#through some shenanigans

[paper-lilypie]

kids be getting themselves into the darnedest of places, ft. Holly

[ronkeyroo]

【 Vilkas / Farkas    Modern!AU 】

[rabbit-exe]

when the fairy godmother refers to having been told about the party’s presence in the village, it probably wasn’t the mice - based on the version of the fairytale I’ve heard (Aschenputtel), it was probably birds. in the story, the birds sing that the shoe is full of blood when the each of the stepsisters is riding in the prince’s carriage, which is what clues him in to the fact that they’re not the shoe’s actual owners because he has a very low passive perception. I have no idea if this is the actual direction it’s going in but it’s my best guess!

[lookanartdweeb]

The urge to draw just Shadow floating in the shatterverse void waiting for Sonic mumbling like, "......I should've stayed on the ark"

He is important to me

[asktehkoopz]

((OOC: And that’s a wrap, both for this year’s April Fools’ event and [the date incident], finally!

Thank you so much, @askboompom​, for helping write all the DM dialogue!! q_q)!! And now that you know who the surprise DM was, go back and read it in a southern accent.))

[mysticmoondancer]

Benny: *singing/acting flirty*🎶 Hey, I just met you, and this crazy. But here's my number, so call me, maybe. 🎶 *gives Ethan a little folded-up piece of paper and then runs away*

Ethan: *stands there looking on with a blank/confused stare* Uh... *yells back cluelessly at Benny* But I already have your number, Benny! We’re best friends! Remember?!

[roseverdict]

ooPS I ACCIDENTALLY TOOK THAT ONE CRACK AU IDEA WHERE KAI IS EVERY INHUMAN THING THE OTHER NINJA WIND UP AS AT ONCE AND I MADE IT ANGST

join me and cry. also no beta i just cranked this nightmare sequence out over the course of the day lol

unrelated but i write in a notes app that doesn't allow bolding or italicing so i just do markup so i know what to do later and copypasting right into tumblr automatically formatted it??? fuckin wild man

~

"We just have to give him time. I dunno how I would feel if I was told I was a robot." "You mean a nindroid." "…yeah, whatever."

Kai and Jay, S1E7, Tick Tock

After the day he'd had, Kai was ready for a nice, restful night of sleep to take him the moment his head hit the pillow.

So, of course, the moment he collapsed into bed is the moment alarms go off, making him lurch forward and nearly fall off the bed.

Kai stumbles to his feet and flails blindly ahead of himself, managing to catch his balance by leaning on Zane.

Zane chuckles and lets him stay there a moment to regain his bearings. "This never gets any easier, does it?"

Kai blinks blearily at him "Whuh?"

"I said, 'Still feeling the taste of video game defeat?'" Zane calls over the blaring of the alarms.

"Maybe a little," Kai huffs good-naturedly. "Come on, let's go catch up to the others."

Zane nods, and the two of them rush out of the bunkroom to do exactly that.

Almost before Kai knows it, the monastery gives way to a snowy forest. He's lost track of the others, but he follows tracks left in the snow for what feels like forever-!

He's inside a tree.

It doesn't look like the inside of a tree. He doesn't know if he even saw the outside before entering, but in some part of his mind, he knows that this tiny little lab-shed is in a tree.

The eerie familiarity of the place gives him the creeps.

Kai wants to turn around and leave, maybe he can wait for the others to get here before investigating-

His hands move without his consent, one uncovering a blue sheet of paper with silvery designs on it, the other leaning heavily on a scepter of some kind.

His own face stares blankly up at him from the page.

As if in a trance, something in Kai's chest opens and there are switches and wires and golden snow that grows faster than he can leap back in shock and his insides feel like they're full to bursting with dark ice and he's about to EXPLODE-

Kai reels back in surprise from-

-the Fangpyre skeleton laid out in the bridge of the Bounty.

This is a completely natural order of events, save for the fact that his finger feels somewhat sore.

