#this is the sort of research I live for

[abysswalkersknight]

Thinking about characters who despite all the hate and despair around and aimed at them are the sweetest people you'd ever know, loving, adoring, loyal to a fault. They'd be spat in the face or beaten in any way but they'd never falter, because they knew that there are people they know who love them as much as they do them. Until one day calamity happens and the character hurries to save their loved one or help them hide only to find that they were on the enemy's side the whole time, the same enemy who'd probably have a major hand in the trauma the character has, and that's when the character's resolve begins to crumble and instead of the usual death scene one by one everyone they ever cared about soon betrays them, scraping away that kind, sweet person until there's nothing but a blazing, searing vessel of pure rage who will stop at nothing until everything burns with them.

...........

Please excuse my deep and long rambling, I'm just playing sad video games and doing extensive research for a similar story I plan on writing.

[otaku553]

2 am thoughts about roommates

[squiddlysq]

Finished System Collapse the other day & Murderbot has never been more relatable

First image based on this post by @murderbot-moodboard

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

guys

im going to Uzbekistan. to work on excavations on a site from the middle paleolithic... wow...

paleolithic professor invited me to join her team. so i had to accept

[practically-an-x-man]

Loki's home and has had his first doses of the medications. Got a chart made to keep track of future doses, should be able to do most of those myself but I've had to enlist my parents for the two times I'll be at work when he needs his meds. Should be able to manage this okay and hopefully he will start improving with these meds

All the vets were in agreement that Loki was the best-behaved hedgehog they've ever seen, they said that normally they have to put hedgehogs in water to convince them to uncurl enough to do an exam but Loki allowed them to examine him without too much protest, and that he cooperated really well with being syringe-fed when they gave him some of that nutrition supplement. He's a very popular boy!

One of the nurses also made the comment of "not everyone can handle exotics, but you can handle exotics. He's clearly really well-socialized and you've obviously done your research" which was really nice to hear especially with all the stress and anxiety about his health lately. Even when I do the best I can and even when it's something outside my control, I still worry that I'm making the wrong choices or am an unfit pet owner when things like this happen, so it was good to have that reassurance

[gothyanki]

Counting down the hours until I have my own room again.

[princessmyriad]

.

[non-un-topo]

Went to a support group specifically for FTMs last night and had a good time. Surprised myself by tearing up. That's not a very cis sign, is it

[fili-oeuvre]

ending up with at least three writing projects at the moment because my brain won’t let me NOT write down whatever slightly interesting idea that spawns in my mind

[eggbagelz]

U have no idea how much thought i put into the culture of the zones

[theygender]

The funny thing about playing BG3 right after its release is like. Usually with RPGs I obsessively look up the dialogue for every interaction to make sure I choose the Right Thing but since this game just came out those kinds of guides just... don't exist yet. Like sure I can look up general walkthroughs for different quests, but there's not any articles detailing the approval/disapproval rating for every character on each individual dialogue option like there is for, say Dragon Age, so I'm having to actually fuck around and find out for once

[ban-joey]

sending laser beams to my professor with my mind. kenneth you said midterm grades would b up by this afternoon. it is officially TONIGHT and guess what? kenneth i would love to not be clenching my teeth in my sleep tonight. kenneth i will be sending you a bill in the mail. yes i know its probably a TAs responsibility but i blame you personally. i hate school

[fruchtfleisch-art]

Something like ‘home sick from work’ or ‘picnic’ could be interesting prompts for the microfics! :)

Three things: (1) my friend Danny has a lovely illustration/microfic of a Kirashino picnic here, please go admire it and the absolutely insane top-down angle it was drawn at.

(2) I apologize for how long this took... I started writing and then immediately got sick myself, which helped me come up with descriptions but really hindered my ability to write them down 😭.

(3) If it wasn't obvious by the slow post rate of these last few prompts, my free time is back to being somewhat limited, so this is the last microfic! Thank you so, so much to everyone who sent a prompt in! I'll definitely run something like this again someday, it was really fun :) This batch will be posted up on AO3 soon, after I rest a bit.

Kirashino microfic #6/6?: Home sick from work

It’s a proven fact: Yoshikage Kira does not take sick days.

That doesn’t mean he’s never been sick, necessarily, but he’s not the type to laze around in bed when he doesn’t feel well. The last time he caught the flu bug circulating in his office, he set a nighttime alarm for his twice-daily dose of fever reducer, wore a mask all week, and stayed out of the break room. His supervisor had praised him for his commitment and excellent work ethic.

“Kawajiri Kosaku”, on the other hand, has called out sick for three days, and is completely fed up with the whole ordeal. It just doesn’t make sense. He’s young, he has a strong immune system, and he takes excellent care of himself. He should be feeling better by now, or at least a bit less like week-old roadkill.

Three days in, and it’s all Kira can do to lie on the Kawajiri’s couch, desperately craving sleep he can’t have. Every time his eyes slide shut and his mind goes quiet, the tight, sharp ache in his throat prods him back to listless wakefulness, forces him to sit up and hack another wad of bloody phlegm into the nearest tissue. It’s miserable work. His chest hurts from coughing.

Time passes in sludgy fits and starts, the dawn light outside growing steadily brighter. The next time he rolls over to cough, it’s agonizingly bright, and Shinobu is standing in the doorway, a shopping bag tucked under her arm. When did she get here?

“Sorry,” she says quietly. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. How are you feeling?”

Instead of leaving, she comes in to tidy up his sick den, picking up trash and empty cups. It’s irritating. The whole point of him staying downstairs is to prevent infecting the one healthy person left in the house. What’s he supposed to do if she gets sick?

