#tried to slow it all down

[jacobseed]

DESTINY CALLED LIKE THE WIND OF A STORM - A CRY FOR HELP ONLY SHE COULD HEAR. she defied the council, no longer willing to plead with them to see reason. nezena felt a call to bring to light what was happening in the undercity and to help the people there, but her presence wasn't as welcomed as she thought it would be and she was left with the choice of running home or adapting to survive the knives resting at her throat.

taglist: @imogenkol @statichvm @marivenah @risingsh0t @strangefable

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[feroluce]

Belobog was my fave main quest but a lot of it is so. Contradictory. It's like they had multiple groups doing different shit and none of them checked in with each other for consistency. And you see this so much in Gepard's profile.

So in the main quest, they made him unfailingly, unquestionably loyal to Cocolia. Gepard's character arc is him learning to question authority etc etc. And this isn't even a bad thing; that's a story worth telling! It makes good conflict between him and Serval! And I love that we got Gepard as a boss battle and I get to see him all the time in SU!

But then you look at his character stories and it's like. The complete opposite.

According to his profile, Gepard has already HAD this awakening, long before the Astral Express, and he'd already decided Cocolia sucks. Even outside of his stories, there's a pretty damning readable between him and Pela.

He even disobeyed direct orders right in front of her- he has been disobeying orders for a while now!

So I've decided I'm marrying the two different sides of this into a 1.5k fic-ish thingy, because I think there's some fun potential there with Gepard not trusting Cocolia, but still having to pretend to be a good obedient little soldier.

Anyway. I love to think of it as like. Gepard knows Cocolia has sunk into her apathy. He can see it in her eyes every time he looks at her. She doesn't care. Not about him, not about Pela, not about all his soldiers on the frontlines giving their lives to protect the citizens. And that's... It makes him bristle a bit, but ok. Gepard can deal with this. Even if Cocolia no longer cares, as long as she does her job then it's fine. Having compassion behind an action doesn't matter as much as the action itself. If Cocolia's heart is no longer swayed, then he'll just have to care twice as hard to pick up the slack. He considers it part of his duty as a captain of the guard anyway. It's fine. Gepard can deal with it.

And then, Cocolia starts coming down to the restricted zone. Issuing direct orders.

And Gepard realizes he is in way over his head.

Because Cocolia orders him to stay back and issue commands from the ramparts, away from all his comrades, away from where he can protect them.

Gepard had thought nothing could be as bad as watching a fellow guard die right next to him. But the first time he watches someone struck by a killing blow, so far away, it hurts. Every defensive scar across his arms itches, his fingers curl in want of a weapon, the cold cannot numb his hands enough as they desperately ache for his shield. It hurts.

Gepard tries to find any reason to stay. Because surely... He knows Cocolia has lost her love for her people, but surely... She wouldn't...

One day, Cocolia orders for their gunners to advance 20 yards. There are no survivors. She almost looks like she smiles.

Gepard doesn't sleep that night.

Pela brings him the report at the end of the first month; and then the month after that, and the month after that. A significant uptick in losses, and all of it started on that first day Cocolia started overriding his authority and issuing her own orders. The ends of Gepard's pens have all been nearly chewed off. Pela outright calls Cocolia an idiot, and Gepard corrects her. Cocolia isn't an idiot. Gepard had known her through Serval, knew her through all her college years and then some, and he knows how intelligent she is. It's not that she's stupid, and it's not that she's inexperienced, it's nothing of the sort.

Cocolia knows exactly what she's doing.

She must, there's no way she could make such a horrible mess of things so badly by accident. And Pela, quick as a whip, sharp as a tack, always too smart for her own good, catches onto the meaning behind Gepard's correction without any further prompting. The tent goes deathly quiet, nothing but the wind howling outside.

"...She's trying to kill us," Pela whispers, her voice swiftly suffocated by the silence.

Gepard swallows. He can't bring himself to correct her this time. There is nothing he could say that he would actually mean.

His gaze drops, back down to his desk and the reports on it. The names aren't listed, just the numbers, but Gepard knows them, knew them, and there must be something wrong, something he's missing, because why, why would she-? What could this possibly accomplish-?

“Gepard! Focus!” Something snaps right under his nose, and Gepard startles, eyes instantly honing in on Pela's irritated face as she leans over his desk. She holds his gaze for a moment before she huffs and begins to pace, wedges a knuckle between her teeth and bites like Gepard hasn't seen her do since cadet school.

Pela angrily strides from one end of his tent to the other, words hissed between her grit teeth. “What are we going to do?” In the dim lighting, Gepard can just barely see the damp spot of blood weeping under her gloves. “We need a plan.”

“A plan?”

“Wh- Yes, a plan! Unless you want more people to die!” Pela rounds on him then, all the wrath of a blizzard, winds roaring and snow sharp enough to cut.

“We don't even know-”

“What does it matter?! She killed-!!” Pela cuts off with a garbled noise when Gepard leaps up from his desk, hastily shoves his hand over her mouth. The prosthetic, not the flesh one, because he knows better than to assume Pela won't seize the opportunity to leave teeth marks in his skin.