Kai shrugs and heads out. There's been Serpentine activity spotted at Megamonster Amusement Park lately, after all, and if that's not something for the Ninja, then he doesn't know what is.

He runs across Jay on his way out and snorts. "Who are you looking to impress, buddy? The snakes?"

"The Sea," says Jay.

Kai cleans out his ear. "What was that?"

"Hey, let a guy finish!" Jay snaps lightheartedly. "It's Nya, if you must know."

Kai knows he can trust Jay with his sister, no matter what happens, on some implicit level he can barely understand. Instead of saying this outright, however, he just smiles. "Break a leg, buddy."

Jay nods and scurries off, and Kai turns to follow when he notices a sickly-green tinge to his skin.

"What?"

He hurries to a mirror to find scales growing in over his skin, and even jutting out oddly from the panels in his chest and arm.

Even as he watches, however, the scales ripple and spread outward, soon turning as blue as the sky. His hair bleaches white, and as he grabs his toothbrush to pull back his lips- are those fangs?!- his reflection scowls at him.

"Hey, dummy!"

Kai yelps as his own words (when, when did he say this?!) are turned back onto him with more venom than he'd thought he was capable of.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you," snarls his reflection. "Would you get your head on straight and start doing your job?"

"My…my job?" breathes Kai.

(wrong wrong wrong something is very wrong)

"You know, protecting your family?" his double drawls. "That thing you claim is the reason you became a ninja in the first place? The fate of the world kinda rests on it!"

Kai shakes his head- he doesn't know what is going on here but he doesn't like it- and bolts outside, ignoring his double's enraged protests.

(Something tells him that if he stayed behind, he'd just get a fist to the face for his trouble.)

He's at the amusement park in a flash, a stupid little electric-blue tail poking out under his gi no matter how much he adjusts it. Eventually he gives up and glances around the deserted park for any sign of movement.

"Hey, Kai! Over here!" Cole calls, waving him over to the haunted house attraction.

Kai is quick to run over. "You find anything?"

"I think so. I saw something purple run in here," Cole explains. "I'd bet you money that it's Pythor looking for that scroll Master Wu told us about."

Kai nods. "You call the others. I'm getting a head start."

Neither of them state the obvious fact that he can't still be inside at sunup, or else.

"Got it," says Cole.

As Kai rushes inside, he swears he can hear Cole say something like, "It's so easy to be forgotten."

However, he's already inside, and the doors slam shut behind him before he can ask.

Nervously, he sneaks through the endless sprawling halls in search of the snake he's chasing. The entire place is dead as the grave, and it's just as quiet.

Then Kai finds the room.

There is no Pythor here, nor is there any scroll, but the moment he steps inside, it is as though the world around him solidifies.

Ironically enough, it feels as though the old man's ghost in the middle of the room is the source of the solidity.

"How did you get here, child?" asks the ghost shortly.

"The front door," answers Kai. He frowns. "You're not Pythor."

The old man lifts an eyebrow, stroking his pitch-dark beard. "Oh? I highly doubt thoughts of Pythor, of all people, would lead your consciousness to my little corner of reality. Not since you ninja fixed up this place and returned it to its status as a tourist attraction for me, anyway."

None of the old man's words make any sense.

"Ah, I see the illusion still has you," the old man says, as if he's piecing something together. "I suppose I will leave you to it, then. However, if anything follows you to the waking world, let it be this: A sword sharpened too often soon wears away into nothing. Just as a blade requires cleaning to retain its shine, so, too, does a warrior require time to reflect."

"What's that even supposed to mean?" demands Kai.

"If you remember after this, you will know," instructs the old man. "Now leave me. Your illusion has not yet run its course, and you are running low on time."

"You keep saying illusion-?" Kai tries.

"It's not really an illusion, but to say its name would mean cutting it off abruptly, and your mind is not yet finished," the man huffs impatiently. "Now leave me!"

There's a power in the words that had been missing the first time, and Kai is flung from the oddly-solid room and into nothingness.

