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lupinqs · 2 months ago

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SAFE AND SOUND (1/3) ━━ pazzi

☆ ━ summary: in which azzi fudd forms an unexpected alliance with paige bueckers as they fight for survival in the hunger games.

☆ ━ word count: 10.1K

☆ ━ warnings: nothing yet really, should all be in the next chapter lol

☆ ━ links: part two, my masterlist, ao3 link

☆ ━ author’s note: if i had a nickel for every time i wrote one of my ships going to the hunger games together, i’d have two nickels. which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice 🧐 obviously this is a hunger games au so if you haven’t read the book or seen the movie or are not familiar with the premise, i don’t know how well you’ll be able to understand. alsoooo this part is lowkey very much buildup and not actual pazzi just mostly azzi; it was meant to be one whole part but it would’ve been too damn long so i split it!

“AZZI FUDD.”

The words hang in the air, and for a moment, everything stops. The world around her seems to freeze in time. Lucia Bliss, the escort from District Nine, says the name with a certain flair, her voice high-pitched and breathy, as if this is a celebration instead of a death sentence. Lucia’s purple hair gleams under the harsh midday sun, her too-bright smile a sick contrast to the crowd’s silence.

Azzi stands rooted to the ground. Her heart slams in her chest, and her vision narrows as shock seeps through her bones. She can’t move, can’t breathe. Her body is disconnected from her mind, numbness spreading through her limbs. She vaguely registers the weight of the stares from the girls around her—some wide-eyed with horror, others carefully blank. Azzi blinks. Is this real? She swallows hard, but her throat feels like sandpaper.

She never let herself think about this. Never allowed the possibility to take root. She spent the whole week worrying about her little brothers, Jon and Jose, her anxiety circling around them like a storm cloud. Jose, especially. It’s his first Reaping, and he’d been so scared he couldn’t sleep the night before. Azzi had promised him it’d be okay, that the odds were in their favor. She’d lied. And now it’s her name that hangs in the air.

Her legs feel heavy, like they’ve been weighed down with stones, but somehow, she forces them to move. One step. Then another. Each movement is stiff, mechanical, her body obeying while her mind is still reeling. The faces in the crowd blur into a mass of pale colors, and Azzi avoids looking at any of them directly. The sun presses down on her back, making her skin feel tight, suffocating, but she barely registers it. Her heartbeat thuds in her ears, a dull roar that drowns out everything else.

I have to do this. She repeats it in her head, over and over, as if it will numb the panic creeping up her spine. I have to get up there.

The platform is higher than it looks. It looms above her as she approaches, and the closer she gets, the more she feels the weight of the district watching her. Her hands tremble at her sides, but she keeps them balled into fists, her nails digging into her palms. She can’t afford to show fear. Not now.

She steps onto the stage, the wooden floor creaking beneath her shoes. Lucia Bliss beams at her, all synthetic kindness and hollow enthusiasm, like she’s completely oblivious to the fact that she’s sending a sixteen-year-old girl to her death. Azzi wants to scream, to shout at her, to demand to know how she can smile like that. Instead, she stands there, stiff as a board, staring blankly into the crowd.

She doesn’t look at her family. Not yet. If she lets herself see them—really see them—she knows she’ll fall apart. And she can’t afford to break down, not in front of everyone. Not here. The numbness is the only thing keeping her from collapsing.

“Now, for the boys!” Lucia announces, with that same bright cheeriness, like this is all just a grand spectacle and not a nightmare come to life.

The second name is pulled, and Azzi barely registers the sound of the boy’s name. “Kellan Ryder.”

Her eyes catch a glimpse of him as he stumbles forward—a scrawny boy with messy red hair and too-thin arms. He looks no older than fourteen, maybe fifteen at most. His face is pale, his mouth set in a tight line as he walks toward the platform like a condemned man heading to the gallows. There’s no strength in him, no fire. He’s shaking like a leaf, and Azzi knows his fate immediately. Anyone with a brain should. He won’t make it.

Kellan’s knees wobble as he climbs onto the platform, nearly tripping on the last step. His frightened eyes dart around, but when they meet Azzi’s for a fleeting moment, she sees it—the absolute terror, the resignation that’s already settled in him. He knows he’s dead. And now, she’s tethered to him.

Lucia claps her hands together, looking as if she expects the crowd to erupt into applause, but no one moves. District Nine never claps at the Reaping. There’s nothing to celebrate here.

Azzi’s jaw tightens, her hands still clenched at her sides. What now? What happens next? She can’t feel anything except a dull, creeping fear gnawing at the edges of her consciousness. It’s been less than five minutes since her name was called, but it feels like an eternity has passed. She feels lost, unmoored, floating in a space where time no longer makes sense.

As the anthem blares across the square, she chances a glance into the crowd—just for a second. Her gaze locks onto her family. Her mom is there, her face pale but strong. Azzi’s dad stands right next to her, an arm around her waist. They wear the same firm expressions—like they may actually believe their daughter can make it through this. Azzi can’t find Jon and Jose—they’re somewhere within the rest of the relieved crowd of boys who have been spared this year.

Lucia is speaking again, but Azzi barely hears her. The words are muffled, distant, as she’s ushered off the stage and into the cold interior of the Justice Building. Her chest feels tight, her throat burning from holding back everything that’s clawing at her insides, threatening to break free. She can’t let them see her cry.

Inside the Justice Building, it’s quieter, but the silence only makes her pulse race faster. She’s taken to a small room to wait. The goodbyes. They give her only a few minutes with her family before she’s whisked away forever.

Her mother is the first to come in, and the second the door closes behind her, the stoic mask she’s been holding up crumbles. She rushes forward and pulls Azzi into a bone-crushing hug. Katie Fudd does not shed any tears, but Azzi can feel her shaking against her shoulder. Trembling, but trying to fight it.

“You’re going to come back,” her mother says firmly, as if she’s manifesting it into existence. And then, more choked: “Please, Azzi. You have to come back.”

Azzi stands stiffly for a moment, then wraps her arms around her mother. She wants to promise that she’ll come back, that she’ll survive, but the words stick in her throat. How can she make a promise like that when she doesn’t know if she can keep it?

“I’ll try,” Azzi says instead, her voice hollow. I’ll try. It’s all she can offer.

Her brothers come in next, Jon leading Jose. The second Jose sees her, he runs to her, clinging to her waist like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he lets go. His face is streaked with tears, his breath coming in ragged sobs.

“You’re gonna come back, right?” Jose’s voice is small, broken. Azzi’s reminded that he’s only twelve. “You have to come back.”

Azzi pulls away slightly, brushing the hair out of his face. “I’ll do my best,” she whispers, her voice trembling. She can’t say anything more than that. She wishes she could lie, give him something more hopeful, but the truth is all she has.

Jon is much quieter, and he stands back, his face hard as stone. But his eyes—his eyes are full of pain, full of everything he’s trying not to feel. When he finally steps forward, he pulls her into a tight hug, whispering in her ear, “Please try to come home.”

Azzi nods, her throat too tight to respond.

And then it’s her dad that gets her last, his arms wrapping around her softer, less firm. He rubs a hand along her back, rests his chin on top of her head. It makes Azzi want to cry. But she doesn’t. She keeps the tears in. Tim tells her, “Be smart. Don’t trust anyone.” And then he pulls away, meeting her gaze. His eyes aren’t sad, they don’t memorize the lines of her face as if this is likely the last time they’ll ever see each other. Instead, they’re firm, a fire burning in them, a fire that believes Azzi has enough spark in her to win. “You’re strong, Az. You find what you’re good at, and you stick to it. Just like shooting.”

Azzi nods, though his words don’t truly reach her. She’s good at basketball—great, even. The best shooter in her district. But the Hunger Games isn’t basketball. It’s entirely different.

The goodbye is over too quickly, the Peacekeepers ushering her family out of the room, their voices echoing down the hall. As the door closes behind them, the reality of the situation hits her with full force. This is happening. This is real. There’s no way out of it. In just a few days, she’ll be in the arena, and all that will matter is survival.

Azzi takes a deep breath, her hands trembling. She has to survive. For her family. For her mom. For her dad. For Jon and Jose. I have to win.

But as the cold emptiness settles into her chest, she knows it’s not going to be that simple. Not even close.

THE ROOM in the Capitol’s Remake Center is pristine and clinical—too clean, in fact. The walls are bright white, and the overhead lights are too harsh, casting everything in an almost sterile glow. The faint hum of machinery buzzes in the background, and Azzi sits stiffly on the plush chair in the center of the room, her back straight and hands clenched in her lap. She can feel the cold, unfamiliar air of the Capitol against her skin, a far cry from the familiar, earthy smells of District Nine. The whole place feels wrong.

Azzi’s mind is still spinning from the events of the past day, from the Reaping to the train ride to the Capitol. Everything feels like a blur—one unending nightmare she can’t escape from. The vibrant, colorful city that’s supposed to be awe-inspiring feels nothing more than a glittering cage, trapping her in a world that doesn’t belong to her.

A knock at the door startles her from her thoughts, and she straightens, her heart thudding a little harder in her chest. The door opens, and in walks a tall, slender woman with dark, shimmering hair cut into a sleek bob. Her skin is flawless, glowing in the artificial light, and she’s dressed in an outfit that’s both futuristic and elegant, all smooth lines and shimmering fabric.

She strides into the room with the kind of confidence Azzi has only ever seen in Capitol citizens, her heels clicking against the floor. When she reaches Azzi, she extends a perfectly manicured hand and offers a soft, warm smile.

“Hello, Azzi. I’m Seraphine,” she says, her voice gentle, as though she knows how jarring this experience must be. “I’ll be your stylist for the Games.”

Azzi stares at Seraphine’s hand for a second too long before realizing she’s supposed to shake it. Her fingers feel cold as she grips the stylist’s hand briefly, then pulls away, her eyes flickering nervously to the floor. She hasn’t said a word since entering the Remake Center, and even now, her throat feels tight, like it’s closed off from the weight of everything around her.

Seraphine seems to notice Azzi’s discomfort and doesn’t push her to speak. Instead, she walks around the chair, studying Azzi with a critical yet kind eye, taking in her features as if she’s a sculpture being examined for the first time.

“You’ve got very strong features,” Seraphine says, her voice soft as she moves to stand in front of Azzi. She lifts a hand, her finger tracing the air just in front of Azzi’s face as if imagining her canvas. “A really beautiful face. Great symmetry. Your nose is perfect—straight, but with just a little softness at the tip. And your lips,” she smiles, “plump and well-shaped, the kind people pay for here in the Capitol.”

Azzi doesn’t know what to say. She swallows hard and forces out a quiet, “Thank you.”

But the words feel hollow in her mouth. Two days ago, she probably would’ve flushed at the compliment and grinned at the woman before her. But it doesn’t matter now. Being beautiful won’t keep her alive. It won’t stop a sword or a spear. It won’t protect her when she’s standing in the arena, staring down a tribute who wants her dead. She doesn’t care about her looks. She cares about surviving.

Seraphine seems to sense the tension in her, but she doesn’t comment on it. Instead, she steps back and claps her hands together, her expression shifting into something more professional. “Well, we’ve got a lot to do before the Opening Ceremony tonight. The tributes from District Nine usually get an agricultural theme, but we’re going to make sure you stand out. You’ll need something that catches the eye, something that makes people remember you. The Capitol loves a good first impression.”

Azzi tries to focus on what Seraphine is saying, but her mind keeps drifting, her thoughts pulling her back to District Nine, to the faces of her brothers, her parents, their small home nestled in the farthest corner of the district. She feels like she’s been dropped into an alien world, surrounded by people who don’t understand what it means to fight for survival. Here, everything is about image—how you look, how you present yourself. But in the Games, none of that matters. At least, not to Azzi.

Seraphine motions for Azzi to stand, and she does so stiffly, her muscles aching from sitting so rigidly for so long. The stylist begins to circle her, appraising her figure and murmuring to herself. After a few moments of quiet contemplation, Seraphine snaps her fingers, and a team of assistants rushes in, carrying bolts of fabric and strange devices Azzi doesn’t recognize.

Seraphine smiles softly, her fingers brushing against Azzi’s shoulder. “We’re going to make you look incredible. Trust me, Azzi. I’ve been doing this for years.”

Azzi doesn’t respond. She lets the team of assistants work on her, trying not to flinch as they run strange tools across her skin, smoothing it, shaping it. They tug at her hair, pulling it back tightly from her face, and apply makeup to her cheeks and eyes. She’s never worn anything like this before, and the sensation of it all feels foreign, uncomfortable. The air smells heavily of perfume and hair products, nothing like the open fields and fresh earth of her home.

Seraphine watches closely, making small adjustments as the assistants work. “We’ll keep it simple but striking,” she says as she examines the fabrics. “District Nine is about agriculture, the backbone of Panem’s food production. So we’ll lean into that, but in a way that makes you look powerful. Strong. Like someone the Capitol will want to root for.”

Azzi barely nods, her mind half-absent.

The assistants pull out a long, flowing piece of fabric, the color a rich golden hue that shimmers in the light. It’s embroidered with intricate patterns, resembling the fields of grain District Nine is known for. The material clings to her body, forming into a fitted jumpsuit that accentuates her athletic build. The design is sleek and modern, with a slight flare at the shoulders, giving her the appearance of strength, while the fabric flows behind her like a cape made of golden wheat.

Seraphine steps back, admiring the final look, her lips curling into a satisfied smile. “You look incredible, Azzi. Absolutely stunning. This will make the audience remember you—beautiful, but more importantly, formidable.”

Azzi stares at herself in the mirror, her reflection almost unrecognizable. The girl looking back at her is a Capitol version of herself, someone polished and made to look like she belongs here. But Azzi can see right through it. She doesn’t belong here.

“How do you feel?” Seraphine asks, stepping up beside her.

Azzi hesitates, her eyes lingering on her reflection. She looks strong, she looks like someone people might fear. But the question gnaws at her, the same thought that’s been looping in her head since she arrived at the Capitol.

“Being beautiful won’t help me in the arena,” she says quietly, her voice low, as if the thought escapes her without permission.

Seraphine’s expression softens, and she places a hand gently on Azzi’s shoulder. “It’s not just about beauty. It’s about presence. The Capitol citizens, the sponsors—they want someone they can believe in. If they believe in you, they’ll help you. They’ll send you things you need. And that could be the difference between life and death.”

Azzi doesn’t know how to respond to that. She’s never thought about it that way—never considered that people watching her might care enough to help. She doesn’t know if she likes that idea, though. It feels too distant, too detached. How can she trust that some faceless audience in the Capitol will care enough to keep her alive?

But she nods anyway, her jaw tight as she looks back at her reflection. “I guess.”

Seraphine gives her a reassuring smile, but Azzi can see the flicker of something else in the stylist’s eyes. Maybe a recognition of the bleakness that comes with the Games. Or maybe just sympathy. Either way, it doesn’t change the reality.

And then Seraphine is clapping her hands again, signaling the rush of assistants and stylists bustling back into the room. They tidy up the last few details, adjusting the cape of shimmering gold fabric that flows behind Azzi, smoothing out any wrinkles in the intricate embroidery of her jumpsuit. The noise, the movement, all of it feels overwhelming, but Seraphine stays calm and poised, giving Azzi a reassuring smile before gesturing toward the door.

“Come, Azzi. We need to head downstairs. Your chariot awaits,” Seraphine says.

Azzi’s legs feel unsteady as she follows her stylist. There’s a gnawing anxiety low in her stomach, a knot that’s only been growing tighter since her name was pulled. She walks behind Seraphine, out of the room and down a long, marble hallway that echoes with the click of the stylist’s heels. The air feels heavier here, the anticipation hanging thick in the space around them as they make their way to the first floor.

The elevator doors open, revealing the Remake Center’s ground floor—a massive, gleaming stable. The smell of horses hits her first, a sharp contrast to the sterile air of the upper floors. The space is wide and open, filled with row after row of chariots, each one assigned to a different district, waiting to carry their tributes into the Opening Ceremony. It’s loud, too, with the sound of people bustling around, prepping the tributes, adjusting the horses’ harnesses, and giving last-minute instructions.

Azzi’s eyes dart around, searching for Kellan, her district partner. She spots him off to the side, standing next to one of the chariots, his eyes wide with fear and his shoulders hunched as if he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. He looks terrible, Azzi thinks, her heart twisting in her chest. Kellan is so young—fourteen—the same age as her little brother Jon.

In fact, Kellan could’ve been Jon. Could’ve been Jose. The thought makes her feel sick. He’s just a kid. And now he’s about to be thrown into a fight to the death.

Azzi’s stomach churns as she approaches Kellan, trying to think of something to say, something that might ease his nerves, but nothing comes to mind. What can she say? You’ll be fine? It won’t be that bad? It would be a lie. There’s no comforting truth here.

Lucia is already there, too, flitting around with her usual enthusiasm. Her bright purple wig bounces as she talks, gesturing wildly with her hands. She’s all Capitol—flashy and clueless, too caught up in the spectacle of it all to realize what’s really at stake.

“Ah, Azzi! You look fan-tastic!” Lucia exclaims, clucking her tongue and clapping her hands together. “Seraphine has really outdone herself this year.”

Azzi gives a stiff nod, but her attention is drawn to the figure standing next to Lucia.

Their mentor—Cyrus.

A tall, grizzled man in his mid-forties, Cyrus won the Games when he was seventeen, Azzi knows that. His hair is streaked with silver now, and his face is lined with years of bitterness and loss—an expression she’s come to recognize in former victors. Cyrus isn’t the warmest person, but he knows what it takes to survive, and that’s all that matters to Azzi now.

He steps forward, eyeing her and Kellan critically, his arms crossed over his broad chest. “You both look good,” he says, his voice gruff, as if the compliment costs him something. “But this isn’t about just looking good. It’s about making the Capitol love you. You need them on your side, or you’re dead in the water.”

Kellan swallows hard, his eyes darting nervously toward the chariots. Azzi can see his hands trembling slightly at his sides, and again, that pang of guilt hits her. He shouldn’t be here. He’s too young.

So is Azzi. So is every other tribute here.

Cyrus doesn’t seem to notice Kallan’s behavior—or if he does, he doesn’t care. He steps closer, his voice dropping into a low, urgent tone. “When you get out there, you smile. You wave. You make sure they see you, like you’re already a victor. The crowd loves confidence. They love tributes who look like they’ll win, not ones who are scared to death.” His eyes flick to Kellan, lingering for a second too long. “So you both smile. Got it?”

Azzi nods, even though the last thing she wants to do is smile right now. But Cyrus is right. They have to play the game, even here.

She turns her head slightly, trying to shake off the weight of the moment when something—or someone—catches her eye.

