten any of those posts past like, twenty notes, lol.

Like, I really can’t stress enough that I don’t make these posts for my own personal benefit. None of them say anything I don’t already know, contain information I don’t already have. Its not fun to dig up, especially when you think barely anyone is even listening, even though everyone around you is talking about the same stuff but its fine and safe to boost when its just entertainment, but god forbid people treat this stuff as REAL. And the fact of the matter is people who want to assume the worst of my intentions with these posts are going to think what they want to think, and nothing I say will ever change their minds if they think I’m just looking for sympathy or pity or milking my personal traumas or whatthefuckever. I can’t be any more sincere than like, just being sincere, lol, so if someone isn’t convinced of that there’s really fuck all I can do about it. *Shrugs*

So at the end of the day its like.....the only thing that really matters with these conversations is like....you think they matter, or you don’t. I think they matter. So I’ll keep having them even if its not particularly fun, because the simple reality is they’re going to keep being everpresent in my awareness as the subject matter of so much media and entertainment around me, and the literal only part of any of this I can control is what I do in response to that, and my choice is to just put out there what I can. But like....any ‘impact’ I have, however small, is still limited entirely to how many people engage with these conversations, even if only to signal boost them to reach more peoples’ awareness so they can at least consider angles of possibility they might not have before. So like, if you think anything I say on these subjects is of value at all, if there’s anything worthwhile in them to consider, please consider reblogging instead of just liking, because I can ONLY ever....post this stuff. Beyond that, its entirely out of my control and so how much these conversations ever get engaged with to any degree is entirely dependent on someone other than me passing it on past whatever number of people I put it in front of initially.

*Shrugs* Anyway, that’s that on that.

Just a general FYI though, I do have a ko-fi page and paypal linked if you ever consider the posts I make about this stuff worth shooting me a donation of any kind. Literally 100% of anything ever donated my way goes directly to either rent, food, or insurance or medication for my mental health and the disability caused by my gaybashing over a decade ago and that I’ve been trying to get surgery for, for about four years at this point, with constant setbacks due to a general lack of money and income dependent entirely on freelancing because my chronic pain and vertigo issues from my disability make any non work from home job basically impossible. My meds alone cost about $300 a month even using GoodRx, and like, I haven’t even begun saving for this month’s meds because everything’s gone to rent, and I’ve been out of said meds for about a week, lmao. So as much as I hate doing these kinds of posts, just a general FYI.....donations are always helpful and appreciated, but so is engagement or even just signal boosting of these topics when they come up.

Anyway, thanks for reading and hearing me out!

https://ko-fi.com/kalenp

https://paypal.me/bigskydreaming?locale.x=en_US

[icharchivist]

I wanted to ask, you said Sandalphon is has similarities to all three wmtsb antagonists, especially on a Though Process scale. Or at least he had when Disasterphon.

Anyway, do you think he still has those similar thoughts/impulses but just doesn't act like that through the power of Being A Decent Being ™, or does he not have them anymore after his redemption? (Ain Soph Aur moments @ Lucio don't count)

oooh i love the question, thank you for directing it my way :D

Mhmm i think Disasterphon was especially destructive because he was trying to find meaning into his existence and that the only way he could cope with his absence of purpose was to project it all on Lucifer. As a result now that he has found a meaning and purpose to his existence, and had made his peace with Lucifer, i feel like those impulses don't really have any more reasons to be.

He seems calmer, more at peace. The Maydays seem to establish that he no longer has any grudge for this world, that he genuinely wants to protect it ect. Feels to me like this is something internal and not some sort of behavior control. He hasn't exactly been doing anything that reminded me of the others antagonists since, except in the way he treats Lucio.

The things he still have in common with the Antagonists are more story beats: His devotion to Lucifer even after his death is still found in Belial's devotion to Lucilius, and now that Sandalphon healthily grew from it, we could wonder whenever Sandalphon encouraging Sariel to find Belial in the Maydays would be an open door for Sandalphon to push Belial into stepping away from Lucilius and finding his own goal, in time. Therefore, their similarities from then on depend on what Belial will do.

For Bubs and Faasan, a lot of what connected them to Sandalphon were their frustration as for why they were into this world, something Sandalphon found his answer to. (especially in the way Faasan used all of his power to defy God the same way Sandalphon gathered all his power against Lucifer... but Sandalphon grew out of it)

Honestly the one thing in common is that Lucilius and Sandalphon both take one look at Lucio and go "i want that twink obliterated " but since it doesn't count-

That said i think the way Lucilius sasses his enemies is still something i could see Sandalphon do? without the destructive angle of "exerces your free will to die", Sandalphon still has a venom tongue when you annoy him, which he totally got from Lucilius i swear.

For exemple in his Light FE, there's a scene where Vyrn apologize because they took all of Sandalphon's coffeebeans and Sandalphon says "oh i'm not mad, i should have been more careful with them" and Vyrn is :O and Sandalphon just

But as far as behavior goes, i think Sandalphon doesn't really feel most of them anymore, that they were too tied to his destructive impulse and that they don't have any reasons to be now that he's at peace.

Ironical how the only character trait i think he still have with the main antagonists is with Lucilius..... Lucilius would be SO MAD, him who thought Sandalphon was useless and should be thrown away, meanwhile they're still so similar.

but so yeah, i think there's still elements of their personal storylines that still are worth noticing - and that's also why Sandalphon seems to pity them more than hate them as of late.

But as far as behavior goes, i think Sandalphon doesn't really feel most of them anymore, that they were too tied to his destructive impulse which he has not felt in a while, and that all that's left is his sass.

That's how i'd see it i think?

Thanks for the ask :D take care!

[peterpan-ouat-imagines]

In Hell I Will: Part 2

What the heck I met the guy I’ve been dying to find out more about within under an hour?  Not even intentionally!  This is crazy and I’m a bit unprepared because I’m taken aback by his appearance.  He looks so professional and serious in a suit... not a ginger head wearing green.  Plus I was not prepared for this like how do I act around him?  I start feeling nervous.

“Um, sorry,” I put it down gently, “Can I just look around for five more minutes?” I smile hopefully.

“That’s fine, take your time,” he tells me and I keep looking trying to find hints or things that belong to Hook having trouble not focusing on Peter Pan in the same room as me, “I haven’t seen you around here before are you new?” he asks.

“That’s a bad pickup line that won’t work on me, but since you asked, I’m temporarily new I guess. I am not dead though, I’m on a trip to find Captain Hook, who you obviously know because of your story.  My family is gonna save him,” I share.

He chuckles.

I stop searching and turn to him, “What’s funny?”

“One, I wasn’t flirting, I was simply asking a question, and the really funny part is that you say your going to save him like it’s easy,” he explains.

I start feeling a bit attacked and the confidence in my voice starts to quiver, “Well obviously it won’t be quick and simple, but it’s not like it’ll take a week or anything,”

He catches me off guard and suddenly goes from across the room to two feet away, “Well maybe I can help you with being more prepared,”

I jump,” Ah! How did you do that?  You were all the way over there less than a second ago!”

“It’s magic, which I’m pretty sure you know of because of your families story,” he answers using my words.

“One, you don’t need to make me eat my words, two they were right, you aren’t like the movies and stories I grew up with, and three, you don’t scare me which apparently you’re trying to do I think,” I tell him.

He chuckles again, “I don’t get it why do you keep making fun of me?!” I exclaim.

“No reason, you’re just funny.  And just so you know, I am as bad as they tell you,” he tells me in a low, serious tone.

I roll my eyes and go to the backroom to get away and he follows me.

“I can help, we can make a deal, just say the word,” he tells me.

I look in his eyes and see the thirst for getting what he wants, which is off-putting but attractive at the same time, “I was told that making deals is a bad idea, so I appreciate the offer but no,” I say politely.

“Alright then, it was nice meeting you...?” he waits for my name.

“Y/n, and thanks.  And you don’t have to go, I’m finished here.  But I’m not going to lie I don’t know whether to say the same about you because your kind of annoying, I hate to be blunt but it’s true,” I admit with no filter.

He chuckles once again but I ignore it and go.  So much for meeting the person I was so defensive about just to be wrong.  But if I didn’t like him why did his voice and eyes, and everything else make me drawn to stay and talk to him?

Henry is waiting for me outside.  “What took you so long?  You were in that shop forever!” he asks.

“Sorry, the things down here are just more interesting than normal Storybrooke,  haven’t seen some before ya know,” I tell him low-key referring to Peter Pan.

“Hey follow me, there’s someone I want to find and I want you to meet him,” he walks towards the bed and breakfast and I walk with him.

“How are you dealing with all of this?  I know it’s your first real adventure,” he asks me standing kind of close.

“I haven’t been here very long but it’s all so interesting and different, I like being in on something like this!” I tell him.

“You can stick with me if you’d like, I have some experience when things go south,” he says.

“I’d like that,” I smile.  I can tell he’s kind of liked me romantically for a while and I wasn’t so sure about it but lately with being around him more and him trying to make me feel better and help me out just shows how sweet he is.

We arrive at the bed and breakfast and he goes behind the counter and grabs a old dirty bronze key with a tag attached but I’m not at the angle to read it clearly.  I follow him up a stairwell and he opens the door to room eight.

“Dad?” he asks as he steps inside.  He looks around, “Dad are you in here?” I walk in a little watching him.

He looks all around the room and I put a hand on his shoulder softly from behind, “Henry, I don’t think your father is in here,” I say gently.

“Yeah I think you’re right, we should go back down to the diner,” he says and I follow him.

We get down and some of the normal gang are already there regrouping.

As usual Mr. Gold left and went his own way because he never believes in teamwork to get things accomplished.  The rest of us stayed and tried to workout a plan.  

An hour passes by and Gold is back holding a small, white, dainty, glass bottle.  He explains that if we pour it on Hook’s grave than we will be able to see and communicate with Hook.  We do just that and apparently he’s in some really crappy shape because Regina and Robin Hood, who’s also her boyfriend block him from me and Henry’s view.  It turns out to be a bust which is really unfortunate because I really want to find him and save him.

We go to Mary Margaret’s and David’s apartment to regroup later on.  We all split up and me, Henry, and Robin go to Regina’s office to get maps that are a replica of the hell Storybooke.  There is a protection spell on it so me and Henry crawl through the air vent.

“It’s so dusty in here,” I cough.

“Don’t worry it isn’t much of a distance just keep following me,” he tells me.

We continue to crawl until we finally bust in.  I get up and see a older woman dressed in black and white with her hair half black and white in color.  It isn’t a “I’m an old person” type of white but intentional as if she dyed it like that, “Henry who is that?” I whisper.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me avoiding the question.

She starts talking to him about this pen that I’m confused on and goes on about  writing the fairytales in the book and bringing her back to life and Henry finally confronts her, “Cruella, why would I do that?” 

She explains and when I hear how Emma killed her I blurt out, “Oh shit,” shocked that Emma would do something so awful.

“And who is this here?  Your little girlfriend?” she asks walking up to me slowly and I hear her heels slowly click.

“Leave her out of this,” he tells her stepping in front of me but she lingers.

I stare at her kind of afraid as she looks me up and down slowly, “pretty face, but I can tell you don’t have a clue what your doing,” she ridicules.

“And why’s that?” I ask a bit angry stepping in front of Henry .

“Y/n, don’t let her get to you,” Henry tells me being protective but I roll my eyes.

“Why don’t I know what I’m doing?” I ask her ignoring Henry.

“Where do I begin?  Your with him, using him as protection, you’ve just been standing here and not trying to talk or intervene with me, and you just... look... weak,” she criticizes telling me I look weak in a slow way

My jaw drops and I clench my fists shocked by her bluntness, “y/n don’t let her get to you,” Henry whispers.

I huff, “Fine,” I unclench my fists.

We exit not finding any maps.  

We all meet Mary Margaret and she says Hercules can help us and like half my family go to find and get him to defeat some 3 headed thing that’s guarding where Hook is but leave me and Henry behind which is annoying.

I kinda want to spend the spare time seeing Pan but remember how he was annoying and I need a reason to visit so me and Henry just go back to the apartment being useless.

The following day Gold says he knows how to get Hook back and my mom and him go off to save him.  A few hours after they return with Hook and even later his brother arrives and joins us all.  We all talk about Hades and try figuring out his story.  Everyone but me and Henry go off in search of answers.

“Hey I need to go see someone I’ll be back,” Henry tells me, “It’s about the quill that Cruella was talking about,”

I get up to follow him and he stops me, “Y/n, this is kind of awkward because I know I said you can stay with me, but this is something I have to do alone,”

“So your just gonna leave me alone? It’s not like anyone will let me in on what’s going on with their plan,” I tell him feeling left out.

“I’m sorry,” I can tell he doesn’t want to leave me but he leaves anyway and I watch him get in this black and white hurst from inside.

The car speeds off and I just sit where I am being useless.

I think about how Pan said he could help contemplating going there.

After a lot of talking myself out of it I decide to do it anyway because what else can I do?

I walk on in and look around the shop and the backroom but don’t see him anywhere, “Pan!” I shout.

“Hello y/n,” he appears directly behind my shoulder after I shout that, “What do I owe this visit?” he asks.

I take a deep breath and turn to him and he’s awfully close to me, “You said you could help with Hades, and I want to make a deal for it,” I say.

“I said I could help with Hook, not Hades.  Sorry love,”

“But! I was going to make a deal!” I complain.

He smirks, “A deal can be made still, what else can I do for you?”

I think for a second, “Well everyone is trying to figure out what Hades story is or where we could find it.  Can you help me there?” I ask.

“I can give you information, but it might be too late,” he tells me.

“Any lead would be helpful right now,” I tell him.

“I will tell you where you could find his story and let’s just say you’ll owe me a favor at some point,” he tells me.

“It depends, is it a bloody favor, that ends with people getting hurt, because I really don’t want to darken my heart anymore,” I tell him.

“Your heart is dark? You seem so innocent so sweet,” he avoids the answer.

“Whatever, avoid the question, I’ll do it,” I gulp and take a deep breath, “It’s a deal,”

He smirks, “I’m glad.  There is a mansion that has the popular storybook, you know the one, it is hidden inside it.  Find that, you find his story,”

“Can I have details on the mansion?  Like where is it?” I ask.

“Ask your brother, he knows,” he tells me.

“Thank you,” I say sincerely.

I head out of the backroom but something in me makes me pause where I am once I walk past the register.  It isn’t magic, it’s just me staying still.

“Something tells me you came in here for more than just to be resourceful,” he tells me following me.

“Okay, yes, maybe a part of me did come to see you, but I have my reasons,” I say still not heading towards the exit.

“And what are those reasons?” he asks leaning in some.

I can feel him have a hold on me as I stare in his green eyes but have to remember Henry is good and who I’m starting to like, unlike him who I know nothing about and could be a bad idea if I get involved.

“I’m leaving before I do something I regret,” I walk towards the exit.

“And what is it that you’ll regret?” He asks appearing in front of me standing very close again and I skip a breath staring in his eyes.  I turn my head again to ignore him reminding myself it is a bad idea and keep going.

“If you need me again you know where to find me,” I can feel his smugness which has a certain charm to it as I walk out.

I walk back into the apartment where everyone else already is, “Y/n, where have you been?”

“Just a walk, no one needed me so I thought why not?” I lie.

“You could have told us you had nothing to do, we could have had you do research on Hades while we were gone,” Regina tells me a bit annoyed.

“I think I know how to figure out what Hades story is though!  Apparently there’s this mansion that has the storybook inside.  I figured if we find that we will see what his story is,” I explain.

“The sorcerers mansion,” Henry says.

[what-is-your-plan-today]

Riding High Ch 3: Chicken Wings and Confessions

Chapter Summary: Fliss heads to Franks and Mary’s for a cookout, and they both learn a little bit more about the other’s troubled past.

Chapter Warnings: Bad Language words.

Chapter Pairings:  Frank Adler x OFC Fliss Gallagher

A/N: Again, as you will all know I’m a Brit so apologies if too much British horsey lingo slips into this…ASK away if you don’t understand. Tagging all my SSB/CSI readers…if you want in or off the list PLEASE just tell me. This chapter is a bit of a filler, things start getting a bit more interesting in the next one, and then we’ll be diving into the Gifted story line in Chapter 4. 

As always I’m a ho for a REBLOG and COMMENT!

Chapter Song: Fighter by Christina Aguilera

Series Masterlist Main Masterlist

“Frank goes out most Fridays, but Saturday we hang out.”” Mary said, explaining about her weekends to Fliss as she sat on the chair with her juice box. Mary had finished her riding lesson roughly 15 minutes ago and they were now sat in Fliss’ office waiting for Frank to finish working on the tractor. Fliss had noticed instantly that Mary’s demeanour around the 2 other girls on her lesson had changed, she had become a lot more introvert. Almost like the children bored her so to speak. It had surprised Fliss a little, as normally it was the other way round, kids happy to be outgoing with people their own age and more reserved with grown-ups. But she had ignored it and introduced the 3 girls to one another, simply carrying on as normal. Mary had simply focussed on her riding, not really speaking to the other kids. Fliss was starting to understand now why Frank thought she needed to socially interact a little more with children. “That’s cool.” Fliss smiled “So what are you doing tonight then?” “He said he was gonna do a BBQ.” Mary said, “Roberta’s coming over. She’s our neighbour. She turns up uninvited all the time so Frank said we might as well ask her if she wanted to come as she’d just rock up anyway.”

Fliss grinned “Is Frank any good with BBQs?”

“He BBQs better than he cooks.” Mary answered and Fliss chuckled. “But that’s because it’s not really cooking is it? It’s just heating meat to a temperature so that all the bacteria is killed.”

“Talking about me again?” Frank leaned in the doorway of the office, wiping his hands on an old rag.

“She was just telling me about your cooking.” Frank snorted “Yeah it’s not much to write home about.” “It’s bad.” Mary shrugged “Unless you get it out of a jar.” At that Fliss tipped her head back in a loud laugh. “Oh God…”

Frank shook his head smiling to himself before he changed the subject. “Tractor’s all done.” “You, Sailor are a God send.” she smiled “What do I owe you?” “Nothing” Frank shook his head “I had the parts lying around so…” Fliss frowned, before she smirked at him “ok then, today’s lesson is on me again.” Frank looked away shaking his head before he turned back, smiling “That’s how it is?” “That’s how it is.” she nodded.

“Alright, quid-pro-quo.” he said, tucking the rag he had been using into his back pocket.

“What are you doing tonight?” Mary asked and Fliss smiled.

“Well my Mum and Dad are away so I have the house to myself. So I’ll probably grab a beer, lay by the pool for a bit and then…” “You have a pool?” Mary’s eyes widened, cutting her off.

“My mum and dad do.” Fliss said.

“That’s so cool.” she looked at Frank “Why can’t we have a pool?” “We do…” “A communal one.” Mary rolled her eyes “ A private one is way cooler.” “Yeah, well, sorry life is such a disappointment to you.” Frank looked at her, Mary rolled her eyes and Fliss smiled at the easy to-and-froing that was going on between the two. “And here’s another disappointment, time to go.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve taken up enough of Miss Gallagher’s…” “Fliss…” “Fliss’ time, and I need to get to the store if you wanna eat anything tonight.”

Mary grumbled but stood up and trudged slowly towards the door.

“Before you go do you wanna book in for next week?” Fliss asked. 

“You gonna let me pay for that one?” Frank looked at her.

“Depends if I find anything else for you to fix.” she shot back, Frank snorted and shook his head. “Same time?” He nodded “That’s great, thanks.” “No problem.”

She bid them both goodbye and Frank and Mary made their way to the truck.

“Do you not think Miss Gallagher might be lonely tonight?” Mary asked Frank suddenly.

“Lonely?”  Frank looked at her, “Why do you think she might be lonely?”