The amusement park is completely gone at this point, leaving only a swirling mass of undead greens that rise up and blow past Kai without slowing his fall.

He crash-lands face-first on some kind of wood paneling, and he peels himself up and off it just in time to leap away from a spray of water.

Kai can't afford to be touched by water anymore.

There's a creaking sound as the ramshackle village around him is warped and twisted, and Kai barely has the presence of mind to leap to a miraculously-untouched portion of wooden deck.

Before him stands the Preeminent.

Behind the Preeminent stands a titan made of stone.

Off to the side, a sea serpent he knows implicitly to be Wojira races closer.

Lloyd and Nya are hidden away in one of the untouched alcoves nearby, and they frantically gesture him closer.

"You'll never be enough!" says Lloyd worriedly.

"How much more can you endure?!" adds Nya, reaching out her hand as if begging him to take it.

Kai tries to run to them, only for a rock crackling with purple energy to come crashing down, sending all three of them plummeting into the sea.

Kai feels like he should have poofed out of being the moment the water touched him, but instead, he finds himself adrift in the endless sea.

Emperor Garmadon's voice slithers into his ears as if the man is right behind him. "You're no ninja. You're barely even a half-rate elemental. How you could have ever thought you could be fit for the title of the Green Ninja is beyond me. Look at yourself. Can you even recognize your own face?"

Kai shakes his head furiously. So what if he has-

-mechanical wiring that's being shorted out from this much time underwater?

-cold blood that's only getting colder, a mind that's only getting drowsier, the longer he stays down here?

-a ghost's inability to touch water, all the while being surrounded by it?

-the weight of a prophecy dragging him down beneath the waves, lower and lower and lower-?

Wait.

Some part of Kai's mind sluggishly rebels, screaming at the top of its tiny lungs that nothing about this situation is real.

When Kai opens his mouth to shoot back a snarky comment at Emperor Garmadon, however, the sea just rushes inside of him, overtaking his every cell, his every breath-

The endless sea shoots into him-

-and rejects him.

Smoke bubbles out from the panels in his body, the scales sprouted along his arms are flung away with his fake skin as the water tears him to shreds from the inside out, agonizingly, viciously, the green light of the Preeminent grows and grows above the surface until it's all he can see-!

Kai opens his mouth and SCREAMS-!

-and then his alarm went off, and the nightmare was pushed back with each round of beeps.

Kai snapped awake, his skin clammy, his breathing loud, and his heart threatening to beat right out of his chest.

It took him a second, but he eventually sighed and slouched forward, burying his head in his hands.

It was coming up on the one-year anniversary of Kalmaar's attack on Ninjago City and Nya's subsequent sacrifice.

"It should have been me," said Kai brokenly, thinking about everything his siblings had given up and none of it at once.

Were he at the monastery, someone would be there for him to talk to.

But he wasn't. He wasn't at the monastery, and he hadn't been for months. He was in his room at his little dojo.

"It should have been me," Kai moaned, pulling his knees up and digging them into his suspiciously-wet eyes.

Were he at the monastery, he'd worry that someone could see him break down.

But he wasn't.

He wasn't, because Nya never could be again, and he felt a lot like the protagonist in that one dystopia series Nya had gotten into back when they both lived at the smithy. After everything the main character had gone through, her sister, the whole reason she'd done any of it, was just gone.

Nya was gone.

After all of them spent years flirting with death, the only friend he'd known since childhood was gone.

His voice was thick, but he couldn't bring himself to care. Not anymore.

"Why couldn't it have been me?"