Just across the stable, standing next to another chariot with her district partner, is a girl. She’s tall for a girl, like Azzi is, with long blonde hair that’s been braided back into a bun. Her outfit is clearly themed around District Seven—lumber—and it’s made of rich brown leather, like freshly cut wood, with patterns that resemble tree bark. But what stands out most to Azzi isn’t the outfit. It’s her face.

The girl’s features are sharp but soft in all the right places. She has a defined jawline, high cheekbones, and a pair of piercing blue eyes that seem to flicker with something unspoken. She’s pretty—beautiful, even—but not in the overdone, Capitol way. There’s something natural about her beauty, something real.

Azzi’s breath catches in her throat as their eyes meet. For a moment, the noise of the stable fades into the background, and all she can hear is the pounding of her heart in her chest. The girl holds her gaze, her expression unreadable but intense, like she’s studying Azzi just as much as Azzi is studying her.

This girl is another tribute. Another person Azzi might have to kill. But the thought doesn’t stop her from staring a second too long, from letting herself get caught in the girl’s gaze.

It’s only when Cyrus barks something at them that Azzi snaps her head back around, her cheeks flushing as she tries to focus. This isn’t the time for distractions.

She forces her attention back to Cyrus as he continues giving them last-minute instructions. “Smile. Wave. Make them love you. Got it?”

Azzi nods, though her thoughts are still jumbled. She glances at Kellan, who’s biting his lip nervously, his eyes darting around the stable like a rabbit caught in a trap.

And then they’re being ushered toward their chariot. Azzi takes a deep breath, her legs feeling wobbly as she steps onto the platform, Kellan following behind her. The horses, sleek and muscular, are restless in front of them, their hooves clattering against the marble floor. She grips the edge of the chariot tightly, her knuckles turning white.

As the chariots begin to roll out, Azzi takes one more deep breath. She can hear the roar of the crowd growing louder, the excitement building as the tributes are about to make their grand entrance.

The moment they roll into view of the massive audience, the noise is deafening. The Capitol citizens cheer and shout, their brightly colored hair and outrageous outfits blending together into a sea of vibrant chaos. Azzi forces herself to smile, just like instructed, letting her dimples show through as she waves to the crowd, her arm moving mechanically as if on autopilot. She hates it—the way their eyes are all on her, the way they’re watching her as if she’s nothing more than a piece in their twisted game.

She’s never wanted attention like this. The only way she’d ever dreamed of being noticed was by playing basketball, maybe one day making it big enough to play in the Capitol’s professional leagues. But that was a stupid dream—something far out of reach for someone from a District. Even if she won the Games, even if she became a Capitol darling, she’d never be allowed to play. The basketball leagues are for Capitol citizens, not for tributes. Not for people like her.

Azzi keeps smiling, keeps waving, even though every second of it feels wrong. The crowd’s cheers grow louder, their excitement palpable, but Azzi feels nothing. All she can think about is the girl from District Seven—the girl whose eyes she can still feel on her, even now, as the chariots roll forward.

IT’S THE second day of training. Yesterday, Azzi found her strength—throwing knives. It was quick; the dagger was the first weapon she picked up and tried. And it just… worked. It surprised her at first, but as the blades left her hand, spinning in the air before sinking into the target with a solid thud, it felt almost familiar. The motion, the precision, the focus—it all reminds her of shooting a basketball. In her mind, it’s the same concept: aim, release, make the shot. Whether it’s a knife sinking into a dummy or a ball swooshing through a hoop, the goal is the same. And it comforts her in a strange way, turning something deadly into something she’s used to, something she can control.

Now, Azzi stands several feet away from a dummy, gripping a knife, the handle cool against her palm. She lines it up with the target. Her muscles tighten as she flicks her wrist, releasing the dagger. It slices through the air, embedding itself into where the heart of the dummy would be with a satisfying thud. A perfect hit. She lets out a slow breath, allowing a small flicker of satisfaction to cross her face. The trainers don’t miss it either, nodding with approval as they observe her from across the room.

Cyrus, her mentor, has been watching her closely since she got here. And, after Azzi informed him of her successes with the daggers last night and his compliments of her physique, the true muscle she has, it’s been clear he’s placing his bets on Azzi this time around. It seems there’s just no point in trying with Kellan.

As for Kellan, he hasn’t said much of anything since they were whisked away to the Capitol. He’s just a boy, and Azzi has watched the fear in his eyes grow with each passing day. Cyrus has tried to train him, to offer him advice, but Kellan’s barely even listened. It’s as if he’s already given up. Azzi sees it in the way his hands tremble whenever he holds a weapon, the way he flinches during combat drills, and the way he refuses to meet anyone’s gaze. He’s already dead in his mind, and Azzi knows that mentality will get him killed in the arena.

“Focus on yourself,” Cyrus had told her bluntly last night after dinner. “Kellan’s not gonna make it. You need to accept that now.”

Azzi had nodded, the truth of Cyrus’ words sitting like a heavy weight in her chest. She tried talking to Kellan once, offering him a few words of encouragement, but he barely even acknowledged her. After that, she stopped trying. She can’t afford to waste time or energy on someone who’s already checked out. It isn’t like she doesn’t feel guilty—she does—but she has to survive.

She can’t focus on anyone else’s survival but her own.

Today, Cyrus has her focusing on something other than knives. “You’ve got those down,” he’d told her before the session. “Learn how to survive the elements now. Plants, food, water. You need to know what’s safe and what isn’t. Most tributes die from hunger, dehydration—not all of it is blood and guts.”

So Azzi finds herself crouched in front of an information station, its holographic displays showing various plants, fruits, and fungi. She taps the screen, cycling through images of plants she might find in the arena, trying to commit them to memory. Which ones are edible, which ones are poisonous, which ones could be used to heal wounds. It’s not as exciting as knife-throwing, but it’s necessary, and she knows it.

She’s absorbed in her study, staring intently at a particularly nasty-looking mushroom, when she senses someone approaching from the side. Her muscles tense instinctively, and she glances up, prepared to brush off whoever it is—until she sees Paige Bueckers standing next to her.

Paige Bueckers. District Seven. Azzi knows who she is. She’s memorized all the tributes’ names and districts by now—it’s smart to know who she’s up against—but Paige was the first one she committed to memory. Maybe it’s because of the way Paige caught her eye before the opening ceremony, their silent exchange of glances lingering in Azzi’s mind longer than she’d like to admit. Or maybe it’s because she’s watched Paige train over the past two days and realized just how dangerous the girl really is. Azzi saw her with a sword earlier, moving with a deadly grace that sent chills down her spine. Paige might be one of the most skilled tributes here, and that’s saying something.

Paige is tall, even a little taller than Azzi, and her blonde hair is pulled back into a ponytail, a thin, black headband resting over it. Her sharp, blue eyes meet Azzi’s as she stops next to her, wearing a grin that seems completely out of place in the tense, competitive atmosphere of the training center.

“Azzi Fudd,” Paige says, her tone casual, as if they’re not preparing to kill each other in a matter of days. “District Nine.”

Azzi glances back at the screen, her brows furrowing slightly. She doesn’t know how to feel about Paige approaching her. She doesn’t know what she wants. This could be some kind of strategy—get close to your enemies, make them lower their guard. Azzi isn’t stupid. She knows better than to trust anyone here.

“Bueckers,” Azzi replies, her voice neutral, not giving anything away. She keeps her eyes on the screen, scrolling through more plant images.

But Paige doesn’t leave. She shifts her weight, bouncing slightly on her heels, like she can’t seem to stay still. The grin on her face widens, and Azzi feels even more confused. Why is Paige so friendly? Why is she smiling like they’re just two normal girls having a chat?

“So, you’re, like, really good with daggers, huh?” Paige says, her voice light. “I saw you throwing earlier. Pretty impressive.”

Azzi doesn’t look up. She sighs instead, her fingers hovering over the screen. “Guess so,” she mumbles. In the back of her mind, she knows she should probably be nicer. Paige might be trying to form an alliance, and with Kellan being a dead end, Azzi could use one. But trust is a luxury she can’t afford right now, and Paige’s enthusiasm throws her off.

Paige doesn’t seem fazed by Azzi’s short response, though. She keeps standing there, grinning like an idiot, her eyes twinkling with some kind of amusement. It’s unnerving how at ease she seems, how… happy. It’s probably a mask. She’s probably as terrified as the rest of them, and she’s just getting through it in her own way.

Nevertheless, Azzi can’t take it anymore. She turns her head slightly, locking eyes with Paige. “Why are you talking to me?” she asks bluntly.

Paige blinks, her grin faltering for just a moment. For the first time, she looks a little unsure of herself. “Um… I don’t really know, actually,” she admits with a small, nervous laugh. “Just… wanted to, I guess.”

Azzi narrows her eyes, studying her. She has no idea if the girl before her is being honest. But the sincerity in her voice catches Azzi a little off guard, and for a second, she’s not sure what to say. This is the Hunger Games. No one talks to someone just because they “want to.” Everyone has an angle. Yet Paige stands there, looking oddly genuine, like she really doesn’t have a reason. Like she just wants to talk to Azzi, no strings attached.

For a moment, Azzi’s walls start to crack. She considers the possibility—however slim—that Paige is just… a good person. It doesn’t make sense, not in a place like this, but the warmth in Paige’s smile makes Azzi’s suspicion waver.

“Well,” Azzi finally says, her voice a little softer than before, “maybe you shouldn’t.” She doesn’t look away this time, her eyes lingering on Paige’s, almost like she’s testing her.

Paige’s grin returns, softer this time, but still there. “Maybe,” she says, “but I’m here anyway.”

Azzi shakes her head a little, gaze returning to the screen. She needs to focus on this, not the girl beside her.

Paige doesn’t seem to be deterred, though, still watching Azzi with that easy smile, her eyes bright. “You’re pretty serious, yeah?” she says, tilting her head, almost like she’s teasing but not quite. “Locked in. I get it. Gotta be. But… we’re all here, y'know? Same boat.”

Azzi shifts her weight, feeling her jaw tighten. “I have to be serious,” Azzi mutters, her fingers swiping across the screen, though she’s not really paying attention to the plants anymore. Her heart beats a little faster under Paige’s gaze. “You can’t survive if you’re not.”

Paige leans in just slightly, and Azzi catches the faint scent of something sweet on her, like flowers. “I know that,” she says, her tone softening for a moment. “But you might need some help in there—if you wanna win.”

Azzi’s shoulders tense. The suggestion makes her uneasy, and her instinct is to push back. Help. From anyone, it feels too dangerous. It feels like relying on someone she can’t control. She barely trusts herself in this place, let alone a girl from another district who, let’s be real, could very well end up as an enemy.

“I don’t need help,” Azzi says, her voice firmer than before. “Especially not from people I don’t know.”

Paige’s smile fades a little, but there’s no frustration in her expression. If anything, she just looks… thoughtful, almost curious about Azzi’s reaction. It’s like she’s trying to figure her out, trying to see beneath the guarded exterior.

Azzi hates that. She doesn’t want to be studied or analyzed, especially not by Paige Bueckers. She’s already doing too much of that herself—constantly assessing everyone, weighing their strengths and weaknesses, trying to predict who’s a threat and who might just fade into the background.

“I’m not trying to get in your way, Azzi,” Paige says quietly, her voice losing some of its earlier lightness. “But, y’know, maybe we don’t have to be enemies. I’ve seen you, and you’re good. Like, real good. And neither of us are Careers and both our district partners are kinda duds, so I just thought…”

Azzi cuts her off, turning to face her abruptly. “Thought what? That we’d be allies? Friends?” She shakes her head, ignoring the strange knot of tension building in her chest. Paige might be trying to help, but Azzi doesn’t want it. She can’t want it. Not here. “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t work like that. Sorry.”

Paige stands there, still watching her, and for a second, Azzi thinks she sees something flicker in Paige’s eyes—disappointment, maybe, or understanding. But Paige doesn’t push back. She just nods once, a slow, thoughtful thing.

“Okay,” Paige says, stepping back a little, giving Azzi space. Her smile returns, softer, but still there. “I get it. Just… keep doin' what you’re good at.”

Azzi feels a strange pang in her chest as she watches Paige step away, like maybe she’s made a mistake. But no—she can’t think like that. She needs to stay focused, stay sharp, stay alone. That’s how she’ll survive.

Without another word, Azzi turns on her heel and walks away, her heart beating faster than before.

THE PINK dress hugs Azzi’s figure, its soft blush fabric shimmering under the bright lights of the dressing room. It’s not something she’s ever imagined herself wearing—not this shade, not this tight. She looks almost like a Capitol citizen now, polished and flawless in her own right.

The dress has a high neckline and delicate straps that crisscross her shoulders, falling in elegant folds down to her ankles. It’s simple, yet the color makes her stand out, glowing softly against her dark skin. Her hair is styled in loose waves, not unlike the Capitol’s obsession with effortless beauty, with the font pieces pulled back into braids. The makeup is light but dramatic—plump lips, accentuated cheekbones, and eyes that pop with a subtle pink shimmer.

Seraphine steps back, admiring her work with a satisfied smile. “You look stunning, Azzi. Like a dream.”

Azzi nods, not fully meeting Seraphine’s gaze. She knows she looks good, but it doesn’t feel like her. The face staring back at her in the mirror is a version of herself she doesn’t recognize. It’s not the Azzi from District Nine; it’s not the girl who shoots hoops with her brothers or helps her dad tend to the crops. It’s someone else—someone made for the Capitol’s stage. Someone for their entertainment.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, though her voice lacks enthusiasm. Seraphine doesn’t seem to mind. She knows by now that Azzi is serious, focused. There’s no time for compliments when the Games are looming.

Seraphine’s assistant adjusts the hem of Azzi’s dress one last time before stepping aside. “You’ll knock them dead,” she says with a wink, though the words sit heavy with the weight of their meaning. Knocking them dead. That’s quite literally what Azzi will have to do soon enough.

As she’s led out to the waiting area before the interviews, Azzi’s mind begins to drift. She thinks back to the training evaluations, how she had scored a 10—one of only four tributes to do so. A 10 is good, she knows that, but the competition is fierce. Both the girl and boy from Two scored 10s and Paige managed a 10 as well. There are other tributes with 9s, plenty who will be formidable in their own right. But Paige? Paige is different. She’s unpredictable, unnervingly skilled. And something about her makes Azzi feel a pang of unease.

As Azzi settles into her seat backstage, waiting for her interview with Caesar Flickerman, she watches the other tributes’ interviews on the screen. The Careers are all flashy and confident, playing up their deadliness to the crowd’s delight. Caesar eats it up, grinning and laughing as they boast about their skills and charm the Capitol audience. The boy from District Four also stands out—tall, muscular, and intimidating. A strong swimmer, no doubt. He’ll be dangerous, especially if the arena is at all water-based.

But none of them hold a candle to Paige.

When Paige steps onto the stage, it’s as if the entire room shifts. She looks stunning, effortlessly cool, in a crisp white suit that contrasts sharply with the frilly dresses most of the other girls have chosen. Her hair is down, styled in soft, wavy locks, with the top half pulled back in a way that highlights her sharp features. She looks more masculine than the other girls, but somehow that works in her favor. It’s not just that she’s different—it’s that she owns it. The Capitol loves different.

Azzi watches, unable to tear her eyes away, as Paige charms the entire crowd. She’s funny, confident, and just the right amount of cocky. Caesar practically beams at her, and the audience is eating out of the palm of her hand.

“You’re quite the swordswoman,” Caesar says, raising his eyebrows in admiration. “I saw your score, Paige—a 10! That’s incredible.”

Paige just grins, shrugging casually. “You know, I try.”

The crowd laughs, and Cyrus begins to mutter under his breath. “Damn it,” he says, shaking his head as he runs a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “She’s going to have sponsors lined up around the block.”

Azzi knows he’s right. Paige isn’t just skilled—she’s magnetic. People want to root for her. She’s dangerous, yes, but she’s also got this charm that makes you want to see her win, even if that means she’ll be killing people to get there.

Azzi swallows hard, feeling a knot form in her stomach. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, she’s drawn to Paige, too. There’s something about her that pulls Azzi in—her confidence, her grace under pressure, her ease in the face of what’s to come. It’s not just attraction, though she can’t deny that Paige is beautiful. It’s more than that. There’s something about Paige that makes Azzi feel like she’s… alive. Like she’s not just surviving, but living fully in the moment, despite everything. Ironic, considering Paige could be the one to kill Azzi in that arena—or vice versa.

And Azzi hates that she feels this way. She shouldn’t be drawn to Paige. She shouldn’t be thinking about how Paige’s eyes had locked onto hers back at the opening ceremony, or how Paige had approached her during training, trying to talk like they were friends. None of it matters. Paige is just another tribute, another obstacle standing between Azzi and survival.

But still… there’s something about her.

As Paige’s interview wraps up, the crowd erupts in applause, and Caesar gives her a hug before she leaves the stage. Azzi watches as Paige walks off, her suit practically glowing under the stage lights. For a brief moment, Paige glances in Azzi’s direction, their eyes meeting across the room. It’s quick—just a fleeting second—but Azzi feels her heart skip a beat before she looks away, reminding herself why she’s here.

Just two interviews later, Azzi is taking a deep breath as the lights hit her, stepping forward onto the stage. The crowd is massive, louder than she imagined, and their cheers seem to echo in her chest. Her eyes land on Caesar Flickerman, who’s grinning wide at her as she approaches him, his flamboyant suit sparkling under the stage lights.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Azzi Fudd from District Nine!” Caesar announces, and the crowd’s cheers grow even louder.

Azzi sits down next to Caesar, her fingers resting awkwardly in her lap. Despite the excitement around her, she feels the familiar nervousness bubbling up inside. This isn’t her element—talking, being the center of attention. She’d rather be on the sidelines, unnoticed, but here, there’s no avoiding it.

“Azzi, you look absolutely radiant tonight!” Caesar says, his voice warm and enthusiastic. “Tell me, how does it feel to be here in the Capitol, getting all this attention?”

Azzi smiles politely, her fingers fidgeting with the hem of her dress. “It’s… different,” she says softly. “I’m not really used to it. But it’s nice, I guess. Everyone’s been very kind.” Very kind because they probably know I’ll be dead in a couple weeks.

Caesar nods, leaning in slightly. “I can imagine it’s quite a change from life in District 9. Tell me, what’s life like back home?”

Azzi pauses, her mind drifting back to the open fields and the quiet days of working alongside her family. “It’s simple,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s peaceful. Most of my days I’m just spending time with my family, doing the chores or playing basketball. It’s nothing like here, but it’s home.”

