#we are given the base pose for it and we just add everything else in it

[amelia-yap]

puts them in a microwave

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

What is a question Atheists cannot answer?

I don't think there is one.

I mean it.

It involves looking at the World a certain way, and if you look at the World in that way, there really is no way to dispute or argue your way out of it. That's why apologetics is so misguided. Nobody's talking to each other, and nobody's listening either.

***********************************************************************

When I was young, my Christian education teacher used the light switch on the wall to demonstrate God's trustworthiness.

Growing up as I did, I could think of any number of reasons why the light-switch might not work as expected. Faulty wiring, bad bulb, blown fuse, general community outage. A flashlight, in addition to the burnt out bulb, could have corroded contacts, rusted wires, or bad batteries. Light switches aren't a 100% certain way to light a random bulb.

I can look at all the natural scientific rules that we base our lives on and see God's hand at work.

We don't even consider the fact that we implicitly trust gravity as a certainty.

Science requires trust in that certainty, and in the certainty of everything else around us that gives us the science we use to manipulate the universe around us.

I see God in that certainty.

Atheists do not, they take it as a given - a "natural law" - and pose no further questions. They take it as it is. That simple certainty gives them peace.

I don't know that there's a way around that.

And, honestly, that's fine as long as we can tone down the rhetoric and just agree to disagree about this.

I explored Atheism. I'm beginning to realize that I was much the same kind of heretic then, as I am now as a Christian. I did not feel the need to scream at Christians to not pray for me - I accepted that for them it provided something of a psychological value, and I wished them well. If God didn't exist, then so what, at worst they were wasting their time. No skin off my nose.

I find the emotional need to validate oneself (Atheist or Christian) at the expense of another to be childish, emotional, unreasonable, irrational - and from a psychological point of view - rather unscientific in that it increases emotional disquiet at its most benign, and possibly emotional trauma at it's worst. When whole groups become involved, societal discord results. (I've trolled atheists by attributing this trigger to "demons", though as noted, Christians suffer from this too.)

One could argue that I'm doing what I claim to detest with this remark. However, my beef is not with anyone who has rejected God, but rather with Christians who claim to be followers, but who fail to live even remotely by the positive principles of their faith.

I personally believe that if most Christians offered a legitimate "Value Proposition" to use classical economic terms, atheists wouldn't exist - or if they did, they wouldn't do so in the form they do now.

Since most Atheists focus on Christian morality, I'll add this. Keep in mind, most of the moral tenants of Christianity also exist in some form under Stoicism, Epicureanism, even Buddhism, and in other philosophical precedents. In terms of morality, Christianity doesn't really deviate too much from these aspirational worldwide Philosophical tenants. For me, Christianity isn't necessarily about morality, its about looking at the universe in a better way. Sin is still a thing, but it's part of a much larger picture, and most "sins" keep in check certain societal pathologies.

But, having said all this, keep in mind, as a Heretic Christian, my opinion doesn't mean much in official circles.

Lord have mercy upon me, A sinner.

[felassan]

Dragon Age II and Dragon Age: Inquisition concept art & assets from a 2016 talk/presentation by Matt Rhodes, titled “The World of Concept Art” [watch link & source]

It’s an interesting and insightful talk which I recommend watching, especially if you have an interest in concept art and related things like character design and how it fits into the overall game dev process. It’s also interesting to see a bit about how the DA team’s art direction/process has changed over time between games, and hear a bit about how they’ve been doing things going forwards for the next game.

This is Part 1. [Link to Part 2]

(Some notes on the commentary given on the images and in general in the presentation under the cut due to length.)

On image 2: DAII had a fast, hot production period where decisions were made very quickly. The devs knew that the central hub, Kirkwall, had been a center of an old slavery-based empire in the past, and wanted to have indications of this [in its art direction]. There were going to be giant statues that the PC eventually fought - on the right is the design for the statues as they originally were. In the top left, this is all they had for the location [owing to the intensive prod period]. They also had a general idea that they wanted to have tableaus that came to life, shown in the bottom left.

On image 3: Going back to the design of the giant statues, the beautiful golden clockwork version of the design doesn’t really say ‘tool of an ancient slavery-based empire’, so they took the model and tried to come up with something that had more of the kinds of shapes that get into the back of your head and say things like ‘aggressive, hard, simple’.

On image 4: So here they had started doing concepts trying to find some of the right poses, accessories etc that these things would have. One of the hearts of the internal ‘DA art [direction] codex’ is “gray and pointy”; if they give a concept like this to [then] Art Director Matthew Goldman he instinctively wants to go “Yes! Approve!”, and so has to kind of reign himself in a little bit.

On image 5: This is where they ended up getting to and how the concept art turned out in terms of the model, with some negotiation back and forth. This is an example of how their art direction process now tries to tell a story with the art (i.e. it tries to support the story through art aspects of the setting and the environment). Historically, they would have just thrown the French-looking, Baroque clockwork version of the statue into the game and gone with it. They are getting more and more intentional with this sort of thing.

On this image: This was an internal image made for internal discussion. The characters in it aren’t ones that exist or that became other characters, with the exception of the Warden, who kind of became Blackwall. In this image, they were trying to think about visual separation among members of a group at the most basic level (simple graphic design principles, like different shapes and colors). This image is part of trying to solve the design problem of having 4 different characters on-screen in the party at once in their games - as in, players of course need to be able to easily tell who is doing what and where.

A general comment: At BioWare, the concept artists nowadays involve themselves in the character design process much earlier than they used to. Historically, as in earlier games, the writers would write up a bunch of characters and then concept artists would be brought in to draw them. Through negotiation and back-and-forth they would then come up with something. Nowadays though, the concept artists are involved from Day 1. The writers now write down 2 words to describe a character and the artists do sketches based on that. The writers then will write a sentence and the artists will do more drawings based on that. Then it progresses to a paragraph and drawings based on that and so on. In this way it goes back and forth and they build it up so that the visual aspects and the writeup/content of the character are developed completely in tandem, complimentary to one another. This is their goal. They aren’t quite there yet, but this is what they’re trying to strive for in this area.

On image 6: These are Dorian concepts. His initial 2-word writeup was “rockstar mage”. They had different artists take different swings at him. The middle concept is Matt’s. The third concept is by Casper Konefal. Everyone was very excited about it and so it was then taken up to a more final stage (image 7).

On image 8: Casper is one of Matt’s favorite concept artists because he goes in and lovingly details absolutely everything - all the pieces of jewelry etc. Each ring has a story. This attention and level of detail and thought behind it adds authenticity and verisimilitude. 

On image 9: In game development, there is an effect on character design that can happen during review meetings. The concept/character artist will know what they need visually from a particular character’s design in order to visually tell the story and to help the character support that. Oftentimes, people who aren’t artists don’t have the language to describe this or realize that’s what’s going on in a character’s design, and instead they just see imperfections in the presented faces. What this can lead to is that unintentionally a group review meeting can slowly trim away all the features of a character that make them interesting or distinct. This is why, for many characters across the game industry, if they were shaved and had their facial decorations etc removed, it would be kind of hard to tell many of them apart, as they have all been subjected to this sort of “council sandblasting” process. Casper figured out an idea to help with this; annotating concept drawings with artistic knowledge that artists know intuitively, as has been done here. Artists know, for instance, that certain shapes and angles can allow for certain assumptions about the character to be made (for example, think about Cassandra’s personality and then consider the angular, straight strong lines that make up her face). Annotating like this and then presenting both versions alongside one another helps these aspects of character design be recognized in the review process, and helps characters remain more distinct.

On image 10: They knew that in DAI there was going to be a character who would be with the PC for the whole game - the humble little hermit, non-intrusive, someone quite closed off who the player wouldn’t know much about. “[quote] And at the very end of the game you’d basically find out that he’s Loki himself, or the embodiment of this ancient god that had been tricking you and basically manipulating you the whole time, characterized by a wolf.” And so Nick Thornborrow hung a wolf’s jaw bone off his neck and it was just there in plain sight the whole game. Because this detail was in the drawings at an early stage, it sparked conversations with the audio department, and the audio department could add touches from their end like having wolves howling when he walked into a new area. They could then get all of these different elements and things that could be hinted at, so that when you play the game a second time it’s like ‘They weren’t even hiding it!! It was there the whole time!!’ He loves that.

A general comment: Any one of BioWare’s 3D modelled characters standing in-game talking or animating probably ends up costing them something in the 40,000 - 60,000 dollar range (they calculated this).

A general comment: For DAI, the concept artists also started to get heavily involved in the storytelling side of things at a deeper level, doing things like quick’n’dirty storyboards for the cinematic designers and spending more time with the writers talking about what emotions they were trying to convey at different points and so forth. Since starting doing this, this has become a built-in part of their process.

A comment in the context of giving advice to up-and-coming and student artists, on the subject of how concepts and ideas are naturally thrown out during the process of iterating on ideas etc: “[quote] Right now, the project that I’m working on that I can’t talk about, I have 3 versions of the story in the garbage, and it’s awesome. Because now I’m working on the fourth with our lead writer and it’s so much better than it would have been otherwise and we’re doing it so much earlier so that we can actually change things up.” Said project could be DA4 or something else. (Please remember these comments were made in November 2016. MEA came out in 2017 and DA4 has been rebooted)

[source]

[janiedean]

Do you think Jonsa is going to happen? I did read some meta about foreshadowing and it's a "squint if you miss it" but there is stuff. For example. Jonnel/Sansa stark in the family tree. People say the fact that Jon didn't care about Sansa being wed to Tyrion, compared to Arya being wed to Ramsay means he his repressing his painful memories and how he has a secret crush on her.