“You're right. I'm sorry, I'm sorry; you're right. But you need to keep quiet.” Pela quirks an eyebrow at him and Gepard can read the question in her face. “Because we both saw what she did to Serval,” he hisses.

It's amazing the snow plains haven't thawed out yet, the amount of heat Pela can put behind a glare. The mere mention of Serval, and the smoking ruins Cocolia had made of her life and career, have her bristling up like a riled cat. The sudden hot breath she takes fans fog across his metal skin, and Gepard wisely keeps it in place until Pela finally sighs and reaches up, taps her fingertips against the back of his hand.

The second she's free, Pela bats him away and then her knuckle is right back between her teeth again, Gepard leaning back against his desk with his arms crossed to watch her resume her pacing. “If we spread the word, she'll have us discharged and make sure we can't even touch the frontlines,” Pela's voice seethes like an open sore. Gepard nods but keeps his silence. He knows better than to get in her way.

“And if you and I are both out of the picture, Belobog is fucked.” A little harsher than how he would have put it, but there's no denying that they're both important to the city's survival. Pela has the restricted zone running as efficiently as ever, and Gepard had become the youngest captain on record for a reason. “We need to keep this tight under wraps, at least for now… It can't leak to anyone higher up the chain.” Another nod. “Serval might know other discontents…” Another n-

Gepard's head snaps up. “No.”

“No what?”

“No. We're not involving Serval in this.”

Somehow, even the same tone that leaves entire squadrons shaking in their boots has never worked on her. “You're not deciding that for her, Gepard.”

Pela hadn't seen the worst of it, though, back when his sister had just been banned from the Architects. Serval's pride hadn't allowed it. Pela wasn't the one to find her passed out bottle still in hand, hadn't been the one to wash the sick out of her hair or carry her to bed. 

Serval still has trouble thinking clearly when it comes to Cocolia, still can't quite bring herself to be objective. And Gepard maybe doesn't want her to be purely objective- but he would worry a lot less if she thought twice before she acted more often.

“At least let me be the one to bring it up to her.”

“Whatever, fine,” Pela gestures affirmatively at him as she paces past, and Gepard sighs. Good, at least that's one thing he can help.

From there, it's a lot of hemming and hawing and frustration. Cocolia has them under her boot, and Gepard and Pela both know it. Even with the way she's been cracking down on freedoms lately, Cocolia is still, overall, liked by the people. It's unlikely anyone would believe them. They don't even have solid proof, because most people don't know Cocolia as well as they do and won't see the clues in the same light. 

The Fragmentum has been ramping up in recent years, too. Everyone is struggling just to survive as is, they can't afford a fight on two fronts. Gepard is a damn good captain, one of the best for that matter. But they're at a massive disadvantage, his experience is narrowed to fighting a defensive battle against monsters, that's all he's ever done. That's all anyone there has ever done. He has no way of finding first-hand knowledge for taking the offensive against a human opponent, and if he goes at this blind, there's no way he'll get everyone out unscathed. He's going to lose people. He's going to lose a lot of people.

He'd never thought before that Cocolia would have it in her to have someone killed. And with this new knowledge, he has no guarantee she won't go after Serval or Lynx if she decides to retaliate.

Gepard has to remind himself to breathe when he realizes this.

Pela writes down every name the two of them can come up with. Lists and lists of names and groups and anyone they can think of who might be an ally in all of this. They memorize every bit of it, make their plans of who to talk to and when. Gepard watches the sparks reflect off Pela's glasses as they burn the evidence together.

Pela finally leaves, far too late to make it home, but says she wants to stay in the restricted zone anyway to investigate. Gepard watches her make her way in the direction of Dunn's tent, watches her back until she's out of his sight and squashes down the urge to follow and keep an eye on her. His tent feels empty.

In the morning, Gepard is up before the wake up bells. He drags himself out of bed, leads his soldiers through their morning training. The same people gravitate to each other everyday. Friend groups and training partners. There's an ongoing rivalry between a few squadrons that everyone bets on. Some of them have lockets around their necks, keepsakes, mementos. Some of them wear wedding rings.

Gepard is suddenly, painfully aware of something acidic clawing at the inside of his throat, of a heavy weight low in his chest that blooms, takes up room until it threatens to spread his ribs. His mouth tastes of bile and blood.

He rearranges the schedules. Puts himself down for every open patrol into the Fragmentum, makes sure he'll be on the frontlines every single time Cocolia visits.

He only hopes that it's enough.