“Because she’s on her own, at home.” Mary shrugged “her parents have been away since yesterday. And she told me that she doesn’t have a lot of friends round here.”

“Neither do you.” Frank looked at Mary. 

Mary scoffed “I have you and Roberta, and Fred…” “Well then Fliss has her family, her horses…” “But why not us?” “I’m not following?” Frank shook his head. “I mean why can’t we be her friends?” “Well, we are.” he said, “Sorta, anyway.” “So why doesn’t she come round tonight as well?”

“Well, I…” Frank  he paused and looked up. He’d only know the woman a week but he couldn’t deny he liked her company. They chatted a little over text each night and again when in person but he didn’t know her in any detail… well, not yet anyway. He was hoping he would in time because he found her a breath of fresh air to be around. She was someone who didn’t know anything about him, his life. She took him for who he was and he liked that. He looked back down at Mary “you think she’d wanna come?”

Mary shrugged before she hopped round to the other side of the truck.  Frank patted the roof and leaned through the open window of the driver’s side. “Wait here a minute…” he said, before he turned and walked back onto the yard.

“Fliss?” he called and she turned to face him.

“Forget something?” she asked, smiling.

“No, well kinda, erm, look. If you want, only if you want, you’re welcome to join us tonight. It won’t be much, but…” “I wasn’t angling for an invite.” she said shaking her head.

“No, I know…” he assured her “But the offer’s there if you fancy it. Although my limits are burgers, sausages and steak.”

“No chicken wings?” she frowned “What kind of BBQ is that?” “You want chicken wings, you can bring them.” he laughed.

She looked at him for a second before she smiled “Alright, deal.”

“Say about half 5? Will you be done here or…”

“I can get one of the girls to close up.” she smiled. “Half 5 is fine.” “Ok, well I’ll text you the address.” he said with a nod “It’s not hard to find, we live in the prefabs near the dock so…”

He trailed off, waiting for the usual judgmental look that came with that but it never arrived. Fliss smiled and nodded.

“Near the dock huh.” she grinned “That’s pretty cool.”

“Well it means the commute to work is acceptable” he said and Fliss laughed. “Ok, right, so I guess I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah, you will.” she smiled.

***** “Hi guys!” Fliss waved at the screen of her phone. 

“Hey Titch!” her Dad grinned back “How’s it going? Burnt the house down yet?”

“Yeah, fire brigade are dealing with it now” she smiled “How’s Seattle?”

“Hot, like muggy hot, and full of people.” her dad grimaced and she heard her mum tssk in the background before she too appeared on the screen.

“Ignore him!”  Verity rolled her eyes, smiling “It’s wonderful!”

“Hmmmm” Bill rolled his eyes “I tell you what won’t be wonderful, my bank statement when I get it. You’ve hit every shop going.” Fliss laughed as her parents began to bicker affectionately.

“So what are you up to tonight?” Verity turned to her daughter “Making the most of the peace and quiet?” “Erm…actually I’m going out. Well, to a BBQ…” she said, trying not to roll her eyes at the surprised look her parents exchanged.

“A BBQ?” Bill asked.

“Yeah, Frank and Mary invited me so…” she shrugged “I thought it beat sitting at home alone.” Another significant look was exchanged between the parents.

“Oh and he fixed the tractor” Fliss said, in a hope that would divert her Dad’s attention. Luckily for her, Bill was a tactful man and could recognise when she was trying to change the subject so to avoid her mother digging further he took the initiative and began to ask her a few questions about it, which she answered as best she could. The call lasted for another 10 minutes or so before the oven sounded, telling her the marinated chicken wings she had cooked to take with her were ready so she bid them both goodbye, promising to be at the airport to pick them up the following evening, and headed into the kitchen.

Once the wings were out cooling, she headed for a shower then set about trying to decide what to wear. Her stomach was churning a little, why she was so nervous she had no idea. This was just Frank, and Mary. In the end she settled on a pair of cut off jeans which grazed her ankles, a pair of brown sandles and a light green checked sleeveless button down. She kept her make up light, and pulled her long hair back into a loose bun. Once she had made sure the dogs were ok she grabbed the chicken wings and the beer she had also bought to take with her and then once she had double checked the directions she set off.

It wasn’t a long drive to the park Frank and Mary lived on. Fliss slowed down carefully, looking for the number she had been given and soon spotted Frank’s truck parked outside. She pulled her Jeep up behind it and clambered out, only to be almost bowled over by a flurry of blonde hair.

“Hi!” Mary said, giving her a hug. Fliss chuckled and bent down to hug her back.

“Mary you saw me like a few hours ago.” she laughed.

“I know but, I’m glad you came.” she said, letting go. She reached down to pick up a ginger one-eyed cat which was following her. “This is Fred.” “Nice to meet you Fred.” Fliss said, giving the cat a scratch behind his ear.

“Mary for Gods sake give it a moment before you start bugging her half to death.” Frank’s voice sounded and Fliss looked up, smiling at him as he appeared from the side of the house. Fliss gave him the once over from behind her sunglasses. He was dressed in a pair of light blue jeans, a dark blue T-shirt, a pair of grubby white sneakers and his ever present aviators were perched on his head. He made his way down to her and frowned as she opened the passenger side of the car and pulled out a ceramic dish.

“You told me to bring chicken wings.” she said as she handed him the dish “I also brought beer.” He laughed and shook his head “I wasn’t being serious…” “Well, I did them anyway. And they’re already cooked so you just need to char them. No chance of food poisoning.”

“Good to know.” Frank nodded, before he gestured with his head “Come on…”

Fliss followed him round to the back of the house and up a set of steps into a small kitchen.

“Come on I’ll show you round!” Mary said, grabbing her hand. Fliss let the girl lead her into the main room of the house. It was small, packed with personal touches. She looked around smiling softly. There was a small bookcase in the corner by the window near the front door in front of which sat a small table and a tool box. In the other corner was a small desk which was loaded with books and school supplies. Along another window sat a small leather couch, and the walls were adorned with the same, slightly shabby light coloured wooden panelling which gave the place the feel of a beach hut. It was bright, homely and Fliss instantly felt herself relax, there was just something about it that made her feel at ease.

“Probably not what you’re used to huh?” Frank said, watching her as she looked around, suddenly a little conscious that she was more than likely coming from a fairly opulent background with the job she did and her family and sporting heritage.

“No, but…” she smiled at him “I love it, feels like a home.” “It’s not much but it does us.” Frank smiled at her comment as he moved back to the fridge. “Beer or…” “Yeah, beer’s good…” she said, standing in the doorway and nodding to the carrier bag of bottles she had put on the table.

“You know you didn’t need to bring any more.” he said, as he glanced inside it “I got plenty” “I’m sure you do but my Mum always told me it was polite to take something with me when I go to someone’s for dinner so…”

Frank smiled and began to place the bottles in the fridge before he pulled out two already chilled bottles of Bud Light and flipped the tops off with the opener he had stuffed in the pocket of his jeans.

“Thanks” she smiled.

Mary walked past the pair of them, Fred shooting ahead of her as she tossed a ping pong ball into the grass of the yard and Frank gestured with his head, questioningly. Fliss nodded and they stepped back outside onto the lawn area, where a BBQ and a small table and a few chairs sat were set up.

Fliss took a seat as Mary flopped onto a beanbag to their left on the grass.

“Frank bought the special burgers” she stated “Said if we had company that wasn’t just Roberta we should wheel out the good stuff.” Frank groaned at his niece “Mary…”

“What?” she asked, and Fliss laughed.

“I’m glad you think I’m worthy of good burgers” she teased, and Frank noticed the corners of her eyes that weren’t hidden by her glasses crinkling up as she smiled.

“And I’m offended to know I’m not…” A voice said, and Frank jumped slightly. Fliss turned to see a kindly faced black woman with chin lengthy curly dark hair rounding the side of the house. Mary jumped up to give her a hug and the woman greeted her before she smiled at Fliss who had stood up.

“You must be Fliss.” “Roberta, yeah?” Fliss asked nodding as she shook the ladies hand “I’ve heard a lot about you.” “Same here.” The woman nodded before she turned to Frank. “You going to get me a beer?” “Get one yourself.” Frank shot back “Make yourself at home. You usually do.” Fliss grinned as Roberta aimed a slap to his head and he dodged the hit as if he knew it was coming. Which he probably did, Fliss realised. There was a comfortable familiarity between the two of them, even if Frank was trying to be all gruff about it.

Roberta came back and dropped into a chair and they all settled info a comfortable chat. Roberta asked Fliss questions about her Yard, Mary interjecting comments here and there as Frank stood by the grill observing their food. Any tension that Fliss had been feeling quickly evaporated as she became even more comfortable in her surroundings, and she happily chatted away. She told them about her brother, Steve and his 2 twin boys Charlie and Joel who were both Mary’s age, where she was from in England, and her parents, revealing to Frank’s surprise that Bill wasn’t actually her biological father.

“I didn’t know that.” Frank looked at her.

“Why would you?” Fliss shrugged “It’s not important really. My actual dad left my mum before she had me and then he died when I was 4 months old. I never met him. Bill brought me up from the age of 2 and adopted me when he married mum, so he is my dad, in everything but blood.”

“So you said they were out of town?” Roberta asked. “Anywhere nice?”

“Seattle.” Fliss said “Mum’s always wanted to go and, well last year they didn’t get much chance to travel what with everything that was going on so they’re just starting to get round to it. Kinda strange them not being around, first time since I’ve been in Florida that they haven’t.”

She pondered that for a moment, her nails lightly tapping on her beer bottle before she gave a grin and looked up at Frank. “I face timed them before. Their reaction when I told them I wasn’t simply sitting at home tonight like a total loser was priceless. I thought Mum was going to tell me to give her a ring when I got back safely…”

Frank gave a little laugh as he recalled their conversation earlier. He was about to reply when Mary cut in.

“Why’s that? You’re a grown up.”

Frank rolled his eyes at Mary’s nosey demeanour but Fliss didn’t seem to mind.

“Well like I told you sweetie, I don’t really have many friends here so I don’t go out a lot.” Fliss shrugged “I only really know the guys from the yard and a few people through my parents. My friends are all in the UK really… even the people I knew in Boston were more…” she trailed off before she took a breath and smiled “Well, I left them all behind when I moved.” “Well now you got us, right Frank?” Mary said simply as she sat on the large bean bag as she tossed a ping pong ball for Fred who obligingly chased it across the lawn. “Sure does.” Frank smiled “And we’re kinda hard to shake off. ” “Like a dose of the clap…” Roberta dropped her voice so only Fliss and Frank could hear. Fliss choked on her beer, sputtering a laugh as Frank flipped the woman off. “Fuck you” Fliss wiped the beer she had slopped onto the front of her shirt. She took little longer, than she needed as her eyes had watered up at the sudden sentiment of the moment. She had only known Frank and Mary a week, yet here she was in their home. Friendship was something she had been aching to feel again for months and now she found herself suddenly surrounded by it and she was a little overwhelmed if truth be told. When she finally looked up Frank was surprised to see there was a shine in her eyes as they had watered over. He shot her a wink, tactful enough not to mention it and then asked her if she would mind grabbing him a beer from the fridge whilst he kept an eye on the steaks, giving her chance to escape and compose herself. She shot him a grateful nod and headed inside, taking a deep breath.

“She alright?” Robert asked, watching.

Frank shrugged “Yeah, I think so, why?” “No reason.” Roberta said, standing up and moving to the grill “She just looked a little upset.” Frank shrugged again, focussing on the grill before he looked at Roberta “Think I should go after her?”

Roberta shot him a look as if he had just asked the most stupid question in the world. “Dur.”

“Watch that…” he instructed, handing Roberta the tongs before he headed inside.

“You alright?” he asked, as Fliss turned to look at him, gesturing to the beer on the side.

“Was just about to try and find the bottle opener…” Reaching into his pocket Frank handed it to her and smiled. “You ok?”

“Yeah…honestly, I guess, well, I’ve just…not done anything like this in a while…other than with my family so…” “Overwhelming?”

“A little, maybe. It’s just…nice.” she shrugged.

“You might not be saying that when you taste my cooking.” he shrugged and she laughed, following him back outside.

******

To Frank’s delight the food was actually pretty damned good. Roberta had brought a potato salad with her and everything got eaten, there wasn’t a scrap left which was why he and Fliss were now sat on the chairs in the garden, Fliss groaning about being in a food coma. Roberta had left half an hour ago and Mary was now flat out on the bean bag, covered by a fleece blanket. Frank had moved the grill away and lit the small portable fire pit before he had retrieved another blanket for Fliss and himself from the stash down the side of the sofa.

Their conversation had turned to Frank’s work and he was telling Fliss about some of the people he had met, the pair of them giggling as he spoke about a real stuck up couple he had fixed a boat for, who had then only gone and crashed it into the side of another boat on the first day of them taking it back out.

“What a waste.” Fliss laughed, “All your hard work gone up in smoke.”

“Well I got paid so…” Frank shrugged “And it was a nice boat to drive…”

“Sail.” Fliss corrected him and he rolled his eyes.

“I’m as much of a sailor as you are a cowgirl…”

Fliss grinned as she took another swig from her beer bottle before she turned to him, the reflection of the fire pit flashing in her eyes “well, if the boots fit”

Frank laughed “Do you actually have a pair of cowboy boots?”

“I used to.” She said, taking a deep breath “I spent a week in Texas one summer on a ranch, just to try my hand at Western riding you know. They gave me a pair of boots and a hat when I left. And then my husband burned them one night after I was late home. You know once he broke 3 of my pandora bracelets that I spent years collecting charms for because I bought the wrong coffee…”

Frank bowed his head. 

“Sorry.” She smiled, “that kinda killed the conversation didn’t it?”

Frank shook his head and shook his head softly “In all honesty I was just thinking about what a prick he is. Something I’ll never understand, a man laying hands on a woman.”

“I tried to understand it for years.” Fliss said “even after he was sent down I still wondered what I did to make him behave like that but now, well now I know it’s him with the problem not me.” she paused and shook her head again “I have no idea why I’m telling you all this, sorry…”

“Don’t apologise.” he shook his head “like I said the other night, I’m a good listener.” “Yeah, you are…you don’t talk much though.” she looked at him. 

“What do you think I’m doing now?” “That’s not what I mean.” she looked at him. “Just a pity I can’t google you like you did to me.”

Frank took a deep breath and grimaced as he looked at her “My dad told me” “Yeah, sorry about that, Mary…

“Its fine.” she sighed “It was a public case and a lot of interest amongst the circuit. The main reason I left boston was to get away from all of it…seems it just follows me all over.” Frank had a sudden flashback to the moment she had asked him what he was running from and took a deep breath. “Well, no matter how much you try and leave the past behind it always has a habit of catching up on you.” he said, glancing at Mary to make sure she was still asleep. He reached for his phone, tapped something into the search bar and hesitated for a second. Was he really sure he wanted to do this? 

He supposed it was only fair. He gently handed it to Fliss. “And you can’t google me but…” Fliss took the phone from him with a questioning look before she glanced down at the article on display. It was from the Boston Herald.com and her eyes were immediately drawn to the black and white picture of a pretty woman with short, blonde hair. She was the double of Mary. Across the top the headline read “A Mind for math: Is Diane Adler the missing female variable that finally solves the Navier-Stokes Equation?”

“This is your sister?” Fliss said softly, “Mary’s mom?”

Frank nodded “She was a genius. The The Navier–Stokes equation they’re talking about, they’re of huge interest in a purely mathematical sense. It hasn’t yet been proven whether solutions always exist in three dimensions and, if they do exist, whether they are smooth or…”

“You’ve lost me.” Fliss chuckled “I was an English major, numbers and maths…” Frank chuckled “Sorry, force of habit.” he said as Fliss handed him the phone back.

“So, what happened to her?” Fliss asked softly. “I mean, I figure something must have for you to end up with Mary but…”

“She killed herself.” he said softly

“Shit.” Fliss said, “I’m sorry Frank…” He took a deep breath. “She was only 27. I was running late for a date of all things. She just showed up, on my doorstep. And she never did that unannounced, and more to the point she never showed up with Mary either…”

Frank swallowed and Fliss waited patiently for him to continue.

“She said she needed to talk. I told her I would talk to her when I got back and I left. I mean, couldn’t be late for a date could I…god forbid it damage my chances of getting’ laid.” Fliss noticed the bitter edge in his voice as he continued “Came home that night. Mary was on the couch…and I found Diane on the bathroom floor.” Fliss gently touched his arm “Frank, there’s no way you could have known.” “But I should have.” Frank said, softly “She was my little sister…you know, I was 2 years older than her. I was only 8 when Dad died but I promised then I’d always look after her but…”

He shook his head. “Anyway, here we are. A few months later we moved here. Fast forward 6 and a half years and…we’re still here.”

“I take it Mary’s father isn’t about?”

Frank snorted “Diane was, well, just like Mary really. Socially awkward. She didn’t date enough really to be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Mary’s father didn’t even last a month.” “And your mom?”

“She turned her back on Diane when she got pregnant. Didn’t fit with her plan. That’s part of the reason I moved Mary and me here. She’s a very exacting woman, uncompromising, very British.” At that Fliss raised an eyebrow and Frank looked at her, suddenly realising what he had said. 

“She’s from England.” he added, and Fliss smiled. “She hated the fact I gave up my job and…well we don’t speak.”

“What did you do before becoming a Sailor?” Fliss smiled and Frank chuckled slightly.

“I was a Philosophy professor at Boston University” he said.

“Wow.” Fliss smiled “That’s pretty smart.” “You sound surprised?” he looked at her

“No, not at all.” Fliss protested.

He smiled again, “You know, sometimes I see so much of Diane in Mary, and she’s just a child. She comes out with stuff that’s way beyond her years. I mean earlier this year she asked me what I thought Executive Order 13769 was going to mean for all those refugees being refused entry…what 7 year old talks about stuff like that?”

“A very smart one.” Fliss replied.

“Exactly.” Frank nodded “I don’t want that life for her, the pressure associated with being a childhood genius like Diane was. Which is why she’s going to School in September, where she’ll hopefully learn how to be a kid.”

Fliss looked at him.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice it before when she was with the other kids on the lesson.” Frank eyed her and Fliss looked down a little “See, she doesn’t know how to a normal 7 year old…well, very rarely anyway. In fact the only time I’ve seen it recently is when she’s at the yard with you.

“She’s just a little awkward…but that’s nothing to worry about.” Fliss looked at her.

“But I do worry.” Frank sighed,

“Because you care.” Fliss said gently, her hand falling to his arm. “I think you’re being a little hard on yourself and her. She’s a good kid.” “Yeah, considering I brought her up.” Frank chuckled.

“Well I think you’ve done a good job so far.” Fliss shrugged “It can’t have been easy.”

“Still isn’t” Frank sighed. “It’s not how I envisaged my life panning out that’s for sure.” “Neither’s mine.” Fliss snorted “If you’d have told me 10 years ago that by the time I was here, aged 33 I’d have had my dreams cut short at the age of 28, then divorced after being hospitalised by a man I moved thousands of miles to be with I’d probably have laughed but here we are.” “He hospitalised you?” Frank frowned, suddenly feeling an inexplicable surge of anger towards this fucker, one which he really shouldn’t feel so strongly considering he had known Fliss for all of a week.

“Did you not read that bit?”

Frank shook his head “No I stopped reading after it mentioned domestic abuse. Was none of our business.”

“He wanted us to have a baby and frankly the thought of bringing a kid up, with him, in that environment…so when I found out I was pregnant in January last year I got rid of it. He found out and he beat me so hard he broke 3 of my ribs, ruptured my spleen and fractured my eye socket. I was in hospital for over a week.”