... tldr and sorry for the harshness: no, but if you want to go into the details, with no offense to anyone shipping it of course:

as I already recently ranted, jon and sansa are in two totally different brackets - jon is a main five, sansa is in the following bracket, jon has the entire chosen one storyline plus being the center of the entire story going on, sansa has the I want the love story and I'll get it plotline which does not mesh with jon's so there's that;

sansa's story arc is admittedly painfully clear in the beginning as in: if she thinks she's going to marry a beautiful gallant pretty prince and she thinks it's joffrey who is like attractive and LOOKS gallant but we all know how it went, then she's going to end up with someone who is the total opposite, also if she wanted to be queen in the beginning then it means she's absolutely not going to be in the end bc her entire arc is about realizing that everything she wanted in the beginning is not what she truly wants, and since jon is absolutely poised to get kingship, divide the kingdoms and fuck off to the wildlings after there is no way that her storyline meshes with his like that;

sansa's only viable love interests at this point on page are sandor and tyrion, the end, which by the way are, guess what, not standard attractive and are two people who need to overcome their trauma but never treated her unfairly, and like... denying that in the text sansa is attracted to sandor (she MAKES UP that he kissed her, she dreams he comes to her on her wedding night, she's all like AH BUT JUST *I* KISSED THE HOUND etc like sorry but that's a thing never mind all the knightly investment subtext) and that sandor is her love interest on text is imvho absolutely senseless - you can ship whatever you want and realize that canon isn't going there and write fanfic, no one is gonna stop you, and I can accept the endgame theory from sansa/tyrion shippers even if I think sansa/sandor is it, but sansa/anyone else is absolutely out of the question;

also sandor is the only one sansa thinks about using all the criteria ned used to describe the knight he would find her which was better than joffrey bless whoever went and did the search (brave gentle and strong) and she doesn't use neither of those terms to think about jon, like there's more evidence for littlefinger based on that and idt lf is gonna be her intended;

they think they're siblings and like I know that saying 'BUT THE INCEST' in these books is not like an automatic NO because there's canon incest and the rival ship ie j*nerys also would be incest but like one thing is jc which is not endgame and plainly described as abusive/unhealthy, one thing is targ incests which like the narrative generally is like HEY THIS WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA ABOUT and one thing is falling in love with someone you thought was your sibling and you grew up with like that the moment you find out you're cousins - that... doesn't work like that. and like while I don't have a horse in this race and j*nerys is hardly my ideal endgame sorry but it's a lot more likely that jon would end up getting with someone who he never met before, was the sister of a father he never knew and doesn't even consider his father and he had no relation with before than with... someone he actually thought was his sister, even if he finds out she's his cousin that doesn't change it;

'repressing painful memories' jon has zero issue thinking about catelyn or sansa not treating him great so idk what he should be repressing;

arya vs sansa question: .... well that's like getting close to the entire point but not getting it, in the sense that while jon didn't take wf because it belonged to sansa - but he said he would have if ygritte had been alive and stannis said he could marry her and not val which I mean... says all honestly - technically he made vows saying he renounced his family which is the entire fucking point re arya - the point is that he didn't give those vows up for robb but he would for arya which was the one he was closest to which is what makes everyone else kill him and no he wouldn't have done that for sansa because she was the only one who kept him at a distance, but...

the entire damned point is that they have to reconnect as siblings. sansa going back north (which is gonna happen) and jon being there and most likely getting legitimized/getting robb's will etc means that they have, as adults (or at least... well not kids) realize that how she treated him was wrong and that they can build a relationship which means that each single text reference to each other which is really nothing romantic™ is posed to tell you THESE TWO WILL BE THE STARK SIBLINGS MEETING FIRST and since they didn't have a close rship before they will forge one now, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be romantic endgame, because jon's point isn't having the uber romantic storyline and sweeping a maiden off her feet and sansa already has at least one love interest posed to do exactly that and while their sl are absolutely meant to intersecate on a sibling finding each other again level they are off when it comes to romance;

also a j*nsa endgame would... imply that she becomes queen of the seven kingdoms and they stay reigning there when sansa is absolutely posed to stay in the north and do her own thing and jon is posed to destroy the united-westeros-because-a-targ-did-it legacy (which like... great bookend bc first legit targ king unites it, bastard stark-targaryen king who most likely is keeping the bastard name undoes it) and he is going to hate each second of it, so it doesn't add up with sansa getting her happy love song fairytale romance... which again she can get from other people that the text strongly pointed at already.

so: no because it makes no sense thematically for either of them and for that matter I don't even think jon*erys is eventual endgame tho I guess it has to happen at this point given the show mess idk but if either of them had to be j*nerys would make a load more sense and I still think that a targ restoration with two monarchs keeping on being monarchs is not what a dude who is obviously anti-monarchy has in mind for the endgame. like no offense to anyone into it ofc but again it has zero textual basis for being romantic endgame and it wouldn't even make either of them happy bc jon is not sansa's gentle brave strong knight and sansa isn't the kind of woman jon is actually into (ygritte reminded him of arya I mean) and idt he'd get romantic feelings for his sister who he's going to think of in that terms anyway so there's my two cents. and I understand that it's not smth that a lot of people would agree with but take it up with grrm because he's the one putting that in the text and not me X°D

[captainkurosolaire]

~ Mass Update ~

Mainly going into future plans and intents alongside ideas below cut.

Ton's of things I've in store this will prove difficult to vent it all out. But here we go... First off rehashing and appropriately learning to tag and organize things better on my blog. Each category will have their own corresponding content, I seek to bring or share. [Tales of Goldbrand] -- I intend this to carry a Compendium of all my writes soon that'll have everything neatly in-order including a glossary, so it'll have highlights of stories that even matter or the best stuff. I've written here for a very, long time, there's been many shifts. I want to make it more accessible. While coloring what matters for people who want to learn Captain or his Crew with less chapters. While also giving choice to find it all easily. This is essentially a step-above master-lists. I'll be doing that after the Saga I have going on, right now is done. [Captain] -- Will provide you strictly with Captain screenshots, gifs, photo-sets. This is still his blog despite the Crew thing's will sort of make this a scuffed Multi-Muse blog. I've few more things to edit and tag fix to get all his stuff though. [The Wild Crew] -- Afterwards this story is done Immortal Age Saga, It's something that I mainly wrote as a passion project within three days to get my warm-up process fixed. It's to allow me to get a feel for all his Crewmates and casts, in combat, in-general, to feel their presences. While also giving a bit of their backstories. At any point, I can go back and polish or tweak things in. They're NPC's but... not entirely. All will have their own 'Dreams' and their own 'Disapproval's' they have their own missions even. These things will factor eventually, they might set seeds, to betray or disagree with something, but that's all angst and more stories to be created, but overall, they'll probably always be Crew, eventually. -- I plan on making character-profile sheets of them and putting them in this Tab, it'll have their screenshots, their likes/dislikes. Some RP partners or people can also be shipped with them, but they'll all be monogamous and originally start off probably Pan. This allows them to figure out what they like on their own stories. I've always been someone who likes organic-flow. Although this one story contain all 16 characters or more, the rest will probably be shortened to a Squad of 4 and dispersed when on adventuring missions. Until I do a War Arc, that's my main goal to build too. [Roster] -- Will contain this Crew in just screen-sets dedicated to them, I'll probably randomly produce those. I've PC players among this Crew too. I may not be done either adding more, but this Crew is mainly built around Quality. Most pirate crew's mainly, have hundreds, thousands. Even Fleets. This Crew has personalities, monsters, people who are living life's that exist with piracy. He's an particular leader that had PC players the same way, he's had split-personality serial killers aboard, tribal chieftains, succubus, all sorts of various people once on a Crew. It's often an outcast style, pirates default are chaotic in nature, so this really isn't any different, it's a Fantasy version of it. There's humanization characters aboard too though, so this cast is really decked, everything and person is vital, they matter because they remind or covet something that others can draw upon. If ever played (Three Houses or Mass Effect / Dragon Age Origins) A lot of things like that are relatable too this structure and format. Which, Is something I want to be able to give when RPing. I want a genuine feel of this new world someone else's muse will be the main-character too. Depending on what's interacting everything they'll be scale appropriately to follow the genre they're in and environment even. [Aesthetics] -- Already explainable what you'll find here. [Asks] -- Same thing. [Prompts] -- Trivial things I was tagged too, I plan on compiling later. [Writing] -- Another alternatively to randomly go-down and it works right now. [Logs] -- Will have more individualistic master-lists and posts there, my poems from Sheik Sphere the Bard, etc.

Things of that nature, I'll probably add still. It's where a lot of my creative writing is summed. [Gems of Hydaelyn] -- My main #tag for other characters and artists, creationist. Lot of amazing people easily to find their zones or follow them optionally if you like. Ton's I intend to support and bolster, be a lot less unspoken. I'm never the type who's been strictly inclusive. But I'll do that when I've time to even explore the dash, I'm always still planning ahead with things and projects. [CKS] My original character-sheet it's outdated on something's but not too terrible. I'll give him polishing someday, I swear? [21+F-List] -- Just purely degenerate stuff of Captain. I'm a pirate blog. I will represent that with openness and furthermore. I'm never projecting you some false-image. I started off a smut-writer by stripping that, I no-longer represent the same aura and identity. But those are strictly his stuff and kinks, I'm effective in executing them but they're not all relatable to me OOC. This blog will always be 18+ containing crude or dark material sometimes, romantic things, this Captain is blunt, will literally put his cock on the table in conversations. Swearing and being censored would be too uncommon and displace most of him, but there's more about him then all this. [Other] -- I pay homage to a lot of characters, I originally am a Concept Designer. Which mean's I make characters and ideas like my addiction. Bad characters / villains or other little things I like to share in designs, I'll put there. Some villains might get little photo-sets, even if they died. Just cause I like their design, or maybe I'll give them an AU, where they won. When I've wrapped up things. [Collabs + Ships] -- Is a new project idea. This isn't going to be something limited too romantic only ships. It'll contain, platonic, romantic, friendships, rivals, frenemies, family, PC Crew, all ships. I am desperately working on improving my gif, screenshot, posing game so I can supply 'Screen Stories' this is not only a way to RP that's accessible with even people who are upon time-crunches from work, It gives visual-representation. To impactful stories shared with others and establish bonds. That are all-valid and impactful matter. Lot of people take a lot of their characters attributes into them and are them dialed up, I work with that and bit more, differently. I'm disconnected from my characters and they'll get hurt and injured and killed by me, that's my duty as their Author to give them conflicts and struggles. I'm their major antagonist, but that doesn't mean at-all, it's always SET that way. The characters I like to make have their own life, they live in this setting and are abide by it, they're often nothing, nobodies, and by the interacting with others, they slowly gradually building, more... Through emotional impacts, they alter, these are REAL people by all their beliefs. Each person they come in-contact with are legitimate and treated like that too. They've always impacted or given them insights to grow, or represent more. Otherwise it'd be criminally disrespectful if I allowed any emotional I felt OOC be the grudge to something IC. Captain in-particular is set on defying me. I cannot have that. ...But I can't stop him. He's met and encountered so many people and lived so many scenarios based on the actions of others, he's giving a chance right now to actually do things a lot further than impossible. The more people he meets and encounters, experiences, the more I lose. These stories are emotionally interactive where everything is a factor and adds to the dice, where the other people are the one who get to roll the dice for him, not me. That's something I want to color in. People range in emotions, they have their down's, ups, their own wholesome-grounding people, spending time with your favorite people, there's nothing more cherishing than that, being in your own comfort-zone or 'safe-space' these are all treasures that we live under, today. Contrary if what people assume of me, I'm not another 'blogger' that's came