Caesar smiles warmly, sensing the connection she has to her district. “Family, huh? I bet they’re watching right now, rooting for you. Tell me, do you have a big family?”

Azzi shrugs a little. “Not too big, not too small, I think. There’s my parents, and then I have two younger brothers. And we’re still very close to my grandparents. I just… love my family, they’re very supportive. They’re great.” She feels her throat get choked up by the end of the sentence, not wanting to think too much about her family, how much she misses them. Even though, truthfully, she knows she should be thinking about her family because that is what needs to be her motivation. She needs to win this for them, no matter how impossible it may seem.

The crowd gives a soft murmur of approval, and Caesar’s grin widens. “That’s wonderful. Sounds like you’ve got a lot of people cheering you on back home. And speaking of support…” He pauses dramatically, the audience clearly hanging on his every word. “Any special someone out there you’re hoping to impress? Perhaps a crush back home?”

Azzi’s eyes widen a little at the question, feeling her face heat up. A crush. That is quite literally the last thing on her mind right now. She shifts uncomfortably in her seat, not sure how to answer without sounding awkward.

“I, um… no,” she says with a laugh that’s more nervous than she intended. “Not really. I’ve been focused on training, so… no time for that.”

Caesar laughs good-naturedly, waving a hand as if to brush off the question. “Oh, I get it, I get it! Training comes first, of course. But I’m sure there are plenty of admirers in the Capitol who are wishing they could get your attention.”

The crowd cheers in agreement, and Azzi can’t help but smile a little at their enthusiasm, though she still feels her nerves fluttering in her stomach.

“But let’s talk about something fun,” Caesar continues, changing gears smoothly. “You’ve been in the Capitol for a little while now. What’s your favorite part so far? The food? The fashion? The luxury?”

Azzi takes a moment to think, glancing down at her dress. It’s true, everything in the Capitol has been overwhelming—lavish and excessive compared to the modest life she’s known back in her district. But there’s one thing that stands out to her more than anything.

“The food,” she answers with a small smile. “I’ve never seen so much of it in my life. And it’s all so… colorful. I didn’t even know you could make food look like that.”

Caesar chuckles. “Colorful! I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.” He hits his knee as he laughs, the audience giggling with him. “But, yes! The Capitol chefs do love their extravagant dishes. Has there been anything in particular that’s caught your eye?”

“Honestly, the desserts,” Azzi admits, her smile widening. “There was this cake we had the other night, and it was shaped like a swan. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was so good.”

The crowd laughs once more, clearly charmed by her innocence, and Caesar claps his hands together. “A girl after my own heart! Who can resist a good dessert, right?”

Azzi relaxes a little more, finding it easier to talk now that the conversation has shifted to lighter topics. Caesar’s friendliness helps, and she realizes that, for the first time, the crowd isn’t as intimidating as she thought they’d be.

“You know, Azzi,” Caesar says, his tone softening just a bit, “you’ve got this quiet strength about you. I think a lot of people are really drawn to that. You don’t need to be loud or flashy to make an impact. And clearly you have made an impact—you scored a ten in the training. I mean, come on!”

Azzi smiles a little bit at the validation, her dimples poking through. “Thank you,” she says, nodding. And then she shrugs, her lips quirking up a little further as she adds, “I try.”

Caesar and the crowd chuckle at the action. “Well, you’ve certainly done well,” he tells her earnestly, before adding, with a wink, “And I have to say, your smile is absolutely infectious. I think you’ve got the whole crowd wrapped around your finger.”

The audience cheers again, louder this time, and Azzi feels her face heat up.

“Well, Azzi, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you tonight,” Caesar says, standing and offering his hand to help her up. “I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re all rooting for you.”

Azzi stands, shaking Caesar’s hand and giving the crowd a small wave as they erupt into applause. As she walks off the stage, back to where Seraphine, Lucia, and Cyrus are waiting, the adrenaline from the interview still buzzes through her.

Lucia beams at her as she approaches, her hands rushing to cup Azzi’s cheeks. “You were perfect, Azzi! Absolutely perfect.”

Seraphine nods in agreement. “The crowd loves you. You’re going to get so many sponsors, I just know it.”

Even Cyrus gives her a rare grin, clapping her on the shoulder. “You did good out there, kid. Real good. I think you’ve got them in the palm of your hand now.”

Azzi lets out a breath, the tension slowly leaving her body as she realizes she’s done it. She got through the interview, and didn’t just survive it—she actually made a connection, made herself heard and liked. The Capitol might not feel like home, but for now, at least, she knows she’s done everything she can to stand out in the best way possible.

THE MORNING is unnervingly quiet. Azzi walks beside Cyrus, the soles of her shoes barely making a sound on the sleek marble floors of the Capitol building. They’re headed toward the hovercraft, the final step before the arena. The place where everything will change. Each step closer feels heavier, the weight of what’s coming settling into her bones.

Cyrus walks just ahead, his brow furrowed in thought. Azzi knows well enough that he’s not the type for overly emotional goodbyes, but there’s a seriousness to him today that wasn’t there during training. His hands are tucked into his pockets, and Azzi notices the faint lines of tension in his jaw. She’s quiet, still processing the fact that in just a few hours, she’ll be fighting for her life.

As they near the docking area, Cyrus stops abruptly, turning to face her. His eyes are sharp, cutting through the nervous haze that’s settled over her.

“Listen to me, Azzi,” he begins, voice low but firm. “This is it. From here on out, it’s all strategy. Everything you do, every move you make—it has to be calculated, smart.”

Azzi nods, her throat tightening as she listens.

“I know it’s not in your nature to trust easily, but in the arena, you’ll need to be even more cautious,” he continues. “Don’t form alliances unless it’s strategically sound. I don’t care if they seem friendly or if they remind you of someone from back home—trust no one unless it gives you an advantage.”

His words cut deep, and she swallows hard. She hasn’t really thought much about alliances, but it’s clear that Cyrus has. He knows this game inside and out.

“And whatever you do, keep your emotions in check,” Cyrus adds, his gaze hardening. “The moment you start caring too much about anyone in there, you’ve already lost. I know you’re good-hearted, Azzi, but that’s not going to save you—not in the Games.”

She doesn’t say anything, just nods again. The lump in her throat grows as the reality of what’s coming washes over her.

“And the bloodbath.” Cyrus pauses, before his voice lowers slightly. “The moment those platforms rise, it’s going to be chaos. Don’t linger. Don’t get caught up in the fight unless it’s unavoidable. Get what you need and get out. Do you understand?”

Azzi meets his eyes, the weight of his words settling deep in her chest. “I understand,” she says softly.

He studies her for a moment, and for the first time since they arrived in the Capitol, Cyrus’s tough exterior seems to soften. His hand reaches out, resting on her shoulder, and the squeeze he gives is firm, reassuring.

“I believe in you,” he says quietly, his voice sincere. “You’re smart, and you’ve trained hard. I’m going to do everything in my power to help get you home.”

Her eyes well up slightly at his words, but she quickly blinks back the tears. She can’t afford to be emotional right now. There’s no space for it.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, barely able to get the words out past the lump in her throat.

Cyrus nods once, and then he’s stepping back, his hand falling away from her shoulder as they reach the hovercraft. Seraphine is already there, waiting for Azzi, her usual cheerful demeanor muted with the solemnity of the day. The metallic hiss of the hovercraft’s door opening sends a shiver down Azzi’s spine. This is it.

Without another word, Azzi steps inside. Seraphine follows, offering a small, reassuring smile as the door slides shut behind them. The hovercraft hums softly as it lifts off, heading toward the arena.

Inside, the sterile, clinical atmosphere makes her stomach churn. A Capitol medic approaches her almost immediately, a small syringe in hand. Azzi barely flinches as the needle pierces her skin, injecting the tracker into her forearm. She knows it’s necessary. They need to know where she is at all times. It’s standard procedure, but it still makes her feel like livestock.

Seraphine sits beside her, her usual flair for Capitol fashion stark against the dull surroundings of the hovercraft. She doesn’t say much, just watches as Azzi rubs her arm where the tracker was inserted. The silence is heavy, filled with unspoken words, and it’s not long before they arrive at the underground facility just outside the arena.

Once inside, they’re led into a small room where Azzi is handed her arena outfit—a black, water-resistant suit that fits snugly against her frame. It’s durable, sleek, and clearly meant for endurance. The material feels odd against her skin, foreign compared to the simple, looser clothes she’s worn most of her life.

She glances at herself in the mirror. The suit is practical, but its design tells her something about the arena. Water. The Capitol is hinting that water will play a significant role in the Games. Maybe a jungle, maybe a lake, or something more treacherous. Her mind races with possibilities, but she pushes the thoughts aside. She’ll find out soon enough.

As she pulls the last of the suit into place, Seraphine watches her carefully, her eyes glassy. The usually confident stylist seems suddenly small, fragile, as if she’s struggling to keep herself together. She steps forward, her hands gently smoothing the fabric of Azzi’s suit, her fingers trembling slightly.

“You’re going to be alright, Azzi,” Seraphine says softly, her voice cracking just a little. “You’ve been so strong. You’re going to make it back—for your family. I know you will.”

Azzi’s chest tightens at the words. Seraphine’s sincerity, her belief that Azzi can survive this—it’s almost too much to bear.

“Thank you,” Azzi whispers, her voice barely audible.

Seraphine pulls her into a tight hug, her arms wrapping around Azzi’s frame with surprising strength. It’s brief, but Azzi feels the weight of Seraphine’s worry in that embrace. It’s like she’s saying goodbye.

When they pull apart, Seraphine’s eyes are red-rimmed, though she’s trying her best to hold it together. “Good luck, Azzi,” she says, her voice shaky. “You’re going to be okay.”

Azzi swallows the lump in her throat and nods. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, so she just gives Seraphine a small, grateful smile.

The door to the launch chamber opens, and it’s time.

Azzi steps into the glass cylinder, her heart pounding in her chest. The last thing she sees before the platform begins to rise is Seraphine, standing in the doorway, her hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer.

And then the ground shifts beneath her feet, and she’s lifted upward, the glass tube carrying her toward the surface. Toward the arena.

The first thing she notices is the intense humidity. The air is thick, almost suffocating, and it clings to her skin. As her eyes adjust to the sudden brightness, she realizes why—it’s a jungle. Dense, tangled vines hang from towering trees, their massive roots weaving through the ground like some ancient network. The ground beneath her platform is slick with mud, and just beyond the edge of the platform is a large body of water—a vast lake, its surface calm and unnervingly still. It stretches out as far as she can see, bordered by the dense jungle on one side and the metallic glint of the Cornucopia in the center.

Water. She was right.

Azzi’s gaze darts to the other tributes. There’s movement all around her, platforms rising as the others are pulled into view. Some faces are familiar from the training center, others not so much. She spots the Careers first—the boy and girl from District Two, standing tall and confident, both of them dangerous and ready. Their eyes are already locked on the Cornucopia, clearly prepared to kill anyone who stands in their way.

A few spots down, she sees Kellan. His face is pale, his eyes wide with fear. He looks like he’s barely holding it together, his body stiff as if he might bolt the second the gong sounds. He’s trembling slightly, and Azzi’s heart tugs at the sight. He’s not going to last long, not with that kind of fear weighing him down. But she can’t afford to think about him—about anyone, really. Cyrus’s voice echoes in her mind: Don’t get too close to anyone.

She swallows hard, her gaze shifting back to the Cornucopia. The metallic structure gleams in the sunlight, stacked with supplies—everything they’ll need to survive. Weapons, food, water. But it’s a death trap. The Careers will get there first, and they’ll cut down anyone who tries to take something they’ve claimed.

Azzi’s eyes flick to the jungle behind her. It might be safer to head for cover, to avoid the bloodbath entirely. But then again, if she doesn’t grab something now, she could be left empty-handed, vulnerable. She forces herself to breathe deeply, trying to focus on her strategy. It has to be quick, precise. She’ll grab something—anything—and get out. That’s it. Nothing fancy.

The countdown begins, the metallic voice booming over the arena. Sixty seconds.

Azzi’s heart races as the clock ticks down. She glances around once more at the other tributes, trying to gauge their movements before it’s too late. Some are already tensing, their eyes glued to the Cornucopia. Others, like Kellan, are frozen in place, terrified to move. Far across from her, Azzi thinks she sees a flash of blonde hair. Paige. She wonders if she’s scared right now.

Thirty seconds.

Azzi’s hands ball into fists at her sides, every muscle in her body tightening. The humidity, the jungle, the water—it all presses in on her, but she pushes the fear down. She can’t afford to freeze up. She won’t.

Fifteen seconds.

Her pulse pounds in her ears, the world around her narrowing to just the Cornucopia and the water at her back. She feels the weight of everything—Cyrus’s words, Seraphine’s hope, the Capitol’s eyes—bearing down on her. It’s overwhelming, but she won’t let it break her.

Ten seconds.

The other tributes are crouching now, their bodies taut, ready to sprint the moment the gong sounds. Azzi glances at the Cornucopia again, her mind calculating every possible move, every route.

Five seconds.

Her heart hammers in her chest, her breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

Three.

She digs her heels into the platform.

Two.

Her hands tremble.

One.

The gong sounds.

The Sixtieth Hunger Games have begun.

#paige bueckers #paige bueckers fic #uconn wbb #uconn #wbb #wcbb #pazzi #pazzi fic #azzi fudd #uconn huskies #paige x azzi #hunger games #wnba #wlw #pazzi angst #hunger games au #safe and sound

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strwbryien · 2 months ago

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｢ ᝰ.ᐟ entry 05: ARE YOU BLUSHING? ⭑.ᐟ ｣

“what's wrong with you, man?” heizou sat beside him and slung an arm around scaramouche’s shoulder. “you messaged me out of nowhere. you good?” he asked.

“tch, it’s nothing serious. i just don’t have anyone to talk to about this, and unfortunately for me, you’re the only one who will understand,” the indigo-haired one scowled.

“it’s about [name], isn’t it?” he smirked. he had a hunch about what scaramouche would talk about, and he was 99.9% sure that it was about [name].

“WHA- HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?!” he shouted. caught red-handed, huh? heizou isn’t called the “best detective of teyvat university” for nothing.

“HAH, i knew it! what about her, hmm? did you finally reveal yourself to her?” heizou wiggled his brows.

“as if! i-it’s more about kumi, actually.”

“did you just fucking stutter? what the heck?”

“SHUT UP!”

“me and kumi are having a collab stream,” he muttered.

“what? i didn’t quite get that,” heizou leaned closer to the male.

“i said we’re having a collab stream, moron,” he spat.

“SERIOUSLY?! that’s great, ma— WAIT, ARE YOU BLUSHING RIGHT NOW?!”

“GET OUT OF MY FACE, SHIKANOIN HEIZOU!”

“HAHAHA, YOU REALLY ARE BLUSHING! THIS IS AMAZING!”

“say goodbye to your family and friends because you're not getting out of this dorm alive.”

“SCARA WAIT-”

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synopsis:

IN WHICH—you, although faceless, are a very famous streamer known as KUMI. you were streaming as usual, playing games and interacting with fans. but when you're about to exit the stream, you accidentally pressed the wrong button that led to you opening your cam and showing your whole face to your audience. this wasn't supposed to happen, no ! so you panicked and quickly ended the stream. numerous screenshots circulated on twitter, which broke both the fans and the internet. this reached a certain someone, SCARAMOUCHE, your rival in streaming. when the said boy saw the trending photo, he almost fell off his gaming chair. because—lo and behold! KUMI was actually [name]?! now who is this [name] in his life, if you may ask? she's the girl that scaramouche has been admiring from afar in real life! quite shocking, right? have i told you that he’s also been sending you anonymous love letters? oh well...

notes ᝰ.ᐟ

— i'll explain the 2-play game mechanics in the next update! — and have you guys noticed that i'm totally (not) in love with childe... so i've been including him whenever i can... haha.... — also, 200 followers is insane, I LOVE YOU GUYS SM, THANK YOU!!! 🩷

ꪆৎ taglist

@imnotyizhuo @kazufavor @najaemism @simonisferal @lovelypadisarah @eternallykira-143 @yourfavoritefreakyhan @yuminako @035814 @squigglewigglewoo @lxkeeeee @blvdmrcnry @wth121 @lloovvv @3lectraheart @lovemiyae @danhenglovebot @heusalettle @automaticpatroltragedy @kyon-cherri @lalalaloveallmydays @musings-of-miss-j @ilxandra @lazy-sanns @vixialuvs @bananasquash @kochothehoe @lily-lmao @shutingstar @sketcheeee @minhosprettywife @crimxeorcremeexistspeacefully @kinanahana @featuredtofu @tamikahoshiko @jayzioxx @kleeboomed @saechiro @shyentsmissingink @poemzcheng @rifran @projectsfantasy @yejiswifex @peachystea @vi0let-writes @sicuit @hee-jinn @6blxe @viannasthings @trulyylee

#CAMERA FLIP HEART LEAP .ᐟ #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact smau #genshin impact au #genshin smau #genshin au #scaramouche x reader #scaramouche smau #scaramouche au #kunikuzushi x reader

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thelunarsystemwrites · 9 months ago

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Agere terminology!

Originally posted on QuoteV!

(Please keep in mind, at the roots, Regression is a coping/defense mechanism that many rely on. If it makes you uncomfortable, that is fine, you are entitled to your safe space. But please do not shame us who do it, and understand that it is in no way a kink, or anything sexual. It's always SFW!)

(Also, mentions of panic attacks, trauma, and the term sexual are used here. But NEVER in detail! It is only for educational purposes.)

Age-regression: Is when someone mentally reverts back to the mindset of a younger age. This can range from a few years younger, to that of an infant. Those who are in the mindset of a child, can not consent to most things they normally could. (Example: Alcohol while regressed.)

Pet-Regression: Is when someone mentally retreats to the mindset of similar to an animal. This allows our wilder sides to be free. Those who are in the mindset of an animal can not consent to most things they normally could. (Example: Alcohol while regressed.)

(Note the difference between Retreats and Reverts. Retreat implies it is a mindset that was not experienced before, but still used. Revert implies that you are going back to an age you once were! :D both are very valid coping mechanisms!!)

Age-Dreaming: Is when someone acts, and often wants to be treated, as though they are a specific age of their choice. This can be a coping mechanism, or just for fun. But never is it sexual in any way. Those who are Age-Dreaming are still fully or partly in the mindset of their actual Age, and is still 100% valid.

Pet-Dreaming: Is when someone acts, and often wants to be treated, as though they are a specific animal of their choice. This can be a coping mechanism, or just for fun. But never is it sexual in any way. Those who are Pet-Dreaming are still partly or fully in the mindset if their actual species, but is still 100% valid.