“Shit, Fliss, I had no idea…”

She wave his apology away “In a sick, twisted way I’m almost glad it happened. It was the final push to leave him for good. Wasn’t easy mind, I was low. Very low for a while and when the trial was going on…” she stopped again and shook her head “You know he plea bargained? Pleaded guilty to a lesser level of assault and got 4 years last summer. He’ll be out next summer I expect if he applies for parole, which he will because, well, that’s John all over.”

“Fucker.” Frank bit out between gritted teeth.

“Yeah, well it’s behind me now.” she said “I’m in a good place. I’m happy, my business is taking off and it’s a job I love. I have my family and, well, some friends.”

Frank smiled and nodded “What Roberta said before is true you know. We’re harder to get rid of than an STD.” Fliss laughed loudly and drained her beer bottle “Well I’m glad to hear it, because I kinda like you Sailor.” “Back at you Cowgirl.” They changed the subject then, Fliss talking about her horses, in particular her chestnut mare that was her pride and joy, and then when Mary stirred Frank glanced at his watch and realised it was past midnight. He didn’t want to kick Fliss out but when he stood saying he should get the little girl in bed, Fliss nodded and agreed she should be going as it was late.

Frank told her to wait whilst he swept Mary up and carried her into the house before he came back out to walk her down to her car.

“We should do this again.” Fliss said, “Only this time you can come to me. Although I’m a better cook than BBQ chef.” “You’re on.” Frank said, “Although don’t mention it to Mary. It’s all I’ll hear about.” Fliss grinned and then leaned up on her toes to press a soft kiss to his cheek. “Thanks Frank.”

He smiled as she climbed into her car and as she set off he tossed a hand at the tailgate as she rounded the corner. He headed back inside, contemplating the evening. The chat had been hard going in some places, he hadn’t told anyone about Diane in a long time. Hell, Mary didn’t know a lot about her mother, he tried to keep her sheltered but he knew that as she grew older that was going to get harder. He also knew how much it must have taken Fliss to open up the way she did. It left him with a puzzlingly warm feeling in his chest that she trusted him enough to do so, one he couldn’t really explain. And he had a feeling it was to do with the fact that he actually wanted to spend time with the woman and get to know her, instead of simply getting her into bed.

Yup, that was it.  For the first time in forever Frank realised he’d extended an offer of no strings attached friendship to a woman.

And he couldn’t deny, it was nice.

@the-omni-princess​​  @momobaby227​​ @geekofmanythings16​​ @angelofhell-666​​ @thewackywriter​​ @marvelfansworld​​​  @cobalt-gear​​  @asgardlover75​​ @jennmurawski13​​​​  @jtargaryen18​​​ @saiyanprincessswanie​​​  @navispalace​​​ @patzammit​​​  @joannaliceevans-fanficblog​​​ ​​ @djeniiscorner​​​  @ayamenimthiriel​​​  @coldmuffinbanditshoe​​​  @disneylovingal​​​ @madzmilllz​​  @sgtjaamesbaarnes​​ @sweater-daddiesdumbdork​​ @southerngracela​ @goldenfightergir​ @kellymat​ @official-and-unstable-satan​ @icanfeelastormbrewing​

[lesserpandeu]

Around The World in 17 Days | Day 1: Toronto

day 0; day 1

fandom: Seventeen 

genre: Fantasy + Angst & Fluff

pairing: Chan (Dino) x Reader 

words: 6,547

summary: Suffering from a condition that causes you to randomly end up in almost any place in the world, your life was a little chaotic, to say the least. When a solution seems to arise, you are more than happy to try it out. In order to heal, you need to meet the several people you are connected to by the red string of fate. And if this situation couldn't have gotten more ridiculous, one of them was your soulmate.You just don't know who.

Your first day on your mission dropped you in the big Canadian city, Toronto. You meet one of the first 'soul-bros', Chan. While you stress over how exactly you're going to fulfill your purpose with him, you end up doing it so naturally you barely even noticed.

A/N: so this has actually been out for a good year now on my ao3, but I forgot to post it here, so yeah. here. woops. ALSO I PROMISE DAY 2 IS COMING SOON I PROMISE. These things are tough because I research a lot about the cities so I get tired of working on this fic pretty easily. So it takes a lot of time, and I get lazy sooo that’s a really messy combination. Thanks for everyone who has stuck around though! You guys are amazing and believe me your comments make me want to work harder, haha. 

Day 1: Toronto

As you began to regain your conscious steadily, you instantly felt an intense difference in the general comfort of your surroundings. The bed you had fell asleep on was replaced by incredibly hard surfaces. Your back was laying up right on a wall of some sort, pain generally coursing through your spine. I should’ve seen a chiropractor before I started this shit, you thought as you winced at the pain when you began to process it. Arching your back, resulting in a cracking noise, your stretched out your arms and legs. Your left leg winced and started when it hit something, causing you to hurriedly open your eyes. 

A dumpster. Briefly taking a glance at your surroundings, you saw you were in a narrow alleyway. The buildings you were between were fairly tall, maybe 4 or 5 stories, and made of brick. Your best guess was that they were apartments. You next paid attention to the heat that had bothered you the instant you woke up. It was summer here still, so that wasn’t unusual. You reached for your pocket, turning on your phone. As you looked down, you started. After the brief panic, you observed closer what had spooked you. 

A thread from the one tied around your finger led across the alleyway, turning around the corner. Scrunching your eyebrows, you turned your hand around. It didn’t get tangled and when you reached with your other hand to touch it, your hand just went through it. It took a moment for you to think of what it might’ve been. One of the red strings of fate? You assumed that was it. Maybe it lead you to a soul bro? You nodded to yourself, slightly skeptical. How else am I supposed to find them? You reasoned. A jingle came from your phone, making you turn your attention towards it. It booted, showing you the time from your original timezone before swiftly switching to what you presumed to be the current timezone. 8 A.M. That was about normal. Your ability usually meant you’d wake up at about that time no matter the timezone, maybe earlier or later depending on how severe the difference was. As you dismissed all the notifications (nothing important, at least for now), a sun graphic appeared on one side of your phone showing the number “78 F” and underneath the word “Toronto”.

Toronto, huh? It wasn’t too far from the Canadian-American border, if you remembered about the location. Near Lake Ontario? You slightly rose an eyebrow. Wasn’t Canada supposed to be cold? Maybe it just wasn’t this time of the year? Clearing your mind of the minor questions you had, you looked back up to where the string was pulling you. You supposed the best way to start was to follow that string somewhere until you could maybe come up with some sort of game plan. Or a money exchange or ATM. Maybe you’d try to go penniless the whole day? The grumble in your stomach disqualified that thought as quickly as it came. Maybe you’d look for breakfast first.

Getting up and dusting yourself off, you began to follow the string. I wonder how far away they are? You wondered as you turned the corner. Your attention drifted from the string and to your surroundings. The surroundings were quite urban, a block away in the direction the string was leading you were office-like buildings much taller than the other buildings. More life appeared on this street than the one you had woken up on. The corner that the string directed you to turn at was what appeared to be a restaurant, advertised by a large sign. It would likely be lit up, blinking, and flashing if it were dark. The rest of the block had a few stores, some more plain looking residential places. It was a pleasant city, similar to other cities you had been to when transporting place to place.

Your stomach twisted inside of you yet again, enough to make you wince a bit and look down at it with a glare. “Be quiet,” you scolded it. It growled back at you, as if refusing to be silenced. Sighing at its persistence, you looked back up at the restaurant. As far as you knew, you only had one day in Toronto to meet the person you were tied to. But you still had to eat, right?

That being said, you figured to stop in. Just before, you slipped off your jacket, tying it around your waist. One essential thing about transporting was wearing layers. You never know when you’ll need it. 

Walking into the restaurant, you were surprised to see a fairly large amount of people. There were just as many enough that you even thought that they were full. Maybe I should just find another place, you thought. Arriving at that decision, you were just about to turn around and leave when a waiter had come up with a smile.

“Hello, just one?” Well it was too late now. Sure, you could simply explain that you had changed your mind and wanted to leave, but that would be awkward for your uncharismatic self to explain. ‘Hi, no, too many people here, I have anxiety haha.’ So you just caved in.

“Yes,” your voice cracked a little. Jesus Christ, you winced inwardly at yourself. This was going to be a long day. 

“Is the bar alright?” Did people even have breakfast at the bar section? You were positive they didn’t, but looking quickly back at the crowded area, you guessed it was because of the capacity. Who even goes out to eat this early in the morning? you kept reminiscing, ever so slightly agitated.

“Yes,” you nodded, a bit quieter than the last time. Despite what you believed to be an awkward interaction, the waiter didn’t seem to care, grabbing a napkin wrapped snugly around some silverware and briefly telling you to follow them. You did so, rubbing your arms, surprised at how cold it was in the restaurant compared to the outside. The waiter sat you at the bar, handing you a menu and leaving you. 

Legs hanging above the ground, you leaned your elbows on the bar counter, looking briefly at the menu. Becoming disinterested fairly quickly, you took a moment to look around. To your left was a woman, body completely turned away from you conversing with her partner. On your right was an empty seat and what you were somewhat convinced was the last one available in the whole restaurant. In front of you, obviously, was the bar, with various taps of beers, other liqueurs, and whiskies stacked on the shelves on the wall. In addition, there was a TV playing some sort of morning show program. Although you took awhile to watch it and the delayed subtitles, you couldn’t recognize it or anyone hosting it. 

The menu was a typical breakfast diner’s menu. Omelettes, pancakes, toast, the usual. You became uninterested in it fairly quickly when your phone started to buzz with the sound of your face call ringtone. You should’ve guessed he would try to contact you. Looking around quickly to make sure no one would try to take your order or judge you for face chatting in public (?), you pulled your phone out of your pocket and answered it.

“Good morning,” you answered when Rowans far too close to the camera face loaded, only illuminated by the screen on the phone. It didn’t necessarily mean it was dark in your timezone, but he refused to use any other sort of light in his dark tent besides candles or lanterns. Electrical lighting “tampered with his work”, or at least that's what he insisted.

“So where are you?” he asked, becoming minimally aware of his ridiculous angle on the camera and tried to fix it a little. It didn’t do much anyways.

“Toronto,” you gave a bit of a forced smile. “But the heat makes me doubt that.”

“Ontario? Oh it's hot this time of year,” he said. “Remember my son, Jacob?”

“Yes, the author,” you did your best to quickly let him know you remembered him, lest he go on to tell you his life story from the moment he was born again. “He lives around here, right?”

“Yes, I’ve been up there a few times to see him,” he laughed a little. The glimpse of the man’s softer side helped you crack a smile. It was short as he went straight back to business. “Did you find them?”

“No,” you admitted, looking at the string. It was leading you out the entrance of the restaurant. “I needed breakfast first. I just got up.”

“You do realise you only have a day to complete your purpose?” Anxiety flooded through you, mostly in your arms that held the phone.

“Yes,” you sighed. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“It’s up to you if this ends up working or not,” he sipped some of his tea. Though you couldn’t see it, you heard it. Rowan made a subconscious effort to make a sound when he drank.

“I know,” you groaned. “I just don’t know how the hell I’m going to do this.” A short silence came after you, as Rowan set down his tea with a clink.

“I’ll tell you what,” he shifted himself in his seat and the camera. “This isn’t  just some stranger whose life your trying to fix.” Except that’s exactly what this is, you rebutted in your head. “This is a soul you’ve been connected to since before either of you were born. The two of you have a connection. Every person you meet this next week or two is connected with you in some way. Fate predetermined that these people could have their lives changed forever by you or that your life would be changed forever by them. Fate is going to be doing all the work for you.” He was probably right. But considering how odd and confusing the situation was for you, you didn’t know if that helped much at all.

“Well,” you paused. “I should probably get the breakfast in me and get out there as soon as possible. Time waits for no one.”

“I wish you all the best of luck,” he told you in his naturally grandiose way. You told him a soft “bye” before you hung up, just at miraculously the same time that a waiter came to take your order from behind the bar.

“Hello, welcome to-” the waiter had begun telling you a customary greeting as you put your phone back in your pocket. He paused suddenly just as he had started, making you quickly look up at him to see what he was doing. He was looking over you, a smile quickly spread on his features as he spoke somewhat louder to somebody behind you.

“Well, I’ll be, it’s Dinosaurus Rex. I thought you were supposed to be gone for the summer like everyone else!” You supposed he saw a friend and you awkwardly looked away from him and back at your menu, like you were trying to memorize all of the pancake toppings. As much as you tried to not be any part of the conversation, you couldn’t help to at least overhear.

“Please stop calling me that, that’s not even a real dinosaur,” the voice that responded was somewhat quiet with a hint of annoyance. “And I thought I mentioned that I was staying for the summer.”

“I get ya, gotta work those loans off,” the waiter seemed to shiver. In that brief moment, after you became less interested in your perusing, your attention was caught by the string. It had definitely moved in the time that you had sat down to this moment. The fact that it was moving gave you an eerie, nervous feeling. Maybe you should’ve just skipped breakfast and went after them? 

Your mangled feelings had then left just as urgently as they came, and your eyes shot back down at the string. As you held your breathe, the string rotated to your right, at a steady pace that seemed to match the sound of the footsteps as they passed behind you. You heard an airy sigh as in the corner of your eye, a silhouette appeared to hop on the bar stool next to you. After a moment of utter disbelief, you carefully tilted your sight from your ring finger to the person now next to you. Following the bright red string that only you could see, its path ended at his crossed arms. You caught sight of the end on the ring finger of his right hand, tucked beneath his left elbow. 

The revelation paralyzed you and your gaze, unable to look away. Your mind realized that if you continued to gawk at him, you would raise suspicions and give off the worst first impression ever. But your body seemed to refuse to listen, as you took in everything about the first “soulbro” you had ever met. 

The bottom layer of his dark brown hair was short. His top layer curled towards his face with a wave to it. He wore a somewhat oversized black graphic tee. His face was young and his eyes were sharp, but they had a small, kind droop to them that you could miss easily at a mere glance. As he continued his conversation that you had muted out, his smile shone not only on his lips but in his eyes. 

The amount of time that past with you looking at the boy become well over uncomfortable when you attempted to get your wits together just in time for you to look back at the waiter, looking back at you. Panicking, you supposed he had come back to you for your order.

“Oh, uh, eggs, sunnyside up, and bacon. And an orange juice.” You looked away quickly, but back at the waiter again briefly when you swear he was giving you a look drowning in suspicion. With a modest amount of shame, you looked down again, menu extended and lips pursed. You were too embarrassed to look up again as he took the menu, saying the typical “i’ll be right back with your drink blablabla”. 

“I’ll have the usual,” your soul bro told him casually after you placed your order.

The waiter left, leaving you completely stiff and nervous, the prescence of the person next to you making you incredibly uneasy. In attempt to calm yourself, you exhaled. Okay. Calm down. Like Rowan said, everything is going to be fine. There’s a reason this guy’s connected to me. I can do it. Just make small talk, get to know him. It shouldn’t be that hard, right? As your nerves returned to a healthy level, you shyly looked at him again. It appeared he still wasn’t paying much attention to you, currently you were just a person he happened to be sitting next to in a crowded restaurant. You thought of what to do, trying to think of anything casual to discuss. What did Canadians talk about?

Without any critical thinking from you whatsoever, you turned your torso towards him as you asked him:

“Hey, did you see the hockey game last night? Pretty intense, right?”

IMBECILE. COMPLETE MORON. YOU FUCKING SOUP CAN. your brain called you names as you realized how stupid you just sounded. You had successfully concocted the lie that you watched hockey while simultaneously just assuming the now bewildered looking boy watched hockey because, oh, we’re in Canada. 

He did a double-take, completely taken aback. He hadn’t realized at first that you were talking to him. Or he did, but he just took a moment to actually process the weird and confusing moment. “Uh, What?” was all he could respond with. Understandably. Petrification hit you yet again, causing your gaze to fumble around and words and thoughts jumble into a complete mess as stutters were all your mouth could formulate.

A laugh sounded from him afterwards, stopping the mess you were experiencing as you looked at him again. It wasn’t like a small “ha” or “hahaha?” laugh, he was cracking up. Maybe you should’ve felt bad like “oh, he’s laughing at me im such an idiot”, but it somehow didn’t feel like he was shaming or embarrassing you at all. As he gradually recovered to form sentences, he wiped his eyes and looked at you with a quirked brow.

“Your visiting, right?”

“Uhm, ah, yes,” you almost mumbled. 

“Well, first, welcome to Canada, and second, hockey season doesn’t start until the fall,” he informed you gently. You gave a small “oh” sound, shifting awkwardly in your seat.

“Where are you from?” he asked curiously, still smiling kindly. You told him where, which he hummed to in understanding. A very brief silence loomed over, causing the panic to set back in your body. “How long have you been here?”

“Oh, maybe a couple,” you paused, almost quickly about to say that for all you knew, you had only been there for at the most an hour. “Late last night, I haven’t gotten the chance to do anything here yet.”

Well if you couldn’t get any more suspicious than asking someone seemingly Canadian if they had seen the nonexistent hockey game the other night, you had just changed your answer for how long you had been in the country mid-sentence. If this guy was an immigration officer, you’d be fucked. 

He at least pretended that he didn’t seem to mind and nodded. You tried to ease into a conversation again by looking over your shoulder at the crowded seating. 

“Is it always this busy at 8 in the morning?”

“No,” somebody else answered. You looked back across the bar to see the waiter, setting down your iced orange juice, with an orange wedge squeezed onto the rim of the glass and a little hot pink umbrella. He then put glass of an iced dark drink which you presumed to be coffee, black, towards your “friend”. “We got a U.S. tour group stop by for breakfast this morning. Could’ve warned us about it, but they just came out of nowhere.”

“I was about to ask, its way too crowded for this time in the day,” the soulbro nodded. He looked back at you and quickly arched his brows and “oh”ed before uncomfortably putting his arms in front of him in a shy/defensive gesture.

“Excuse me, my name is Chan Lee. I forgot to introduce myself.” You swiftly told him it was okay and introduced yourself next.

“And I’m Jack. Just call that guy Dino.”

“That’s not my name,” you watched Chan roll his eyes. 

“Sure it is! You look like a dinosaur, so why not?”

“I don’t look like a dinosaur, Jack.”

“You’re not gonna admit that if you squint really really hard, you kind of look like one?”

“Jack, Table 10’s order is ready!”

“Shouldn’t you be going now?”

As he hurriedly left, he yelled back, “THIS ISN’T OVER!”

The interaction made you laugh, turning Chan’s attention back towards you. You both took sips of your drinks as the conversation steadily became more casual.

“So… Dino?” you started back up. He groaned.

“Just a name my friends call me. It’s not my favorite.”

“Well…” you squinted at him a bit. You saw it. 

“Yeah, just forget it,” he waved it off, with a skeptical face. Your grin widened and a laugh left you.

Taking a sip of your orange juice, you felt a shiver run through you. It was hot outside, but that seemed to instantly mean intense cooling inside as always. As you set your glass down, you looked back at Chan. “I thought Canada was supposed to be cold.”

“It is, in the winter. Summer gets pretty hot in Toronto though,” he explained between sips of his own drink. You nodded, Toronto wasn’t incredibly North. 

As the small talk continued, you were surprised by how easy it was to get to know him. It turned out Rowan was right after all. This wasn’t incredibly difficult. But even though it wasn’t hard to converse, you still couldn’t place exactly what you were supposed to be doing to help the guy out. You knew one of the people you were going to meet would be your soulmate, as much as that terrified you. But you couldn’t just assume everyone was going to be the “one” or whatever. You figured you had to dig deeper. But that was going to be tough, or at least you thought. How were you supposed to potentially change somebody’s life in one day?

“So, what do you do?” you asked. You were almost surprised by your own “boldness”. Well, bold for you.