before, who's wanting to force a harem, then constantly is bewildered when that falls to pieces cause of selfishness or a lack of communication, or the skeletons they have in their closets and beliefs they hid behind and swindled fooled everyone. I'm not looking to be popular or anything really, I just create stories and want to share in those, and I want to also boost others included, upward with me, especially those who make me. There's no ego in anything I do, this is purely love. I've never cared about being replicated or duplicated, I've had stalkers, I've gone through more then anyone would imagine, I've been used OOC and abused, just for my writing and cold-harshly told, i'd never amount to anything other then that or vice-versa. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Passion. That's all I got and am anymore. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Passion is the hardest thing to keep. It's something that can be stolen, quite effortlessly. Few words of discouragement, a bad negative representation, a lack of confidence, or small amount of time, there's many thing's that can put that flame out. Once you lose it. The difficulty to reattain is hundred-times harder than climbing any mountain for real. I've watched the greatest creators crumble from under the pressure, from beaten down by others. I watched many of them do it to themselves because they put a grand vision of needing validation of another and once lost, felt uncompelling to press onward. But passion also can be given BACK and drawn. It can be shown and encourage others, with a soft-triggering, that pushes them. That motivates, that constantly sticks to it. There are many that fuel me. If I ever quit, I let them down, I spit in the faces of people who're better than me in every-way. Or people who've came and given me their precious Time. That have given their character's or dedication to the abundant stories and community-driven things I've done. There's ONLY things you can do, create, give and provide. It cannot ever come to life without YOU. This is a fact. ...I swear, If you let your creativity soar, you'll be amazed by the heights you get. Constantly polish and learn and hone the best you, challenge yourself day after painstaking day, to draw better improvement on something, no matter how trivial or unfamiliar you are. You'll find a confidence only you can give yourself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Future Plans --------------------------------------------------------------------- For me, I've got so much more stories to give and also explore, I might be taking up soon some other artists and more skilled people from community and hire them for some of my future writes, to up my game or cause something thing's can't be done in-game cause no background carries it. I also got a lot of-set up things and more angst stuff I want to practice, plus I'm adamantly on that grind to produce screen-sets with the intent's to some sort of improving daily. Additionally more people I'll be reaching out too soon for these collab's ideas and things. I look forward to shaking your hands, giving some hugs, show you my respect and admiration, then creating some enchanting stories and giving plots light. Feel free to reach out to me, I get scattered-brain but I'm working on getting better about it. Eventually will get to you though, my goals, if uninterested just say so when I poke, no bites, unless you kinky. Anyways, cheers hearties.

[wicked-mind]

Remember Me: Chapter Seven

Summary: Y/N and Bucky were the unlikely match when it came to love, but they were inseparable since they met. After a fight, Y/N left to be a trauma surgeon in the military and returns without her memories. How will Bucky remind Y/N how she is the fire in his bones?

Word Count: 4.4k

Warnings: Swearing (I like swearing. Adds character and sounds pretty to me lol), mentions of surgical procedures, car crash, miscarriage, John Walker, slight bit of PTSD.

Series Masterlist

All Writings Masterlist

As always, any likes, reblog, or comments are appreciated (:

*gifs not mine

Previously

Y/N removed her eyes from his face, listening to the story. Her forehead creased a moment as she thought about all that was said before meeting his gaze once again. A small smile curved on her lips and she leaned towards him, kissing his lips softly before pulling away slightly to look at him, “I forgive you, Bucky."

Bucky felt relief flood through him at her words, smiling down to her. He couldn’t find any words to say to her so instead he returned his arms around her body and pulled her closer, kissing her deeply. Those were words Bucky had waited to hear for so long and for a while he didn’t know if he would ever hear them from Y/N. Everything seemed right in the world for now, and even though he was worried about what was written in those journals John had given her due to what Steve had said, he hoped that whatever else it was would be forgiven also.

Truth was, Y/N always had forgiven Bucky for what was said the moment she left. She knew it was from his own fears. But what had broken her heart was hidden in the pages of those journals.

Chapter seven - The truth in the writing

Y/N wasn’t supposed to be back to work until noon, but she got called in early due to an apartment fire that would lead to multiple traumas coming in meaning it was all hands on deck. Bucky watched her pack the yellow folder John had given to her last night into her backpack before taking her to the hospital. He came back to Steve’s to find him and Peggy having some coffee. Bucky grabbed himself a mug of the dark liquid before leaning against the counter, “She took the journals with her.” He said over to Steve.

Peggy narrowed her eyes as they flickered between the two, “What journals?”

Steve sighed, sitting at the dining table next to Peggy, “Y/N’s friend, that blonde guy named John, brought some of her journals that were left behind at her base camp. Says there’s everything in there.” He informed.

“Yeah, including something we don’t know about.” Bucky grumbled out, “Something that made our break-up worse than just the words that were said.” He would be lying if he said he wasn’t worried. He replayed that night so many times in his head that every moment was burned into his brain and he couldn’t think of anything other than what was said before she left, “We gotta figure this out. So I can at least try to make it better after she reads whatever is in there.”

Peggy set her glass mug on the table, “Okay, then let’s walk through it.” She said helpfully, “Y/N came here that night after her shift and showed us the deployment papers with the date for her to leave set in a month, June 7th. She was so excited to tell you that she left immediately after. What happened at your house, James?”

Bucky sighs, setting his mug down on the counter to run a hand through his dark hair, “She came in all excited and jumped into my arms. Everything was fine and then she showed me the papers. We argued about it because I didn’t want her to go. I told her if she walked out those doors I wouldn’t be here waiting for her and not to come back. And then she left.” He flinched at his own words. He hated that he had said that to Y/N.

Steve leans back in his chair, “Then she came back here in tears and frantic. We tried to get her to talk to us about what happened but she just packed her bags, got in her car, and left.” He sighs, “I called her everyday for about four days until she finally picked up and told me she was fine, just needed some space, and she would be back soon. After that, I didn’t hear from her until she was deployed.”

Bucky cocks his head to the side at Steve, narrowing his eyes, “You never told me that.”

Steve scoffs slightly, “Yeah, well, you made my sister run away, we weren’t exactly on the best speaking terms, Buck.”

“So we have no idea where she was or what she was doing for a month before she was deployed?” Peggy interrupted, watching Bucky and Steve shake their heads to say no. She bit her bottom lip for a moment, “Maybe something happened in that month.”

Bucky looked over from Peggy to Steve, “What did she say while she was deployed?” He asks curiously, folding his arms as he leaned against the counter.

Steve looked from Peggy to Bucky, picking up his mug and bringing it to his lips for a drink before setting it back down, “Y/N called me when she got to the base, told me she made it safe and she was sorry she didn’t come back before she left, that she couldn’t come back. I asked her what happened between you two and she told me what was said. I told her you didn’t mean it and to at least give you a call.” He watched Bucky’s features soften for a moment, “There were a few more phone calls. She told me what you said hurt, but that she was okay and there was another reason she couldn’t come home or talk to you. We didn’t really talk about you two after that.”

Bucky groaned slightly. What had happened? The more he thought about it the more the timeline didn’t make sense. Everything had been fine between them the days, even weeks leading up to when she ran away were fine. He sighs looking back to Steve, “I don’t know, man.” He said, “Everything was great. We made cookies together, went on rides, had a Star Wars marathon. Everything was perfect… So perfect in fact I bought a damn engagement ring.”

Steve looked at Bucky with almost fully wide eyes before looking at Peggy who was sipping her coffee avoiding eye contact, “You knew about this, Peggy?”

Peggy put her coffee down, pursing her lips a little before speaking, “Of course I knew! Who do you think had to help him pick out the damn thing?”

Steve nodded and turned his attention back to Bucky, “Wow.” He said still nodding, “Well, now I really wish things would’ve gone differently. She would’ve been so excited.” He said with a small smile towards Bucky. Steve had always trusted Bucky with Y/N. The way he treated her was like a queen.

Bucky’s lips twitched into a small smile for a moment at Steve’s approval before it faded back into a stern line. He was going to ask Steve for help with the proposal when Bucky eventually figured out how to ask, but hadn’t gotten around to it before it all went to shit, “So nobody knows what the reason is…”

Steve nodded slowly, “Well… none of us know. But there is one person who does.”

Bucky groaned a little again and rubs his hand along his face, “God, I really hate John Walker.”