Caregiver: Sometimes known as a Caretaker, is someone who is responsible for caring for a regressor and or dreamer. The Regressor/Dreamer that they are caring for may give them a nickname like Papa, Daddy, Mama, Sissy, Bubba, or whatever else makes them happy. (Note: Some chose not to use nicknames, others might use specific names that are a version of their caregivers name, and or a specific nickname that doesn't relate to being parental. There's no right or wrong way to do it! ^^)

Babysitter: A person who isn't the primary Caregiver(s) of a Dreamer/Regressor, but May watch over them for certain periods of time, especially if the Caregiver isn't available.

Flip: Is someone who fluctuates between being a Regressor/Dreamer, or both, and Caregiver/Babysitter.

Agere: An aberration of Age-Regression.

Petre: An aberration of Pet-Regression.

Agedre: An aberration of Age-Dreaming.

Petdre: An aberration of Pet-Dreaming.

CG: An aberration of Caregiver.

Voluntary regression: Is when someone will purposefully regress into the mindset of an animal/younger age. This can be done for coping, stress relief, fun, etc. And can done by colouring, playing with toys, listening to baby music, or other things that make you feel safe, bring positive emotions out, remind you of your childhood, or the childhood you always wanted. (And hey, some like playing games like destiny, ark, etc! Or like listening to rock, watching shows for older people, it's about what makes YOU feel regressed!)

Involuntary regression: Is when someone will go into the mindset of an animal/younger age. This can be triggered by stress, fear, over or understimulation, or a variety of negative feelings.

Partial-Regression: Sometimes also uses the term Age-Dreaming. Is when someone is only partially in their headspace. Those who are partially regressed can still not consent to what they normally could, as they may not be fully coherent.

Full-Regression: Also known as just Regression. Is when someone is fully regressed, and will think and act as the age, or animal, they have regressed to.

Slipping: Somethings also known as regressing, or dropping, is when someone regresses. (Example: "Mary started to slip into the age of a toddler.")

Littles: Are someone who primarily regresses to the age, or around, 8 and under. This may fluctuate.

Middles: Are someone who primarily regresses to the age, or around, 9 and older. This may fluctuate.

Regressors: The general term for someone who regresses/chooses not to label themself!

Dreamers: The general term for someone who dreams.

Littlespace: Sometimes spelled little space or little-space, is the mindset of someone 8 or younger. (Example: Mary slipped into Littlespace.)

Middlespace: Sometimes spelled middle space or middle-space, is the mindset of someone 9 or older. (Example: Mary slipped into Middlespace.)

Petspace: Sometimes spelled pet space or pet-space, is the mindset of someone who is pet regressed! (Example: Mary slipped into Petspace.)

Headspace: Sometimes spelled head space or head-space, is the general term for Littlespaces, Middlespaces, and Petspaces.

Positive regression: Previously known as Pure regression. Is when regressed, you might feel happy, bubbly. It can involves playing, laughing, and or other things associated with the happier side of regression. (Note: some still chose to use the term Pure Regression, and that's absolutely okay!)

Negative regression: Previously known as Impure regression. Sometimes known as Vent Regression. Is when regressed, you may feel sad, moody, angry. It can involve tantrums, crying, kicking, and or other things associated with the less happy side of regression. (Note: some still chose to use the term Impure Regression, and that's absolutely okay!)

Little gear: Sometimes spelled littlegear or little-gear, is the supplies used while regressed/dreaming, this can include, but not limited to: Pacifiers. Blankies. Bottles. Fidgets. Diapers. And or other things used by Regressors/Dreamers, that fit their age and preferences! (Note: Little gear isn't required to regress! ^^)

Petre gear: Sometimes spelled petregear or petre-gear, is the supplies used while regressed/dreaming, this can include, but not limited to: Chew toys. Teethers. Treats. And or other things used by Regressors/Dreamers, that fit their animal and preferences. (Note: Petre gear isn't required to regress! ^^)

(Often both can be shortened to just Gear if wanted!)

Positive triggers: Are something used to trigger someone into Voluntary regression. (Example: Colouring, Music, Dancing, Etc.)

Negative triggers: Is something that triggers unwanted memories, Involuntary regression, panic attacks, or other things that are unwanted to the regressor.(Example: a Negative trigger caused Mary to have a flashback.)

In the closet: It is when someone who is part of the Agere/Petre community is still secret. Sometimes, they are also known as Discreet Littles! (Generally, "closeted" means you are secretly, or not directly promoting that you are in a certain community. The term is often associated with it's use in the LGBTQIAP+ community!)

Finally, if you know a term that I don't, do not be afraid to share! And remember, not all regressors/dreamers are the same! One may love Pacifiers, the other may strongly dislike them. That's okay! We're all different and unique in our own ways!

Remember that Agere is beautiful, all sides of it. Sometimes you have to have negative regression to feel better, it's okay! All sides of it are needed, and rather voluntarily or not, it's your brain trying to help you, and cope! It's a completely healthy coping mechanism, as long as you don't let it become your life 24/7. (That goes for all coping mechanisms, becoming obsessive over something is a big factor in it becoming unhealthy!)

Please try to hydrate! Stay safe! And have a wonderful day/night/evening my friends!

(To confirm: When regressed, you are still valid if you like swearing while regressed. You are still valid if you like playing/watching more mature games or shows or movies while regressed. You are still valid if nobody can tell you're regressed without you telling them. There are no rules to regression, expect that it's never sexual. Cater to how YOU need to regress, not everyone fits into the same box, and that's the beauty of diversity in how we each do it.)

Remember I'm not an expert! I've been in the community for years, and I'm trying to share my knowledge! :D

Bai!! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🩷🩵🤎🖤🩶💛

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sharksandjays · 1 year ago

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anybody else notice that lloyd is just having so much fun fighting in dragons rising? Of course, with the more serious villains like the Imperium and stuff like that he can become serious, but overall you see him smile a lot more while fighting.

And it's just super cool to me because it's sorta hinted throughout the seasons that the ninja think of certain villains as below them. Like uhh i forgot who but didn't kai or someone call the Mechanic a "third tier" villain in season 6, whereas nadakhan was first tier.

And it could be associated with arrogance but honestly? I just think the ninja know their jobs. Their jobs are to basically keep ninjago together and the citizens alive. Anyone that is a major threat can be handled by them, whereas anyone less than them will be handled by the police force.

But the thing is, the ninja LOVE fighting! They spar all the time, of course to keep their stamina up, but also because they find it fun! Cole was ITCHING to fight for half of the older seasons, and Kai always rushes into them. Even Jay seems to have fun with them. It makes sense that they would see low-level villains that they can easily beat as a game, as something amusing. And yes, there's probably an ego boost in there. Like "lol look at that guy that i just beat in 0.5 seconds while the police are struggling for a day to find and arrest him."

So I honestly just see Lloyd in Dragons Rising as having fun. Low level thugs like the guards in Imperium that he can just flaunt his skills to and maybe add a few flourishes to the fight that he'd never be able to use in a real fight...maybe a little flip that Jay had taught him, or a special spin that Kai showed him. And when he's fighting Wyldfire he's just!! Amused!!!

Ther''s also probably an added "PLEASE these ppl think they can beat ME?" to the mix. Again, it might look like arrogance...but think about this. It's deserved arrogance. Lloyd has literally beaten the master of evil itself. Twice. And here's this 15 year old Kai equivilant raving about killing him. It must be really amusing to him. He is very skilled, professional, and powerful. He knows his worth. Humility is hard to have when you were forced to carry the burden of the world at 9 years old.

#lloyd garmadon ramble #ninjago #ninjago thoughts #sharkanalysis #lloyd garmadon #ninjago lloyd

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happysparklingshadows · 1 year ago

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𝙱𝙶𝟹 𝙻𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚎𝚜 ✿ 𝙿𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚜𝚎 ✿

Note: I am still writing A Certain Hunger but I have been very scared about publish it because it has taken so long to write because of some personal issues with my family and work! I hope you like my headcannons about Bg3 woman. They have infested my brain 😵‍💫

Lae’zel

-Not one to really give or receive praise in a context outside of battle.

-She would compliment you in her husky tone occasionally if you did impressive work against an enemy. But praise for being around? No.

-Lae’zel grew up in a culture that refuses kindness or praise. “It only makes us slower. We think of our greatness more than being great; I will not fall for that. I know my greatness in the screams of my enemies.”

-However, over time, and after being introduced to Faeyan culture, she slowly learned that praise was judged as encouragement or care for others. Especially after staying with you to choose her future, she learns the importance of praise but uses it very sparingly.

-“You did well.” She would say after you kill some goblins. Or the time she mentioned that she liked the “strength” you showed when you got beaten to your last hit point.

-She was never good at taking praise. She didn’t like being called a good girl; it implied you were superior to her somehow, and she didn’t like being called anything other than Lae’zel.

-“Champion, You were so strong tonight. It made me shiver.” You told her once as she was sharpening her sword. She stops abruptly and stares ahead of her momentarily, and she starts sharpening again. She got flustered very easily with those words.

-She does say in sex, though, “You take me so well, my scent still on you from last time. Screaming you are mine.” To you in sex. She likes to praise your good behavior as her mate, but she doesn’t think it is praise. She is stating a fact. You were good at taking her????

-She isn’t the best at giving or taking praise, but nothing is better for her when it is earned. She loves to hear your approval of her, and she tries her best to do the same for you because beneath the coldness was someone who couldn’t imagine a world without you. Didn’t want to.

-I believe after the end of Act 3 in the game, she would call you “good girl” if you told her you liked it and explained how it made you feel. She won’t develop it independently, even with how well she knows you, but she wants to make you feel good. She isn’t above proving herself to you or changing small things, like what to call you in bed.

Karlach

-Fucking loves it and loves giving it both.

-She calls you baby (girl or boy) whenever she is pleased with your behavior, and she kisses you whenever the urge comes over her, which is a lot.

-Karlach has no shame or embarrassment to praise her beautiful Girlfriend.

-Karlach had helped you once with her strength; you had asked them to hold you up as you wanted to grab a honeycomb. Her solid and big hands grabbed your waist gently and lifted you up like you were nothing; it made you feel flustered and turned on.

-“Gods, I don’t think I have ever met anyone as strong as you, Karlach! That was amazing!” You said without a filter when your feet met the ground again. You looked up to the now-flustered barbarian. “Seriously,” you say as you touch her bicep innocently to investigate your girlfriend's muscle, “What were you fed as a child? Rocks and nails?”

-Which ended up with you pushed against that tree and fucked beyond belief.

-The night came over you that night under the tree. You lay naked in the grass with Karlach. You hear the turning of mechanical parts in her chest as you look up at her, resting your chin on her breast, “You are so beautiful. It is just a privilege to love you, Karlach. Truly, I can’t believe we haven’t known each other longer for how much you have taken from my heart.”

-Karlach is a soft girl sometimes, and saying something like that to her would make her stare at you with tears in her eyes. She softly cries, not believing what you are saying. She chuckles at her own tears at such a nice thing. She sniffles and says, “Thank you, baby, I can’t- ah, I can’t find the words to tell you how much that makes me feel. I love you. You are the best love I have ever known.”

-You kiss her skin softly as you cuddle closer to the tearful tiefling, “I love you too. So greatly… it’s good to know it is mutual.”

-“It is, baby, it really is. Tonight is such a beautiful night.”

Shadowheart

-Shadowheart doesn’t admit it, but she has such a big praise kink.

-It started when you two met when you noticed how she would look away when you thanked her for saving you, or she would blush when you told her how great she was beside you in a fight.

-But she was slow with her love and couldn’t be won over with some simple praise. It takes time to win her trust, let alone her heart.

-She finds her need for your praise as something she needs to hide. It was a vulnerability to exploit if she let it show. It is how she is used to being. She tries to hide her happiness with praise, but it is hard.

-But, when you two start seeing each other seriously, she takes that shit to the heart every time.

-“Good girl.” You said in passing when she healed you without being asked. It caused her to blush and feel a heat wave through her.

-She was happy to make things easier for you when she was in love with you and away from Shar. She doesn’t need anyone's approval anymore, no more sacrifices to be enough. She was enough to you. It made her feel comfortable.

-Shadow wasn’t scared to praise you back. She is similar to Karlach in that way. She has no shame when she is happy with you to tell you that or give you a look that communicates that she will treat you to something more.

-One night after she had abandoned Shar, she was still very lost and felt not herself. Even her hair isn’t the same as what she remembered. She didn’t remember much. It killed her, and you came to your shared tent.

-“Shadow, I want you to know I haven’t met someone with so much bravery before.” You say to her as she sits across from you, saddened and quiet, and you come closer to her. “You were scared and did what you thought was right, and it was right, without knowing how it would end up. You dared to do something that terrified you. It inspires me, my love.” You finish as you touch her hand, you move a hair out of her face that still looks at the ground. She had red cheeks, and her breath was hitched. She needed to hear that. But she couldn’t find words to speak. “My brave cleric.” You say as you touch her cheek tenderly with a finger, rubbing it up and down and moving it away. “I think you will find your nerve again. Give it some time.”

-She, of course, finds it again and is her typically goofy brooding self again. And she remembers those words when she is afraid. She reminds herself that you find her brave, so she must act bravely.

-The praise you give her keeps her sane even if she will never admit it.

Minthara

-Praise is not something to take or give lightly to Minthara.

-Minthara is 230 years old (45ish in human years), and you are way younger than her by a hundred(s) of years. She sees you as someone who has yet to mold into a fully well-rounded person, and she likes to see herself as some kind of mentor and lover.

-Minthara smirked at you when you did something she liked in the company of your party; she would back you up on almost any decision you made. If you kill or attack someone without asking questions, she will give you a nod and a “Good kill.”

-Minthara doesn’t hate when she is praised by you. It gave her a reasonable confidence boost that she needed right now. But she scoffs at it and doesn’t like overly affectional praise or one that doesn’t feel earned.

-She thinks the best praise is in sex with your moans and begs to her. She worships you, eyes devouring you as much as her mouth did to your clit. Her fingers toying and occasionally pinching your nipples, she moans into your body as she tastes your essence. She loves hearing how good she is doing and how great you feel; she keeps her path of getting your cum on her lips.

-Minthara kisses up your body when she is done. She links her hips with yours with firm thrusts against you, and she says down to you, “Good girl, that’s right, move with me.”

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animatedglittergraphics-n-more · 1 year ago

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RIP, AIM: Remembering how we used to talk on the internet

A eulogy for AOL Instant Messenger, and how it changed the way we talk about games and everything else By Luke Winkie published December 15, 2017

Do you remember all the souls you've lost to the internet? Those incidental friendships, forged in IRC clients, Newgrounds forums, 40-man Ragnaros wipes, scattered across the globe when the web was young? They came into your life and played Fall Out Boy over Ventrilo. They came into your life and disappeared forever. Do you remember when snapping a selfie required a frustrating tangle of mechanical coercion, but it was worth it to show them your face? When real-life names were rarefied information shared exclusively through digital blood pacts? AIM shut down today, and the only thing I can think about is how all of those people still exist somewhere, perhaps exploring the same pit in their stomach that I am.

AIM belongs to all of us. As a pioneering force of internet communication, anyone born in the early '90s or late '80s has spent some time on the platform. As a 26-year old, I'm crucially aware that my appreciation for the prodigal instant messenger is colored by a nostalgia that has nothing to do with the service itself. It was simply the medium of choice to grouse about homework, The Decemberists, girls I liked, and the rest of my random bullshit.

But I do believe that there's a special union between AIM and people who grew up playing games, or at least came of age on the internet with people who played games. The early millennium revolutions in online multiplayer pitted us together and asked us to collaborate, so of course we carried those early internet accords to their logical extremes—talking all night in lonely chat boxes about what's cool, what sucks, and how easy it is to relate. In 2017, the web feels less like something I approach for those connections, and more like an overwhelming ennui that I'm constantly trying to outrun. Boston's Kyle Seeley nailed that feeling perfectly with 2015's Emily is Away, and this year's sequel Emily is Away Too—both of which transport you back to the spongy leather office chairs of your parents' computer room.

"AIM was primarily for one-on-one conversations between teenagers. That's how I used AIM, to have a very intimate conversation with another person. Now we have texting and Facebook messenger, but you can use those wherever you are," he says. "You can use those at a concert or while driving. But when you were using AIM, you were sitting down at a computer to talk to people. You had their undivided attention."

Emily is Away tributes AIM in the only way anyone can—spinning a yarn of disentranced high-school drama that eventually mounts into something deeply sad. The way Seeley presents an old Windows XP desktop, with the hilariously temperamental tastes of your idiot friends revealing themselves in their bios and away messages (until one day they stop logging on entirely) is immediately resonant. We've all had our Emilys. "When you have a conversation on the phone, you spend 10 minutes making small talk," says Seeley. "On AIM you talk to someone for hours. Like eight hours, 10 hours straight. You get all the small talk out of the way in the first hour, and then you're talking about these big teenager questions. Who am I? Who do I want to be? I think AIM was really good at that."

It was always difficult for me to articulate the intimacy I felt with my internet friends to my parents. There were the obvious, mechanical mistranslations; I begged my mother for early exits from countless family dinners that consistently managed to interfere with my guild's crucial Molten Core attempts. But beyond that, there was a certain shame in feeling loved and valued by people I only knew by username. A latent fear that those who did not understand might consider that affection to be false, or even sinister. That's different now, as social media has flattened out our offline/online dichotomy, but if you were on AIM, you probably remember how once upon a time those bonds felt illegal.

Years ago Nina Freeman, level designer at Fullbright and one of the foremost thinkers on love and technology, launched a flat-out covert campaign to get close with one of those friends. She spent months locked in the holy matrimony of Final Fantasy XI and nightly AIM treatises with a boy named Glenn from New York City. Eventually they met, but not before Freeman satisfied her aunt, (who she was staying with) with a fabricated narrative—Glenn was no longer a dude from the internet, now he was just an old family friend who happened to move east. "I was still in high school," says Freeman. "We made up that whole story."

That secrecy is immediately familiar to me. AIM was surreptitious, clandestine. A service that belonged to teenagers, sequestered from leering ears and concerned authority figures. As Freeman notes, a screen name was one of the few commodities a young person could fully own. A domain, an aesthetic, a communication channel you could control. It was rare to feel fully untethered from your parents, so you guarded that sliver of liberty with your life.

"I wouldn't hand out [my username] lightly," explains Freeman. "I'd only really do it with people I felt close enough with. It seems sort intimate. It was a 'thing' to add someone on AIM. The expectation would be that if we're adding each other, we're going to chat regularly.… It had a weight to it."