[bills-pokedex]

I’ve a question, but I’m not sure if it qualifies as a stupid one or not. I feel really bad - I came to the Pokemon center a few hours ago because one of my Pokemon needed a checkup and I got distracted. thing is, as she was being seen I had left my dinner out, and I came back to one of the blissey having eaten it. Considering the meal included meat… I’m not actually sure what blissey eat. She didn’t seem to be uncomfortable but I’m worried I might have poisoned her. What do I do? D:

OOC regarding the blissey ask: no IRL basis don’t worry, it’s not really urgent! Thanks for being cool. (You don’t have to publish this)

{<3 to this anon! Thanks so much for your consideration and patience! :')}

Ah, no need to worry, anonymous! Blissey are actually omnivorous, and it's not uncommon for nurse blissey to share meals with their Nurse Joy partners. Meat is just as an essential part of their diet as anything else, and unlike quite a number of pokémon, consuming cooked foods isn't necessarily detrimental to them. It's just that blissey can't really subsist on fatty, oily, or sugary foods, so avoid feeding them things like french fries or cakes.

That having been said, it's also common to see nurse blissey and chansey consume leftovers from trainers, as these pokémon are often tasked with keeping the center and its attached café clean. It's just that Nurse Joys often try to train their partners to compost leftovers rather than consume them (you likely wouldn't eat off a stranger's plate either, after all), but sometimes, this sort of training doesn't always stick for a pokémon, especially if a nearly full meal is involved.

In other words, there's very little chance that you've poisoned this blissey, but there is a chance the center's Nurse Joy had a very long conversation with her about the compost bin.

[flintbian]

Can someone tell me what gtn/The Locked Tomb series is actually about? Unfortunately when people recommend it they often just say "lesbians necromancers in space" and that just ain't enough,,, but I see it all over my dash and I'm curious 👀

[tev-the-random]

*tears all my headcanons about angsty family backstory and travelling half-elf sun champion and stuff*

GODDAMNIT, GEM-

[aspiring-wildfire]

bruce wayne is a good dad and i will die on that hill anything dc releases to the contrary is fake and incorrect sorry i don’t make the rules

[reachexceedinggrasp]

[ronkeyroo]

I have so many questions about your truple! Like how do each of the wolf twins show they love your oc?

And ask you may!! I love talking about the wolf trio and their shenanigans/relationship so much! :’D

They show their love in a variety of ways...♥ I chose to illustrate some of the more...Wholesome ones!

[radioactivepeasant]

In which the Underground has the terrible idea of trying to make a very unwilling Jak king of Haven

[al-mayriti]

the funniest thing about my sister and her not-so-secret girlfriend is that today i literally saw them kissing while crossing the road and still she will only call her a frieend around me

[deaththeyamikid]

Okay listen can we talk about that moment in Once Upon a Long Time Ago right before Rudyard and Eric go over the cliff because like.

Erics WHOLE thing, his SOLE reason for being in Piffling is because of the trauma he hasn't unpacked from his last mission with the MI5. He literally ran away from the government to a tiny island where nobody (in theory) will find him, and entered the funeral business because he 1. Was good at giving a speech for STIFD and 2. Because of Brett Critchley's death. He knew Brett for like a week. But he took his death and his own failure to save him so horribly that he disappeared without a word, causing the MI5 TO BELIEVE HE'D DIED TOO BECAUSE ZOE HAS THAT LINE ABOUT NEEDING TO MAKE AN EDIT TO ERIC'S FILE!!! They'd probably listed him as KIA until Zoe found him.

ANYWAY, the point is, Eric's unprocessed emotional trauma from the death of a man he knew for a WEEK is literally his whole reason for being on Piffling.

And now we have this moment on the edge of a cliff. Eric has known Rudyard for years at this point. Yes, the relationship is rocky but they care about each other whether or not they want to admit it. And Rudyard is having a full on breakdown and he's getting far too close to the edge and Eric's like dude, you gotta calm down, you've got to stop, you are going to fall and die "I am trying to save your life!"

And Rudyard, not knowing about Brett and how Eric blames himself for his death because he couldn't save him, claps back with "Well you're not doing a very good job of it!"

And they both go over anyway.

And then there's the moment in the hospital when he wakes up and Zoe tells Eric Rudyard didn't make it and Eric, despite the circumstances that led up to the fall, sounds devestated because Oh God, it happened again.