—

Y/N dealt with the wave of incoming traumas from the apartment building fire, running point on sorting patients by the degree of their injuries to create a steady flow in the operating room and emergency room. Once everything had died down, Y/N sat in the attending’s lounge eating a sandwich and starting to go through yellow folder from her backpack. There were photos of Y/N with Bucky and some of her with Steve and Peggy as well of her with John. There were also photos of her while she was deployed mostly doing silly poses in the middle of nowhere. She placed the photos back into the folder and pulled out the two notebooks next. They were leather-bound full sized journals. She opened the first one that looked just a bit more well used, figuring it was the first one. Her brow furrowed when she turned to the first page. It was dated at the top, May 15, 2019 but the rest of the page looked like the words had been gone over with permanent marker. Y/N turned to the next page and the next but for about ten pages over the next ten days from May 15th, all the words had been scribbled over with permanent marker, “Well, that’s just great.” She mutters out to herself softly, “Thanks me. Super helpful.”

Y/N finally found a page with actual words instead of just a page of black marker, the date read May 25th, 2019. It was filled with the words repeating ‘I am not my trauma.’ over and over again until the last line that read:

I’ll forget the piece that was taken away from me.

She frowned a little. What trauma did this refer to? What had happened? She turns the page quickly to read the next page.

May 26th, 2019

I leave in eleven days.

I want more than anything to call him. I don’t know what I would say. How do I explain what happened. Where do I begin?

He told me if I leave to never come back. That he won’t be waiting for me.

A part of me knows that’s a lie. I know he’d be there with open arms if he knew what happened.

I found that ring after all…

Y/N had to read the line over again a few times. Ring? There was a ring?

But how would he feel if he knew how ruined I was?

His sun swallowed into a dark pit.

He loves me. And I don’t think I’m me anymore.

Nobody wants broken things.

May 28th, 2019

I want to feel safe again.

They say writing down what I feel is going to ground me to reality. They also said I should call somebody. I can’t do that. I can’t let them know how much I hurt. I just want to run as far away as possible and that’s what I’ll do. I need to get out of here. It feels like I can’t breathe and everywhere I look I’m met with eyes filled with pity. It makes everything worse the way they look at me and stare. I get released tomorrow, I’m signing out AMA. Then it’s just nine more days. Maybe it’ll replace my trauma with a different trauma. Anything would be better than this.

I miss Bucky. I miss running my fingers through his hair and the way his stubble would brush against my skin. I miss being in his arms the most. They were so safe like nothing could ever hurt me. I wish I would’ve stayed then none of this would’ve happened. We could’ve just fought about it then go to bed and sort it out until I left. At least then I would’ve felt save and would’ve been safe.

I think the worst part about our fight was that I knew about the ring. I found it in his boxer drawer when putting away his laundry. You’d figure he would’ve picked a better hiding spot, but nope. He’s never been good at hiding things from me. I was halfway expecting him to propose when I showed him my deployment papers so we both had something to look forward to when I came back. I would’ve said yes in a heartbeat if he did. After all, James Buchanan Barnes is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. But that’s not what happened. And here I am stuck in pain and guilt.

Y/N shut the book when she heard someone come in, wiping away some tears she hadn’t noticed falling from her cheeks. She looks over and put on her best smile for Chief Miller, “Afternoon, Chief.”

Miller had his hands tucked in his pockets, “Everything okay, Y/N?” He asks gently, nothing the tear brimmed eyes.

Y/N nodded, keeping the same smile on her face, “Yeah, everything’s good. A friend brought me some journals to see if they’ll help me remember. It’s just confusing and a lot to read.” She said softly, “Were you looking for me?”

Miller nodded at her words, “I’m sorry, that must be hard.” He said with a reassuring smile, “I was just getting all your medical records transferred over and one was locked from a hospital in Queens. I just wanted to ask if you wanted to unlock it so we have that information on file in case it’s needed in the future.”

Y/N tilted her head at him, her brow pulling together in confusion, “I don’t remember what the nature of that visit would be… Did it have a date? I can call the doctor from the hospital to get it unlocked if I know the date.”

“May 14th, 2019.” Miller replied, “The doctors name I think was Wanda Maximoff.”

Y/N nodded slowly at the date. It was the day before her journal started with the scribbled out pages. She pushed the journal into her backpack, “Thanks, Chief. I’ll give them a call.” She said with a small smile before standing and leaving the room. She found an empty office with a computer, googling the hospital in Queens and asking for Dr. Maximoff.

“This is Dr. Maximoff.” A woman with an accent said over the phone when Y/N was connected.

“Hi, this is Dr. Rogers from Brooklyn Mercy. I was calling about a locked file in my health records.”

“Oh, Y/N! How have you been? Are you back from deployment?”

“Been better… And yes, I am. I was calling because a medical report of mine from May 14, 2019 is sealed and I don’t remember the nature of the visit. I lost a lot of my memories due to an incident overseas and I’m trying to put pieces together.”

“I see.. I’m so sorry to hear that. Our hospital isn’t too far from Brooklyn Mercy, I think we should talk about this in person given the situation. I’ll drive down and meet you in about forty-five minutes, would that work?”

“That’d be perfect, thank you Dr. Maximoff.” Y/N said before enhancing goodbyes and hanging up. It felt like her heart was going to beat out of her chest with how fast it was racing and she felt sick to her stomach as she tried to remember what happened. Whatever happened, it was bad enough that Dr. Maximoff was coming to tell her in person.

Y/N asked Chief Miller if he would be there when she went over the information with Maximoff, wanting some sort of support in case whatever happened was really bad. She kept adjusting herself in the chair in front of Chief Miller, nervous for whatever information was about to come out. She put on a small smile when Dr. Maximoff came into the office holding a medical file, shaking her hand and watching her take a seat in the chair next to her, “Nice to meet you again, Dr. Maximoff.”

“Oh call me Wanda. And again, I’m very sorry about your memory loss. I want to start by saying that we have support groups I can recommend after we talk about this information. Given that you don’t remember, it is possible you’ll go through all the emotions and grief again.” Wanda said before placing the file on Chief Miller’s desk and opening it slowly, “The night of May 14th, 2019 paramedics responded to an accident involving two vehicles. You were in one of them. It was determined the other driver was driving under the influence and had a large amount of alcohol in his system.”

Y/N nodded slowly, watching Wanda instead of looking at the file. Her eyes were full of kindness, even maybe a little pity, “What happened to the drunk driver?”

“He died in surgery. With the amount of alcohol in his system, the bleeding couldn’t be controlled and the damage was too severe.” Wanda said before continuing, “It was later determined that he was going forty miles per hour over the speed limit and from your statement, he was driving down the wrong side of the road with his headlights off. You didn’t see him coming until it was too late.”

“How bad was it?” Y/N asks softly, picking at her fingers nervously as she listened.

Wanda sighs, flipping through pages of the file on Chief Miller’s desk, “You sustained abdominal bleeding, two fractured ribs, and superficial lacerations that our head of plastic surgery took care of which is why there is no scarring. You made me promise not to call your emergency contacts.” Wanda paused, observing Y/N’s reaction but she was just sitting there nodding, “We took blood samples to cross match your blood so we couldn’t have to keep giving you O-negative blood. Those blood tests showed trace amounts of the hCG hormone. After we took care of the abdominal bleeding, you miscarried from stress. You didn’t know you were pregnant. You asked me to seal the records of the accident and you signed yourself out against medical advice.”

Y/N took a deep ragged breath, looking down at the floor in shock. The writings in the journal were making sense. She could hear Chief Miller and Wanda asking if she was okay but they sounded distant and like they were underwater. Flashes started coming back in her mind of that night. She was driving down the road back to her hotel she was staying at, crying and listening to sad songs on the radio when the crash happened. Y/N put her hand on her chest as her breathing became more erratic, it was like she couldn’t get enough air. She could see Wanda and Miller trying to ask if she was okay and calm her down but their voices were so different and everything around her was swaying. She remembered sitting in a hospital bed and crying over the news and the guilt she felt for leaving the safety of Bucky, “Can’t breathe…” She whispers out, trying to stand slowly from the chair. Y/N remembered the day after it happened, Wanda brought the journals to her hoping it would help to write what she was feeling since she wouldn’t contact anybody. She remembered the grief she felt as well as the shock and pain. This was the reason she didn’t come back to Bucky and avoided him, she didn’t know what to tell him. The world was swaying like she was on a boat and it felt like she was underwater, unable to get air in her lungs or hear the muffled sounds coming from Chief Miller and Wanda. She stumbled around at the room spinning, blinking rapidly before the world around her started fading to black and she fell onto the floor.

——

Steve, Peggy, and Bucky were still all trying to figure out events that lead up to Y/N running away a month before her deployment, trying to think of any clues that would help put the puzzle pieces together.

Steve’s phone starting ringing and he excused himself from the conversation to take the call, “Hello?”

“Hi, this is Doctor Miller, Chief of Surgery over at Brooklyn Mercy. Is this Steve Rogers, Y/N’s brother?”

“This is Steve. Is everything alright?” “Yes, everything is alright. I’m just giving you a call to ask you to come in. Your sister had a pretty serious panic attack and lost consciousness. I think it would be good if you came in.”

“What? Yeah, I’m on my way.” Steve said, walking back into the kitchen, “We have to go, Y/N’s been admitted to the hospital for a panic attack.”

Bucky frowns, “Probably read those damn journals.” He growled out, turning immediately and walking out the front door to his motorcycle and speeding down the road towards the hospital with Peggy and Steve right behind him in their car.

When they arrived at the hospital, Chief Miller was waiting for them at the front doors. He lead them up to the room Y/N was in where she was talking to Wanda with the door closed and crying, pulling an oxygen mask up to her mouth every so often. Bucky looked through the window to the room before noticing that none other than John Walker was standing a little bit away from the room leaning against the wall with a frown. Bucky immediately felt rage consume him, stomping over to John and pushing him against the wall, “What were in those journals?!” He yelled before landing a punch to John’s cheek.

John winced at the hit and pushed Bucky away from him, “She knew about the ring, asshole! She thought you were going to propose that night but instead you broke up with her!”

Chief Miller and Steve quickly pulled the two apart, Miller holding John back while Steve held Bucky back, “That’s not what it was about! Now knock if off before I call security.” Chief Miller said, moving to stand between the men, “Due to her privacy, I can’t tell you what it was but it wasn’t about a ring.”