Cecilia D'Anastasio, senior reporter at Kotaku (and a friend of mine) went a step further. As an 11-year-old, she was already griefing in the multiplayer Flash games she shared with her friends over AIM. I don't think anything sums up the juvenile euphoria of instant messaging quite like using that power to cheat in stakes-free freeware.

"One of the Flash games I discovered was basically Pictionary, but online and with a chat room. One player would etch out an image in a Microsoft Paint-like interface while the chat would dutifully guess at what it could possibly be. It was very wholesome," says D'Anastasio. "That's why my friend June and I were passionate about cheating. We'd join a game on the same team. Over AIM, we'd tell each other what we were assigned to draw, instructing whoever was guessing to wait a solid ten seconds before revealing the answer. It was a riot. We always won."

Over the past decade or so AIM has slowly been replaced with services that de-emphasize traditional internet patois. Gchat and Twitter are all full of real names and faces instead of coded handles and custom-colored text, and logging in to most platforms scarcely takes more than a click on a Facebook icon. For the most part, this is a good thing. Anonymity is one of the scourges of online culture—a de facto institution that continues to cause a lot of people pain. Personally though, I can't help but feel like we've lost something along the way. There was a certain sublimity in typing from behind the guise of a username. It gave way to a feeling that your AIM conversations existed in some sort of permissive, alternative reality, the ideal spot to work up the nerve for swollen 3 am confessions. In 2017 there is no such thing as "IRL" anymore; your internet presence is permanently married to your day-to-day existence. Everyone on earth spends their waking hours waging wars and making peace with strangers they will never meet. It is overwhelming and insoluble, and there are moments where I wish I could get outside again.

I'm not the only person that feels this way, and there are some people working to restore the parts of the mid-aughts internet that worked. When I interviewed Jason Citron, CEO of Discord, earlier this year, he affirmed a deep appreciation for AIM, and believed that perhaps the online infrastructure might soon swing back in that direction. "When you zoom out and think about the internet and how communication is trending, there's definitely a trend to more live experiences," he said. "The internet has done so much to connect people asynchronously, so I think there's something more macro happening that Discord is taking part in. It's like we're bringing it back to how it used to be."

He's right. One of the things that's made Discord successful is how separated it feels from the rest of the internet. When you join an ultra-specific channel—for niche Hearthstone formats or fan-favorite Persona characters—it's like you're uncovering a league of obsessives that are ready to welcome you with open arms. The true solidarity of dorkiness. It's funny, but by holding back on cosmopolitan design choices (like Facebook integration or a required photo-reel), Cintron stumbled into a scheme that evokes the furtive splendor that made AIM special. This is something Nina Freeman found when she started up a Discord channel to support her growing Twitch following. "It quickly became a community, and now I have a bunch of newer online friends. I'm already cracking up at myself as I'm wondering what they look like, or what they do in real life," says Freeman. "It definitely has a similar appeal."

If Discord doesn't quite meet your personal instant messaging standards, Citron tells me that, if enough people in the community request it, he'd consider implementing the low-res AIM chimes into the service. You know, door creak, door slam, those disruptive MIDI twinkles. "To this day, that sound still triggers my desire to hop online," he says.

Kyle Seeley is doing something similar. Yesterday he released a piece of DLC for Emily is Away Too that reskins Steam Chat to look exactly like AIM circa 2006. He spared no expense; you can change your text color, drop in vintage, blocky emoticons, and create your own custom profile so you can tell the world that Warped Tour will never die. "It's a farewell to AIM," he says. As one gaming's foremost nostalgia artists, it'd be wrong if he didn't say goodbye.

Now the AIM generation is old enough to both intellectualize their wistfulness, and use the lessons they learned from the service to create for the today's teenagers. To facilitate affection and respect on the internet, to show them what it looks like. We were the first to taste love on the web, at a time when those feelings had no context or guidance, and I hope that AIM helped create a baseline for young people and the midnight communion with those across the screen. The liberation that comes with knowing that the internet friendships you cherish are just as valid and wonderful as you think they are—these stories matter, because they help light that path. Lord knows I needed it, and I'm sure you did too.

Luke Winkie

Contributing Writer

Luke Winkie is a freelance journalist and contributor to many publications, including PC Gamer, The New York Times, Gawker, Slate, and Mel Magazine. In between bouts of writing about Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and Twitch culture here on PC Gamer, Luke also publishes the newsletter On Posting. As a self-described "chronic poster," Luke has "spent hours deep-scrolling through surreptitious Likes tabs to uncover the root of intra-publication beef and broken down quote-tweet animosity like it’s Super Bowl tape." When he graduated from journalism school, he had no idea how bad it was going to get.

#rip aim #aim #aol instant messeging #old web #techcore #aim eulogy #webcore

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hrhmimieucliffe · 4 months ago

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⚠️⚠️Another Mimi Rant Incoming (ik, not again) ⚠️⚠️

Love and Deepspace.

I love the game. I've met so many kind and wonderful people within this fandom. But no fandom is without its problems.

If you know me, you know what my page is all about and how I advocate for the inclusion of more Black women in different fandom spaces and consumable media. We are often either forgotten about, used as comedic relief, stereotypes, or as an antagonist who is loud, bitter, has an attitude, etc.

Cool, fine, whatever, over it.

But one thing I will address is the fact that some people in the LADS fandom seem to have forgotten one major thing about the game. Pertaining to the MC.

SHE IS FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE AND DOES NOT HAVE A CANON APPEARANCE.

Yes, I'm aware the devs use a 'base' look for her on some of the cards and in the previews of new battle mechanics/ five-star kindled scenes. But they're not how she canonically looks. She looks that way because Infold is an eastern based company with certain beauty standards, cool, not asking you to suddenly change her. I'm cool with that.

But people in the FANDOM seem to be forgetting that you can customize her yourself. Into an OC or a self insert, it doesn't matter.

So if you know this, why is it that people with a tan or dark MC receive hate and harassment for making fanart of their self-insert MCs who look like the real them with the MLs?

Why is it that as non pale/fair skinned women, we are expected to always sit back and relate to a pale MC who has a personality that usually doesn't match some of us, either? If we can bear it for our entire lives, why is it a problem when we get a *small crumb* of inclusiveness in making the MC customizable to shape her how we want, it's not a problem until someone actually makes fanart of their MC with an ML and that MC is not the same pale/fair-skinned one?

How is that fair? It's like some people deliberately ignore it or are part of the problem. Especially those who make excuses like

"Oh, but they're not a western based company." I know that. Which is why I'm not aiming this rant at Infold themselves.

"Oh, don't bring politics into the game". First of all, how is the existence of dark or tan people politics? It's not "politics" when it involves someone who is part of the usual beauty standard, is it? Second of all, Infold themselves practically brought those said "politics" in by having tan/dark skinned options into the game in the first place.

Do you all see what I'm getting at, here?

This all came about because I'm part of (both) LADS subs on Reddit, and someone recently made a post about how they were attacked on Tiktok by LADS "fans" for her MC being dark in some *FANART* she made of her MC (based on herself) with her favourite ML.

Why can't we just have peace as women who don't conform to the outdated beauty standards? Why does it matter so much if MC is customizable?

What, do people think that as dark or Black women, we're not allowed to have certain interests? We're not allowed to like certain characters, games, movies, shows, etc? Why?

Wake UP and start calling it out when you see it!! You can't claim not to be a part of the "bad part" when you sit back and let it happen which makes those people get comfortable doing it.

Rant over. Have a nice day girls.

#love and deep space #love & deepspace #loveanddeepspace #love and deepspace #love and deepspace mc #lnds #lnd #lads #love and deepspace rant #STOP #Another Mimi Rant #love and deepspace rafayel #love and deepspace caleb #love and deepspace fanart #love and deepspace xavier #love and deepspace zayne

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bladekindeyewear · 4 months ago

Text

HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2024-08-24

(Previous post - current page 666)

Section 3 of page 666 is now upd8'd, let's check it out! And as you can expect very much from the topic it's almost certainly covering, they've warned us via the twitter "Content warning for references to themes of physical and mental abuse, flashing imagery, and mild gore". By the way, when Force Refresh didn't reload the game data enough to show the new chapter in Google Chrome for me, I had to go in settings to "Delete Browsing Data" > "Cookies and other site data" for the Time Range "Last hour", because just deleting "Cached images and files" or "Hosted app data" didn't help.

(EDIT: THEY WERE NOT KIDDING AROUND ABOUT THE CONTENT WARNINGS, IF YOU HAVE ANY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH ANY SORT OF ABUSE PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH THIS ONE.)

Although, before we get into it (AND WAY BEFORE I SCROLLED BACK UP TO EDIT THAT EXTRA WARNING UP THERE), I wanted to cover something that'd been on my mind since my last post, predictionways: How IS Vriska going to escape the Plot Point?

There seem a number of obvious answers that we'll get some combination of, but the last one might not be obvious to everyone, so I wanted to cover it and flesh out / examine the possibilities so we all can feel really smart if it pans out at all the way I'm thinking it could pan out:

(1) Vriska realizes the true power and relevance she'd attained as a Thief of Light never left her heart all along, and this singularity is Nothing, a realm Void of relevance where only she exists. (Very like the Neverending Story after everything was destroyed, maybe?) If she allows herself to divest herself of some of her relevance she's been so desperately clutching onto, she can 8r8k the Plot Point.

Callie hinted that this singularity-center might need to be destroyed, and the fifth section is an 8-ball, a type of container Vriska is famously known to break. It may make a degree of sense that realizing her own power, her ultimate freedom, might be enough to do just that and free her.

(1a) Vriska becomes her Ultimate Self, and is too full of Light for the singularity to contain. This could break it or otherwise get her out of it...

...but I'm not sure it's either possible or a good thing for her to consolidate ALL of herself from the rest of Paradox Space into herself while she's trapped in here? Those versions of her perhaps deserve to keep existing rather than falling into a sea of herself that would need to hold powerfully to the self-actualization and psychological progress she's made as THIS version of her instead of the versions of her that didn't. We're not certain of all the mechanics of being an Ultimate Self, so it's hard to say whether or not it's possible... or could even see her backslide from this Therapy Session, which I really wouldn't want to see because this has been so good, and would definitely make some sense of alt!Callie / AL's warning that what was inside the Plot Point was hungry, because an Ultimate Vriska certainly could be. This doesn't seem the right choice unless in combination with one of the other options:

(2) Vriska finds the collapsed core of the Green Sun's power here and steals it for herself, a hidden treasure that could be intensely empowering, whether via Light or even giving her fancy barrier-busting Black Hole powers similar to alt!Calliope's dead!Jade body. I... feel this option is unlikely. It'd certainly count as something "greedy" inside the Plot Point that "isn't salvation" and could hasten the fragmentation of the Candy storyline because there isn't a singularity vacuuming its power all together, which could apply to breaking the Plot Point too, frankly... eh, I just still think other options seem more likely and better foreshadowed. Especially this last one:

(3) Vriska uses the same communication-across-barriers ability she used to contact (Meat)!Terezi in order to message JOHN and ask the HEIR OF BREATH to free her from the singularity as I once long ago wrongly predicted. If John is the only one who can reach in and pull her out, it would require Vriska to overcome herself enough to realize she needs -- and has the power -- to MAKE a divestment of relevance (as (1) suggested) to John from herself, and let John be the hero in her place for at least a moment. The arms he once reached everywhere with using his ultimate power suddenly become an arm reaching for another hand to pull someone to freedom.

Now on top of everything I mentioned in the old Breath, Blood, and the Flow of Reality post about John being one of the only people possibly capable of freeing someone from a singularity that "not even Light can escape", there's a bunch of EXTREMELY RECENT evidence for this, too. In addition to telling us how surprising and unlikely they would have found it to learn that Vriska messaged Terezi past the barrier sealing Candy's timeline away from the rest of Paradox Space, Callie ALSO just got done asking John to break Vriska out of jail, reinforcing it with an open statement that Breath was the aspect of Freedom, and John embodied the concept. And more importantly, John HADN'T BEEN NECESSARY to break Vriska out at all, and ended up only tagging along for conversation and fun, not even needing to tell Serket where to go! Which makes the entire relevance and narrative choice of Callie asking him to break her out better suited as foreshadowing for this exact necessity while she's trapped in the Plot Point, and all Vriska would need to do to make it happen is pull a trick (communicating across the Breach) we've already seen her pull before in the Epilogues. To have the courage and stability of mind to realize she can't do this on her own, and know who to ask for help. (Roxy, as a Rogue of Void, might even be able to lend her power to the effort too.)

Apologies for the pre-update writeup, I just really wanted to make that last John call for y'all if you hadn't realized the possibility, y'know, before we potentially see it happen a few upd8s from now. :D

Alright, on to all the trauma that Doc Scratch helped inflict on Vriska, manipulating her into actions that only injured her psyche further and her friends moreso, and all the guilt and anger she feels over it. I suspect she'll have to finally at least PARTIALLY realize the trick that's being hinted at regarding "ultimate freedom" -- ie, the answer to the Ultimate Riddle -- and just how much Doc Scratch's talk of inevitability not only gaslit her into thinking her worst instincts were unavoidable, but that even as he was TELLING her that he was manipulating her, he was admitting that he HAD to manipulate her to make this happen, meaning the power had been in HER hands all along, not his. Without Vriska provoked into being the one to inflict the injuries in the entire Team Charge vs Team Scourge cascade, without the fact that this was all FRIENDS hurting FRIENDS, none of them would have experienced enough of the severe psychological trauma required for Doc Scratch's half-Gamzee chucklevoodoos to control them into unknowingly writing his DNA code, and leaving those like Aradia in an inverted, highly manipulatable state for guiding their session into creating the Tumor that would birth the Green Sun. Let's click the White Cueball and start watching Vriska painfully confronting some serious emotional abuse and trauma from her past at the hands of a very-Dirk-Strider-like pseudo-parental figure...

*CLICKING THAT DAMNED CUEBALL NOW*

Okay, NO TIMESKIP notice this time, she looks the same in her room-- it would make sense that Doc Scratch is next on the chopping block this time and I'd WANT to see her live first reaction to it. What's with this poppy hoppy fun music? We're definitely getting something more sinister for Scratch. (Also I have to say, the music so far this entire Vriska Therapy Session flash has been... okay? But not up to the usual Homestuck banger standards the original comic's run spoiled us with constantly, in my personal view.)

VRISKA: Whew. VRISKA: Long day.

Oh gosh I hope she doesn't go into the next one IMMEDIATELY and rests first--

Oh GCATAVROSPRITE is the music this time, I get it! And he's acting more catlike than ever w/ those paws lifted!

GCATAVROSPRITE: mAYBE, yOU SHOULD TAKE A BREAK, fROM ALL THE TOTALLY AWESOME PERSONAL BREAKTHROUGHS YOU ARE HAVING, GCATAVROSPRITE: aND KICK IT WITH ME AND ERISOL FOR A WHILE, ERISOLSPRITE: yeah, you kiinda look liike 2hiit.

THANK you, get her to relax at least a BIT before tackling something harder than her freakin' abusive mother(s). Also,

--just, Erisol looking unexpectedly fly as fuck, and more Dave-like than ever. Like, I'm just surprised he looks so cool. Good damn art.

VRISKA: Says Scarfshades McLopsided.

Hey!!!

ERISOLSPRITE: 2ay2 the bu2ted a22 biitch wwearin the 2ame raggedy jacket 2he2 wworn 2ince wwe wwere liike fiivve.

FUCKIN' OWNED, GOOD SNAPBACK.

VRISKA: Says the guy who literally can't change his clothes.

That's low AND not helping your case, fuck you! You're being incredibly disrespectful AND proving him right!

ERISOLSPRITE: ii cant be held accountable for my dii2cordant cla22-2wwag diichotomy, but here you are a 2weep and a half deep iin a per2onally raiilored realm of 2elf-reflectiion and you 2tiill choo2e twwo look liike thii2.

EXACTLY, that's what we're saying!!! --Not that it can be helped TOO much, from an emotional standpoint she sorta has to take forms similar to her past to face her past to an extent, so...

Also, let me do the math on that... (6/13)*4 ≈ 1.85, so if we're still in "YEAR 4" then 1.85 solar sweeps have passed for her since she entered the Plot Point. If anything, Erisol's being generous as fuck here by rounding down instead of saying "nearly two sweeps". (And this confirms we haven't timeskipped again-- or if we have, must not have skipped MUCH.)

VRISKA: Heh.

What, can't mess with perfection?

ERISOLSPRITE: heh.

Oh shit, they're actually getting on, look at his damned animated grin. This is just some black-vibey friendly jabbing!

ERISOLSPRITE: anyway, come chiill.

Please, please do Vriska for your own damn sake.

Oh no, Tavros, don't suggest cat things.

Yeah, get some R and R. (And pointless playtime.) So you don't burn out. Good advice Tav.

FUCK IS HE STILL ALLERGIC? :C

.....okay GCATavrosprite you make a good goddamned point, you're doing pretty well against the allergies all things considered.

Oh no, she thinks she needs to keep going. :( This is gonna be even less fun for her than she thinks.

VRISKA: I'm kind of on a roll here. Gotta strike while the iron is hot!

Intense trauma-release therapy does not work that way!!! Heavy revelations have to be PROCESSED and mulled over before you subject yourself to more psychological pounding!

GCATAVROSPRITE: [...] aND IT KIND OF FEELS LIKE THE FIRE IS ABOUT TO GET REALLY REALLY HOT,

Ooh, a serious warning from Tav and Erisol that this shit is about to be some fuckin' BUSINESS. Listen to them! (Exactly as you put it Tav, that iron is gonna MELT too long in too hot a fire. I hope this doesn't knock her back at first and then we get ANOTHER TIMESKIP so soon mid-section... D: )

VRISKA: Whaaaaaaaat?

Oh she doesn't fucking see it coming, does she. She thought she just conquered the worst of her abuse with her mother(s) just now. She is NOT ready.

VRISKA: Oh 8lah 8lah 8lah, don't be such a pussy. GCATAVROSPRITE: i LITERALLY CAN'T NOT BE A CAT,

PFFF

VRISKA: How 8ad could it even 8e?

How genre savvy could you POSSIBLY have lost track of being to make such a statement?

...Welp, she's gonna try it. Let's hope it doesn't make her backslide into being too afraid to touch it for another year or two. :C :C :C

ERISOLSPRITE: ok wwell fuck u2 for tryiin ii gue22, havve fun gettiing traumatiized.

PFFFFDHF okay that was pretty funny

VRISKA: I'm not gonna get traumatized!