“Hmm?” he seemed to momentarily leave and enter back in the discussion, setting down his coffee. “Oh, I’m a student in medicine at University of Toronto.” You nodded. 

“Medicine, eh? What do you want to be?”

He chuckled hesitantly, seeming somewhat fake. Oh? 

“Yeah, I don’t really know yet.” Oh. That’s when you thought: Maybe he’s one of those students that don’t actually know/like what they’re studying? Medicine seemed like one of those fields where students would enter to satisfy some sort of familial standard. Not necessarily because they themselves wanted it. You hesitated as you stirred your juice with your straw. Should you ask?

“Your orders!” the waiter, Jack, slipped from behind the bar with both your orders. Even though you hadn’t come together. He slid your platter towards you and then Chan’s. Your glimpse at his food showed you a stack of pancakes doused in cream and strawberries. Nice. 

Naturally, the conversation was interrupted as you had now received your food, conversation becoming relatively minimal. Thankfully, after he finished his meal first with you close behind, the conversation stayed.

“Any plans for what your doing while your here?”

“Ahh,” you paused. Maybe this was your chance to spend the rest of the day with him? But how to do so without coming on too strong and scaring him away? ‘Lmao, you’ ‘How bout YOU show me the town tonight, big boy ;)))’ ‘Greetings soulmate, allow me to follow you for the day and reveal your deepest, darkest emotions so I may heal you’ ‘I have come from afar to change your life’.

“... nothing?” before you realised it, you were taking way too long to think of an excuse and Chan had caught on to your speechlessness.

“...no, haha?” you smiled nervously. Your smile must have been contagious, as he then reflected it.

“Well, some people like to go down to the TU campus-”

“Are you here alone, though?” Jack had leaned against the bar from the other side, more liberated to socialize now that the tour group he complained about earlier had left. 

“Yeah, just me!” you nodded towards him.

“That’s no fun,” he groaned. He beamed up and leaned over the bar, towards you. “Want me to show ya around?!”

With all due respect to Jack, you had shit to do. Specifically with Chan. You tried keeping a straight face while you looked away, pretending to consider the premise. Before you could gently turn down the offer, you looked over at Chan as he spoke up. 

“I thought you said you were busy today?” he seemed annoyed.

“When did I say that?”

“When I asked if you wanted to hang out today last night,” Jack had a face that seemed like he was searching his brain for answers when he “oohhhh”ed.

“I forgot,” he seemed distraught and mildly upset. “I’m covering Wendy’s shift today while she’s at her friend’s wedding…”

You gave a small laugh, “It’s okay, I’m fine.”

“No, it’s not,” he groaned. “Sightseeing by yourself is, like, boring as fuck.” 

“Some people, believe it or not, like having that kind of time to themselves,” Chan defended.

“Blah, blah, that’s bullshit,” Jack argued back, almost like a toddler. He then gasped and yelled, “YOU CAN SHOW HER AROUND!”

“JACK,” he simply stated. 

“C’mon! Don’t you want a real local to show you around?” the question was directed at you. Chan also hesitantly looked at you, awaiting a response. 

“Uhhh, I mean,” you hesitated. “It sounds nice, but I wouldn’t want to impose on anyone-”

“Meh, Chan had nothing to do today, anyways,” he shrugged. “It’s not a problem, right?” He directed his question towards Chan.

You shyly looked at him, when he met your gaze he quickly looked away, flustered and struggling to find his words. “Uhm, well no-”

“PERFECT!” he hopped over the bar counter (who the fuck was this dude) and pulled you both up from your seats by your arms. “Chan’s been needing a date.”

“A d-date?”

“Now, GO HAVE FUN,” he dragged you out towards the entrance and pushed you both out the restaurant. 

Did you just get kicked out?

Now it was just the two of you, awkwardly standing on the sidewalk at the entrance to the restaurant, standing by the side to not impede pedestrian traffic. A brief silence filled with awkwardness, confusion, and tension swept over as you looked at him in confusion.

“We didn’t even pay?”

“Y-yeah,” he scratched his head, looking back inside. “Well, it’s coming out of his check.”

“Ah…” you awkwardly pulled at the bottom of your shirt. 

“Yeah, so…” he rubbed his hands together. “I’m so sorry, about all of this. Jack is… unusual. He means well, though. I wouldn’t want to intrude on your stay here, so you totally don’t have to do what he says, I can give you a few places to go, tips, recommendations for food, photo ops-”

You breathed deeply as you watched him talk. His looks were nothing to sneeze at, and him rambling on made you tune out as it only drew you more towards his face. He made eye contact, making you flinch, unnoticeably perhaps as he just looked away and kept talking. As much as you tried to not think about what Rowan said about the soulmate, you couldn’t help but at least wonder. Well, it was more like daydreaming. 

Before you could finish admiring him and tune back into what he was telling you, you found his mouth stop moving and his face look towards you, waiting for interaction on your part.

“Oh, uhm, ah,” you not so charismatically brainstormed to find the words you were looking for. “Actually, I was… uhm…” You folded your arms across in front of you in an instinctively defensive manner. “I would appreciate being shown Toronto by a local, kind of like what Jack said. That is, if you actually wanted to, I don’t want to force you into something you don’t want to do, after all-”

“Okay, I can do that.” You stopped dead in your sentence when he said that, trying to suppress the light fluttery feeling of happiness that welled up inside of you. You smiled wide, only slightly embarrassed by your probably red cheeks. 

“Really? Oh, thank you so much-”

“Don’t mention it,” he laughed, scratching the back of his neck. “Besides, I think we get along pretty well, anyways.”

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

To start, he took you down to University of Toronto’s campus where you could see a few people, young and old, laid out on blankets. Some were having picnics, some were just enjoying the day, all in the shade. The temperature had gotten higher from when you first woke up, to a point that you couldn’t ignore it. 

Nervously, Chan asked if you would like your picture taken there, which you said yes to. You posed cutely along a tree for a short few minutes, before the heat began to set and he proposed going to cool down in the visitor’s centre. As you did so, you thought to bring up the topic of what he was majoring in.

“Medicine, huh?”

“Hmm?” he set down his can of coke that he got from the vending machine. “Oh, yeah.”

“Do you… like it?” he didn’t make any eye contact as he just sat staring at the can, tracing the rim with his finger. 

“Can’t say,” he said. “It’s not the worst thing, I don’t hate it. I think the idea is cool, and the stuff I’m learning isn’t all that bad, but…” he took a deep breath. “I have no idea of telling if this is what I was meant to do.”

Silence overtook the both of you for awhile. You definitely understood. You didn’t know what you were going to graduate with a degree in when you first went to college, either. That part of your life was so hard, you remembered. Leaving home, living by yourself, starting your journey to the rest of your life. It was terrifying. It was lonely. No matter the amount of support you got, you still didn’t have what you thought you needed. Someone, something, anything to tell you what to do. 

Afterwards, he decided to take you to the Toronto sign with the fountain. You took the trolleys, falling in love with the idea at first and soon realizing it was still public transport and wasn’t some Cinderella carriage. It was pretty busy to, the two of you were packed in, and while the AC was doing its best to keep up, it just wasn’t made to withstand the heat. It was up to about 96 degrees, you overheard some other people saying who were complaining about it. 

“It’s so freaking hot,” he groaned as he shook his shirt, trying to create some sort of flowing air. “You came on a pretty bad day. I mean, it’s not Canada day, but still.”

“Yeah, the heat is killing me,” you laughed, fanning yourself. “At least I got to meet you, though!” You stated a little too enthusiastically. You could’ve sworn the person you were standing over looked up at the two of you, as if watching some sort of drama or crime taking place. 

Nonetheless, Chan became shy again, scratching his hair a little as he smiled and awkwardly looked out a window. As he did, his eyes shot open as he then stated “crap” and grabbed your hand as he pulled you off the trolley at the stop that the trolley was just about to leave. Once you both were out of danger of being crushed by the doors, he instantly spurted out a bunch of apologies, which you needed to quelm. 

He calmed down, and after he let go of your hand in a silly, flustered way, you headed to the fountain. Along the way, you stopped and asked if you could get some ice cream, to which he happily obliged. Hopping into a sweets shop for a moment, you both got your respective favorite flavors in cones. You paid, after much arguing on both of you insisting you would cover it, Chan threw in the towel after witnessing your aggressive assertiveness to pay.

“I’ll just have to pay next time!” he ended with, handing you your cone after holding them while you fumbled with your bag, which still seemed suspiciously prepared for whatever you could need. You smiled a little, almost solemnly. You thought about staying in contact, but you remembered the reason you were there with him in the first place. To fulfill some sort of purpose you were meant to do with him, and go on to the next one. This day was technically supposed to be the only one where you would spend time with him at all. It’s not like you could come to Toronto, or wherever your “soul bros” were whenever you felt like it. You had a busy job that worked you as hard as it could within the legal (though you had your doubts at times) limits. 

You made it to the sign, and it was crowded. And hot again. The ice cream helped minimally, and you could hardly stand the heat. The photo op was ruined quite a few times by kids who were climbing around the sign, but you did manage to get a nice picture with the second ‘T’. Someone offered to take a picture of the two of you, which Chan hesitantly complied to. You understood nearly instantly why, as the minute he stood by you, you realized how weird it was going to look. In a brave attempt to prevent the weird picture you came closer and wrapped an arm around him, posing with a peace sign. You didn’t catch his reaction, smiling at the person who was taking your picture with Chan’s phone. You heard the faint shutter click over the noise of a thousand demons (commonly known as children), as the stranger then put down the phone and came up to Chan and gave him his phone back. You said thank you, followed by a hurried one from Chan, who seemed flustered. You turned to look at him, seeing his face was flushed, maybe just due to the heat, but the rush of heat that you felt the second you came in contact made you think otherwise. 

“You guys make a nice couple!” the stranger complimented with a genuine smile before he left. Oh, boy. 

“How’d it turn out?” you asked as you tried to peak at the photo. You saw yourself smiling, fairly brightly, while leaning on a surprised Chan who was looking at you as opposed to the camera. The ‘T’ was practically illegible, as well. 

“I blame the photographic technique,” you playfully patted his shoulder. He chuckled, and then groaned. 

“I suck at posing for pictures,” he stated. “I think I have one good selfie I’ve ever taken. I had weird hair then, too.”

“Let’s take a better one, then!” you suggested.

“I’d rather be done with my complimentary sweat soak first.”

“Good point,” you giggled. “Any plans on what to do?”

“Hmm,” he seemed to think, though only for a brief second. “We could go to the aquarium. I’ve never been and I’d think it’s air conditioned.”

“Sounds like a plan!”

Oh, it was a plan. Maybe not one where you weighed the pros and cons of, but a plan. Everything was fine until you got there. It appeared as if everyone else in the city had the same plan as you did. The line for tickets was enormous, and the aquarium itself was packed. 

You stayed regardless, at least it was cool. You started by walking through some more isolated halls with fish tanks. All sorts of colorful fish from yellow, blue, and red swam aside you, back and forth. You’d point out a fish you thought looked nice every once in awhile, or one that was doing something funny. 

Chan tried to take some pictures of the fish, to which he voiced some disappointment of because the glass hindered it. As you went further in, more kids started showing up and running around, bumping into the two of  you. As minimally irritating as it was, at one point a little girl came running full speed and crashed into Chan. She fell down, and he had suddenly pushed into you a bit.

Before you could understand that was what happened yourself, Chan crouched down and asked if she was okay. You watched them as the girl got up and looked down at a scratch she got. 

“I think I hurt my knee,” the girl spoke shyly.

“Uh oh, do you want to get a band aid for it?” he asked gently. She nodded silently. You smiled at how he handled the situation with care. Several college students would be angry as all hell if a kid ran into them. You commended his patience.

“I think I have one with me,” you kneeled down to the girl and started searching your backpack. You pulled out one and took the packaging off, applying it as she let you.

“Thank you!” she beamed. She turned to run off again but paused, turning around and waving. You both waved back before getting back up on your feet.

“I see you, Doctor Lee. You’d nail the pediatrician vibe if you went that way,” you mildly teased him. He laughed, scratching the back of his head.

“Yeah, I guess that would be cool.” You hesitated a moment before you began walking further into the aquarium.

“I don’t know if my career is what I’m meant to do, either.”

He looked at you quickly enough for you to feel a minitare draft hit your face. You continued.

“Working is hard, no matter what your doing. My mother always told me to never pick your favorite hobby as your career. Then that hobby becomes your job. And I think there is some truth to that…” you stopped at a dimly lit jellyfish tank and stared at the purple tentacles.

“But I also don’t see the problem with loving your job. Yes, it becomes a job, but doesn’t that just make you love it all the more?” You took a long pause, sneaking a glance at Chan. He was staring at the tank, as if thinking about your words.

“Even if your job isn’t your favorite, why can’t you learn to love it anyway? Someone’s gotta do it. Your role matters. Medicine is so important in that regards. You get to make people’s lives better, longer, and less painful. You can give them the chance to find the meaning that we are all searching for in our little lives. Maybe some people feel that sense of what they’re meant to do. And maybe some need more time to figure that out.”

Your monologue finished, leaving you two in the silence of the one place in the aquarium that wasn’t loud and bombarded with people. For awhile you both stood there, just staring at the slow movements the jellyfish made. Something about the moment made you feel that you had done what you came to do.

“... Thanks,” Chan broke the silence. You smiled and looked over at him. 

“It’s no problem.”

After the aquarium, you realized how late it was. The evening produced the wash of orange and yellow that was starting to light up all the street lamps. It only seemed to encourage younger people out to enjoy the night on the town. Traffic seemed worse and more people were out on the streets. 

“Hey, (y/n),” Chan initiated as you slowly walked down the street together. “Today was lots of fun. Seriously. I really enjoyed it.”

“Hey, I did too!” you replied.

“I just wanted to say thanks. I thought I was gonna stay in all day and do nothing but this was so much better than that. Like, I don’t wanna be cheesy or anything, I feel like we were almost meant to meet in that stupid diner.” You chuckled to yourself. If only he knew.

“I get it, I felt the same way.”

You kept walking together like that until you came to a park and decided to sit. The two of you kept talking and talking until somehow, in your exhaustion, you managed to fall dead asleep on his shoulder. Though you didn’t notice, Chan surely did as his cheeks grew red and his lips curled into a smile, looking back up at the painted sky.

[rockshortage]

Question time! So, how moral is Hector's spine in terms of slavery, experimenting on people, prostitution, u know all the ugly and uncomfy topics of fallout universe. What he would fight and what ignore. Sry if this was mentioned but dont remember tbh if i saw it.

Thank you for the question! Once again I wrote Way Too Much

If we were to go by DnD alignments, Hector is chaotic neutral.

He doesn’t have strong opinions in either direction, but he’s easily influenced by the opinions of the people around him. And since he’s surrounded by raiders, he has less and less trouble agreeing with them as time goes on. Putting that kind of agreement into action is a different story though.

Hector can be cruel as long as he’s ignorant to the fact that people exist as individuals, as long as he’s able to dehumanize them in some way. His success rate really depends on the group of people in question. The easiest ones are children of atom and gunners. Raiders used to be easy but it gets harder the more he bonds with the gangs. Settlers are difficult.

In general, Hector isn’t a sadist. He doesn’t enjoy preying on people who are weaker than him and tries to avoid raids on settlements as much as he can. In terms of conquering new territory, he’d much rather take out rival gangs, clear out a gunner base or just claim some vermin infested ruins to fix up. It works for the most part but he can’t always get away with it, and one of the many things Gage has to teach him is how to stop being so sympathetic to the poor little settlers. Or at least how to tough it out and just fuck up their day regardless of how he feels about it. He has no problem with the ‘doing what you have to’ angle, but in the context of Nuka World, they’re definitely not just doing this for survival anymore. So he can’t justify it in that way.

He’s not a fan of slavery at all. How the raiders treat the traders at the market has been a thorn in his side from day one, but with how little respect and authority he commands at the start, there’s just nothing he can do about it. Not without the risk of making all hell break loose anyway. Once he gets things a little more under control, he tries to phase it out gradually, in a way that won’t be obvious to the raiders until it’s too late or they just don’t care anymore. Like giving the traders a salary disguised as a budget for improving their posts and inventory. Letting them become ‘experts’ at their jobs, which gives them some amount of authority. He does have to put his foot down about the collars and fair treatment, which is sure to cause backlash. So he can’t do that too early in his career. Eventually though, business is good, the caps are flowing and there will be people who actually want to work there. Maybe some of the original traders stay, or they can hire new help so they themselves can leave. It works, but it takes a really long time. Too long for Hector to be really considered heroic or anything for freeing them.

Experimenting on people… depends on the ‘mood’ I guess. In the pursuit of SCIENCE, he can sometimes forget that morals and ethics are a thing. Desecrating bodies is a non-issue, because they’re dead anyway, why should anyone care? If spirits exist and the spirit of that person decides to hang around here and get offended, then that’s their fucking problem, isn’t it? Live experiments are more tricky. If he believes they deserve to be in this position in some way, and they’re acting all tough guy, then it’s doable. But if they’re screaming, crying, begging? Hard no, abort mission.

Prostitution… People being openly and overly sexual makes him very uncomfortable, so he certainly doesn’t like it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it though, as long as people are doing it voluntarily. Live and let live, just not near him please. ((had (have?) half a mind to make the story of Rammstein’s “Puppe” part of his backstory, because my brain connected the two at one point and the thought has not let me go ever since. like yknow... big sister who saved baby hector having to earn money to survive somehow and meeting a bad ending And the song goes so fucking hard it gives me chills every time. It would add another layer to his discomfort for that kinda stuff but it’s like. So Much Angst))

[timeisacephalopod]

Mini Sex Toy Material Lesson

@boompowkablam​ I wanted to answer your question in full context rather than just handing out an answer with no rhyme or reason behind it so! Prepare for a lesson in sex toy materials! Warning: there will be dildo pics under the cuts for visual demonstration.

This is gunna go from worst to best and I’ll have a TL:DR at the end. 

So, worst: jellies like one of these fucks.

On a texture level they’re tacky and sticky so they just feel gross, but on a material level they’re porous. What that means is that they’re like sponges, they’ll absorb all your bacteria and leak all their gross stuff into you because the material has wide pores. They straight up aren’t body safe. You could, in theory, try to make them more body safe by throwing condoms over them, but that only kind of helps from my understanding, it doesn’t make them safe. Also condoms are expensive, so. It also ‘sweats’ in packaging- kind of like the material is wet and its sticking to the packaging. And dust sticks to this shit like no tomorrow.

Don’t stick this in any office, but especially don’t put it in your booty. Booty bacteria is extra strength so its just going to stick into the material more, and because its so porous its impossible to truly clean. I’ve hear horror stories that range from chemical burns to the junk to the toy going moldy on people. Don’t use these.

TPE: this is that plastic-y feeling or rubbery feeling stuff like this little bastard

This shit isn’t gunna feel good anyway, its rigid, often has little ridges that show that it was stuck in a mold and not filed down after and the little ridges can be sharp- those fuckers can cut and you don’t want to cut yourself on your sex toys. Also its not body safe to my knowledge though its not like jellies as far as being that porous, that said I feel like it should be somewhat obvious that you wouldn’t want plastic in sensitive areas on principle.

Silicone: like this lil fucker

Silicone is good! Make sure it doesn’t feel like its mixed with something else- generally its smooth to the touch, not sticky, not rubbery feeling. A good quality silicone won’t have a tacky texture and you are generally able to move your hand across it without sticking. Not all silicone is good quality silicone, but the stuff that feels more like the kind you’d find in your kitchen (if softer to the touch) is better quality silicone than something that has a slightly tacky texture. Some silicone has a very grippy texture but not because its sticky, but rough. That’s okay too, its just the type of silicone that is and you’d feel the difference between low quality silicone and grippy silicone.