“She knew about the ring?” Bucky said, wide eyed as he processed the words. No wonder she had been so mad at him and what he had said. She thought she was coming home to a potential proposal and instead he told her if she left to never come back.

Peggy had separated herself from all the testosterone and walked into the room Y/N was in, shutting the door behind her, “I’m Peggy, her sister-in-law.” She told Wanda before she took a seat on the edge of Y/N’s bed, gently taking her head, “Are you okay, honey?”

Y/N shook her head rapidly, keeping the oxygen mask pressed to her mouth and nose as she cried into it. She remembered the pain when Wanda had told her she miscarried and feeling alone due to the fight she had with Bucky. It was the reason she had ran- she didn’t feel like she had a home to go back to and she wouldn’t know what Bucky would think if she told him she had lost their child. All Bucky had wanted was to grow up and have a family with her and she ruined that. Her gaze set on Bucky through the window and she pulled the blanket on her legs up over her head, sobbing loudly underneath the blanket. How could she even look at him knowing what she knew now?

Wanda got up to close the blinds in the window before returning the chair placed next to the bed, “Y/N,” Wanda asks gently, reaching out a hand to rest reassuringly on Y/N’s leg over the blanket, “You’ve dealt with this pain alone for a long time and you’re going through it again like it’s fresh. You should talk to someone about it, you need support.”

Y/N pulled the blanket off her head at the sound of the blinds shutting, looking at Wanda through her blurry tear filled eyes, “I can’t…You… You tell Peggy… I can’t… I can’t.” She sobbed out, dropping the oxygen mask to her lap and putting her face in her hands.

Wanda looks over to Peggy who was eyeing her curiously, “The night of May 14th, 2019 Y/N was brought in after her car was hit by a drunk driver. We took care of all the injuries… But we found out she was about six weeks pregnant. Due to the stress of her injuries and the stress she was already under, she miscarried.”

Peggy’s jaw dropped at the news, slowly looking over to Y/N. She quickly adjusted herself on the bed to scoot closer to Y/N, pulling her into a secure hug and stroking her hair softly, “Shh… It’s okay… I’m so sorry, honey…I’m here…” She soothed gently. It all made sense of why Y/N didn’t come back before she was deployed and why she never talked to Bucky.

Eventually Wanda offered a light sedation for Y/N since she couldn’t stop crying and keep her breathing under control. Y/N drifted off to sleep from the sedative, her mind finally calming but the ache in her body didn’t fade. When she opened her eyes, it was nighttime. She looked over to the window to see Peggy and Steve talking to Wanda and Chief Miller outside of the room. Her attention was take when she felt a soft squeeze of her hand, looking over and seeing Bucky sitting in the chair staring at her with a small smile. The sight of him almost made her break again, pulling her hand out of his grasp and pulling the blanket up over her head to hide from his face.

“Hey, Y/N,” Bucky said with a small frown when she hid away from him under the blanket, “Baby, come on look at me. Talk to me.” He pleaded, trying to pull the blanket away from her face, “What happened, doll?”

Y.N eventually quit fighting the tug of war with the blanket, letting him pull it away from her face. She didn’t meet his gaze though, staring into her lap as tears started to roll down her face. She was amazed she still had any water left in her body to cry, “I can’t… You should go…”

“Fuck that, darlin. I’m not going anywhere when you’re crying.” Bucky told her, moving himself from the chair to sit by her bedside. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, leaning close and kissing her temple softly, “Talk to me, please.”

“I can’t.” Y/N replied, still not meeting his gaze as she shook her head, “I was finally feeling like everything was right in the world… Like I was back where I belonged with you… Safe.” She took in a sharp breath, releasing it slowly, “Now, it’s just all going to be ruined again. We’ll be ruined. You’ll leave.”

Bucky’s frown deepened at her words as scenarios ran through his mind of what Y/N could be talking about, studying her features intently, “No we won’t. I told you that you are the love of my life, Y/N. Nothing is going to change that.” He told her, moving his position to take her face in his hand and forcing her to look at him, “Now talk to me.”

Y/N stared at Bucky for what felt like forever, studying his face. She wondered what would reflect back to her in his eyes when she told him. Right now his eyes were pooled with concern for her but once she would tell him, they knew that concern would leave, “The night we fought… May seventh right?” She watched him nod, “On May fourteenth I was driving and I was hit by a drunk driver. I was taken to a hospital in Queens where I was treated.” She watched the concern grow in his eyes at her words, “I didn’t know I was six weeks pregnant and I lost the baby… Our baby… I would’ve came back if I knew, never left… But after I couldn’t come back to you.”

Bucky’s mouth parted slightly at the words, his eyes moving across the features of her face watching the tears leak down her face. He hadn’t even noticed his own tears starting to fall at the news. Guilt raked through his body at the words he had said that made her leave, put her in that position to get hurt. It would have never happened if he would’ve swallowed his own fear and anger at her deployment. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her into a tight hug, “I’m so sorry, doll.” He said through his own shaky breathes, trying to control his breathing as he cried, “I’m sorry, Y/N. I did this, it’s my fault… I’m so sorry.”

_____________________________________________________________Taglist: @vicmc624 @buckypops @shawnie--jo @ahahafudge @intothesoul @austynparksandpizza @stcrryslibrary

Shout out to @shawnie--jo for having a big brain and guessing correct (:

If I missed anybody on the taglist or you would like to be added, send me a quick message, comment, or ask. Thank you for the support (:

[fabdante]

Ok, last one. The Kat and Artemisia post. Incase you missed them, this is part of a trio of posts on Baroque art and the DmC reboot trio and a separate post on the DmC reboot and the Baroque as an art movement.

The other posts if you want to check them out: Dante and Caravaggio, Vergil and Benini, DmC and the Baroque

Today for the final installment in this little mini series, we’ll be discussing the artist who won the Baroque, Artemisia Gentileschi, and her painting Judith Slaying Holofernes, featured below. 

Analysis of this painting, why it’s such a bop, Kat, and the devil may cry reboot below the cut!

Content Warning: discussion of abuse as it relates to Kat.

I guess we start with the beginning and the beginning is who Judith is. 

Judith is a biblical character. Upon impending invasion, she is unsatisfied with the response of her people and decides to infiltrate the enemy camp with her maid, intent to stop the enemy army. After gaining the trust of the people there, she eventually seduces general Holofernes and is invited to his tent. Then she beheads him with what I am left to assume is his sword. I suppose given the painting that part’s a little spoiled. 

A lot of paintings focus on the beheading or Judith posing with the decapitated head in victory. But a lot of them don’t have the impact of Artemisias, as seen above. 

Judith, as painted by Artemisia, is full of rage. She is not serene or delicate. She is not posing or unsure. She is angry, certain, and out for blood. Everything in her expression and her movements is full of force and intent. It’s the little details like his hair between her knuckles from where she’s gripping it and the forceful twist of her wrist on his sword that she’s taken. To her rolled sleeves in her incredibly fancy dress. And it’s not afraid to be gory to. Perhaps this is tame by modern standards of blood and gore but for the time it’s very bloody and violent. Supposedly the violence was too much for the first owner who kept it hidden for some time (allegedly). I think it’s important that while the focus is Judith doing the act, her maid is not passive in the violence. She’s holding him down with just as much force as Judith. And unwavering to, despite how we can see how Holofernes was trying to throw her off before he died, his hands still limply in the air. The maids full of as much determination as Judith is. Judith’s dressed up for this to, in a fine gown with her hair done up. This is likely part of the ruse Judith set up before she got Holofernes alone, but I like the detail none the less. That she’s dressed up for this murder.

The key to why this painting fits Kat so much to me is how it is not only full of anger and femininity and violence but how in Artemisias hands, the image feels like a bloody catharsis. There’s something personal in Judith's glare, in her rage. Something kind of interesting to in how she’s forced Holofernes to look away from her, like he hasn’t earned the right to see her victory even if by this point he is surely dead (I mean, the sword is nearly through his neck). Or like she doesn’t want to look at him at all, like he’s not worth looking at.

Likewise, for Kat, hunting demons is personal. The Order is personal. Why she’s here doing this is personal.

It’s personal because Kat killed her abusive foster father. I don’t think how impressive this is truly gets conveyed. It’s almost a throw away statement. It’s just that one line, ‘I killed the bastard’, and that’s that. Like it was easy or something. In the reboot universe, though, she’s not even in the same dimension as her foster father. We don’t get a lot of information about how much a demons human form impacts their demon form. We are told Mundus is fused to his human form, but we’re also told this is because he’s been in it so long and also there’s the matter of his relationship to the hell gate. We’re not even told how long he’s been in this form. Has it been years, decades, centuries? How long is so long that it led to this fusion? So, I don’t think we can base the average demon to this. As far as we know in canon, it’s Kat against a being in another dimension. A dimension she cannot engage with physically and to which he can escape to at any time. 

And yet she kills him anyway.

She is the only human we know of in canon who’s done this, to. To be fair, she is the only human mentioned at all in the reboot canon but by how Dante positions himself as human savior and by how certain Vergil seems to be that humans cannot take care of themselves, this must be rare.

I cannot express enough how important it is that Kat is the one who kills him to. It’s not Vergil. She doesn’t say it was Vergil. It’s also not her and Vergil, she doesn’t say that either, she doesn’t say ‘we killed the bastard’. Kat says explicitly that she killed him, ‘I killed the bastard’. It’s Kats kill. No matter how much Vergil helped her, she did it. She killed her abuser despite the odds against her. 

I can’t imagine the sort of catharsis Kat must have felt in that moment. We don’t know how she killed him, she never says. The greatest crime of the comics, in my opinion, are how they take this kill away from Kat and give it to Vergil instead. Which means no further elaboration there on what went down. But I can imagine her in that moment after, unsure how to feel with the rush of adrenaline and power and newfound safety. She’s done it. She’s done something she must have thought was impossible. And she tells us in game how this made her feel emboldened to handle the rest of demon kind. She doesn’t tell us in that many words, I suppose, but she says that she wants to deal with them all because she killed her foster father.