Lemme guess, smash cut to a dozen and change clicks from now: "...I got fucking traumatized."? X'D

Oh here we go:

{ENTER SCRATCH'S PARLOR}

OH HERE WE GO WITH SOME PROPERLY OMINOUS MUSIC. AND I LOVE THE TYPEWRITER SOUNDS AS HIS TEXT TYPES OUT AGAINST THE PURE BACKGROUND. THIS IS DONE SO GODDAMN WELL

(Even if I still think this music still doesn't measure up to original Homestuck tunes, it's still FITTING AND WORKS GREAT for the scene, and the style and art choices are top notch, especially the pure backgroundless white font.)

Yep Vriska, a "perfectly predictable inevitability", you should have seen this coming. Did you know you'd show up here, or did you not and he's rubbing it in your face? Cause I'd bet it's the latter.

It certainly has been a while, Vriska. You seem to have blossomed nicely.

CREEPY ABUSIVE UNCLE VIBES ALREADY REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS THREE CLICKS IN

Care for a piece of candy?

GOD DAMNIT

VRISKA: Oh fuck your stupid candy, you glo8e-headed little freak.

Congratulations Vriska, you've successfully lost 99% of your chill five seconds in, have fun getting traumatized

Doc hinting at the inevitability theme by saying he'd know for a fact she'd enjoy the candy.

Although it was less the wary hunch of a scared little girl than the delightful certainty that you'd come crawling back to me, sooner or later.

FUCK THIS IS JUST RAW ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP WE ARE FULL NON-WATERED-DOWN EVERCLEAR HERE

Holy SHIT are they pulling out all the stops with his awful phrasing here, no wonder they put so big an emotional abuse trigger warning on this update on the twitter page. And it's only going to get worse.

Of course I know. I'm always watching you.

Fuck, this is just. Exposing levels of vulnerability and awful fear that Vriska had to contend with in her youth that we hadn't even PUT TOGETHER back then. Every veil of silliness has been ripped straight off to show the gory mess of how this would have psychologically affected her while she was younger, here. I used to hate the epilogues and early HS^2 a little for doing this so liberally, for making clear how RETROACTIVELY FUCKED things were in ways that made my heart ache without any balm or healing... but unlike those earlier glimpses into their past attitudes, THIS time we are fucking going to goddamn RESOLVE the psychological issues and get some clear closure on them. That's part of why the entire p666 Vriska Therapy Session / Hyperbolic Therapy Chamber is already quite nearly my favorite part of all Homestuck so far, and I DO mean ALL of Homestuck so far.

VRISKA: You know what? VRISKA: I've 8een pretty damn good. VRISKA: 8een losing track of the sweeps I've spent in here fixing pretty much everything other than the thing I actually came in here to fix, 8ut it's paying off! There's a convenient timer for the express purpose of tracking that.

Oh god don't show her. Don't make her worry about how much time she's losing in here or how much it might be reflecting out there.

VRISKA: Yeah, and I never look at it 8ecause it pisses me off!

Phew. At least she's had TIME to come to terms with worrying about it.

VRISKA: 8ut it's fine. VRISKA: It just means I've had a lot of time to think stuff over. VRISKA: Stuff that was holding me 8ack, throwing me off-course.

I get the feeling he's about to do a pretty good job trying to convince you that you can't escape this so easily. To throw the wrong sort of doubt at you about what exactly you're barreling towards. About who the real "YOU" is-- he's going to try and convince you you're the one who hurts people.

I like to think that I'm far and away the most prolific contributor to your baggage.

Fuck. This won't be good.

VRISKA: Man, I figured may8e this place was working up to something really intense, 8ut instead all I get is Glo8ehead the Gru8toucher playing puppetmaster again.

Eueuuugh that nickname D:

...Is Vriska shaking or laughing? I think she's shaking. D:

VRISKA: You fucked with a 8unch of little kids and 8lew up, then you LOST.

Lord English might have lost, but I don't feel quite like Doc Scratch really did. He pretty much gave his master the Paradox-Space-spanning story he wanted, from beginning to end.

VRISKA: You could 8arely handle me when I was six, I'm supposed to 8e scared of you NOW?

It doesn't matter that you're not six sweeps anymore, that's-- you're visibly shaking. This is a big fucking deal. This is digging into the creepiest and most disgusting parts of what was done to you.

Well, you're shaking.

There we have it.

...Vriska is pulling out the whole-ass PDF File word. I... I hope she's just trying to taunt him for manipulating children, here, and playing the uncle angle. He's not-- I mean nothing actually happened, right? Please tell me nothing physical actually fucking happened besides the cueball-explosion physical-abuse-ways, I don't want sexual abuse retconned into existence here...

Exquisite. I missed that fumbling braggadocio. It's heartening to know that this place hasn't cured you of it yet. It makes you so much fun to play with.

Yeah... the parts of Doc Scratch that Vriska is going to remember most clearly are the times where he was condescending in ways that denigrated her and confirmed her worst fears about herself, intentionally. :C

WHOA DID HE JUST SPACE SHRINK HER??? IS HE GONNA PUT HER ON THE TOY BATTLEFIELD?!

{o} ==>

Matching the scale and visuals of the situation to how she always felt. :C :C

And SICK that the music is breaking down, I'll freely give it credit for shifting to action mode.

Now then, why don't we have ourselves a little game?

Just like Dirk and Caliborn, and their union in Doc Scratch, always love to do to people.

FUCK he glitched away the "WHAT WILL YOU DO?" prompt. This is DEFINITELY about the Ultimate Riddle and Doc Scratch's ultimate lie that Vriska never had any autonomy, a lie he poisoned her with from an early age to make her even easier to manipulate both then and down the line.

DAMMIT, changing her clothes by force?! D: D: D: D:

FUCK FUCK FUCK NO THAT'S EVEN WORSE HE CHANGED HER INTO KID FORM HUGGING HERSELF FROM WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT TO BE INJURED THAT'S CREEPIER AND MORE AWFUL THAN I EVER EXPECTED NO WONDER THEY CONTENT WARNING'D THE FUCK OUT OF THIS, I'm going up there and putting some EXTRAS on there.

I don't have personal experience with this sort of abuse but I do have experience with some who HAVE and some who WORK therapeutically with those who have so this is playing out like a critical hit to triggers I can only empathize from a distance with and it's STILL getting almost too much already. Wow wow wow wow wow they didn't pull any punches.

Ah, and there she is. My favorite piece.

AAAAAA

Thief to E4; Thief takes Page.

That loud BLAM just then and the brown blood knocking her back along with her injuries, so pithy yet so HEAVY and with the meaty SFX to go with it, just, brutal, auughh.... Vriska's NOT getting out of this one lightly. She's not going to want to come back here. She's going to be too traumatized for a good while isn't she.

Thief to F5; Thief takes Maid.

Oh god I don't want to screenshot each of these...

Another meaty THUNK and some rust blood splashing her. God.

Thief to Z8; Thief takes Seer.

Even after all Terezi taunted her and so clearly loved being blind, she STILL hates herself for what she did to Terezi?? :'C

Her blood too D:

Z8 ISN'T EVEN A F8CKING P8SITION, YOU HACK!!!!!!!

She didn't even get the number of exclamation points right...

All the world's my board.

No Escape.

Thief to ∫40; Thief takes pawn.

Wait what, who?

Is that Gamzee's blood or Eridan's? She only killed Gamzee just recently in Candy... (Checks with digital color meter--) That's #680768 blood, which is closest to... Eridan's, huh, weird. Maybe Erisol will be able to help her with this later after she's run away. IF AND WHEN she can finally run away. It looks like he wants to reinforce the impression that he can make her kill ANY AND ALL of the people friends she knows, COULD have made her do it. That's horrible for her to think of herself.

Now Equius's blood. She's swearing but can't make it stop.

He even calls Kanaya (and her blood splash) nothing but her killing a pawn of his choosing.

Thief to Ω413; Thief takes pawn. Check.

This is one of the first reappearances I can remember of the arc number 413 since we started HS^2, I don't even recall it in the epilogues. What's in Check here, the kids' whole universe, the one the trolls created? Is he getting her to blame herself for that, too?

KARKAT'S BLOOD AUGH that's always tough to see whenever I have to see it, it just makes you want to protect him when you know you can't.

Vriska calling him a cheap fucking karma ghost, this a stupid fucking charade... won't stop the fact that this is real emotional pain she's feeling and real pain that was already inside her for nearly her whole life up until this vision brought it out into the open.

VRISKA: AND I'M NEVER GOING TO 8E CAUGHT UP IN YOUR FUCKING G8MES EVER AGAIN!!!!!!!!

Then why are you so afraid you will be?

Of course you will. You think you're better than me? Better than fate? Vriska, I am going to put you in situations where you have the potential to do terrible things. I am going to make things ugly. I am going to corner you. I am going to pressure you. And no matter how much "better" you claim to be, all I have to do is catch you at the wrong moment. You're one bad turn from burning all your quaint little progress to the ground. One lapse away from being mine again.

Yeah, these are ALL just more and more of her deepest fears about herself. That she can be made to kill again, so easily, no matter how far she thinks she's moved past it all. Until she internalizes the answer to the Ultimate Riddle and realizes she has the power to make the better choice-- to ALWAYS make the better choice, and he was just fooling her into thinking she never did-- how could she possibly escape this sort of trap? She can't, not yet. And that abusive cueball asshole INTENTIONALLY made sure she felt that way, because that's what kept her easy to control. Learned helplesness.

VRISKA: Get me out of here.

Fuck, she's so defeated... so helpless. Please, PLEASE let this work. Please make it so she CAN escape this memory RIGHT THE FUCK NOW and confront it later. Because I'm very afraid it won't.

VRISKA: I want a do-over. Oh, please. You of all people should know that you don't *get* do-overs. The rest of these frivolous little vision quests may feel like sparing you the effort of getting things right the first time around, but the real world doesn't work that way.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK THAT'S EVEN WORSE THAN I EXPECTED

No, you'll just have to endure it. This won't take long.

LET HER OUT YOU FUCK

You had a good run out there, flying solo and swashbuckling around as if Light itself were yours to command. It'd be wise to remember that it's a borrowed blessing. You flourish at its whim. Continue to spit in its face and take it for granted, and it will abandon you once again, perhaps for good.

Back to the ultimate riddle shit again. Doc Scratch conning her into thinking "everything you've achieved, I made for you, or you stole from others".

Being a true Thief of Light doesn't mean being at the whim of Light, at the mercy of what she can borrow. Kanaya tried to teach her back when she wanted her to clean her room that anybody can make their own luck.

Instead Doc Scratch is playing the role of Demiurge, standing in place of the Sun and claiming all Light radiates from him, when there was plenty inside her all along.

Do you remember who you were, before it chose you? The choices you made when luck wasn't on your side? You were such a delectable little victim.

Bluh!!!!!!

Poor Vriska, with her voracious lusus. With her demanding legacy and her uncooperative, fickle little friends. So much was out of your hands, then; how could you help but mbe my lovely assistant?

Doc Scratch inherited every last ounce of Equius's nonconsensual creep factor from Arquiusprite.

And this is going into the relationship between Light and Agency again, Void and the Lack of agency-- when Vriska felt trapped, felt she didn't have a choice, that was Void hemming her in, her "bad luck streak". Agency is your ability to choose what you do next, and so is Light. That's the privilege sometimes but not exclusively known as Luck.

Vriska: You didn't fucking own me.

Still so helpless-looking, but at least a bit of defiance in her expression. Which I expect handily crushed, unfortunately...

Exactly.

Fuck! And yeah, that's his point-- he's trying to say she CHOSE to do the wrong thing when the chips were down, which is what she's most afraid she'll do again.

But she needs to internalize the fact that it was a choice... that it HAD to be a choice... is an important flaw in the way he gaslit and conned her.

But what matters is that I might as well have. You let yourself believe you had no option other than to take me up on my hard bargains, again and again. For all your talk of independence, all your combative posturing and insistence on your own freedom, you barely bothered to put up any actual resistance to my suggestions. You took the easy way out, swearing all teh while it was your move. What a phenomenal waste of your considerable talents.

Her psyche is playing against her with the cards face up here... she just has to read them correctly. This is what she's afraid of, but it's also the flaw in his logic, the source of his power over her. The idea that she never possessed Ultimate Freedom, even though he's practically telling her that she DID, just to convince her she's an awful person.

It was an insult, and a warning. You're a trump card, Vriska, but your potency is a double-edged sword. One you've gotten far too comfortable swinging around, in the past. What do you intend to fix, when you leave this place? What, I wonder, will you break? I'd encourage you to be mindful of both. Of course, you could always cast aside those pesky trivialities and go with the flow, smashing through circumstances with nary a thought for the consequences. It'd be easier. We could dance together again, just like old times. You choose.

This isn't the real Doc Scratch-- this version of him IS, in its sick perverse way, still helping her. Still giving her the hints to realize that true balance between embracing your role and yielding agency to others is CRUCIAL to make sure you're doing your best to do the right thing. Which is especially difficult when your role, your best methodology, is that of an Agency Thief. A dangerous role which must be careful with its moves so as not to gluttonously trample over the wills of others who deserve a say.

But in order to choose, to take up the mantle of Ultimate Freedom, Vriska has to TRUST herself enough TO choose.

Trusting yourself enough to entrust yourself with CHOICE is one of the hardest decisions you can possibly make. Few ever truly make that decision.

What'll it be, Vriska? Player, or piece?

Well?

Thief to ∞108.

Whoa, what now? What the fuck is this going to be?

I look forward to finding out. Good luck.

Oh, so it's sending her back to the Plot Point. ∞108, or 8108. Is this the elusive arc number of one of our timelines, of Candy? One of infinite... or 1 and 0, creation and destruction, sandwiched between two 8s, two Vriskas with perpendicular orientations, Vriska and Vrissy? Hmm...

Oh thank fucking god we're back...

HAH

thanks so much I needed that mood lifter XD

{Level Complete!}

Thanks for ENDING it too, holy shit. I don't think I could have taken much longer of something THAT heavy tonight. Wow, that was masterfully done... not dragged out, just enough to get to the true point. To a setup for her decision, for her personal answer to the Ultimate Riddle.

Which makes plenty of sense why the NEXT section seems like it's likely a weird colorless version of one of Davepetasprite^2's feathers. They're the perfect person to talk to about her Soul/Heart, the greater self and the meaning of Ultimate Freedom, just as they hinted at during their last big talk in Homestuck.

--Yeah, she didn't get as much help from that as she would have wanted... and now the candle is ABSOLUTELY burning down.

The glimpse of the next unclaimed tiers, here... are these hinting at the start of the next section? We have her inhibitions bound, then a reference to a child development psychologist, then a somatic spark-- physical contact?! Then Deja Vu, a flash of the past (or possibly even meeting her GHOST self from the ghost rain, the more vulnerable (Vriska) inverted to Page of Void mode that she BERATED TO TEARS back toward the end of Homestuck to prove how much more (Vriska) had grown than Vriska before leaving her crying and for Ghost Terezi from the pre-retcon timeline to meet)... Heuristic Grace, getting her luck back possibly... burning, getting hotter, and then a transcendental gleam? No, no that's got to just be a candle and it burning out the rest of the singularity... I still don't think Ultimate Vriska is the solution to all this, could it be?

Oh shit, I forgot about how the BLACK CANDLE is burning down due to VRISKA'S blue flame.

Recall my proposals at the beginning of this post? I completely forgot about yet one more opportunity for her escape:

(4) That Vriska's Light has been burning away at the singularity of the Plot Point this entire time, and will naturally destroy it no matter what, especially if she embraces her Agency and her inner Light. The Green Sun was not just a symbol of Light but an ultimate manifestation of Space power... and collapsed into a singularity, it could indeed also have been not just a Void but an ultimate manifestation of Time power. The years, sweeps, that Vriska is spending inside of it could be wearing it away all on its own, rapidly exhausting a reservoir of Time that alt!Calliope preserved at the center of the singularity just to give the noncanon timeline more time to exist than it otherwise would have had?!! Instead, Vriska is burning it up, and the sprites and ghosts who fell into the Black Hole during the Ghost Rain and concentrated themselves in this singularity are helping her use that naturally limited Time to arm herself and become the best version of herself she can be, so when the Plot Point collapses and shit really starts hitting the fan for the Candy timeline, they can execute a NEW plan to breach into the Canon/Meat timeline and do something so incredibly important that it reseats the timelines outside Paradox Space in new relevance stolen out from Canon. Something incredibly important, like unexpectedly facilitating Sburb's creation in what Dirk and Rosebot are trying to do, or sendificating the kids the final frog they used to create this Universe, or something, which came from somewhere we've still never resolved...

So many interesting possibilities here. And only two or three more updates until we'll know for sure what and how!

I'll probably continue to be too busy the next week or two to be in the mood to chew through bonus material or commentary. Talk to you next upd8 instead, most likely! :D

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #Homestuck^2 #upd8 #spoiler #spoilers #Vriska #Doc Scratch #John Egbert #Breath and Blood #Light and Void #Classes and Aspects #Calliope #Roxy Lalonde #Erisolsprite #Gcatavrosprite #cw: abuse

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hsr-texts · 1 year ago

Text

find your cinderella

꒰‧₊˚✩彡‧꒱ ┊ ━━━━ prologue

꒰⸝⸝₊ʚ♡ɞ ┊ streamer!reader x mystery hsr character ꒱

꒰⸝⸝₊ʚ♡ɞ ┊ otome event ꒱

꒰ ☰ WORD COUNT ┊1.4k ꒱

꒰ ☰ DESCRIPTION ┊ ━━ When you do an unboxing livestream for your subsribers, you find an invite to an exclusive event called the "Find Your Cinderella" masquerade gala where you are guaranteed to find your supposed true love, as a rather enthusiastic manager told you. ꒱

꒰ ☰ NOTES ┊HIII omg you guys THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE SUPPORT!! Getting 1k followers is so crazy for me because I've never had a blog be received with this much love and support before so I've decided to make an extra special otome game style fanfic! ꒱

“Guys, look! The package just came in!”

You rushed into your studio, holding a sizable metal box. Inscribed on the sides was a logo of two masks, resembling a certain Aeon. Placing it down on the floor, you gave a sigh of relief. “Aeons, that was heavy!”

Your eyes glanced at the live chat and saw all the messages, curious about the package.

“Seems like you guys are more excited than I am,” You couldn’t help a small chuckle leaving your lips. “It took me quite a lot to get a hold of this limited edition package from LumiPro. Like, do you guys know how much it cost?”

A few comments popped up trying to guess the price.

You shook your head. “100,000 credits.”

The chat then flooded with shocked emotes and comments. It was more than a fair reaction. You found yourself silently thanking the stars that your current occupation as a streamer granted you a steady income. Otherwise, you probably would’ve had to eat the same type of cup noodles for months.