Actually, while I’m at it this is why visiting a sex shop is kind of important. Some people don’t like certain textures, some people have allergies and are looking for especially good quality silicone may want to feel the material or ask the people working there what’s best for someone with allergies/ sensitivities, and if you’re like me you just don’t like certain textures so you’ll want to gently feel up the dildo anyway. 

Don’t feel weird doing this, you have no idea how much of my day is spent handling dongs. Its not weird and you should feel how a toy works anyway, I’ve unsold so many toys because people didn’t like the texture or the way the toy worked- you don’t want something you hate! Go feel up some toys to figure out what features you want and what ones you don’t.

Glass and metal are also really good choices but they come with the downside of being totally rigid. Some people like that, but the last thing anyone wants is something jammed in at the wrong angle and it doesn’t bend to your body given that that can hurt. But both materials are fine for the body and if your muscles are strong enough to shatter the glass seek medical help because that shit is not natural. Also a lot of glass toys are shatterproof so they’ll be extra fine. Don’t throw them off buildings to test durability, but they’ll be fine for what you’re using them for. Also, great for temperature play! Glass and metal toys have the added benefit of being useful for other types of play in your sex life if you like toying with your senses during sex or by yourself :)

Now, on to the answer to the actual question at hand: the best dildo goes to this guy:

Like, its not definitively ‘the best’ on account of that can depend on the person. This one is quite girthy, which can be off-putting to some people. Its also that really grippy silicone, which can also be off-putting to people texture wise. Also use lube for the love of god use lube on fun factory toys. You don’t want to ram their exceptionally high quality grippy silicone anywhere without lube and yes, that includes the self lubricating vagina. You should use lube as a general rule, it helps things go easier and also silicone can cause some friction internally and you don’t want too much friction. Just a little friction.

The reason I’ve listed it as ‘best’ though is because its a very high quality silicone- all of Fun Factory’s toys are body safe (no material guess work like a lot of other companies) and they’re a high enough grade of silicone that if you’ve got allergies or sensitivities you’re more than likely fine (leaving some room for exceptions for people with extreme sensitivities even among extremes). Generally if someone’s very concerned about material this is what I send them towards. It does come with a cost, which doesn’t necessarily translate to quality with sex toys- you can get a 35$ silicone dildo that doesn’t vibrate that’s still a better quality than the 65$ vibrating jelly rabbit- but in this particular case the money is worth it.

Other than that any solid silicone, glass, or metal dildo is a good choice. From material its more a decision on size, if you want it to look realistic or not (I find lesbians don’t like more realistic dildos more often than not, and also some people just find the more realistic looking ones more aggressive and want something less in their face), and actual function. If you’re camming you might want something with a suction cup so you can use it hands free, or if you’re using it with a partner you might have joint desires about what its for, you get the point.

Vibrating dildos are more work because then you get into tech specs and other considerations on function and what you’re looking for (ie. thrusting features vs strong vibes vs rabbit style (a clitoral attachment to stimulate the clitoris from the outside for anyone who is unfamiliar with the term), ect). But this is an ok run down of non vibrating boys. There are more materials to consider, and all their care options too, but these are the materials I see around the most regardless of where the toys are being sold.

Also one may ask why anyone can sell jellies anyway if they aren’t body safe and that is because FDA type structures don’t monitor sex toy industries. So any asshole who argues its good for companies to monitor themselves like they don’t have all the incentive in the world to sell people garbage that can result in dramatic medical consequences like jelly dildos can go sit on a jelly and rotate. This is why we need regulations and thank you for reading in on a mini sex toy material lesson with a dash of fuck companies propaganda lol.

[ego-driven-one-wing-angel]

I LOVE YOUR WRITING! What's your routine? Do you have one? Any tips on being a better writer?? THANKKSSS

I want to first say thank you for the compliment, it’s super sweet <3.

During Quarantine this is about a rough idea on what my daily schedule has been the past three weeks:

I wake up around 9-10 am. Depending on the type of sleep I’ve received. But I’m always up before 11 am.

I go and have a small breakfast after brushing my teeth. I’m pollotarian so I eat something small like a bagel with cream cheese or oatmeal and fruit. Something that’s filling and won’t waste away too fast. I also check emails and reply to asks on Tumblr.

At around 11:30 I do homework. I’m an honor University student who is going way over time. So I spend roughly three to four hours doing homework or studying. I try to write a bit in between breaks, but usually, when I’m in a homework mood I try to stay in a homework mood.

Around 3-4 I’ll have lunch. So this is where something heavier can come in like a few slices of pizza, a sandwich or two, something to last me until dinner. Or if I’m not that hungry I’ll eat something small as to not cause headaches. 

Usually, after 5 pm I’m done with homework for the day and can start to work on my writing. I’ll spend around 2-3 hours checking Tumblr, writing my original works, working on fanfics/imagines, whatever.

Around 8 or 9 I eat dinner with my parents. We eat late so this is pretty normal for me.

Then after dinner, I’ll spend some time checking school emails, checking Tumblr messages/asks, and check-in with my friends. 

I’ll work on Tumblr requests until about eleven or twelve am. (Right now as I write this it’s 11:40 pm)

I’ll finish out my last request for the night. I like to do first come first serve, so I go in order as I receive. So sometimes, like today, I have received around 32 requests and I try to get about five done in the timespan I have. SO DON’T WORRY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN YOURS YET. I’m a slow writer and I apologize.

Anyway, after like, 12:30 I’ll turn my laptop off and go to bed. I’ll listen to music for about thirty minutes to wind down and get sleepy.

And I’m usually passed out around 1-1:30 am. And I repeat.

Some writing tips I can give are as follows:

Don’t stress about how you write. This is something I catch myself doing a lot, because I believe it has to perfect the first time I write something. DON’T DO THIS TO YOURSELF. It will cause you to give up. I’ve been postponing so many fanfictions because of this so please don’t stress about how you write it. Your goal should be to write it BEFORE worrying about it.

Always have an idea about where you want things to go. I wasn’t big on outlines when I was growing up, so believe me when I tell you OUTLINES WILL BE YOUR FRIEND. Especially in bigger picture books.

Get Grammarly. This baby will do wonders for you and is one of my best writing friends.

Try to find a time of day where you can sit and write something. In college, I learned your biological clock can help you find the best times to work on things. If you’re a morning person, don’t do things around night or late when you’re tired. Vice versa if you’re a night owl. Find a time where you’re most productive and stick to it.

Don’t make writing seem like a chore. If you don’t want to write something, simply don’t do it. Writing should be a fun hobby to relax you!

Keep your phone away from you! This is something I learned from experience. I usually keep my cell phone away while I’m writing/doing homework. Cell phones are an easy way to get distracted. One moment you’re sitting to write at noon and the next it’s eleven pm and you’ve been on YouTube. Don’t let this be you!

Practice. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. Just like any skill you need to work on it. You think I work up one day and just started writing!? YOU BET YOUR BEHIND I DID. But I was awful at it! CRINGE! I live my life by this quote so take it as you will:

“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is your best.” St. Jerome

Think of writing as a movie playing in a way. Imagine the characters interacting, the dialogue, the camera angles, how they respond, where they put their hands. You won’t write it all, but you need to be able to see it first before you can show others.

Before you write, try inspirational quotes, Pinterest boards, draw, get your mind to relax so let yourself immerse in the world you’re creating.

Find your strengths and weaknesses. For example, I really suck at writing out more dynamic relationships sometimes, because I let the main storyline take over. If the romance is the focus, it needs to stay the focus. If your adventure is the main storyline, stick to it. Don’t be switching on the readers all the time because it can make them lose their focus on what’s more important.

RESEARCH. You don’t need to be googling the average rainfall in a town in Nigeria to be accurate, it helps, but not always needed especially if it’s minor details the reader will forget three chapters down the line. HOWEVER, if your story takes place in a small town in Nigeria, knowing the average weather patterns will be a big help. PLEASE DO THIS FOR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DISORDERS. You have no idea how little people actually read about this type of stuff. Reading real accounts on certain disorders of illnesses will give a big insight into how it actually works. For example, I watched a few videos on how someone goes through narcoleptic attacks for a book I was working on not long ago. Not only did I do that, but I also rented out a few sleep psychology books and asked my Dr. Psych Advisor on certain illnesses and mental help on certain disorders. You don’t have to find a professional to answer your questions, but knowing a little can go a long ways.

It’s now 12:17 and I’m a bit tired, so if you have any more questions please feel free to ask! I’m always open to hearing the types of questions you have and I’m grateful you asked for any of my advice. 

THANKS

-KITTY

[foxtophat]

in chapter 3, nick brings john some food and tries to interrogate him, but it doesn’t go quite as planned. john sure is acting weird! i mean, weirder than usual. i mean, usual for john, anyway. i mean... well, let’s just say that nick is as in control as he can be in today’s update!

WHEW i really like this chapter actually, i had fun editing and writing it and all that. soooo i’ve been doing weekly updates but for the sake of consistency i’m going to be changing that to a bi-weekly schedule instead. gives me more time to flesh out these thinner chapters before i get them out to you, the viewer!

speaking of viewers, DAMN thank you guys for the warm ass welcome for this story! i’m so glad to see that people are enjoying my self-indulgent mess. i’ve had so much fun working on it by myself but i’m having even more fun now that i know other people like it!

hey, i’ll slap the text of this chapter below the cut so you don’t have to go off-site if you don’t feel like it. if you read, please consider reblogging, as that’s the best way for me to get this update out there :) otherwise, just like, have a good day and junk!

John is, unfortunately, still alive when Nick goes to check on him. He even seems to be aware of his surroundings, unsurprised when Nick opens the door and downright guarded as Nick approaches him with a plate of vegetables and some smoked venison. The role reversal doesn't sit right at all with Nick, but at least he knows he's in control of the situation for now. Give the bastard a couple of nights of good rest and John will no doubt attempt to get back on top, but tonight he's too sick to do anything but cringe away as Nick unceremoniously drops into a crouch and drops the plate in his general direction.

Tense, with his fingers twisting in the blanket below him, John rasps, "What's this?"

Nick frowns. "Food," he snaps, trying not to let his own rudeness bother him. He doesn't have to feel guilty being short with John — it's fucking John . Nick should be mad at himself for not being more of a dick! Being in a position that would earn a normal person sympathy doesn't mean squat when the guy is a murdering, violent psychopath wearing the thin veneer of a human being! He doesn't deserve anything Nick gives him, besides a swift and merciless kick to the temple.

Nick exhales heavily and reluctantly adds, "You look like you need it."

It's only once Nick rises to his feet again that John reaches for the plate, dragging it into his lap and proving Nick right as he quickly begins to inhale his food. It's alarming to watch John cramming jerky and vegetables into his mouth hand-over-fist, and despite himself he warns, "Slow down, you're gonna choke."

John stops eating like a switch has been flipped, dropping his hands to the plate as though he's been physically restrained. He doesn't say anything, just twists his fingers against the rim and stares at Nick's boots.

Okay.

This, uh. This is weird.

Nick feels his unease chewing at his nerves. "Well?" he snaps, trying to bluster his way through it.

"Well, what ?" John asks in return. There's an edge of annoyance in his voice, an old-world relic of John's normally nasty attitude, but it's not enough to reassure Nick.

"You know what. You're supposed to be dead . Rook put you down almost a decade ago, and I dunno if you noticed, but there's been a nuclear apocalypse since then. There's no way I'm putting you in your grave before you tell me how you got this far in the first place."

It's a lie, but the important part is that Nick sounds tough when he says it.

John clenches his jaw in response and finally meets Nick's glare with his own steely gaze. "They shot me," he says, his ragged voice still managing to scrape together enough attitude to sound vaguely condescending. He touches his gut, fingers prodding gently. "Then, the deputy left me for dead. I assume they returned to your welcoming arms."

Ugh, it is so fucking weird to hear John's passive-aggressive bullshit. Eight years apparently wasn't enough time for him to get over his nasty infatuation, if he's still bitter about Rook picking the Ryes over his own family.

"All of us were happy you were gone," Nick says, unwilling to indulge in John's creepy pity-lust for the deputy. "So, what then? How did you find that bunker? How'd you even know it was there ?"

John picks up a piece of jerky, bending it between his thumb and index finger. "It was my backup plan."

"What, in case the Cult backfired on you?" Nick scoffs loudly as John silently pops the piece of meat into his mouth. "I bet your brother would be real pleased to know you tried to weasel your way out of his prophecy."

John chews and swallows. "I doubt Joseph survived the Deputy at close range. I doubt I'll survive the second round myself. Where... is the Deputy, anyway? Shouldn't they be here casting down judgment, too?"

Nick sets his jaw. "I don't know," he says, folding his arms over his chest. "Nobody knows. They went to confront Joseph, but with all the Bliss in the air... I don't know. We lost track of them in the chaos. If they've had access to a radio, they haven't used it to contact anyone."

If John has any insight into what might've happened, he doesn't share it. He picks at a few pieces of carrot but it seems like he's lost his appetite again. "I see," he says, too pensively for someone who seems half out of their gourd.

"So, you survived being shot down, crawled into a hole with a gut full of buckshot, survived that , and then... what?"

"You saw what," John sighs. He looks tired — all this talking must be wearing him out. It's hard to believe John Seed is too weak to hold a conversation, considering how hard it used to be to get him to shut the fuck up. Nick tries not to spend too much time thinking about it.

"You want me to believe that you spent eight years just sitting there ?" Nick asks. The disbelief in his voice doesn't come close to the incredulity he's feeling. There's no way that John spent the last eight years in a quiet limbo. Hell, Nick's bunker life wouldn't make for riveting television or anything, but he still did more than exist . Even if he was on his own, John had to have some kind of — of backup backup plan, a plot to manipulate the nuclear apocalypse in his favor, something . Right?

"What do you want me to say? The bunker was lacking in entertainment. I was trapped alone, miles away from the Project, with nowhere near enough supplies. I was certain I would die before the first year was over, and from then on I assumed every day would somehow become my last. My being here is as much a surprise to you as it is to me."

He glances up, watching Nick's reaction with a wariness Nick isn't comfortable with. It's too much like a wounded dog, and John has to be playing some kind of angle to be using it.

"I had a radio, but no microphone," he says. "All I could do was listen."

Nick remembers what the radio channels were like for the first couple of months after the bombs dropped. Everyone going through every step of the grieving process over the world they'd known, screaming, begging, arguing, crying all the time. Lots of repentant Peggy idiots cursing Eden's Gate, even more innocent people sending out their last painful goodbyes. Kim would talk to them, sometimes, but for a while, it was safer to just leave the damned thing off.

"Eventually, the radio died," John mutters. "I thought it would be... better, somehow, being isolated. After all, that's how Joseph spoke to God, and I had a lot of questions that He might have answered."

"The last thing we need is another hallucinating prophet," Nick warns. He hopes John tries to sell him on some new-wave Josephism, though — he'd love to shoot the guy on principle and be done with everything. Boy, would that take a load of ethical weight off his back!

John's lips tighten wryly. "Apparently I don't possess the same qualities that made Joseph such an inviting disciple," he says. "I was alone. For... seven years, eight months, three days. Give or take."

"You keep a calendar down there?" Nick snaps, as if he and Kim hadn't quickly sorted time out themselves.

"I did," John replies, somewhat smugly. "Long enough to know when I ran out of supplies, at least. After that, it wasn't long before I had to leave the bunker. I couldn't... I couldn't take it anymore."

Nick waits for John to continue, but he doesn't. There must be more to it than that, Nick's sure of it, but John doesn't seem capable of handling the conversation.

John drops his line of sight to the pistol holstered at Nick's hip. He seems to be waiting for something.

"What happens now?" he asks, once whatever he's waiting for fails to happen. No doubt he expects Nick to brandish the gun in his face, to intimidate him or threaten him or... whatever. Shoot him, probably, because not even John Seed would be stupid enough to give himself clemency for all his crimes.

"Now?" Nick repeats. "Well, I guess that depends on you." He crouches down once more, sure that he's well out of John's grasp as he does so. He wants John to look him in the eye. "See, it's been a while, but I still really fuckin' hate you. After everything you've done, to me, my family, my home ... Honestly, I should've probably put you down the moment I recognized you."

John meets Nick's hard glare with the resolve of a condemned man. "Why didn't you?" he asks.

"Because I haven't had to kill anybody in nearly a decade, and y'know, I'd like to keep that streak." Nick jabs a finger at John, inwardly pleased when he recoils to avoid contact. " You're the one who came to Hope County looking for a fight. So I'm not gonna kill you. Not yet."

Nick figures he sounds pretty intimidating, but John doesn't seem moved by the indirect threat. Of course he isn't. The guy built half a religious movement out of his sadomasochism — he's not going to feel threatened by Nick, not even if he were holding a pair of pliers to his teeth. He doesn't even give Nick the satisfaction of asking what he means — he only stares and waits for Nick to hand down his sentence.

"First, we gotta see if you're gonna make it through the night," Nick says, gesturing towards the abandoned plate. "After that, I'm gonna put you to work. Kim and I, we got a list of things we need to get done. It's back-breaking manual labor, and you're gonna be the one whose back breaks." Nick rises to his feet, trying to seem tough when in reality, his knees are starting to ache, and he can't afford to throw one out over a show of force. "You do what you're told with no back-talking, and I guess we'll find a way to keep you fed."

"And if I don't?"

"I don't think you're in any position to refuse, jackass. Nobody else is going to think twice about shooting you around here. The cult, your followers, family, they're all dead and gone. Anyone left who knows your face is gonna want to smash it to bits, and they aren't going to be inclined to be as generous as Kim and I are being. So it's either this, or I throw you back in that bunker where you belong."

For a moment, Nick thinks that John might try to turn him down anyway. He hopes he does — it'd be nice to get to punch the guy without feeling guilty for hitting a seriously ill man. But John's pale face belies how desperate he is to avoid that bunker of his, and eventually he gives in with a slow, resigned nod.

"You're right," John replies, voice hoarse from exhaustion. "Joseph — the Project — it's all gone. And I..."

John trails off with a heavy, resigned sigh. He looks up at Nick through a thick clump of long, tangled hair that's fallen over his face. "I'm at your mercy," he finally says, dropping Nick's gaze immediately after as though he doesn't expect much mercy at all.

"What, that's it?" Nick asks, honestly fucking confounded at the lack of backtalk. He'd made a good argument, sure, but — what? "No arguing? No negotiating, no defending the cult? No trying to deflect blame?"

"What good would it do?" John replies. Despite everything, he manages to scrape together enough attitude to look unimpressed by Nick's entire deal. It's the first time since realizing John was alive that Nick feels a twinge of that old-fashioned irritation that used to make shooting John seem so appealing. "I have nothing. You've won, Nick. I hope you've been enjoying the prize."

"I ought to punch you," Nick snaps. "Lucky for you, I'd feel bad for giving you a beat-down in your sorry state." He nudges the plate with his boot, sliding it closer to John. "I'll be back with some water so you can clean yourself up. You stink enough to put me off my own dinner. Anything else, well..."

He gestures to the ratty, mildewy pile of junk that they've been collecting in the room, as if any of it could be useful. Broken picture frames, mouse-torn bedding, broken down cardboard boxes and more all piled innocently away in what was going to be Carmina's room. Looking at it fills Nick with a sense of profound sadness that he shoves right back down where it belongs.

"You can figure something out," he tells John, who doesn't seem capable of making another dig at Nick's new position as prison guard. Unwilling to be moved by John's labored breathing as he simply nods in return, Nick quickly about-faces, storming from the room with just enough anger to hide the retreat for what it is.