To Kat, this is personal. To Kat, mankind is something worth saving that she is willing to do everything to save. We don’t see her violence in game, but we know she’s willing to kill for this freedom. We know she’s willing to die for it to, given the aftermath of the Orders fall. It’s personal. And Kat sees it as something far bigger then her.

Often Kat I think is written off as someone who is naïve and weak and in need of saving. I’ve complained at length how I feel about her being called naïve. In game we see a very interesting, complex person in Kat I think. I’ve said before that it’s kind of fun to just watch her in scenes. Like really watch her. She has very deliberate body language that often betrays this calm she’s fighting to display, particularly around Dante for the first half of the game or so. It’s little things like how she physically contains herself after the ‘I like it rough’ comment, shutting her eyes and taking in a deep breath, but things that are there. She’s someone who, despite everything, is fighting to be a softer, kinder person even if she’s still got a lot of anger (Vergil does compare her and Dante, after all).

And being soft and kind does not make someone weak. Existing in a world where you are at a disadvantage to the things that aim to hurt you is not weak. Entering into your enemies tent armed with nothing but an elaborate gown and your anger, waiting until you spot a sword and an opportunity is not weak either.

I think something about Kat that is so often forgotten in the drama of the twins and everything else (because lets face it, no matter the media, female characters tend to get side lined for...everything else really), is without her the twins would have failed. It’s Kat who gets Dante and safely brings him to the Order. It’s Kat’s spells that bridge the human world to Limbo. It’s Kat who saves Vergil in the server room by way of bringing Dante to him. It’s Kat who ultimately gives the twins the final plan to get to Mundus. It was her. Dante says so at the end, to. The game recognizes that without Kat, the boys have nothing. And it's still Kat at the end who saves Vergil, and saves Dante from the guilt of killing him.

With Kat taking so much into her own hands despite her disadvantage, despite just being human, despite her softness, despite this rage boiling under her skin (or perhaps because of it), she is so much of why the world is free from demons. 

I mean Artemisia herself got that treatment, largely left out of artistic canon until very recently despite her success during her time. I also debated for a very, very long time across the many, many iteration of this essay on how much I talk about Artemisia’s personal life. I suppose if you made it this far you’ve seen that I’ve chosen not to, despite how it could be relevant to this discussion. But I think her work stands on it’s own without me having to justify the anger Artemisia may have personally felt and conveyed here without bringing up her personal life in depth. Though, if you want to know, I assure you that pretty much any information you look up on Artemisia will go into detail on her personal traumas and how that might impact her work. And it could definitely be relevant angle in discussing Kat and Artemisia, I just felt it overall did not add to this essay.

I often wonder, if she was in a different game or a different medium or a different story, if Kat might get more love. So often she’s called weak for the crime of not having a big weapon and a trail of dead demons behind her. So often she’s reduced to a love interest or a damsel despite how she is really the thing that saved the day, despite the fact her relationship with both twins is much more then ‘potential love interest’. And how many times have you  guys seen a post on your dash about wishing a character picked to enact revenge on an abuser? How they fought to be soft despite their trauma and pain? But I suppose, as is often the case with women in any story, she might have gotten this treatment anyway.

So, here’s to Kat. The brain cell, the Nephilim baby sitter, the girl who wanted to throw Vergil off a cliff, the hero Limbo city got who will never get enough credit, and forever the girl who deserved more. 

Those of us who love you will love you enough for the whole fandom, it’s alright.

[the-twewy-sequel]

TWEWY: The Animation - Episode 1 Review

Like a bolt from the blue, it’s time for the TWEWY Anime Review!

After a lot of anticipation, it's finally here, and I sure do have a lot to say. So no stalling—let's get to it!

The show starts off right about where you’d expect it to—Neku waking up in the Scramble Crossing—and to me, a strong feeling that “the animators did their research”.

From the early scenes where Neku dodges incoming traffic in a movement style reminiscent of his dodge animation in TWEWY, to the poses and facial expressions of the characters introduced so far, the way the show is presented and paced feels not only natural, but authentically “TWEWY”.

Remember this pose? She also does the hand-wavy thing too, but animated, and it's great.

Of course, the foundation of this authenticity is the amazing art style that we knew we were being treated to from previous trailers—not just colorful and vibrant, but endearing through its simpleness, immersive, and an overall pleasure to look at. Then, throw in the excellent voice acting from some notable voice artists, well-executed dialog that feels accurate to the characters, and thankfully, actually treating partners like they're both important—I was admittedly sort of worried they would make Shiki seem a bit too weak/helpless, but she's moving around, fighting, and carrying her weight like I'd expect her to—and you get something that I think is, at the very least, trying to do justice to the source material as best as it reasonably can.

However, while the art style is pretty great when there's not much movement going on, it does take small hits from the usual pitfalls of 3D/CG animation. The variance of thickness in the lines and slight heaviness in the movement as the models are rotated in combat scenes feel like they give themselves away, and it can sometimes be a little bit difficult to process what's happening in fight scenes. I felt this was especially evident against the bear-like noise where Neku and Shiki do the anime's version of "syncing up" for the first time.

However, as long as you're not analyzing it too much, it shouldn't be a deal-breaker or anything. It's not like the CG jumps out at you or anything, right?

Story-wise, it's an adaptation of a game, so it's given it's going to cut some corners and simplify some things—but again, I don't think anything that's a deal-breaker has been cut-out yet. Smartphones are updated, missions might be simplified a bit, and Rhyme can apparently shoot energy-somethings around, but I think it's paced so that people who haven't played the game won't lose interest, which I think is fair given that RPGs can be a bit "slow" to get interesting.

Further more, even though we're only a single episode in, we've already established the core cast of both player characters and antagonistic ones, and just enough information has been given to give us a sense of what the characters relationships are—or in some cases, could be.

Rhyme and Beat seem to get along fairly well, while Neku and Shiki... well, don't, actually, but also Shiki is so forgiving and flexible it kind of works out, and Neku DOES show signs that he's not a jerk at heart.

And like in the game, Neku adds a bit of tension to everything, but the goodwill of everyone else keeps things going for the moment. In the mean time, the viewer is getting used to the whole premise of this "death game", what the enemies are like, and more, and I think just setting things up like this is all we could ask for in an intro episode.

Beyond the story and visuals though, it would be a disservice not to mention the music, which features both familiar and original tracks that I think are mostly used well—one could maybe argue the game songs don't perfectly fit an animation context, but if they continue a balance of hitting us with the soundtrack-based fan-service and playing music that fits the actual context, there should be nothing to worry about.

While I don't have too much to say on the general sound design, it definitely felt fine and fitting enough that... well, I don't have anything to say. Sometimes saying nothing is a good thing, yeah? Just not necessarily in Neku's case...

Given that it's the first episode, me and everyone else watching are forming first impressions, but it'll be exciting to get comfortable in this visually mesmerizing show (the scenes that don't clearly look like CG are seriously, seriously beautiful IMO—I'm actually kind of moved, haha) and see how the pacing adjusts as we go through the... well, you all know how many days it is, right? ;) For now though: thanks for reading, I look forward to your thoughts, and I'm excited for the next episode! --- First Impressions: 7.5/10 if I'm trying to be objective about it (it's a game adaptation, it can only be so good imo), but 9/10 because I'm a diehard TWEWY fan XD

[nomolosk]

“I hope all the documents are in order,” Adrien Agreste said, looking and sounding smug over the transmission. His ship was currently en route to the Francoise Space Station orbiting the planet Dupont, where the Dupain-Cheng’s had based their surface-to-orbit shipping business. Marinette Dupain-Cheng didn’t bother trying to suppress her glare. He should be well aware of the reasons for her frustration, but she reminded him anyway.

“Yes, Mr. Agreste Junior, the documents are in order,” she replied. “They have been waiting for your signature for the past month. A month in which, I might add, we haven’t been able to do any business at all.”

“My apologies for the delay,” Adrien said - but neither tone nor expression changed an iota.

By all the gods in the heavens, Marinette loathed this man. She couldn’t imagine any future in which she didn’t, especially given the reason for his visit today. He was going to buy out her parents’ business, and Marinette only had to deal with him because she’d refused to make her parents deal with him after everything else they had gone through. Unfortunately, this had only confirmed his awful reputation.

When it came to systematically ruining and then buying out competitors, Adrien Agreste - the scion of Agreste Shipping - was a one-man juggernaut, apparently all too eager to do a few dirty deeds in order to keep his otherwise indulgent lifestyle. By all reports he was a true Daddy’s boy, playing with money, power, and hearts as if he had no concept of personal responsibility. After all, Daddy Agreste would take care of any... unpleasantness. And all he had to do was be dear Daddy’s hatchet-man. It looked like he enjoyed it, too.

Fortunately, she had the means to wipe that self-satisfied look off his face permanently, thanks to a mole who called himself Chat Noir. He’d been feeding her inside information for over a year - information that had let her and the crew of the Miraculous put quite a dent in the Agreste Shipping bottom line. But for now, she had to play along.

“Just make sure you’re on time,” Marinette said through gritted teeth. “You’ve tortured my family enough. No need to drag it out any longer.”

“I’ll be only too happy to accommodate your schedule, Ms. Dupain-Cheng,” Adrien said. “And perhaps, afterward, you will let me buy you a drink to... commemorate the occasion.”

A smirk - an actual, god-forsaken smirk - appeared on his face. Marinette’s fingernails dug painfully into her palms. If he’d been within reach at that moment, he would have found himself flat on the floor with several broken bones, and Marinette would have found herself in a holding cell on charges of assault. Breathing deeply, Marinette reminded herself of the plan, and terminated the transmission before she could incriminate herself.