“Anyway!” You clasped your hands together. “Let’s open it up already! I’m dying to see what’s inside. What could possibly warrant such a steep price?”

Your index finger pressed on the button at the top and heard a voice.

“Vocal identification. Please state your name.”

You uttered your name. It was a good thing you added an auto-censor to your setup so that any sensitive information that could get you doxxed would be redacted in the stream. You didn’t want stalkers showing up at your home after all.

“Permission granted.”

Faint clicks of metal against metal could be heard as the mechanisms worked to unlock the box. A hissing noise came from it as the lid opened. You watched, feeling anticipation and eagerness bubble within your chest.

A hologram was projected from the box, showing a person wearing professional attire. They smiled.

“Thank you for purchasing from Luminous Productions. We’ve curated a package that we believe would be of most use to you. For further questions, you may contact support on our site. We hope you enjoy it to the fullest.”

You took a peek and gasped at the sight. “Guys, oh my god, they just gave me a new PC!”

They must’ve done their research because you did mention in your stream a month ago that you were looking for a better PC.

The chat seemed to be as excited as you were, knowing this meant you’d be able to go back to your regular streaming schedule.

You could tell this was a real high end PC after seeing the graphics card and CPU model. Not only that, but it came with a new headset, keyboard, and mouse. You took out the stuff and gently placed them on the floor, letting the viewers see it.

After noticing that there was more in the package, you rummaged around for the other objects. Your hand made contact with some sort of fabric so you pulled it out.

Your eyes widened as you realised that it was a fancy outfit. Upon looking, you could estimate that it was your size too. Was this tailor made?

“Holy shit…”

It seemed like it was for a real special occasion, not even just your run-of-the-mill party that regular people go to. This outfit would probably fit right in with a red carpet event for rich folks or celebrities. Well— One may say, “Hey, aren’t you a celebrity too?” but you weren’t cocky enough to claim the same status as those with inter-galactic levels of fame.

A slip of paper fell out of the outfit’s pocket and you turned to see what it was.

You squinted in confusion. A ticket…? After picking up, you couldn’t help but notice the holographic shine to it first. How pretty.

“Find Your Cinderella Masquerade Event?” You mumbled in confusion. Who was Sugo? You couldn’t recall knowing anyone that went by that name.

Suddenly, the screen flickered for a moment and a new window popped up next to your stream.

A person showed up, wearing what you could only describe as a pink clown outfit that somehow combines cuteness and gaudiness in one. They grinned at you with amusement.

“Heya to all those viewers watching at home!” Even the way they spoke seemed to have a theatrical ring to it. By the way the chat was going insane, the people watching the stream could also see them.

“My name is Sugo and I’m the event organiser of the Find Your Cinderella Gala, or the FYC Gala for short,” they introduced themselves with a flourish. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Uh… hi?” You didn’t know how to respond. This was quite a bizarre experience to have someone hijack your stream to introduce themselves. Was this legal…?

They chuckled. “Yeah, sorry for the sudden appearance but I figured that it would shake things up a little. I’m sure your dear fans appreciate having two exciting things happening at the same time. You can bet that this’ll go viral too~”

“Right… So what exactly is this Find Your Cinderella Gala?”

“Glad you asked, dear anomaly!” They beamed. Eh? Why were they calling you anomaly?

“See, I’m doing a collaborative project with LumiPro. I proposed to them a large-scale event with celebrities from all over the galaxy, which would be broadcast to every streaming platform out there. The premise is simple, all attendees are there to find their one and only, their true love, their Cinderella, you get the idea.”

“So it’s a speed dating event for rich people?” Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion. It sounded like a stupid idea. And yet, a part of you was intrigued.

“Right on the money! What a clever streamer, it’s no wonder you got such high compatibility ratings with the other attendees~”

“A what?”

Their eyes gleamed with amusement. “So, we didn’t just pick the celebrities at random. I bet you’re wondering why a small time streamer is getting an invite to such an exclusive event, right?” They tilted their head, leaning on their desk.

You nodded slowly. It was still a mystery to you why you’d be invited when there are far more famous people in the galaxy.

“Behind the scenes, we’ve been developing an advanced algorithm that can find your best match in a group. How it works is that we pick a participant, feed it available information on said participant, then it calculates how well the person would get along with those within the group,” they explained, “What’s interesting for your case is that your average compatibility score with the group is 90%. Most folks that got tested only came up with a 60% average compatibility rating.”

You raised an eyebrow at this in skepticism. “Don’t you think that’s just a bug or something?”

They shrugged. “It could be, but we’ve done several tests and it always came out the same. We were hoping to add you in to act as an outlier to our pool of data.”

“So I’m just a guinea pig for your weird little experiment?” You gave them an unamused look.

“It’s just to see if your results were really true or if it was just a mistake on the algorithm’s part.” They shrugged. “I’m sure it’ll be a fun time for you regardless of my motives. A win win for all parties involved, don’t you just love that kind of thing?”

“I guess but doesn’t this come with strings attached?”

Sugo whined. “Ughhh, you’re gonna make this way less fun if you go in already knowing what you’re getting!”

“What kind of sane person would do something without knowing the full details?!”

A groan came from them. “Booo, that’s so boring! Life needs a special surprise factor that keeps things fun and interesting.”

They sighed after. “But fine. If you’re so skeptical, then I can throw in a 500,000 credit compensation if you end up not enjoying it. So even if you do lose, you still gain something!”

You stayed silent, trying to figure out if this was really worth the trouble of dressing up and going to a party.

“Anyway, that’s all the information I’m contractually allowed to give out. It’s your choice whether you want to go or not.”

“Can I have some time to decide this?” You asked them.

Sugo nodded, smiling in amusement. “Of course! It’s not good for a show to spend too much time on exposition, after all. Let’s give the player some time to shine, hm?”

“I have no idea what you’re saying.”

They giggled, ignoring what you said. “Bye bye! I’ll see you at the gala!”

Their window disappeared, leaving you with your viewers again.

You sighed. What a strange person. Did you really wanna go? It’s not like you had much to lose. Plus, you would be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t want to find out what that compatibility rating was all about.

“What do you think, chat? Should I go?” You turned to the screen, waiting for their input.

#honkai star rail #hsr #honkai star rail x reader #hsr x reader #jing yuan x reader #dan heng x reader #gepard x reader #sampo x reader #blade x reader #welt x reader

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facts-i-just-made-up · 1 year ago

Note

Know any gaming myths to debunk?

Gaming myths have been around as long as games, from the earliest Sumerian board games to the latest video game for your brand new Nintendo 64. Here are a few popular myths over the years to debunk:

The Royal Game of Ur: According to the weekly cuneiform tablet of Lord Kotaqu VI, the Royal Game of Ur held a secret block that could be accessed by moving a stone left, right, left, and right and up and down several times. This was simply untrue and Kotaqu was executed for his charlatan magic.

Chess: Several early critics of the game of Chess claimed that the game's battlefield strategy emulation inspired violence, despite many studies showing that Chess players like Gandhi were no more likely to go to war than non-Chess players such as Napoleon, except in certain Sid Meier simulations.

Texas Hold-'Em Poker: Many poker players were prone to cheating, especially in the old west. There are claims that card manufacturers such as Bicycle and Hoyle began to include serial numbers and codes, such as letter "L" on the lower left corner of a card so that nobody could claim a 9 was a 6, and so on. Though this has never been proven, many still claim that the L is real.

Pong: In the 1970s, games went electronic and many myths developed about this strange new form of play. The first game, "Pong," was much like table tennis, and some players claimed that one could, with proper timing, pick up the "ball" pixel and throw it on the "roof" of the video screen. This was proven untrue as more people learned how computers worked.

Tomb Raider: As more teenagers played video games, playground rumors such as a "Nude Code" to show the game protagonist naked became popular. Though there is no nude code in Tomb Raider, there is one in Kirby's Dream Land, in which Kirby can appear nude but for shoes by starting the game in normal mode.

Dark Souls: With the complexity of the world of Dark Souls, many rumors and myths were spawned, such as the ability to fast-travel early, a hidden map behind an old fog gate, and even the ability to enter other games by switching discs during a load screen. This last bit was only true in one case, where replacing the game disc with Postal 3 would improve the quality of the Postal game by making it crash irrecoverably.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder: The newest Mario game's "Wonder" mechanics are strange and diverse, leading to many rumors about weird tricks they can result in. While the normal game can turn Mario into a sticky blob, make inanimate pipes crawl like inchworms, or illuminate previously invisible walkways, claims of Wonder effects that make the console explode, save money on your car's extended warranty, or even let you see real people's names and how many days they have left to live have mostly proven false. One Wonder effect that did prove real was a 79 step ladder that lets Mario climb into a developer room. The room didn't have all that much in it, but also, it's everything.

#gaming #mario #dark souls #jacob geller #death note #unreality

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blueskittlesart · 4 months ago

Note

So my first LoZ game was TOTK. I got it as a gift and I just recently obtained BOTW. After watching the Echoes of Wisdom trailer, I have a few questions and figured considering the document u could prolly answer.

Are the Rito a staple of the game? They don't appear to be in EoW.

Are Sidon, Riju, Yunobo, and Tulin/Teba similar staples? Do their tribes appear without them, the characters changing?

What are Deku? Are they korok alternatives?

Finally, where do u think the game would fall on the timeline?

Thank you so much.

omg yaaay i havent talked at length about zelda lore/theories in a while lets go

Rito are a relatively new addition to the franchise. the only games which feature them are wind waker (2002) and its sequels, and botw (2016) and its sequels. the canonical explanation for why the rito just showed up is that they evolved in the thousands of years between wind waker and the game that came before it on the timeline. Based on the general vibe of eow i've seen in the trailers, it looks like it probably comes before wind waker on the timeline or exists in a different timeline entirely. so i think the rito probably haven't evolved yet. because the rito haven't been around since the very beginning like other races in the games, the devs seem to have more freedom to pick and choose whether they want them around, so i wouldn't exactly call them a staple race in the way that zora and gorons are.

While the RACES of hyrule are staples of the franchise, the specific champions we see in botw/totk are not. those characters don't reincarnate the way link, zelda, and ganon do, so they only exist within that one specific link's time. So while we'll definitely zee zora and gorons in eow, we almost definitely aren't going to see any familiar characters.

Deku are a race of forest spirit-adjacent. things. their first appearance was in oot iirc. the great deku tree, as you may remember from botw/totk, is a very old, very powerful forest spirit who rules over the forest. in oot, deku scrubs were usually hostiles you had to either fight or negotiate with, and in mm, link could become a deku scrub via a kind of terrifying mechanic we don't have to get into here. based on the eow trailer, in this version of hyrule the deku scrubs are korok/kokiri substitutes. the race that lives in the forest is one of the most inconsistent pieces of overarching zelda lore, so yeah tldr you can just assume theyre basically koroks.

the timeline question is. well. before the most recent trailer I was almost completely convinced that it was going to be on the alttp timeline, somewhere after link's awakening. but that was based solely on the vibes and the bare glimpses of the hyrule map we got in the first trailer. now that we've gotten a much more extensive look at the map and the races of hyrule, I think it's a little more likely that the game takes place sometime before oot. the map looks similar enough to minish cap while featuring races and regions that made their debut in oot, so I think that it makes sense for the game to fall somewhere in between the two, and I think that a lot of the choices they made sort of lend themselves to the game being a transition between minish cap/4 swords and oot. the crack theory is that it takes place AFTER botw/totk, purely because of how visually similar bind looks to ultrahand and the appearance of certain races being super similar to botw/totk, but i think the pre-oot theory is MUCH more likely.

#the addition of sea vs river zora is killing me btw. nothing like a one off line in a trailer to make me insane for days on end #asks #i do think the combat system of eow looks annoying as shit still tho. that being said i have preordered already

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anneapocalypse · 2 years ago

Text

Demands of the Qun, or How the Inquisitor's Choice Answers the Iron Bull's Most Important Question

I was having a chat about the Iron Bull and his personal quest with some friends and one person said in response to something I said that I should make it a Post, so here it is! And a usual disclaimer: this is not about which in-game decision is "correct"--it's an RPG, there's no wrong way to play the game. I just want to talk about the meaning of this decision for Bull's character and for his future.

Dragon Age: Inquisition’s “Demands of the Qun” is, for me, one of those quests where the RPG format of “player character makes major decision for companion character” really works. I do not see this as an example of game mechanics taking away agency from an NPC. I think Bull has agency in this situation.

The Chargers are not Inquisition soldiers. They are mercenaries, and Bull is their commander. If the Inquisitor makes a call he doesn't like, he is free to say "Screw you" and take his people and leave, because they are not soldiers, they're independent contractors, so leaving isn't desertion, it's just quitting. If he were already certain he wanted to leave the Qun, he could simply call the retreat himself, take the Chargers and leave. Similarly if he were certain of his loyalties and willing to sacrifice the Chargers for that purpose, he could do that, regardless of what the Inquisitor says.

He lets the Inquisitor make this choice.

The Iron Bull has had one foot out the door of the Qun for a long time now. But he's gone back and gone back, submitted himself for re-education and done his best to keep serving the Qun, because he believes he needs the Qun. To him, becoming Tal-Vashoth means losing himself, his identity, his purpose, his very sanity, and as the Fade tells us in "Here Lies the Abyss," this is quite literally his greatest fear. Bull could never bring himself to leave the Qun with nowhere to go instead, nothing to give his life purpose and meaning—and no one to entrust himself to should he doubt his own sanity.

But in his work in the south, the Iron Bull has found community and identity and purpose outside the Qun. The very name he has given himself speaks to that, as does his close relationship to the Chargers.

Right from the beginning, there is tension in "Demands of the Qun." Bull remarks that he's gotten used to the Qunari being "over there" during his life in the south. I think Bull has a very potent anxiety when he meets Gatt again on the Storm Coast, and introduces him to the Inquisitor and their party. To me, it very much has the vibes of introducing two friend groups, where you're not only pretty sure they won't get along, but you're also very aware that they know very different sides of you—and neither of them are going to like seeing the other side. Bull's discomfort is visible both when Gatt speaks freely about Bull's work in the Ben-Hassrath, and when the Inquisitor's other companions make disparaging remarks about the Qun. His two worlds have collided, calling into conflict two sides of his sense of self that he has thus far managed to avoid confronting.

And this is likely part of the point. The Qun does not truly respect alliances with any outside the Qun. I wouldn't say for sure that the Qunari set up this whole situation just to test Bull—it's possible they knew exactly how many Venatori would show up, but they couldn't have known precisely how the Inquisition would respond. That, and their desire to root out the Venatori is no doubt sincere. But I do think they are watching Bull's actions very closely throughout this proposed alliance, gauging his loyalty. Gatt tells him outright that many already believe he has betrayed the Qun.

Bull's internal conflict quickly becomes an external one when the Venatori reinforcements show up, and Bull is faced with the decision of whether to withdraw the Chargers or defend the dreadnought at the cost of their lives.

The thing is, Bull is not neutral on this. He tells the Inquisitor what he wants. He wants to save the Chargers. If the Inquisitor says that the Chargers still have time to retreat, Bull agrees. When Gatt tells him they need to hold position, he says in a low, intense tone, "They're my men."

And then, when Gatt tells him in no uncertain terms that calling the retreat will make him Tal-Vashoth, the Iron Bull looks to the Inquisitor.

Again, he is not neutral. He knows what he wants. He is standing there basically begging the Inquisitor with his eyes to save his boys.

So why doesn't he just make the call himself?

Because just as this whole situation is in part a test of Bull's loyalty, this is also a test of the Inquisitor.

What Bull needs to leave the Qun is not simply for someone else to make the choice for him, but to believe that there is a future for him outside the Qun. That he will still be himself, that he will have purpose, and meaning, and that someone else is worth trusting. Bull cannot bring himself to leave the Qun if it means he will be left utterly alone with nothing but his own mind and his deepest fears. And if that's what leaving the Qun means… then in his mind, it would be better to stay.

The Inquisitor's choice will answer that question.

To sacrifice the Chargers leaves Bull with nothing outside of the Qun. He has just watched his closest friends die, and he cannot trust the Inquisitor. With Krem and Rocky and Skinner and Stitches and Dalish and Grim, the new sense of self that the Iron Bull has found in the south also dies.

Of course he turns back to the Qun. He has nothing else left.

But if it's the Inquisitor who makes the call to save the Chargers… Bull can leave. He has friends who care about him. He has purpose. He has someone whose command he can trust. He has hope. None of this makes the choice easy for him. It is quite clearly very painful and difficult, and I don't think there's any way it could be otherwise. But he has a way forward nonetheless. The choice makes leaving possible.

The Inquisitor doesn't force the Iron Bull to become Tal-Vashoth. Instead, Bull implicitly asks a question, and the Inquisitor by their choice gives him an answer.

#the iron bull #iron bull #demands of the qun #dragon age inquisition #dragon age meta #dragon age #blunders of thedas

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moanz111 · 28 days ago

Text

✩°⋆｡ system error ⋆｡°✩ - 20

chapter 20 ✧ unforeseen circumstances - written + texts

< previous ✧ m.list ✧ next >

synopsis ✧ you've always dreamt of having your fantasy-like love story. naturally, hearing the sweet melodic ring of your love alarm was what you wanted the most, right? until it actually happened. four times.

pairing ✧ uni student! choi san x fem! uni student! reader

wc ✧ 4.2 k (i apologise)

warnings ✧ english is not my native language so there could be mistakes; attempt for humour; reader is confused af and so is san; swearing; mentioned fear of heights (reader is a bit scared but the description is very brief and she's riding a ferris wheel); reader is in an emotional crisis lowkey; lmk if i've missed something

If you got a penny every time you got yourself into an extremely uncomfortable situation, you would’ve had at least 20 by now and it was just 1 pm.

You weren't going home anytime soon.

“Y/n, stop spacing out. We still have 2 more hours,” Beomgyu whispered in your ear, nudging you with his elbow. You had agreed to come to this so-called “Love Alarm” dating event just to make him happy and maybe test your own alarm again, but you hadn’t had any idea it was going to be this excruciating for your poor soul. You tried your best to smile, talk to people when they showed interest but with each interaction your social battery was rapidly dying. Beomgyu, on the other hand, seemed to be having the time of his life which made you feel a little guilty for having running away thoughts.

The park was bustling with students and music could be heard playing from speakers placed on the ground. Most of the benches were occupied by groups of friends or newly found matches that the alarm had brought together. A pinch of jealousy stung your heart by the sight of them.

Wish my alarm and I weren't in a dysfunctional toxic relationship.