[shijiujun]

history3 ep10 summary - POOR SHAO FEI AND TANG YI BB, this is what heartbreak looks like

I JUST ABOUT DIED. I DID. THE LAST PART WAS MAD - just this 30 seconds alone carried the entire fucking episode

We are at the halfway mark - Part of me doesn’t want it to end at all but I need to see the birthday cake and domestic scenes ASAP!! Currently I’m just enjoying the ride and so glad we get to see Chris and Jake and Andy and Kenny and everyone of those other hot and excellent actors in this show. I’ve never done a GIF or subtitled in all my years on tumblr before History3 - life changing this is what this show is and I’m so happy we’re all doing this together! Let’s make it through the halfway mark together omgosh excited guys!!!!!

Shopping scene with Shao Fei + Hong Ye: Hong Ye is telling SF to walk faster they go into a department store and she keeps changing clothes OMG LOL THEY ARE SO CUTE TGT!!! She wears smth with ruffles and then asks SF how it looks and then he’s like ‘why do u look like a seaweed’ and she’s like ‘who’s a seaweed you’re a seaweed’ and then she dances LOL and then LOL HE FELL ASLEEP WHILE SHOPPING WITH HER AND LOST HER omg Shao Fei seriously

They’re playing a game on the escalator this is the funniest shit and OF COURSE she brings him to a lingerie shop and omg Shao Fei so poor thing just sits there and OMG YAS HONG YE SISTER-BROTHER RIVALRY and she buys him UNDERWEAR and she’s like “hang on a second, this is too big for you, you need a smaller one” LOL BURN

Carpark/shooting scene: They’re almost like friends or something, although later after we see the hong ye and bodyguard ah de scene you’ll realise why she was speaking to shao fei like that (because she knew smth was going to happen and she thought everything was going to go to plan but who knew they were coming with guns) and anw, then the bullets start going off and shao fei protects her with all of his body like OH MY GOD - And wow the angle of the shot and how it struck SF is totally wrong and omggg this scene was faster than I thought JESUS CHRIST - is it just me or did Shao Fei get hit on the wrong side? Either they missed a scene or the bullet came from elsewhere

and then we get the scene of tang yi storming into the hospital and he goes straight for hong ye first, hugs her as she cries etc. and then hot doctor is there and when hot doctor is NOT SMILING  YOU KNOW SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN - anyway, the nurse tells hot doctor that the surgery has been prepped, and then hot doctor nods and says ‘let’s go’ - and that’s when tang yi REMEMBERS AND LOOKS UP - “is that for meng shao fei?” And his look of absolute regret is ridiculous

and hot doctor just somberly nods 

Police chief STILL DOESNT KNOW THAT SHAO FEI HAS BEEN SHOT omg he’s going around doing his usual shit and everyone is clearing shit with him and fuck he misses shao fei so much I like that they finally show that shao fei is useful in the office and everyone is dependent on him and then suddenly Yu Qi turns up because she somehow got the call that shao fei is in the hospital

Oh goddddd Tang Yi’s face as he sits there AND LOL Dao yi (glasses guy) knows police chief quite well he called him Brother Bao, and tells him to calm down and they will take care of everything but POLICE CHIEF AINT HAVING NONE OF THAT BULLSHIT he pushes dao yi aside and this is one of the only times he can legit grab a mob boss by the neck and not get shot at after - police chief loves Shao Fei so much you can tell he totally lost it and Hong Ye genuinely feels bad and she’s saying sorry over and over to him as tang yi sits there catatonic - tang yi is totally quiet

also not sure if you guys caught it but the older guy in the investigative team, the one who always kind of says smth subtly bad about shao fei, he shot a look to bodyguard ah de when police chief was confronting tang yi in the hospital - they are totally up to something, corrupt police!!!!

The rest of the investigative team - LOL Zhao zi: “wow I’ve never seen police boss chief grab someone so much larger than him by the neck” - Yu Qi really likes Shao Fei, she’s crying by herself at the stairs and police chief is the one who’s standing by Shao fei’s door the moment he’s out of surgery and he scoffs “what ‘they’ll take care of everything’? the moment they heard shao fei was going to pull through they all left’- he tells zhao zi that they’ll start investigating who the fuck was behind the shooting and reminds them all to be careful

Captain Shi: “those who dare to touch any one from the investigative team, I’ll bring them all back to the police station!!!!”

OMG WE GET THE SCENE WHERE TANG YI IS HOTLY WALKING AND RIPPING OFF HIS JACKET AND OH JESUS CHRIST BRASS KNUCKLES?!!! Anw here’s the gem oh my god: Tang yi comes in where the culprit is already seated and he tells everyone to get the fuck out (OMG YOU KNOW HE MEANS BUSINESS) 

Ah De is like ‘boss, this is a small thing, let me do it’ - and he’s so damn insistent on interrogating the culprit himself even though tang yi is literally ready to set fire on the bitch you know and i’m like AH DE THAT IS SO NOT SMART YOU WANNA DIE?!

and well, we all called it - tang yi hears that and he’s like wtf and he gets mad, hauls bodyguard ah de off his feet and slams him against the wall and yells: “SMALL THING?! HE TOUCHED MY PEOPLE, AND YOU CALL IT A SMALL THING?!”

and bodyguard is like fuckkkk: “yes i’m sorry boss, i said the wrong thing, i’ll leave now”

and then he goes out and hovers by the door while tang yi puts on his brass knuckles and starts punching the dude who is yelling a bit like... not realistically HAHAHAHA - and omg Jack hit it right on the nail, he asked Brother De why he looks so worried and ‘jokingly’ asks, “why, do u know the person inside?” And Brother De is so angry and defensive - jack totally knows what is up

Brother de and Hong Ye meet up and here we find out that they ordered the hit on shao fei in a sense to get rid of him - they wanted to show tang yi that shao fei can’t protect anyone and then chase him away, but they were supposed to come teach shao fei a lesson with like wooden sticks and not guns - hong ye was a bit stunned by that as well and she asked ah de like wtf did you really want to kill me?! and ah de is like confused also, he doesn’t really know how the plan went wrong?! and hong ye is like, whatever, i will cooperate with you only up to here, if tang yi manages to get any answers, it’s all on you (like not cool hong ye, tang yi would totes forgive you if you just admitted it i think)

anyway, switch to the balcony scene with tang yi and jack, where jack asks who it was that ordered the hit, and tang yi says: “chen wen hao”

okay so my theory is that maybe chen wen hao really has smth to do with this - he kind of derailed the plan and changed it to legitly wanting to kil hong ye and shao fei (more hong ye than shao fei more likely) - but right now they dont know it they just think that they’re safe and their story checks out

Okay so Hong Ye and Dao Yi - Gosh she’s kind of a brat but I get where she’s coming from. anyway she leaves brother de and then dao yi is waiting for her in the carpark - the man knows he way better than she knows herself, and i think he knows that she had something to do with the shooting, but he didn’t say anything except to hint that she better leave shao fei up to tang yi and stop trying to interfere. hong ye is adamant that shao fei is a different kind of person from them, and dao yi is like: “that’s for the boss to decide. the way he treats him... shao fei is different to him”

OH MY GOD THANK YOU SOMEONE SAYING IT AS IT IS FINALLY NO MORE SUBTLE LOOKS AND SMILES SOMEONE SAID IT

and anw, hong ye manages to make this entire thing about her and how dao yi doesn’t love her - sister, i really get you and dao yi really needs to get his shit together, but srsly, a man just got shot for you because you were unhappy with his presence - and gosh unrequited (actually requited) love, but i get her in this part

but seriously, i get that she want shao fei out of the way but they way she did it was totally wrong, does she not know that tang yi is soft for him and cares for him like he has no one else before? she was willing to hurt him to make a point, and then ah de is - gosh dude get a grip

AND OMGGGGGG TANG YI’S FACE AS HE IS BY SHAO FEI’S BEDSIDE - this is what heartbreak looks like guys, he looks like he’s saying goodbye and his fucking expression - wow Chris did a fucking good job he totally looks heartbroken and as if shao fei died or smth, he’s holding his hand and air-tracing his nose and he looks like he’s going to cry - HE REALLY LOVES HIM GUYS - the emotion was really right on point

(and lol the chinese audience - they were scolding tang yi during the first part of the ep because he didn’t seem to have much of a reaction to shao fei’s injury and then when the last part came everyone went BATSHIT CRAZY)

what the fuck is going to happen next episode? i ask, but i know already - tang yi is getting ready to say goodbye to shao fei and push him away because he realised how dangerous it is for shao fei to be around him BUT OUR FAVE CHARACTERS WILL FIND SOME WAY TO BE TOGETHER AGAIN NO WORRIES I DOUBT THEIR BREAKUP WILL LAST MORE THAN AN EP

[thewadapan]

It's Friday night.

You've locked yourself out.

The streets are empty.

> RETRACE STEPS

(I finished an MS Paint fan adventure.)

Creator’s Commentary

Normally, when I post stories on this blog, I throw the whole thing beneath the spoiler break - but that’s not really possible this time around. Click the link above if you haven’t read it yet - it only takes about ten minutes - then come back here if you want.

All done? Still with me? Okay, cool, because we’re going to be heading into spoiler territory here pretty quickly.

                               “RETRACE STEPS”

OPEN ON BLACK:

INT. – LATE AFTERNOON

A door opens on the right, spilling light into the threshold. The ceiling light automatically flickers on. Alice enters frame and heads to her door.

She tries the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. As her hand depresses the handle, the title briefly becomes visible.

We return to the original angle. Alice reaches into her left pocket, and finds nothing. She turns to lean against the door, facing the camera, and checks her right pocket, then the pockets of her hoodie. She tries the handle again, but the door is definitely locked. She leans, for a second, motionless.

           ALICE    Fuck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her.

I. Making friends is harder than I thought.

When you’re a kid, people sorta make friends for you. Maybe your parents’ friends have kids, so suddenly those kids are your friends. Maybe you go to nursery or school, and then your classmates are kinda your friends too. At least some of those people will probably never stop being your friends. As you move through the education system, that cohort diffuses through the local schools - but chances are a few of your friends will stick with you all the way.

When you arrive at university, chances are you’re completely alone.

You’re thrown through the gauntlet of fresher’s week, forced to put yourself out there as you identify new friends and foes. One of the main attractions of university-managed accommodation - particularly catered accommodation - is that it places you with a huge amount of new people. Heck, part of the idea behind having a roommate is that they’re your “designated friend”.

(I didn’t have a roommate, and ended up going to university with two of my school friends, so these are less experiences and more observations - but that’s not to say I didn’t go out of my way to make new friends in those first weeks.)

After a month or so of the dreaded “three questions” (”What’s your name? Where are you from? What are you studying?”), the cliques have mostly solidified. The college relationships have crumbled, after one or both parties realised they were mostly in it for the sex. The cool people have long since stopped showing up to lectures. You haven’t gone back to any of the sports clubs and societies you signed up for. Maybe, just maybe, you’re occasionally glancing at your phone and wondering if you should finally give your parents a call to let them know you haven’t died.

If you’re lucky, you’ve met your new best friends. If you’re unlucky, then you’re very, very alone.

But of course, it’s not all down to luck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her. Outside the threshold, there is a shot from the banister above of Alice walking down the stairs, facing away from the camera and typing on her phone.

Outside, Alice sits on the wall and stares at her phone. There is a brief montage of her slowly pacing up and down the path, leaning out into the road to check if anyone’s coming, checking her phone, peering into the downstairs window, kicking loose stones back into the gravel, and back to her sitting on the wall. After a few seconds, she puts her phone away and trudges out of frame across the stones.

II. Coming up with stories is harder than I thought.

I can’t exactly remember what I put my name down for during freshers’ week, but one way or another I ended up dragging a new friend to a writing workshop for my university’s filmmaking society. A bunch of strangers from all years were crammed around some tables that had been pushed together in our Student Union’s bar.

This guy, the head of the- president of the society? Sure, the President, let’s go with that. The President stands up and sorta fumbles his way through an introduction, before telling us to turn to the person next to us. I turn to my friend, because I don’t like talking to strangers. Then the President tells us (I might be misremembering here) that we’ve got one minute to come up with a story.

There’s a moment of awkward silence, because nobody wants to be the first person to start talking about the first dumb idea that’s popped into their head at those words.

Then the conversations start.

I went into that first minute expecting to come up with absolutely nothing. To be honest, I’m pretty sure we came up with nothing. I think there might’ve been some implication that they’d go around the table once time was up asking for quick summaries - this terrified me not just at the prospect of having to bluff my way through a pitch, but at the prospect of having to listen to everyone else do the same. Honestly, the moment that’s stuck in my mind most since was when I talked to the guy sitting on the other side of me, and he started trying to tell me about Lord of the Rings, which... okay, I don’t like Lord of the Rings, sue me, whatever. Someone else talked about the Batman movies at one point, and - actually, that might’ve been the same guy. Y’know what, I’ve gotten off track.

The point is that at some point during that meeting, Retrace Steps was born. I don’t remember when exactly, or how I came up with it - I suspect I’d locked myself out of accommodation at some point, or knew a friend who had, and thought it’d be funny to do a story where someone does that and can’t for the life of them get back in. In order to add complications, I decided that their roommate wouldn’t answer their texts, and that the residence office would be out of hours - and that was when the idea that everyone had disappeared came into my head.

INT. MAIN BUILDING – LATE AFTERNOON

Over-the-shoulder shot of Alice entering a corridor in the main building. The camera focuses on the sign saying ‘ON DUTY’, then pans across to the door to the general office. It focuses on another sign saying ‘The office is now closed...’, then across to another sign by the door with a phone number on it.

Foreground with Alice comes back into focus. She takes out her phone and dials.

           ALICE    Hello? I’ve locked myself out, do you have a spare...

She trails off, and puts the phone away. Clearly, someone’s answered but has hung up. Cut across for a close-up of her face, trying to figure out her next move.

SERIES OF BRIEF SHOTS:

Alice looks for her keys in:

A) a computer lab B) a library C) a laundry room D) a games room E) a bathroom

There are no keys, and no people. Alice goes to the kitchen and gets a mini-doughnut out from a box in a cupboard. She eats it thoughtfully. Once she’s finished, she reaches out to grab another, hesitates, and decides against it.

III. Making movies is harder than I thought.

A lot of the ideas being thrown around the table were for some pretty high-concept stuff, and I remember thinking - hang on, aren’t you supposed to actually be filming that? I’d approached the challenge from the angle of “what do I have, and what can I make with it”, not “what do I want to make, and how can I make it”. In an unfortunate twist of fate, my film - of all those that were conceived that day - would end up being far and away the worst. But I’ll get to that.

For a student film, the "everybody disappears and you’re locked out” concept made perfect sense - you could film it at your accommodation, you’d only need a single actor, and it’s a story that your audience will probably (if not immediately, then at least after another month or two) be able to relate to.

(Side note: I obviously hadn’t come up with this concept whole-cloth. Michael Grant’s Gone series of YA novels - which I’d finished reading midway through secondary school - is a superhero story about a bunch of kids on an island where all the adults have suddenly disappeared. More pertinently, Starscribe’s The Last Pony on Earth is the diary of someone who wakes up completely alone in their city, only in the body of a cartoon horse. Yes, Retrace Steps has its roots in My Little Pony fanfiction, and I’m very sorry about that.)

My friend wasn’t interested in sticking with the society - he mostly did it to back me up - but I guess I was. Knowing that most people would be angling for directorial roles, I signed up as a writer and threw together a script. An email came back the following day; apparently from el Presidente himself:

Thank you for sending the script Retrace Steps. As you have said in your original email, the script is quite short. But I do think it is a very intriguing concept nonetheless, one that is probably helped more so than hampered by its brevity. After all, the nature of your script would to a degree require an empty street, as well as a quiet hall, both of which are rare commodities indeed, especially during the weekends.

Anyways, since the script is well formatted, I will just offer a suggestion, one which I hope may help your final edit before the deadline, should you wish to do so.

Your script portrays excellently Sam's anxiety over the course of the narrative, from his inability to find his keys, then his inability to find anyone at all. I do however believe that you could make the final scene perhaps have more impact. How this is done depends on the overarching theme of the story you are telling, as what you would emphasize at the films' conclusion would depend on it.

Is it an allegory to the anxieties of the average student (Sam), who finds himself socially isolated by a sense of exile or ignorance of the larger community? Or is it perhaps more of an absurdist comedy, or even horror? Though I could wrong, I was under the impression that it was more likely to be the former than the latter. If so, could the story end with it emphasizing Sam's exclusion from society, such as a close up shot to the door and keyhole?

As with all feedback, you are under no obligation to take them to heart, and the things I pointed out are but small things to consider on an otherwise great piece of work. Thank you for making this piece available to the rest of the society.

It seemed that I’d successfully communicated the theme of isolation - less so the theme of entitlement. Bringing that theme to the fore would be my biggest challenge throughout subsequent drafts of the script (where I failed miserably) and the development of the fanventure (on which the jury’s still out).

(Those subsequent drafts would also see the characters “Sam” and “Chris” - those being the names of two friends I’d pegged as backup actors for the roles - get renamed as a more generic “Alice” and “Bob”.)

The Retrace Steps team consisted of a director, a producer, a cameraman/editor, and me. I met with the director only a couple of times - she seemed pretty competent, but decided that she couldn’t commit the time to the project and stepped down. Our producer was all too happy to take over the role.

Auditions started shortly after the teams were assigned - although I’d used male pronouns in the script, I’d anticipated that there’d be a greater demand for male actors (because most of the writers/directors would be male and most of the actors would be female) and planned to go into the auditions with no preference one way or another.

In truth, however, I think the gender of the story’s lead does have a noticeable impact on how it comes across - at least in film, where there’s no good means of narration. Speaking very broadly, when dealing with themes of isolation, I think the key question that comes to an audience’s mind is “why is this person isolated?” - and if the character is male, I feel like they’re more likely to assume the answer is a personal failure of some sort; there must surely be something wrong with him. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in pretty deep on the internet, where I think these issues of perception are less pronounced - so if your instinct is to buck against those assumptions, well, I’m glad.

(The fanventure would end up using second-person narration, they/them pronouns and androgynous character designs to sidestep these issues entirely, while drawing the reader directly into the conflict.)

Our producer/director wasn’t able to make the callbacks (which felt like another red flag), so it was down to me to relay back to her what I thought of everyone. It was kind of a challenging process, because - as I’ve said - I don’t like talking to strangers and I certainly don’t like telling them what to do. Still, I was able to more-or-less settle into it, and eventually the director and I settled on a girl who seemed to know what she was doing. I feel a little bad for effectively putting her through the project, but the joke’s on us: within a year she’d been elected el Presidente of the entire students’ association. I can only assume that none of her opponents knew about the movie; it might’ve made for a pretty good smear campaign. Or not, nobody really cares about student politics anyway.

(The director couldn’t make it to the meeting where the society allocated the actors either. Basically, the President went through the actors one by one, and the teams would negotiate for each of them in turn. I’m fairly sure only one or two of the other teams were after the same actress as we were - I basically just said “we only need one cast member and we thought she’d do best,” and that was all it took; once that was settled I simply left and pretty much didn’t interact with any other members of the society in person until the screening. The other roles she could’ve got were minor anyway - although, in retrospect, she might’ve been better off.)

I think I’m not going to bother explaining exactly why the Retrace Steps short film turned out to be such a disaster. I’m pretty willing to pin the blame at the director’s feet - she’d arrange shoots at strange times with little notice, only to show up half an hour late herself. When she and I disagreed on part of the story, our cinematographer generally sided with her; she had the strongest personality of any of us, while I didn’t want to cause trouble. Our other team members - the actress and a lights guy who the society’d lumped with us (the lights ended up being a collaborative effort) - stayed out of it.