As soon as Adrien Agreste’s smug, smarmy, and infuriatingly handsome face disappeared from her screen, she closed her eyes and breathed, letting out all the tension and anger that had built up during their brief conversation. After all, under the right circumstances, Adrien Agreste might be exactly what her parents, and countless other victims, needed: a valuable hostage.

----

Adrien let that god-awful smirk linger for a moment before wiping it away with a weary hand. He slumped back in his seat and started massaging one temple while he swiped back to his desktop screen on the terminal.

He’d always hated this part, even back when he'd been naive enough to believe that the firm he was about to buy out had just had a run of bad luck. Back then he would have been secure in the knowledge that the ‘merger’ he’d ‘negotiated’ was a good deal for both parties, but he’d still been aware that it was a defeat for the original owners.

Now he knew all too well the depths Gabriel would sink to - the depths he would drag Adrien down to - all for the sake of his precious shipping empire. The clear disgust and loathing on that woman’s face only added to his own sense of personal guilt and disgust.

At least this time, if everything went according to plan, this family’s business would be just fine. This time, Adrien could look forward to handing control of that company back to the people who’d built it. He glanced at the time on the terminal and took a deep, calming breath.

Please, Ladybug… don’t let me down.

Adrien, in his persona as the mole Chat Noir, had given Ladybug and her team of raiders especially good intel this time, all but painting the word TARGET in bold letters on his own face. That, plus the file he’d sent containing a preview of every last blot on his father’s stainless reputation… yes. He knew how much Ladybug loathed Adrien Agreste personally. She’d often claimed a burning need to punch his face in their double-encoded communiques - not that she knew it was his face - so he was sure she would jump at the chance. He only hoped she could pull it off.

The raiding crew of the Miraculous had caused enough disruption to the Agreste Shipping lines that Gabriel had actually hired the Akumas - a mercenary group known for their brutal efficiency - to track her down. Chat Noir had warned her, and so far she’d managed to elude their crack agents, making them look remarkably foolish in the process.

He only hoped that, when the time came and he found himself on board the Miraculous at last, that she would leave him enough wits - and teeth - to stutter out the recognition phrase Chat Noir had given her.

----

Ladybug’s assault and infiltration were quieter than Adrien had expected. He wasn’t part of the Hawkmoth’s crew, so when the alarms went off, his only role was to get to a secure area and stay out of everyone else’s way. The most he heard of it was the alarm and muffled shouting in the distance while Nathalie hurried him away.

It wasn’t what he wanted - he would much rather have had an active role in the ship’s defense. But of course Gabriel would never allow that, and Nathalie enforced his rules with an iron fist. So he ended up crouched behind Nathalie and his Personal Gorilla Bodyguard™, waiting breathlessly for Ladybug to find them in the reinforced bunker that posed as a small cargo hold in the ship designs. Every small sound echoed in the space, but he wasn’t bothered by it. In fact, he hoped Ladybug’s team had audio sensors sensitive enough to pick them up.

A touch on his shoulder made his heart rate skyrocket even more - but it was only Nathalie, turning to check on him. Adrien covered her hand with his own and squeezed, letting some of his excitement show with a shaky breath. She must have assumed he was scared and squeezed back before turning to the hatch and adjusting her grip on her firearm.

He’d tried to talk her into giving him one of the shipboard assault rifles, too. He wanted to make sure his ‘protectors’ went down quickly if need be, but he told her that he needed some way to defend himself. She’d only given him a look. Apparently Gabriel was willing to sacrifice his only son before allowing him a weapon.

God he couldn’t wait to be free of his life.

A commotion in the corridor outside focused his attention. A sizzling sound came from the door and it whooshed open, briefly blinding him before the bulky forms of the intruders blocked the light. The dark shapes were outlined in silhouettes the color of their hardened spacesuits: pink, orange, green, and gold. His heart leaped again and he fought to suppress a smile.

Nathalie and the bodyguard were quickly dispatched with stun blasts, though it took several simultaneous shots to bring the bodyguard down. Then it was Adrien’s turn. He scooted back as the leader advanced, heart pounding with excitement and fear. Chat Noir had advocated for a hostage situation, but it was possible that Ladybug had decided on outright assassination. One way or another, this would all be over shortly.

The pink-haloed leader raised her weapon, pointing it at him. Adrien gulped and closed his eyes. He didn’t even have time to register the blast before his mind went numb.

----

Marinette leaned against a cabinet in the medbay, waiting for their hostage to wake up. It shouldn’t take long - the effects of the stunners they’d used could be counteracted by the contents of any decently stocked medbay, and Marinette made sure the Miraculous was always overstocked with medical supplies.

Her crew was there, too, all except for Max, who couldn’t leave the bridge. Nino and Alya were busy flirting with each other, Kim was trying to balance a (needle-less) syringe on the end of his nose, and Markov hovered overhead, ready to record everything. Marinette was taking no chances on being accused of human rights violations, though her hands ached with the need to punch their guest.

The unfairly attractive blonde strapped to the medical chair in front of her stirred, and the tension in the room skyrocketed. Kim put the syringe down, Nino and Alya looked up, and Markov beeped to indicate recording was in progress. Marinette also stood up and crossed her arms to avoid temptation.

Adrien Agreste opened unfocused eyes, staring into space with his head lolling a bit. He was clearly still out of it, but it didn’t take long for him to come to full alertness. Curiously, he remained silent, merely looking around the room in a manner so unconcerned that it immediately made Marinette suspicious.

“Are you carrying a tracker?” she asked harshly. They’d scanned him for any such device, of course, but it was possible Agreste Senior managed to obtain something small enough that it wouldn’t show up on a scan.

Agreste Junior met her eyes and his own widened slightly in obvious recognition. “Uh… no. Not that I’m aware of, I mean.”

He smiled, and it was... joyful?

“I’m afraid I’m going to miss that meeting after all, Ms. Dupain-Cheng, though I still hope for that drink sometime. Looks like you’ll just have to keep control of your own business. Thanks for not killing me, by the way - to all of you. I know you must have been tempted,” he added, looking around at them all before leaning his head back with a satisfied smile. “I wish I could see the look on my father’s face when he realizes he’s not getting me back.”

His tone was so full of glee that Marinette barely managed to keep her mouth from dropping open, but she must have looked as astonished as she felt, because his smile turned into a full-fledged grin.

“Oh, haven’t you figured it out yet, Ladybug?” he said, grinning and winking at her. Then he said the three words she’d been waiting to hear for over a year now, ever since her informant had told her he wanted out. Words she’d imagined coming out of the mouth of anyone - literally anyone - but his.

“Plagg, claws out.”

All four of them gasped. Marinette gaped at the man she'd thought she would loathe for all eternity.

“Chat Noir?”

----

“I trust the papers are in order,” Marinette Dupain-Cheng said, smiling at everyone on the other side of the conference table. Her parents sat beside her, but they continued to let her take the lead.

“Drawn up and ready to sign,” the lawyer said, tapping on a tablet before handing it to her. Beside him, Adrien Agreste smiled softly at her. Marinette ignored him and read the documents carefully, making sure that what remained of Agreste Shipping relinquished all claim to her parents’ business, and that the court-mandated payout would cover all the expenses of getting back up and running, with a nice cushion. Satisfied, she handed the tablet to her mother and father, who read and signed it. There was a round of handshakes and congratulations - sincere, as far as she could tell, with no trace of Adrien’s former smug persona.

“Well,” Marinette said, once everyone else had left. “I believe you owe me a drink.”

Adrien’s face lit up. “I do, indeed! Well, who am I to go back on my word? Shall we?”

He held out his arm and Marinette took it. After all, Ladybug had trusted Chat Noir and that had turned out well. Perhaps the future for Marinette and Adrien was equally bright.

@luckycharmzine

[mack3030]

i feel like you're a c0mmie /lh

First of all, there is a reason that assume is spelled the way it is, but I'll answer this seriously because I'm in the mood to. First of all, hating how commercialism and monetization has taken over what should be an open-source community does not mean I am a communist. It means that I just think that there are some places and communities that don't need everything to be transactionary. I'm all for people making money with their own labor, talent and tools but the truth is, when you're making works for the Sims 4, the labor and talent is not all you. And I personally don't think it's fair for people to monetize what is essentially a derivitive work, especially when they use that as an excuse to act like asshats to the community on top of it. First of all, you are using EA's platform/game which they worked hard on as a display for your work. To get your CC, poses, or mods to work in the game, you have to use their tuning files, and/or clone their objects in Sims 4 Studio or another similar program. Which, ironically...let's think about it...oh wait...Sims 4 Studio is a FREE program that someone else made. And they FREELY update it and add important patch-fixes to the community for zero cost. Again. Not your work. In addition, there are a LARGE number of very WELL known sims 4 creators {especially in the alpha side of things} who are converting from 3D models they didn't make in the first place, and doing it unethically without talking to the original owners of the models. So that compounds the "not your work" argument further. If people want to sell 3D stuff they made on a 3D modeling site, or on a site that has terms that allow it like secondlife, they can go wild. But this community, when it originally started, hated and villified paywallers, because the community was open and focused on sharing and being creative. Sadly, we've strayed from how things used to be, and have slowly let in drips and drips of monetization until we basically expect that everything we try to download is going to lead to an ad or a patreon-locked page. And that f'ing sucks.

Also, let's turn to the dictionary and look up COMMUNISM, shall we? {Because I'm the daughter of a history teacher, and I like talking about history and stuff like this.}

If I were a communist, here are some statements I'd probably make: - We all own all CC that is made, and can freely share it regardless of who made it in the first place. [Oh wait, I've talked before about how you should talk to people who own rights to the original 3D models, and how we shouldn't share early access content. Darn.] - Each person who is the community must work for the betterment of the community. Nobody can freeload, or else they will not get any cc or spoils at all. [But wait, I've never said anything about how everyone has to work on something to receive CC. Because obviously I currently don't have the talent yet to make custom content by myself. Darn it again.]