“Shinobu,” he tries to say, but his voice breaks with a raspy squeak. He tries again and nothing comes out.

“Hayato is feeling a lot better today,” Shinobu says cheerfully, giving no indication she heard him. “So I’m sure you won’t be far behind.”

Kira doesn’t want to hear about the disease vector she calls her son, doesn’t want to even think about him. The idea of Hayato contaminating him, of his virus squirming its way past his immune system, replicating, clogging his airways with gunk and boiling his brain to fevered mush is…

Another thick, sticky cough bubbles up and forces him forward, tears pricking his eyes as mucus shifts painfully in his chest. Shinobu is there with a pack of tissues when the cough is finally productive, brings a glass of water when he’s done with the tissues.

“That sounds awful, sweetie. Can I help?” She brings her shopping bag over to the couch. A thin blue box emerges from the shopping bag. From the box, like magic, emerges a fresh bottle of SS Bron.

Shinobu! Wonderful woman! His own Florence Nightingale. He didn’t even know they were running low on cough medicine. He watches her measure out a few milliliters of cola-colored syrup into a spoon, the harsh sunlight bouncing off the rim in a blinding white circle.

The light.

“T-” Kira says. Swallows hard, throat working a slimy circuit. Tries again: “Time is it?”

“Almost noon. Why?”

His last dose was at eight o’clock, not even four hours ago. It hasn’t been nearly long enough for him to have another. Didn’t she read the label?

Horrible woman! Is she trying to give him brain damage? Kill him?

He bristles, ready to admonish Shinobu for her carelessness, but the moment he opens his mouth she brings the spoon to his lips. A barely-there sweetness trickles over his tongue.

“Don’t worry about that. You need the rest,” she says, smiling fondly at him. “I’m not keeping you on a schedule, honey. You just work on feeling better.”

That’s not it, not at all! Kira isn’t worried about oversleeping. He’s worried about missing too much work and contagion and how he has, just now, possibly overdosed on codeine. He would happily explain this to her, but his throat is packed with ground glass and forcing out anything louder than a sigh is painful, terribly painful.

Shinobu bends down to kiss his cheek, then places a cool hand on his forehead. He closes his eyes as her fingers push through his sweat-sodden bangs, scratch lightly at his scalp.

It’s humiliating, being petted like a dog, or a… something. That’s it. Humiliating.

He’s too sick to move, though. So, so, sick.

Might as well make himself comfortable.

[fatherramiro]

god im so excited to transition. like oh my god.

[reginrokkr]

Eventually I cheated and opted for playing one SQ first, namely Wriothesley's (shame on me for not having it played sooner tbh) and I have to say that it was sublime.

✦ As always I adore Wrio's brilliant mind and his no chill attitude despite being actually cautious most of the time to set an example for the others in the Fortress. Sadly I don't have much more to say about this but it's self-explanatory enough and I reaffirm what I said some time ago that he's hands down one of my favorite characters of the entire cast of Genshin thus far.

✧ I love that each time the script of the stories is getting darker and that it masks better this Traveler harem syndrome that I abhor. Putting the latter aside, I loved the level of detail of how sickeningly manipulative Dougier is and how everything played out keeping me on my toes at all times.

✦ As it is customary to this blog, that black stone caught my attention and so did the thorn method and the Aqua Doloris. I might write a more thorough addendum or headcanon about this in the future once I have ruminated more on this concept. What I'm going to say is that I have no doubts that its substance stems from the Abyss as it is well-established by now that it heightens negative feelings and fear is one such feeling. The fact that it actually awakens bad memories give me some food for thinking, but it also makes me wonder something: if someone were to have a certain degree of expertise to isolate whatever negative feeling and the means to reach to it into a substance and be able to implant it into other people's brains, it could be other things that aren't solely fear. And things that aren't entirely negative in the eyes of others. If you haven't guessed where I'm going with this yet, I'll give you a small hint: Khaenri'ah.

✧ Lastly (but not least), what I've been awaiting for the whole quest to learn as I have already read bits and pieces about this before and been talked to about this: children trading in black market and Wriothesley's experience as both a victim and executioner of two despicable adults partaking into this. In a way it is nothing new to me as I still remember that the webtoon, placed just a few years before the beginning of Genshin's story (further back in time too if we count the flashbacks, but that isn't relevant to this), already mentioned that the Fatui are actively seeking kids to take to Snezhnaya and most likely be dumped into the House of Hearth and pretty much cultivate them to become Fatui.

I particularly like the placement of this shred of light about his own personal story, as going through everything else that was happening in the Fortress only to culminate into learning about that gives more sense to what exactly drove Wriothesley to take the actions he took and to act the way he did with Dougier (the mfer deserved even more, but it's a good thing that Wrio has plans and freedom to make the most of his punishments).

Now, as a more portrayal-oriented thing and how Dain would view this... it is very rare to find characters that in one way or another he can see himself reflected on to some degree, but I can say positively that Wriothesley just joined the small gang. As for what Dain would see himself reflected exactly, that is Wrio's drive to fight for others' freedom. Just as he did for his "family" back then, and just as he did for the Fortress of Meropide in his particular SQ and will continue to do in order to ensure that his new family has a chance for rebirth. Dain would find great respect in this, as someone who is on the same boat himself no matter if in a greater scale, in his pursuit for humanity's freedom from the looming danger the Abyss Order will suppose for them as part of their revenge and obsessions, but also freedom from the ugly schemes of the higher gods above the Archons that still remain unknown, but looking into the Vision's workings alone there is something highly suspicious to me that I can't shake off.

[tubbytarchia]

can I have anything?? Can I have anything that makes me happy not tarnished?? Can I do anything?? Can I do anything without severe mental stress??