As the end of the semester approached, we were missing crucial swathes of footage. Our director pulled an ending out of her ass - a brief confrontation between myself-as-Bob and the actress, that... somehow involved custard creams? The script called for doughnuts, but we weren’t organised enough to have bought those in advance, and the biscuits were all we had at hand. I can’t actually remember exactly how it went, because it didn’t make any sense, but I remember enough to know that it actually ended up indirectly inspiring the execution of the revised ending present in the fanventure.

The end of the semester arrived. The society had hired out the small hall in the students’ union to screen all the movies. The screening started, and there was no sign of our director or cinematographer - they’d apparently been editing all afternoon. Eventually they arrived and sat down near myself and our actress.

I’m not gonna lie. What followed wasn’t the most embarrassing experience of my life. It probably wasn’t even in the top ten. But it was pretty embarrassing. All the movies were pretty awful in their own ways, but ours was uniquely terrible. To our director’s credit, she’d managed to cut the footage together into something we could maybe pass off as an absurdist comedy (which, to my own credit, had been kinda what I’d pictured in the first place - I’d just pictured something with a little more in the way of actual narrative). Even so, despite the awkward laughs - or perhaps because of them - it was atrocious.

I’ve only seen the movie once, at that screening, and I cringed the whole way through. Some time later, the director messaged me asking if I had a copy - apparently it hadn’t occurred to her to save one for herself, and our ex-cinematographer had gone AWOL - but I didn’t. Stupidly, I’d decided not to chase after one either, because in the moment I couldn’t imagine wanting to put myself through the experience of seeing it again. Almost half a year later, when I was almost done with the fanventure, I got back in touch with both the director and the society: I wanted to have the movie on hand so I could write about it in this commentary, but I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to let on that I’d remade it as a frikkin’ webcomic. The person from the society said she knew someone who had a copy, and that she’d ask, but she never got back to me and by the time I remembered to chase her up it felt like it was too late to actually do so. It’s likely that the movie will never resurface - which I guess is good in a way, in that there’s no way in hell I’m gonna show it to any of you.

I was bitter. I wanted nothing to do with student societies. I wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, and haven’t made a film since - not unless you count Are You Happy, which I pretty much only made because I could do so entirely on my own. I’m much more leery about the prospect of collaborating with strangers, although I suspect that if an opportunity came my way I’d probably take it.

(Side note: last October, in an interaction which wound up being pretty excruciating in its own right, I contributed a satirical listicle to another society. This was a nightmare for a variety of reasons, but - suffice to say - it’s not particularly pleasant to discover that somebody’s made a bunch of edits to your work without telling you, especially if the changes are for the worse. I wish I had more positive things to say about collaboration, really, I do. Actually, I will say that my experiences working with others in the Transformers fandom have been pretty darn good - you can find details of that stuff over on the list of things I made.)

For a good while, I suspected that Retrace Steps would never see the light of day. I entertained the idea of rounding up a few of my friends and bashing the thing out myself over the course of a few weekends, but I ended up being pretty busy with other stuff. Besides, the society had the nice lights and cameras, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of borrowing from them. Most of all, there was the tiny voice telling me that my script probably hadn’t ever been much good in the first place, and that I should switch back to pure prose - a medium with a much faster turnaround.

(That voice was right, as I’m sure you’re seeing for yourself. Look, it was a student film, there’s probably no such thing as a good student film - I’m just banking on fanventure-adaptation-of-a-bad-student-film still being fair game.)

EXT. STREET

Wide shot of Alice walking through the street, shouting. It is raining.

      ALICE   Hello? Is anybody there?

Overhead shot as she looks up and squints at the sky, then reaches back and lifts her hood.

Everything slows down. Cut to a side-on shot of Alice lifting her hood. A muted sound slowly turns into the jangle of keys as things speed up again. Cut across to medium shot face-on, as Alice looks confused. She reaches up with her other hand into her raised hood, and pulls out the keys. She holds them between two fingers, and the camera focuses on them.

      ALICE    Oh, for fuck’s sake.

IV. Talking about Retrace Steps without talking a little bit about Homestuck is harder than I thought.

Homestuck was this big multimedia webcomic that ran from 2009 to 2016. Homestuck was very good, and its unique “MS Paint Adventures” format inspired thousands of “MS Paint Fan Adventures” - some of which take Homestuck’s premise, but many of which are otherwise entirely original stories.

The oldest writing on this blog, in fact - presuming I haven’t hidden it out of mortification - is a rudimentary (and really god-awful) fanventure called You’ve Just Been FiRED. Don’t read it, it’s very, very bad, and I abandoned it after about thirty pages - some of which remain unpublished as of writing.

My second attempt at a fanventure, which - no joke - I wrote in the pages of my school planner during one exam season, is called SP00KY M4N0R; unlike traditional fanventures, which use the aesthetic of interactive fiction but none of the non-linear storytelling, this one was a fully-fledged choose-your-own-adventure story. In the following year’s planner, I started writing a spiritual successor called W1LT1NG (the setting of this one is slightly less self-evident: it took place inside an Egyptian pyramid). Neither of these stories have seen the light of day outside of a couple of my friends (and teachers) - but they might, so I’ll discuss them no further.

At some point in high school, I tried adapting SP00KY M4N0R for the web - first in MS Paint, then later in Photoshop CS2 - but put the project on the back burner and never really picked it back up again.

It wasn’t until after I joined the Homestuck Discord server that my interest in fanventures was rekindled. I became its 9615th member on the 6th of January, 2018 - in other words, a good while after we’d wrapped on Retrace Steps - but very quickly realised that its rate of activity was far to high for me to keep up with anything, duly muted it, and pretty much just forgot about it entirely.

Months later, something - presumably in either the Worth the Candle server or the Worm server - drew me back, and I found myself lurking there infrequently. On the 2nd of November, I briefly waded in - to ask some questions about Cordyceps - and after that, I think I lurked on-and-off for pretty much a whole month while I finished the remaining works on Makin’s List of Shills (if you’re wondering what all of these names in italics are, you might want to click that link). After that, I was pretty much there to stay.

A small but notable number of the server’s regulars ran fanventures of their own, and so I found myself becoming much more aware of the format than I ever had been while working on SP00KY M4N0R. Eventually, I decided I wanted to make something of my own - this was shortly after I’d finished working on Another Son, which had ended up being something of a mixed bag in a lot of ways - and hit upon the idea of adapting Retrace Steps as a fanventure.

You see, the thing about fanventures is that many of them begin with the same premise - “you are mysteriously alone”, and then things escalate as you learn more about the world the second-person protagonist has found themselves in. Retrace Steps has that same premise, with a very simple twist - the reason you are mysteriously alone is simply that nobody likes you.

SERIES OF SHOTS:

A) Alice re-enters the building B) She heads up the stairs, C) reaches the door to the threshold D) (a brief return to the original angle from the very beginning of the film) and enters the threshold. E) Extreme close-up of the key entering the lock. F) Over-the-shoulder shot as the door is unlocked and starts to open. G) (180-degree cut) She stares, dumbfounded at what she finds within. F) (Her POV) Her room is full of people, all holding red plastic cups and staring at her.

V. Drawing is harder than I thought.

Before I get into the meat of the work, I should probably give a broad overview of the process I used for creating the images - which, for the most part, was identical to the process I’d used for SP00KY M4N0R. The panels in Homestuck are 650px by 450px; in order to create a rougher (read: more forgiving) look, I halved these dimensions to 325px by 225px. I’d originally planned to scale the images back up to full size during publication, but ended up deciding that the negative space around the smaller frames helped create an atmosphere of isolation. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it’d be possible to scale the images back up without any anti-aliasing.

If you don’t know what anti-aliasing is, I’ll briefly explain - it’s when pixels at the edge of shapes in digital images get changed to a slightly different colour, to create smoother outlines. This works well at high resolutions, but at lower resolutions muddies detail and makes the image appear somewhat blurred - the effect is particularly pronounced if the images are entirely black and white. Homestuck avoids anti-aliasing pretty consistently, and doing so is a hallmark of the MSPA style.

Thankfully, Photoshop CS2 allows you to turn off antialiasing on pretty much every individual tool. I drew all the graphics using a 4px brush, but thanks to a beat-up old variable-pressure graphics tablet I could reduce this to 2px as needed. The 2px brush size was employed pretty heavily for detail in some of the busier environments, and at times I found myself using the selection tool to nudge stuff around at a pixel-by-pixel level.

Although Retrace Steps is adapted from a script, I’m pretty sure none of the dialogue from that script ended up making the jump into the second-person narration of the story. In fact, very few of the script’s locations remain either. The words and the artwork developed in tandem - I was rarely more than a few panels ahead in the script, and would generally let the physical on-panel action inform what was being written.

I occasionally looked up bits of reference - most notably to get some architectural details for the Tesco store - but otherwise winged it. Occasionally, in the more complicated images, I’d start out by drawing some perspective lines. For a couple of the images in the credits (specifically the cup and the Poké Ball) I went so far as to use autoshapes as guides, because I was struggling to draw passable circles freehand.

(No, those shapes on the right aren’t my attempts at circles, they’re the guide I used while drawing the doughnut.)

I’ll give more specific thoughts later, but broadly speaking I think my drawings suited the story I was trying to tell about as well as they could. I’m not an artist, and in the future I’m going to stray away from visual projects like this; the part I value most is the writing process, and I’d say that only a tiny fraction of the time I devoted to this project was actually spent writing. The flip side of that, of course, is that people generally much prefer stories with a visual aspect - it’s hard to convince them to read a webcomic, much less a prose story.

           ALICE    What the actual fuck are you all doing in my room?            BOB (somewhat passively)    Uhhh… didn’t you get my email?            ALICE    What email? Everyone in the room stares at her. Then, as one, they move to push her out of the room and shut the door. She protests, until-

           ALICE    This is my room!

           BOB (poking his head back into shot with mucho sass)    Yeah, but it’s not though, is it? He slams the door the rest of the way shut, and the lock clicks back into place.

Back to very first angle.

           ALICE (quietly, to herself)    What the actual fuck.

She knocks on the door loudly.

           ALICE (shouting, her face inches from the door)    This is my room!

Silence. She tilts her head forward, hitting the door with a sad thud. Then she turns and sits down, back to the door, and the camera cuts to join her at this new level.

She sits for a few seconds, thinking, then gets up again and leaves frame.

VI. Writing this commentary is harder than I thought.

Anyway, I figure the best way to get down into the details is to just start at the beginning and work my way through.

The first twenty panels take place in something of a liminal space - the corridor on which the reader’s room lies. I made sure never to show any of the other doors in the corridor; so far as the reader is concerned, they may as well not exist. The door is numbered “41″ - this being a truncation of “413″, the most ubiquitous of Homestuck’s so-called “meme numbers”. I kinda envisioned the room as being the first on the fourth floor of the building.

(If I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll say that the other doors are the ones up in the site’s navigation bar - they literally exist outside the scope of the panels.)

I probably didn’t spend as much time as I should’ve perfecting this environment - the door’s very wobbly. My first attempt placed it at the end of the corridor, but I didn’t like the way that looked at all.

Just in terms of the site itself, there’s a couple of things to take note of. The first is the solo cup sitting at the top of page, next to the advertisement, which is also the story’s icon on the site - and its only splash of colour (well, except in the ads, which I don’t have any control over). The second is that the link to the next panel is “->” - a slight variation on the command used by Homestuck, which was “==>”. The significance of this should be obvious to Homestuck readers, but I’ll comment no further on either of these details until later.

(Fun fact: I didn’t find out that those big red American plastic party cups had an actual proper name, and that that name was frikkin’ solo cup, until well into the fanventure’s development, if not after I’d finished it entirely. One of my friends used the term in passing conversation - I can’t remember what about, because I was too busy freaking out internally. It’s like pottery; it rhymes.)

On panel 3 - once they’ve walked into the corridor - the lights have turned on, and the entire colour scheme for the comic flips. The idea of having automatic lights was present in the original script, but it wasn’t until pretty late in the fanventure’s development that I decided to make them plot-relevant!

Out of all the images, it’s the close-up of the door on panels 5-7 that comes closest to matching a shot description in the script. The original idea was that the door being locked was the inciting incident that would lead the protagonist to go look for their keys - so the title/command “RETRACE STEPS” would literally appear as they pressed the handle. In the first draft of that panel, this was in fact the case - but my prereaders didn’t think it looked that great, and I was inclined to agree; besides, the title also appeared prominently on the title page and during the credits.

It’s not until panel 7 that we get any words at all - a simple “huh”. In the original script, I made relatively heavy use of profanity in Alice’s dialogue - this was supposed to signify hostility. I wasn’t happy with how this came across, and completely backpedalled in the fanventure - the second-person narration is entirely devoid of swears. I wanted to portray your inability to curse to as a deficiency: you’re unable to fully express yourself. Like most aspects of your character, this isn’t something you’re supposed to consciously notice or understand until after the story’s twist is revealed.

Panel 8 includes a command: “Try door again.” Generally speaking, the commands used in Retrace Steps are much more perfunctory than those in Homestuck - they’re almost entirely devoid of snark, with many being only a single word.

This entire sequence has a lot of legwork to do in terms of laying out the situation in a believable manner without giving too much away. On panel 14, the narration lists your inventory: a phone, a packet of tissues, and a wallet. The phone and the wallet both play direct roles in the narrative, but I consciously chose to include the tissues because I think the word itself has connotations with illness, sadness, and loneliness.

It’s worth noting that these items are those that I personally carry about in real life. Other than the abstract geography of the corridor, this is perhaps the clearest example of me drawing directly from my own day-to-day experiences. The word “self-insert” is kind of a dirty word in a lot of ways, but the truth is that I wanted the protagonist of Retrace Steps to serve as both a self-insert and an audience surrogate. This is why I felt like the MSPA format would serve the story well.

(None of that is to say that you should draw conclusions about me as a person based on the behaviour of the character in the story. Superficially, they share a lot of my tics, but their actual thought processes and motivations are different in many ways.)

Panels 17-19 are just repeated images of the empty corridor; the lights turn off on panel 20, and the site’s colours briefly flip again. Heading into this project, I had the rough idea that I wanted to tell the story in a “nice” number of pages - maybe a hundred, maybe less, maybe more. I decided that, if I repeated the door image, I’d have a buffer to use to shorten or lengthen the final page count as needed - but that turned out not to be necessary. This little span establishes that the lights in the corridor are on a timer, a fact which turns out to be relevant down the line.

The first scene change occurs on panel 21, which shows a stairwell. My original version of this sequence confused basically everyone who saw it - I’d envisioned the camera as being at the bottom, looking up, but everyone presumed I’d done it from the top down. The current approach makes much more sense, as all of the lines of action in the image point towards its centre.

As you descend the stairs and thinks about your roommate, the narration rambles much more. In this story, I decided that use of the internet would be a signifier for loneliness in some way - the roommate has an old-fashioned phone and communicates only by text. I wanted to give the impression that they’re bad at checking their messages; preferring instead just to talk to people face-to-face. That’s not the whole story, though - to a certain extent, they actively ghost you.

Once more, I’m drawing pretty heavily from my own life experiences for this sequence. For a long time in high school, I used to have a terrible flip phone - my parents didn’t want me to have anything better. I eventually upgraded to a terrible smartphone, which I mostly used to play Hill Climb Racing and Glow Hockey. Late in high school, I wound up using a bulky Kindle Fire as a portable computer, with my brother’s old terrible smartphone in case I needed to call anyone; the phone was pretty much always out of battery. It was only within the last six months - halfway through my second year of university - that I got an actual honest-to-god good smartphone. This stuff becomes relevant again later, during the Pokémon GO sequences.

(As I said earlier, I didn’t have a roommate, but my neighbour did - his roommate kept strange hours, and I’m pretty sure most nights he didn’t come back to accommodation to sleep. They got along, but there was an arrangement in place there.)

The image of seeing someone at meals but never speaking to them struck me as a fairly strong one - in student accommodation, you’re forced to interact with people because you use the same amenities, but the extent to which you actually communicate with those people is a matter of personal choice. The narration uses the word “sit”, which I think implies a lack of understanding of that element of choice - you don’t sit together, therefore you cannot speak. The idea that you totally could sit together just doesn’t occur to you.

Anyway, panels 25-33 take place immediately outside the building. With public buildings like this, people who smoke are unlikely to stray far from the door - and the smell lingers for a while after they’re finished. Public smoking has always been one of my pet hates - I’m asthmatic - but I consider the extent to which it bothers me to be something of a character flaw. The protagonist of Retrace Steps is kinda built of flaws like this: things which sound reasonable but are rooted in their lack of empathy.

The narration uses the word “ramble” to describe the text sent to your roommate - later on, we learn that the word “rant” might’ve been more accurate.

This is the point where the story itself notes that it’s a Friday night - a fact which was previously stated in the very first line of its description. The idea of not doing anything on a Friday night is a pretty common symbol for loneliness; it’s the night when most people go out with friends, at the conclusion of the workweek. Tropes are tools - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The other symbol for loneliness in this sequence is slightly less obvious, I think - it’s when the reader kicks a single stone out onto the path. The narration notes that they “don’t know” why they did that; this was intended to mirror the story’s central mystery. In the original version, they kicked the stone from the path back in amongst the rest - the idea being that they’d kinda fallen by the wayside, and wanted not to be alone. I kinda go back and forth on which version I prefer, but they get the same thing across.

Panels 34-35 are each “unique” images, in that they only recur in the credits. It felt like a waste to spend a long time drawing complicated images like this without reusing them in any capacity, but I’m glad I did.

The first of these unique images was supposed to convey the city’s emptiness in a clear way. It’s probably one of my favourites, even if it’s pretty rough in places. The forced perspective is more strongly felt in this image than in any other in the fanventure, and it led me to mess up the scale of the protagonist - this was something that I only fixed after the comic was otherwise pretty much done.

I was on the fence as to whether or not to include the billboard. A lot of the imagery in the fanventure is very on-the-nose, but the billboard is easily the most blatant in this respect - the protagonist completely ignores the concept of self-improvement so they can play Pokémon GO. I ended up showing the panel to an uncredited friend, and they convinced me it was a good idea to keep it in.

The Pokémon GO stuff is pretty much when the fanventure jumps the shark, to be honest. You can tell, because the command - “Pokemon GO on your phone” - is a reference to a dumb thing Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 American presidential election.

See, the thing is, the vast majority of the game’s mechanics are designed to encourage going outside and interacting with others - you can ignore or circumvent this, but it’ll cost you one way or another. Which is fascinating to me! The game is easiest if you go out of your way to make friends with other people who play the game. This is a common theme throughout much of Nintendo’s output - and it somehow usually feels less cynical than the kinds of forced interaction you find in many other mobile games.

The bit that’s really fascinating, however, is the lengths people go to avoid these inconveniences. They’ll buy both versions of each new Pokémon game, rather than trading with someone who has the version they didn’t buy! They’ll buy a second Nintendo DS, just so they can get the Pokémon from one game to another! I can’t begrudge them, because I’ve certainly done similar things myself in the past, but I think you can certainly frame it in a way where it looks like all these gamers treat social interaction as an obstacle to overcome. Who’d’ve thought?

The narration on panel 37 ended up going through several revisions, thanks to feedback from Gitaxian. Back when I was new to the Homestuck Discord, Gitaxian was one of the people who made me feel welcome - we both really like this one obscure essay about the live-action Transformers movies (and totally recommend that you should read it). He responded pretty positively to Everything Is Red Now, a Spider-Man comic I made over a year ago, and was my first choice for a prereader on Retrace Steps.

Gitaxian found the sequence in its original form to be a little over-detailed, and suggested that I change its tone from “explaining the game” to “complaining about the game”. He also noted that making it “rantier” would be a way of concretely validating the roommate’s perspective. I followed his advice, and I’m much happier with where the story ended up as a result.