[kelpermoosee]

Knocking them over and watching them scramble to get up with those big ass heads

[gar-a-ash]

This little man ran face first into the fence at the breeder's<3

[artificer-real]

ive started to really despise self help posts because all they do for me is illustrate just how apparently fucked i am compared to most other people

[stevieharringtonwifeguy]

i love a/b/o steddie where they get started like so young that if it was someone i knew irl i'd have a panic attack. like,, mated right out of high school, baby pops out a year later, they've got like five kids by the time they're 25

thinking about an au where they were already together pre- start of s4 and steve goes through the whole thing like three months pregnant. like he's stressed about the baby and eddie and eddie's SUPER stressed about the baby and steve, like eddie's trying to get steve to sit this one out for the baby and steve has to yell at him to stop bc yeah, he's worried about losing their first child, but if he sat at home while everyone else dealt with the upside down and someone didn't come back??? he'd never be able to live with himself

and when the bats get eddie and steve tries to use the mating bond to share some of eddie's pain, help him hold on until they get to the hospital, eddie weakly tries to tell him not to, to think of the baby. and steve's just. not having it. and once eddie wakes up from his medically induced coma he's like :(( why'd you do that and steve is just. so mad. he says yeah, if i had lost the baby (he doesn't, she's fine) that would have been the most terrible pain i'd ever felt. but it would have been worse if i lost you. and eddie's like. oh. bc maybe part of him has always been thinking that steve's only stuck with him bc he's the father of their kid. but no, steve loves him.

so eddie's crying, and steve's crying, and then steve shows eddie the ultrasound they did during eddie's coma to check the baby hadn't been hurt by the week of stress and danger and pain-sharing, and it's the first time they've been able to actually see the shape of a baby in all the weird white noise of an ultrasound, and now they're both crying even harder

[iamespecter]

ima need the rest of the pomnitober art :)

No. I'm feeling petty today

[invinciblerodent]

making the decision on who to back for Archon is...

ngl, it feels a little different now, from the way they perhaps intended when they were writing that quest

[monowires]

you know what fucks me up the most about me2, though? it isn't just the fact that there was a 2 year time gap, it's that that time didn't even pass for shepard.

shepard was, as jacob puts it, "in a coma or worse" for most of it—the only real conscious moment he has before waking up at the start of the game during the attack is that one moment where the sedatives wore off and he started waking up.

everyone he runs into gives him some form of "it's been two years, you shouldn't expect things to be the same," but it's literally been like blinking to shepard. he was asphyxiating in space and then he was fighting for his life in a cerberus facility. he's expected to handle this reorientation himself; it's never really talked about, not fully. he catches up with people like anderson on what's happened in the past two years, but it's never really clarified how he processes it. and even so, he makes a visible effort to try and understand it, to try and understand the viewpoints of old allies like kaidan and tali and garrus.

this is something that i feel a lot of the characters overlooked when chiding him for 'working with' cerberus. like, my dude died and then woke up immediately thereafter (to him) in a cerberus facility. his only options were to ally with them or die, and then the elusive man went to extensive lengths to make it such that shepard COULDN'T leave—where would he go? the normandy wasn't his anymore. what crew would he take with him? they'd all been contacted by cerberus beforehand.

it just breaks my heart, because he dies saving joker/his crew during the normandy attack, and is then thrust into the future—literally, to him—and expected to just get up and keep moving. he was never given any time to process it, never given any time to argue, never given any autonomy beyond which mission he did first.

in me3, he still isn't given the luxury of being understood—people don't trust him, and understandably so given the reputation cerberus built for itself—but they also don't listen to him. when he tries to defend himself by saying he didn't have much choice, he is told "isn't that just what they want you to say?"

even jack gives him shit for it, and she was with him in me2. and if he tries to say he knows, he knows cerberus is awful, she says something along the lines of 'i'm sure that'll comfort all the people they killed' and that just stung in the moment because it really shows how alone shepard is, how alone he always has been. how being alone is a necessity when you're tasked with the fate of the galaxy—how he has to sacrifice himself in more ways than one to ensure the continuity of time itself.

[pebblezone]

She was Twelve I don’t care how mature she was she’s going to feel emotions

[fbfh]

good news wildcats, I'm finally watching hsmtmts s4. I just finished episode 1 and I am SCREAMING.

toxic ricky is back!!!!!!!!!!! unhinged unstable season 1 ricky my darling!!!! my beloved!!!!!!!!! my pathetic soggy prayers have been answered!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ratatatastic]

there is something so special about self fulfilling prophecies

[charlie-rulerofhell]

Chris Harms | Shock to the System

[evergreen-cc]

EVERGREEN SAVE (PT. 2)

To be honest, very little of this one is me. It's the same as before but I replaced all the lots with lots from the gallery or tumblr that I tweaked to fit my version of the sims. All of them have the credit in the description of the lot. The only one that doesn't is the Robles-Ruano house in San Sequoia because I couldn't find one I liked so I just edited it myself.

As before, this uses all packs except Batuu (and maybe the new luxe kit?) I encourage acquiring them however you see fit... The CC link is the same as part 1 because I haven't changed anything.

Anyway, there's no way I'll get part 3 before the new pack and I think I'll want to change the way a lot of the lots are configured with the new multi-household system.

DOWNLOAD: CC | SAVE

Credit to the builders below!

@okruee @helgatisha @rebouks @xogerardine @moonlight-falls @omgkayplays @torif0xx @m0ckest @cowplant-pizza @catsaar @ozono96 @beetlemp3 @simsontherope @haledela @futurelabs @chrissieyt @spookcy and plenty more (but ch'aboy is low on spoons)

[elpsycongruent]

once again finding myself deeply tempted to hurl dog shit at cars that ignore stop signs

[mayonaisalspray]

Goddd okay. Don’t look at me