You let your eyes wander, trying to spot familiar faces even though the thought of someone you knew seeing you there, mortified you. The possibility of that wasn’t high but never zero since all of your university’s students were invited and granted an entry. You found it kind of funny - the way so many were positive their soulmate was walking the same ground as them right now and what they were waiting for was the love alarm to bring them together. For some that would be the case but others were surely up for disappointment. No one really knew how the whole mechanism worked and it appeared that everything was random - the time, the place but the alarm was certain of one thing - the person.

Shaking your head as if it could chase away your thoughts, you took in the atmosphere and breathed in the fresh early spring air, the warm breeze ruffling your hair which you moved out of your face, annoyed.

“Can’t we go sit down and eat? If I talk to one more man, I’ll explode,” you said, stopping in your tracks and pointing towards an empty blanket on the grass near you. A bunch of people were lying down on the field, chatting, eating or playing board games. You wished you had brought your cards deck. A rematch with Beomgyu was all you wanted after he had beaten you in a game of war last weekend.

“Fine,” Beomgyu rolled his eyes, strolling towards it and you followed quietly behind him. If you made him talk enough and maybe made him ride the ferris wheel with you, maybe he would get tired enough so both of you could go home. As if sensing your plan, he abruptly turned around, “Stop scheming, we aren't leaving.”

You let out a sigh and sat down on the white blanket with colourful flowers drawn on it. It was warm and fluffy and it tickled your hands as you plopped yourself down, supporting your body on your elbows. Maybe if you fell asleep then…

“Hey, isn't that Wooyoung?”

Yeah, your plan was definitely going down the drain.

If Wooyoung saw you here, he would make fun of you for centuries and he could even tell Mingi about it. Or even worse. Choi San.

Choi San? Who was currently walking beside his friend, apparently not having spotted you yet.

He had a white t-shirt and a black leather jacket on, his black jeans matching it. A beanie of the same colour was covering his hair and you noticed a necklace dangling around his neck.

He looked…good?

... handsome?

You shoved your thoughts away and focused on Wooyoung instead who wore his usual black Chrome Hearts hoodie and some baggy jeans, a beanie on his head. The two boys’ outfits matched which made you smile to yourself. But who were you to laugh when you and Beomgyu weren't any better. Your closets were basically almost identical.

“Over here,” Beomgyu shouted as he got up to catch their attention. This was going to be the most mortifying interaction of the day.

Another penny added.

“Beomgyu, don't call them over here,” you whispered as you got up to a seated position, tugging at his jeans.

“Don’t be so obsessed with me, they’re my friends too.”

You snorted at his answer, turning to look at the boys who were approaching you. Wooyoung was enthusiastically waving in your direction while San looked indifferent to what was about to happen.

Lately, it was harder to be around him. After he made the step to try and make amends with you, you weren't sure how to behave around him. Did that make you friends again? Or maybe just acquaintances? Whatever it was you tried your hardest to be on your best behaviour especially for Wooyoung and Mingi’s sake. For Seonghwa’s too. You had no idea how he managed to stay so composed while you bickered over nothing during tutoring. Maybe he was due his apology soon.

“Now, now, look who we have here,” Wooyoung exclaimed as he stood in front of you, grinning. San was next to him, greeting Beomgyu with a hug. “I’m hurt, Y/n. You could've just asked me out instead of coming here.”

“You and Y/n? I’d rather bleach my eyes than witness this,” Beomgyu chimed in before you got the chance to respond to which Wooyoung laughed.

“Makes two of us,” San added, a slight annoyance apparent in his tone, and you looked at him curiously. For the first time in a while you weren't met with his cold eyes, piercing right through you. His gaze was warm, maybe even friendly?

My brain is playing tricks on me.

“Don’t be so jealous, Sannie,” Wooyoung said, tapping him on the shoulder which earned him a smack on the neck. “Ouch?”

“Deserved,” Beomgyu laughed and looked over at you. “Cat got your tongue? Oh, right, she said she doesn't want to talk to men anymore today.”

“Trust me, you will get the longest silent treatment out of everyone here.”

“Mean.”

“So what are you two doing here?” Wooyoung asked, changing the topic just as you and Beomgyu were about to start bickering again. Truly fascinating how the biggest instigators turned into peacemakers in dire situations.

“Y/n wants a boyfriend and since I’m an amazing friend, I came to judge her questionable taste,” Beomgyu teased and you pulled at the fabric of his jeans again, making him slightly lose his balance.

“He wanted to say he was the one who dragged me here because he can't go anywhere alone,” you said in a matter of fact tone which got a chuckle out of Wooyoung.

“This version is more believable.”

“And what about you two,” you asked, trying to sound as nonchalantly as possible even though curiosity burned in you. You could imagine Wooyoung coming to an event like that but San? It wasn’t like you knew him that well anyway, maybe he was looking for a partner. For some reason, the thought of that made your stomach twist a little.

Huh…?

“I dragged San here,” Wooyoung announced proudly and wrapped his hand around his friend’s wide shoulders and San threw him a sarcastic smile. “Don't tell anyone though, it's between the four of us.”

“Yeah, and the 10 other people who saw us here and greeted you,” San added.

“Oh, well…That’s something I can’t control. Having a pretty face means attracting attention.”

“Anyway, why don't we hang out for some time? Y/n and I were just about to eat,” Beomgyu suggested suddenly and all you could do was to side eye him. Sure, of course they were his friends but you and San in the same space was never a good idea.

“A spectacular idea!” Wooyoung’s enthusiasm was contagious. You had to calm down and enjoy the moment, Choi San wasn't the cause of every problem in the universe and he wasn't even that bad. He had a good sense of humour and he had a pretty laugh and dimples and you loved his habit of him closing his eyes when he found something funny and-

“Y/n to Earth…” Beomgyu’s voice brought you back to reality and you shook your head. What was in the air today? Maybe it was the pollen that had you acting this weirdly? “You totally spaced out.”

“Yeah, sorry,” you said after coughing quietly to clear your voice and you shifted your focus to Wooyoung who you thought had probably said something moments ago, judging by the amused expression on his face. Staring at your shoes all day and spacing out wasn't going to make things better. “What were you saying?”

“I said me and Beomgyu will go grab some food from the trucks and you and San can stay here and wait,” he repeated and you shifted uncomfortably in your place. Yes, the universe was testing you.

Sure, you had been alone with him plenty of times be it for tutoring or when you used to hang out before but now it felt different. Your nerves were going to eat you inside out.

San had an unreadable expression on his face when you looked at him and Beomgyu just winked (?) at you when you turned to him so you just shrugged. “I’m okay with that.”

“I’m okay with that, too,” added San and Beomgyu and Wooyoung looked at each other, a knowing smile forming on both of their lips.

“Then we’re set,” Beomgyu clapped his hands and patted you on the shoulder as he bent to pick up his bag from the ground. “Behave yourself.”

“What am I? A dog?”

“Obviously. Then, see you in a bit.” As both Beomgyu and Wooyoung turned their back on you and walked towards the food trucks, you felt abandoned. Maybe that was a little dramatic. San was just San. No need to be so stressed. You could just sit in silence and that was going to be it. No need to have a conversation.

“So how are you doing?” San asked as he laid down on his side next to you, his hand supporting his head. You could sense the scent of his perfume and his biceps were basically almost ripping his jacket in this position. His face was glowing, his clear skin illuminated by the sunlight, gently coming through the tree’s branches. Mentally, you slapped yourself across the face. Staring was rude.

“I’m alright,” you answered, trying to find strength again. You seriously needed to stand up. Choi San shouldn't have had that much power over your mind. “Exhausted after the social torture Beomgyu put me through.”

San chuckled at your comment, his dimples slightly appearing. “I guess I understand why he and Wooyoung get along.”

“They’re friends?”

“Shouldn't you know that,” he asked, confused, one of his eyebrows raised. You knew they knew each other. Obviously, Beomgyu was close with San so it was only natural for him to be around Wooyoung too but your friend never talked about this, given how your relationship with San was.

“I just had no idea they were that close,” you said simply. San regarded you curiously for a moment before speaking again. “I think they’ve got closer recently. I don't know how or why but they’ve been spending a lot of time together.”

“Then they’re definitely up to no good.” This was truly interesting. Beomgyu was notorious for doing things behind your back so you wondered if this was the case this time around too. Him making remarks about your dating life all the time, telling you to stop “adding more men to the equation”, him giving Wooyoung your number, you joining his talent show team, him flirting all the time, San, his best friend and your arch nemesis, suddenly following you on your social media and being kind of friendly, and now Beomgyu dragging you here and Wooyoung was miraculously here too? Was he…No way. There was no way.

Was he setting you up with Wooyoung?

The thought made you shiver. There was just no way for this to be happening.

You stopped yourself from gasping at the realisation and instead closed your eyes to take a deep breath. Beomgyu was going to get an earful from you very soon.

Maybe you could ask San about it? But what were you going to say to him?

Hey, I think my best friend is trying to set me up with your best friend so I wanted to ask you if he’s in love with me?

…

I sound so delusional and out of my mind.

You chose silence and turned to look at San who was staring at the small stage being set up a few meters away from you. There was going to be a concert later in the afternoon organised by the university’s band and you wondered if Beomgyu would make you stick around for this long to watch it.

Suddenly, your phone vibrated in your tote bag and you took it out, seeing you’ve got a text from Beomgyu.

You sighed, locking your phone and turning to San again. “Beomgyu said Wooyoung feels sick so they went back to the dorms.”

“What? Is he okay? I should go there too,” San said and took out his phone.

“He said they didn't need help and he just needed to take some pills. But you can text him, just in case…” you trailed off, unsure of what to do now. San didn't answer, instead focusing on his phone, seemingly reading a text. His eyebrows furrowed more and more with each movement of his eyes and he rubbed his temples with his free hand. “Yeah, he has texted me. Apparently, he doesn't need any more assistance and will take a nap.”

“Well, then I won't keep you if you want to go home too,” you said even though you weren't sure if you wanted to do that yet. Yes, you absolutely hated the speed dating and Beomgyu dragging you around but this was also a chance to maybe find out what Choi San’s issue with you was. If you cornered him…

That sounds too insane.

“No! I mean,” San hesitated. “We can at least grab some lunch together. Wouldn't hurt, would it?”

“I suppose not,” you said, smiling slightly and surprisingly San did the same.

Hanging out with your so-called arch nemesis wasn't as bad as you thought it could be.

San ordered for you, paid for your lunch, treated you to some bubble tea and then got you ice cream. Yeah, maybe it sounded like wallet abuse on your part but in reality he just kept insisting on doing all this and wouldn't hear any of your protests. It was a bit flustering even if you were secretly enjoying it. His company was also nice. He was respectful, kept the conversation going and surprisingly he seemed to be having a good time too.

Time seemed to pass by quickly while you were together. You found yourself talking about anything and everything with him - he told you about his current florist job, how annoying some customers were and how much he adored making bouquets and arrangements, and you told him about your love for clothes and fashion and how you still haven’t returned Hongjoong his sewing machine. You joked, you laughed and you felt liberated in a way. For the first time in a while you didn’t have to tiptoe around San, too afraid that the thin ice beneath your feet was going to crumble.

Is this what happens when we aren't so stubborn?

Currently, you were sitting on a bench, taking in the atmosphere around you in comfortable silence as the last sunbeams were illuminating the sky. The sunset painted it in shades of orange, pink and purple and you sighed contently, bopping your head in the rhythm of the song that the university’s band was rehearsing. A small group of people had already gathered and was clapping in encouragement after each song. San was humming quietly next to you, tapping with his foot and you snorted. “Don’t you think it’s a little unfair?”

“What do you mean,” he said surprised and turned to look at you. His natural soft blush could be seen on his cheeks and your heart warmed up at the sight. For probably the 10th time today. He had taken his beanie earlier and now his messy locks were falling freely around his face.

“Being good at dancing and now even at singing? Can’t you leave something for the rest of us?”

Your comment earned you a chuckle from San, his fist coming up to cover his lips. you could swear his cheeks turned into a deeper shade of red. “No need to exaggerate, Y/n. Lying is bad.”

“Hey, I’m being serious,” you exclaimed. “But better hide that talent from Beomgyu. He would get even more mad that we aren’t in the same team for the talent show. I heard he has been looking for a vocalist.”

“And while we’re still on the topic,” San said, running his hand through his dark hair. “Why did you agree to join our team?”

“It was a good opportunity to practice my skills. Plus, Wooyoung was way too enthusiastic for me to turn him down.”

“Even though you have to spend more time with me too?” When you met his eyes, a glint of hope and maybe hurt could be read in them. When had things gone so irrevocably wrong with both of you?

“Listen,” you started, unsure of what to say. There wasn’t truly a right or wrong answer. “I don’t mind spending time with you, it’s just so…”

“Awkward?” “You could say so. But it’s also hard because I have no idea what I have done to you. I want to fix this,” you gestured to the space between you two. “But again - you aren’t helping. Maybe I’m not doing it either. We’re both stubborn.”

“Yes, we are I suppose,” San agreed, seemingly deep in thought. “I just don’t know how much I can tell you and how much you know…”

“What do you mean?”

A ding interrupted San who had just opened his mouth to answer. “I’m sorry.”

You hurriedly took your phone out of your pocket and saw you had 5 new texts from none other than Beomgyu.

Feeling your heart picking up its pace, you clenched your jaw. You were so so so so wrong earlier. Beomgyu wasn’t setting you up with Wooyoung.

It was San all along.

The tutoring, the way Beomgyu was so opposed of you hanging out with Yeonjun, the way he was trying his hardest to force you and San to interact...

You wondered if Wooyoung was his accomplice then and what had he told San? Did San know anything?

“Hey, are you okay? You look a little pale,” San’s voice interrupted your thoughts and you locked your phone, forcing yourself to look at his now concerned face as he put his hand on your shoulder.

“Everything’s alright. It’s just Beomgyu being a menace.” You smiled lightly and you fought the urge to get up and run away.

Even if the situation was becoming severely uncomfortable with each passing second, this all didn’t automatically overrule how happy you were with San today. You got to see his usual sweet self and not whatever was presented to you on the daily. You also had got so close to him opening up to you so you couldn’t just leave him like that. Your heart was greedy to spend some more time with him before you had to deal with whatever Beomgyu thought he was doing.

“Are you scared of heights?” Your sudden question made San furrowed his brows confused and you just pointed to the ferris wheel shyly.

As San took your hand gently and led you to the tickets queue, all you could see were his deep dimples.

Yes, you were positive your heart was going to burst today.

You were a little scared of heights.

But exposure therapy worked, right? It had to because currently you were hanging meters away from the ground and the only thing you could think about was how you were almost able to feel San’s breath hitting your face. The cabin was rather small and his form being much bigger than yours meant he was taking most of the space even if you were sitting across from each other. Your legs were between his and occasionally your knees would touch which sent a jolt down your spine that you were desperately trying to ignore.

Instead, you focused on the view before you - the sun had completely disappeared under the moon’s watchful gaze and now the city’s and the campus’ lights were shimmering like stars in the distance. San’s surprised squeaks would make you giggle now and then when he was showing you something he had spotted while the ferris wheel was spinning slowly.

“This is my first time riding a ferris wheel,” San said quietly, drawing your attention back to him. Even though the cabin lacked lighting, you could still see the playfulness in his eyes as he looked at you intently.

“It’s my first time too,” you admitted, fiddling with your fingers in your lap. Was it always this hot here?

“Really? That’s rather special, Y/n,” San teased you. “Wouldn’t you rather share this moment with someone else? I’ll start thinking we’re friends.” “Well,” you coughed, clearing up your voice. “I’d say I would like to consider us friends given how civilised we were today.”

San laughed loudly, his whole body shaking, “That’s true. Then - friends?”

“Friends,” you answered grinning and took his extended hand to shake it, sealing your deal. His hand was hugging yours completely and you wished you could stay like this a little longer when you lost contact with his skin. “You still haven’t told me the whole story behind our enemies era though.”

“Shouldn’t you tell me your point of view too?

“I was just returning the energy you were giving me.”

“Deserved,” he sighed, shaking his head. “Let’s say this can wait for another time. I don’t want to ruin this moment like any other we’ve had lately.”

Something passed in his eyes, an emotion you couldn’t quite decipher but when were you able to do it when it came to San?

So now, locking eyes with him once again, you felt electricity buzzing between the two of you as he leaned in closer to you. Unspoken words were hanging around you and filled the space but you shoved those aside and noticed his gaze going back and forth between your eyes and lips. You felt your cheeks heating up under his stare and you held your breath, too scared to make even the quietest noise. Your faces were mere centimeters away from each other and

Ding.

Closing your eyes and taking a deep breath, you cursed your phone mentally. You were sure you put it on dnd mode earlier.

“Don’t worry. Answer it,” San said softly and smiled at you, leaning back on his seat and putting some distance between you two. It wasn’t like you were going to kiss anyway. Right?

Nodding, you reached for your bag, forgotten on the seat next to you and your hand was searching for it impatiently until you felt it and took it out. Just as your trembling fingers were about to unlock it, the cabin shook causing you to drop your phone on the ground. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. I think we’ll have to get off soon,” San explained as he reached down to grab your phone for you. “And you really need to stop apologising.”

At this moment the doors opened and the employee announced that 20 minutes had passed so the fun was officially over. You stepped out first, feeling a little dizzy and walked to the side so you could wait for San without blocking the way.

Seconds after, he came next to you, handing you your phone with an unreadable expression, “Here you are.”

“Thanks,” you said, panic arousing inside you.

What if it was Beomgyu again and he saw his weird texts? Or even worse - it was the group chat since Beomgyu never knows when to shut up-

“I’ll go get us some water, you can wait here if you want to,” San said as he looked around. “There’s an empty bench there.”

“I’ll go sit there then.”

Parting ways with him even for a bit, gave you room to process what had just happened in the cabin and you sat down with a sigh. Your feet hurt because you chose to wear your new shoes today out of all days and more than anything you felt so many different emotions at once that you had no idea which one to focus on first and it made you even more mentally exhausted. You weren’t sure what was happening between the two of you but whatever it was - it was gaining momentum way too quickly.

Are we crazy? Yesterday we got into yet another argument and today…

Reading your texts, you decided, was the easiest task for now but as you unlocked your phone, everything came crashing down around you once again.

Your blood froze as the severity of the situation hit you. The answer had been right under your nose this whole time.

San was possibly your soulmate.

note ✧ i know this got very long and i feel like it's 5 chapters in one but i really want to get things moving so please understand 😭 i haven't written a full length chapter in a while so feedback is greatly appreciated, i hope this isn't that bad (the struggle was real and im not sure im satisfied but)! i hope you enjoyed reading it <3

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