Knowing I’d be revisiting these panels later in the story, I ended up taking the time to polish them up a little: I added details of a fence and path in the background, and tweaked the hand in the foreground. By this point, I was starting to get pretty tired of drawing; of the project in general. I’d put aside other things I was working on, and had academic assignments to deal with as well.

Panel 40 is one of a couple of panels that I feel would benefit from similar polishing. The idea was that it’d be a top-down view of the street, with two streetlamps providing light. The round shadows would give the impression of a pair of eyes or binoculars, with the lampposts themselves being pupils - tying into the paranoia described in the narration.

I thought that, by zooming out and letting the darkness creep into frame, I’d be able to force something of a tonal shift - and I think I was reasonably successful in this regard, particularly as the colours of the site itself flip once more. The prose also shifts slightly in tone, as the tail-end of the rant leads into the realisation that something’s wrong.

In its original form, people were confused by the image - the shading wasn’t nearly heavy enough, and the composition was unusual. This is where the art style works against me; I only have two colours to work with, and it can be hard to distinguish between detail and shadow at such a low resolution.

(There’s an animated music video for SIAMÉS’ “The Wolf” which uses a similar monochrome-plus-red palette to Retrace Steps - I saw it long before development on the story started and forgot about it until just now, so I don’t think it was an influence on the fanventure, but it’s definitely worth a watch!)

In the very first draft of the script, the protagonist found the key to their room in their hood. Seriously. Like, it’d start raining, they’d put their hood up and there’d be the key. I couldn’t think of a good ending, so I just came up with something daft and called it a day. The “doughnut offering” aspect of the story didn’t appear until I redrafted the script, a little ways into the film’s development (probably before we shot anything), but I can’t remember exactly how it came about. Originally, the script simply ended with the door getting slammed shut - the last line being a “what the actual fuck” from Sam/Alice.

(At the time when I was writing the story, I didn’t make a habit of buying mini doughnuts. I still don’t, except for on some occasions when I’m eating at a friend’s house and want to bring something low-commitment - even then, it’s usually cookies or muffins or full-sized doughnuts. Presumably, it was Retrace Steps which influenced that particular habit.)

On at least a literal level, the story’s message is “buy people doughnuts if you want them to be friends with you”. But naturally the actual message - and, I think, the reality - is that it’s not so transactional; really it’s just about assuming the best of people and being nice to them. Of course, there’s plenty of pitfalls in that approach - I’d be tempted to write a whole ‘nother story about them, if I didn’t think it’d end up being a little too dark and deconstructive. Be nice! That’s all I’m saying.

At least when I was writing the script, I’d actually planned for the protagonist to buy doughnuts from the local Sainsbury’s store. We have a Tesco store as well, plus a bunch of bigger supermarkets, but the Sainsbury’s is usually the quietest - it’s expensive and poorly-stocked. Plus, I just felt like it’d look better on-camera.

(If you’re not from the UK, all you need to know is that Tesco and Sainsbury’s are the two biggest supermarket chains. Well, apparently Asda overtook Sainsbury’s last month, but we’ll see how long that lasts. I’d say they’re generally pretty-much-indistinguishable, but at least in my mind I associate Sainsbury’s more closely with the middle classes - Tesco, meanwhile, is ubiquitous.)

When it came to adapting the script, I realised I could use any supermarket I wanted, and I picked Tesco. Specifically an “Express” store, which is a smaller shop found in town centres and the like. It fitted the story better - and besides, I’ve always liked the colloquialism “Tescos”. As in “aight mum I’m poppin off Tescos, our Jack says they’ve got a bogof on Lucozade, works out a quid for two litres so I’m buzzin, you after anythin or nah”.

(As part of let’s-call-it-research for the story, I found an eight-page thread on Mumsnet where a mum asks “am I being unreasonable to get really annoyed with people who call Tesco ‘Tescos’?” - this was immensely funny to me, and pretty much cemented my decision to use a real supermarket in the story as opposed to a made-up one.)

So yeah, panels 41-44 take place outside this Tescos. It was my brother - credited as “patipon” - who noted that I needed to use more solid black in the image. Most of what we discussed about the story took place in voice calls, which is a shame; historically, it’s been uncommon for me to solicit him for feedback on projects like this one. I consulted him on several of this story’s panels - he devotes much more time to graphics and artwork than I do - and his suggestions were always useful.

The prose on panel 43 is probably one of the bits I’m most proud of. It’s an awkward mix of metaphors coming from a character who isn’t used to being able to think when they’re at this particular place. I like the phrase “fumbled passes in the aisles” a lot.

(Gospar, one of my IRL friends and another prereader on Retrace Steps, occasionally graces us with the saying “ah, another day, another butchered social interaction”. Meanwhile, I went through a short-but-embarassing phase of butchering the trivial social interaction of “how are you?” by replying “I’m here” - something which I can’t excuse, but which I sure can immortalise in a webcomic.)

(All of this talk of Tescos reminds me of a draft I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive forever - the beginning of a first chapter which I wrote early in secondary school. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic snow-covered Britain where people travel around in sailboats on skis, and opens with some guy going into a buried Tescos for supplies. There, he runs into some orphan, who persuades the guy to let him hitch a ride on the snow-boat - snoat? Sure, whatever, snoat. The twist was going to be that the guy was planning to nuke some settlement, for reasons which I never wrote down and have since forgotten, and the kid would work this out and have to kill the guy to stop him. I note this simply to say that, while my stories may have gotten slightly less dumb and bad since I started writing, it seems that Tescos will be an enduring feature.)

(Wintry post-apocalyptic settings will also be an enduring feature, come to think of it: around the time I was writing Retrace Steps, I was also running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for some friends which was basically standard fantasy - only it was set on an infinite-in-every-direction ski slope. I’m not a very good Dungeon Master, so I let the campaign die after a handful of sessions over the course of the year - which is a shame, because I’d planned a KILLER TWIST for that story too. Anyway, enough nonsense - back to Pokémon GO.)

I suppose at this point I should note that the two Pokémon you run into are Dugtrio and Magneton. These two are the evolved forms of Diglett and Magnemite, and are kinda-unique in that they’re literally just three of their previous stage grouped together. Hopefully, the symbolism of someone trying to obtain these Pokémon - and only succeeding after offering them a berry - should be clear enough.

(Note that the narration on panel 46 says you’re “not sure why this thing wants the berry” - at this point in the story, the protagonist doesn’t understand the significance of gestures like this.)

(I’ve yet to obtain either of these Pokémon in-game myself; Diglett and Magnemite are surprisingly hard to come by.)

The second half of the fanventure - from panel 51 all the way to panel 100 - takes place back inside the corridor. There’s a lot in the way of repeated panels with very little narration here - I was going for a more introspective tone, and this seemed like a good way to achieve that.

On panel 52, the narration notes that you plan to message your internet friends, then call your parents. It’s a little beat, but I felt like there was something kinda sad about the idea of having a closer connection with people you’ve never met than with your own parents. This is a pretty irrational way of looking at it - in my experience, most people on the internet who talk about their parents have pretty frayed relationships with them. Besides, there are plenty of cases where random peers will be better-equipped to help with specific problems - it’s just a case of balancing that against the fact that your own parents will probably care about you far more than any of those people.

I wanted to convey the image of someone who has the vast majority of their social interactions online. This theme is crucial to Homestuck itself, but while Homestuck demonstrates it by communicating its story pretty much entirely in chatlogs, in Retrace Steps I try to communicate it by showing everything except the chatlogs. Homestuck kills off everyone except a bunch of internet friends and their guardians; Retrace Steps just quietly omits everyone except a bunch of strangers standing in a room ha ha ha whoops spoilers.

Anyway, on panel 53, we start to see an environmental change caused by these strangers. For the first time, it seems like you’re not completely alone in this world.

The light's motion-activated - it turns on when you open the door, and then turns off again after around ten minutes. You've been gone much longer than that... meaning somebody else must have triggered it since then.

While working on this commentary, I decided that the original text of panel 55 - present in the story since its original release on 04/04/2019 and preserved in the above quote - was kinda overwrought and clumsy. Usually I’m pretty loathe to make edits to a story after it’s out on the internet, but this one felt acceptable - “Why was the light on when you arrived?” is much more succinct way of communicating what’s going on.

This panel’s artwork is also pretty clumsy - in case you’re having trouble parsing it, that’s supposed to be your head at the bottom. I tried to put a bit of light shading on it, but I’m not really happy with the result. Like I say, at this point I was getting pretty tired of drawing. Nah, I’m not changing it.

On panel 58, there’s a rare bit of onomatopoeia as you finally think to knock on the door. The negative space encroaches in from the right... but what does it hide?

Oh hey, it’s your roommate!

I think to a certain extent, this is another confusing image - Gitaxian observed that it didn’t really make much sense spatially. It’s kinda supposed to be a side-on cutaway, but that doesn’t really come across - I briefly tried adding a wood grain, to communicate that it’s the open door, but that didn’t make much sense at this scale and only confused matters further. In the end, I tweaked the boundary between the door and the corridor to give the impression of a couple of hinges and called it a day.

Panel 61 is, I guess, the big twist. You wanted to know where everyone is? Surprise! They’re in your room! Having a party! And you weren’t invited!

I wanted the reader to have a second to contemplate this, so the next couple of panels swap back-and-forth between you and the doorway. To underscore the silliness of the twist, one of the people in the back takes a big long sluuuurp from their solo cup - this breaks the spell, and you point for them all to leave.

It’s panel 67 that breaks the narration for the first time in the story. I wanted to present the roommate’s dialogue as a sharp contrast to the inner voice of the protagonist - it’s full of abbreviations, completely devoid of punctuation, and written entirely in solo-cup-red. The roommate simply sighs that you “never change”, and slams the door on you (with yet another cheeky bit of onomatopoeia appearing on-panel).

The idea that being around other people somehow supplants your inner thoughts is a very deliberate one - the commands cease entirely, the narration goes away. In these moments, we see you how everyone else sees you - as someone who’s pretty much entirely silent. On panels 69-70 there’s simply some ellipses, which kinda lengthen into a brief return of narration as you’re left on your own once more.

The reason this party’s taking place in “YOUR room” - as noted in the narration on panel 71 - is simply to show a feeling of entitlement. On the surface, you’re mad that you can’t get into your room - but you're also just feeling like people should invite you to parties.

Hopefully, the questions on panel 72 and panel 74 should be answering themselves by this point. You don’t know it at the time, but these will prove to be the last pieces of narration in the story.

After you’ve had some time to sit in the corridor and feel sorry for yourself, your roommate starts feeling bad and comes out to offer a sincere-but-backhanded apology. We’re into the last quarter of the comic now - starting with panel 76, there’s no text outside of what is spoken by your roommate.

The command used to advance to the next page has changed from “->” to “-->”. The story isn’t about just one person any more.

(This device is lifted directly from Homestuck, which switched from the command “==>” - used when the comic had four main characters - to “======>” when it swapped to a cast of twelve. Many fanventures - such as Oceanfalls - riff on this concept further, and mine is no exception.)

Out of all the text in the story, I’m probably happiest with the monologue on panel 79 and panel 80. I think it speaks for itself.

(As I always find myself saying, these commentaries kinda show that I don’t trust my stories to speak for themselves. I did hold off on writing this one for a couple of months, but there was lots of behind-the-scenes stuff I wanted to get on the record and I ultimately couldn’t help myself. The truth is that pretty much nobody reads these things - the commentaries, or the stories they’re for - and so the whole thing’s pretty much for my own benefit. I get to declare what I was going for, you get to decide whether or not I got it.)

Panels 81-95 are pretty much a frame-by-frame animation of you offering your roommate the doughnuts, and them leading you into the party. It’s basically two actions, but I try my best to draw them out as long as possible - by this point, the story’s said pretty much everything it needs to, and now it’s all just... emotional payoff? I feel like I’ve never been much good with character arcs, but I’m proud of how this turned out.

As promised, panels 96-99 are a straight repeat of panels 17-19 - the automatic lights turn off and the site’s colours flip for the last time, neatly mirroring the story’s first two panels in its last two.

Back in the kitchen, she opens the cupboard again and grabs the box of mini doughnuts.

She returns to her door and knocks again.

           ALICE    I bought doughnuts?

There is a long pause. The door suddenly opens and Bob pokes his head around, reaches out to grab like three doughnuts from the box, and then darts back inside. The door slams shut again.

           ALICE    Hey!

VII. Animation is harder than I thought.

This story is titled Retrace Steps because, in its original script form, it mostly focused on somebody retracing their steps in the hopes that they’d find their keys. The fanventure, however, drops this aspect of the plot entirely - leaving it with something of an artifact title. Maybe I should’ve come up with an alternate title, but I didn’t. On some level, it now simply refers to the trip to Tescos - on another, I think it implies that something’s been lost. I think it was the nagging feeling that the title no longer held enough significance that led me to create the story’s final flash.

If you haven’t read Homestuck, all you need to know is that pages with commands that are prefixed with an “[S]” are usually longer animations set to music, used for particularly important moments in the plot (or, just as often, for random chicanery). Having a flash of this sort is a point of prestige for fanventures - especially if it approaches any real length of complexity. I’d vaguely liked the idea of letting music play a fairly prominent role in the short film, and it felt right to return to those roots.

There wasn’t really any question as to which song I’d pick, either. See, back in college, I ran this terrible meme page called Summer Meme Sundae. It was absolute garbage. Please don’t click that link. Basically, its deal was that - for the latter half of its run - I tried to introduce something of a plot across the “memes”, wherein the page’s mascot got castaway and wound up in Australia. It was very silly and absolutely incomprehensible. Like I say, don’t look at it. This isn’t reverse psychology, it’s legitimately unfunny and bad. Anyway, the last post I made was something of a rudimentary flash in its own right - set to “Pizza for Breakfast” from The Meme Friends’ Last Week’s Pizza EP. I know basically nothing about The Meme Friends, but I thiiink they were some randos on 4chan’s /mu/ board.

It’s fair to say that the aesthetic of Last Week’s Pizza, which includes such tracks as “Cold Pizza”, “Everyone I Ever Loved is Now Dead”, and “Executive Pizza Party (Business)”, kinda appeals to me. If you’re reading Retrace Steps, the chances that you’ve heard the track before are next to nil - it comes with zero baggage. Moreover, it’s from a freely-distributed independent project created by a collective that hasn’t put out anything in years - it’s extremely unlikely that anybody’s going to come and tell me off for using it.

I specifically picked “No Forks, No Knives, It’s Pizza Time” because I felt like its tone was closest to that of the story, and because it has a relatively short runtime of just over two minutes - which still ended up being a little too long, but I don’t think it turned out too bad.

The flash opens on the image of the door in the corridor from the previous panel, which is gradually cut into smaller and smaller pieces by black lines until it disappears altogether. Cue title. One of the reasons I like the flash format - aside from the lack of antialiasing - is that you really have no way of telling how long the video’s going to be or what happens except by watching it. There’s none of YouTube’s functionality for skipping around - you’re forced to sit and watch the entire thing start-to-finish without stopping.

(I think Retrace Steps is definitely best read in a single sitting, and the final flash is a big part of that. My fourth prereader, Multivac of the Homestuck Discord server, was unable to watch the flash at first - I forget why - and found the story unclear. After watching the flash, he seemed to backpedal on this sentiment. Time will tell whether his initial assessment was correct; I picked Multivac because he’d previously responded positively to Everything Is Red Now, and because I’d usually consider his reaction to something to be a pretty decent rough baseline for the general reaction of the Homestuck Discord server.)

When stuff starts happening, it starts happening fast - you see the protagonist’s descent down the stairs again, but this time you see all three panels at once, as if there’s more than one person on the stairs. The minute you get outside, you start seeing entirely new people - many with red accents of some kind. Someone smoking, someone who’s been shopping, someone with a rucksack...

The people outside Tescos had a little more in the way of thought put into them. On the left, there’s a homeless person, and someone walking by with headphones on. Over on the far right, there’s someone holding their phone out in front of them - they’re wearing a hat famously worn by Ash Ketchum in the Pokémon anime, just in case there’s any doubt as to what game they’re playing. Someone sorta tired-looking crosses away from the rest. Everyone in the frame’s kinda collectively ignoring the two people holding hands.

(Textually, Retrace Steps is a story about... platonic fulfillment? If that’s a phrase that makes sense? My personal take is that the protagonist of this story struggles to create and maintain friendships. However, I tried to leave room for interpretation - particularly in terms of this section of the flash - and I think a reading definitely exists that brings in more romantic subtext.)

(Actually, I already kinda explored this last year - much less effectively - in Another Son. Like in that story, I wanted the audience to understand why the characters are lonely - but I used a much more sympathetic approach this time around, which crucially makes you actually want the story’s protagonist to stop being lonely. Something which bothers me about certain stories - and this is a really common failing of music videos, which lack the introspection of prose - is when the narrative takes its protagonist and frames things in a way which says “you should feel sorry for this person” while they proceed to do really unsympathetic things. If you’re going to give them a victory, the audience should feel like they actually deserve it!)

After a brief segment where you finally catch that Dugtrio, the flash cycles back through the various locations until we arrive back in the corridor. This sequence was added mostly to pad for time, but also serves to bring things full circle for the flash’s final shots. On the final beats of each bar - which fall on a higher note - the colours flip; this was purely an aesthetic choice.

The next section of the flash is just credits, which I kinda wanted to use to lull the audience into a false sense of security. See, the original plan was for the final image of the comic to just be you, standing completely alone, holding a solo cup - an ending which I think is much more ambiguous.

I still think this original ending provokes a much stronger emotional reaction - and indeed, it did at the time. As Gospar said, “also you sure you wanna keep the sad end / I think the fade out on others and the static / sort of implied they hadn’t changed?” Gitaxian agreed - “I think having the crowd fade to just the two of them, and then ending there, would be the best ending”. I’d already considered doing that, but had decided against it for reasons I’ve forgotten.

See, by this point in the story, you’ve made this connection with your roommate - but everyone else remains a stranger. I like this ending for its optimism: instead of saying “you're still alone”, it says “this is a good start”.

Oh, and remember the solo cup that’s been sitting up next to the ad? Yeah, that’s gone now.

She protests and knocks on the door again. Just before she kicks it, it suddenly opens again. Bob has like three doughnuts in his mouth.

           BOB    These are pretty good actually.

He grabs the whole box and opens the door fully, lightly beckoning for Alice to enter. She does so. The door closes.

We cut to inside the room. Everyone is standing in cramped, uncomfortable silence. Somebody hands Alice a red plastic cup.

CUT TO BLACK.

THE END

VIII. Knowing when to shut up is harder than I thought.

I just went to Tescos and bought a box of mini doughnuts.

(I didn’t set out to do that, but they were selling a single box for next to nothing and I felt like it was too serendipitous to ignore.)

It’s the end of the year. Classes finished over a month ago. I always end up staying for a good while after, because doing so gives me more time to work on projects like this, but most of my friends end up leaving before me - in other words, I don’t have anyone to share the doughnuts with.

(They have strawberry-flavoured icing and multicoloured sprinkles, and they taste frikkin’ great, so I can’t say I’m too beat up about that.)

I’ve played very little Pokémon GO since I started working on this fanventure. I... think I kinda ruined it for myself?

When I finished Retrace Steps, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do the fanventure format for a while. That lasted all of about four days, after which I started Huskyquest. It seems silly to give away this new fanventure’s plot here, so all I’ll say is this: it’s got dogs in it, it’s got more than three colours, and you should definitely drop it a like because I’ll hopefully be picking it back up again pretty soon.

In the meantime, feel free to peruse all the other things I made on this blog! There should be another project coming out here very soon, so if you wanna be informed when that happens, drop me a follow either here or on twitter. And of course, if you have any questions, my ask box is always open. Thanks for reading!

...You’re still here?

It’s over.

Pokémon GO home.

> Go.