- People should be paid based on their cc making abilities. So people who mesh their own stuff like Bill L and Syb should be paid more than people who convert! [Wait, I've not said that either. I have said that people need to be ethical and give credit when converting, but I haven't said that people who hand mesh deserve to be paid more...shucks.] Also, let me be real....communism is one of those things that is often FORCED upon people. The main people who choose to be communist, are usually people high up in the ponzi-scheme that is that political system, because they want to gain power, wealth, or other resources off the backs of their people. Many people who are in communist countries don't choose to be communist, they just...are...because the people in power are and make them be that way. It's a system that benefits few, and hurts many. And that's not what I'm about. The fact that you're so ignorant about how this system causes people to suffer while those in power grow rich and fat just shows your immaturity {and your lack of capitalization doesn't help either}. I'm an artist. I believe artistic spaces should be about sharing and creating, not profit. Especially when the PLATFORM and the TOOLS we are given to make that art are not our own. I feel making a profit off a community that already has been fleeced so much by EA is just ethically yucky. One last thing, here's a couple documentaries about Communism and Facism, should you decide you want to educate yourself on how those political systems actually work, and why they should be avoided: How to Become a Tyrant - Documentary Series, Netflix Evolution of Evil - Documentary Series, Amazon Prime Video I would highly recommend both as they dive very deeply into what makes someone a dictator, and you will find that communism/facism are both primary tools used by evil people suffering from delusions of grandeur to achieve such power over their people. I'd also recommend reading books on the subject, but you don't seem like the type who'd enjoy that. I hope you've learned a little something. If you don't like my answer, here's where you can go to solve that problem!

[rjhpandapaws]

Something Familiar

Chapter 2: Lessons in Good Faith Tw: PTSD and mentions of torture and death

Living with Daniel was a lesson in many things. A lesson in patience, trust, and it was a constant trial in checking is biases. Daniel was one of the few good humans, and Silas’s fear still ran unchecked. He knew it would take time to work through all of his baggage, and that Daniel was willing to wait. The thing was that Silas wanted to trust him, but couldn’t because there was still too much in the way. Daniel had even given him space after they sealed the contract. Silas bore the mark of it on the inside of his left wrist. A small circle of red, yellow, and blue lining. Daniel had the same on his left wrist as well. It marked them as equals, but it still felt like imprisonment to Silas. He was grateful for the week alone though. It gave him time to get used to his human shape again. He spent a lot of his time on the upstairs balcony watching the world go by with out him. Being outside like this was something he hadn’t been able to do for years. He would have preferred to change shape and wander, maybe even fly; but he was still on the mend and under strict orders not to shift unless it was an emergency. Daniel wasn’t here to stop him. He could have run away, and yet he stayed. Like a good Familiar.

When Daniel came back Silas’s private moments gained a witness, and his nightmares gained an exit. Daniel was always gentle when he woke Silas. He made sure he was genuinely awake and then let him come back to the real world on his own. He would offer to listen and Silas would always turn him down. There were nights that were worse. Nights when he didn’t dream, but remembered. The sleep he got was always more restful on those nights, but waking up always hurt worse. He woke up buried under the weight of all the things he should have done; could have done if he was a better person. On these mornings the only thing he wanted was space to think. So he would quietly make himself coffee and head up to the balcony. Daniel always came up eventually, and he usually brought breakfast with him. He would set the tray down on the small glass table and take a moment to observe Silas. He never said was he was looking for, but Silas assumed he found it because he would go back inside after a while. As a healer it wasn’t in Daniel’s nature to leave things alone, but he seemed to understand that Silas needed time to himself every once in a while. It was something Silas was grateful for. Someday he would let Daniel in, he deserved to know what he had gotten stuck with.

He woke suddenly from a dead sleep and sighed. He could still see Connor clearly in his mind, the fear in his eyes as they were separated almost felt accusing now. He should have stayed. He should have done a lot of things, but he was a coward and ran away instead. Silas got up with a practiced silence and started on his coffee. The house was still dark, but he had the kitchen layout memorized. By the time his coffee was ready he could use the early rays of dawn to make it up to the balcony. Today was going to be long and painful. He leaned against the front railing of the balcony to watch the sunrise and let his thoughts run loose with him. If he got it out of his system now, then maybe he could be something close to composed by the time Daniel came up to check on him. So for now, he would let himself remember. They were good things at first. His childhood, play fighting with his brothers. Learning the importance of the ancient magic they carried with them. The rush of freedom that came from knowing a thought was all it took to become any creature he wanted. The sacred bind that came with choosing a patron mage. There was a complexity that came with choosing to be a Familiar. It was a bond based on sharing strength and it lasted a lifetime. Different from a contract.

He remembered the day everything changed. The day the world as he understood it would come to an end. It was a normal day, he and his brothers woke up and did their chores, but never made it back to the house. Traps had been set in the night and each of them fell victim to one. He remembered waking up in the dark and in pain, surrounded by everyone from his village. All of them had been taken. They were given a week to recover and adjust to their new life before the Conditioning started. Each of them was branded with a unique number. Something that could be used to find them in the event that one of them escaped. The ones that the Conditioning worked on disappeared. Bought by mages that believed them to be Creature Familiars. Those who didn’t take to the Conditioning were tortured until they broke. It went on like this until their anger finally outweighed their fear. Their revolt; if it could really even be called that; was a failure in Silas’s opinion. So many of them had died. Freedom for the few of them that had made it out was paid for in the blood of those who hadn’t. Silas had taken his new freedom and run to the nearest mage. Signed it away in exchange for survival. Even if Daniel saw them as equals; Silas had still done the exact thing they had fought so hard to be freed from. He would have almost rather having died. Almost.

He could feel Daniel’s eyes on him and had the feeling he wasn’t going to be able to get out of this one without talking. He knew Daniel wouldn’t ask outright, but would linger until Silas said something. It Gave the illusion that he had other options; but if he wanted to be alone he would have to say something. “There were three of us, you know, that made it out.” He began and did what he could to keep the emotion out of his voice, “Me and then two of my brothers. I lost them in our mad dash to get out, and now I don’t know if they’re even alive.” He tried to blink away his tears, but they only rolled down his cheeks instead, “After everything we’d been through; I couldn’t be bothered to stay. I ran away like a fucking coward and sold myself out in a desperate bid to survive. Some fucking brother I am.” Daniel was quiet for a long while. This was the most Silas had ever ‘willingly’ said to him. “In a few weeks you’ll be healed enough to handle mildly strenuous activity.” He said eventually, “We could go looking for them if you would like.” Cold heavy dread settled in the pit of Silas’s stomach, “Why?” He snapped, “So you can add them to your collection? So you can have the complete set of the last shapeshifters known to man?”

“No.” Daniel replied sharply, “So you can have some damn closure and a place to stay once the contract is up. I actually want you to be safe, believe it or not.” Silas flinched. He knew Daniel wasn’t the same as the other humans he had dealt with, but he was still afraid. He set down his mug of long forgotten coffee and breathed out a defeated sigh. It was too early in the morning for a fight. On top of that, Daniel hadn’t done anything to deserve this. The contract was a means of protecting him. He understood that. “I’m sorry. You’ve been nothing but kind to me, and yet I still fear completely offering you my trust.” He said after the silence had long since grown uncomfortable, “You may very well be the only human with my best interests at heart and I keep pushing you away.” He took a deep breath and tuned to face Daniel, “I’ll think about it, but that is asking a lot of faith from me; and for now, I think I would rather be alone.” Daniel looked away from him and his shoulders slumped, “I understand.” His voice was almost level, but hurt lingered just beneath the surface, “I’ll be in the house if you need me.” Silas watched him leave and wondered if he should have been gentler. It wasn’t Daniel’s fault he’d gone through all that, but he had nothing else to do with all his anger. Burying it clearly hadn’t helped. 

He picked through the food Daniel had brought up for him and tried to gather himself a little more. Daniel didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of his anger. He wasn’t responsible for what was done to him. He was the only person that was trying to help. The least Silas could do was give him the results he wanted. Even if they were fake. Time to see if he could even manage to be a convincing liar. The sooner he seemed well, the sooner he could get out of here. He didn’t know where he would go, yet, but he was sure he would find his place eventually. On top of that Daniel wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. He could go back to whatever it was he had been doing before Silas had come crashing into his life. It was late in the day when Silas had gathered enough of himself back together to handle being around another person. He didn’t say anything to Daniel when he came back; because he looked busy, and because he simply didn’t feel like it. He got to work on the dishes so he would have less to do later in the evening. “I’m sorry Silas.” Daniel broke the silence after a while, “For this morning. It was insensitive and out of line.”

The laugh that hitched and bubbled it’s way out of his chest was bitter and humorless. It surprised him, this was the first time he had laughed in years. “Was it?” He asked coolly, “Are you rescinding your offer to help me find my only remaining relatives then?” “Well, no.” Daniel scrambled, “I just; I wanted you to know that I meant no offense by it.” He explained and Silas relaxed some, “I feel like I’ve messed something up, and I want to know how I can fix it. I hate seeing you so upset.” “It’s a matter of learning to trust you.” He said and looked down at his hands, “My whole life up until now has been spent in fear of humans. I just have to keep in mind that you haven’t posed a danger to me yet. Sorry for being so... defensive, I guess would be the word.” “You’re alright.” He replied kindly, “These things take time. Even at that, you have a lot of trauma to work through and-” “Daniel stop.” Silas interrupted, “I need someone to listen to me, not psychoanalyze me. Believe me, I am well aware of all my trauma and the power imbalance of our dynamic. I really don’t need the reminder.” “Right.” He agreed with a sharp nod, “It can be difficult to turn my doctor off sometimes.”

“I understand.” Silas replied as he leaned against the counter to face Daniel, “It’s the only way people will acknowledge you, so it has become your primary mode of existing.” He watched with mild amusement as Daniel’s jaw dropped, “You’re more than that to me, you know. You’re the closest thing to a friend I’ve had actually.” “First of all, ow.” He said with a laugh and put his hand over his heart, “Secondly, what happened to not psychoanalyzing each other? I’m glad you think of me as a friend though.” Silas smiled, and it felt strange after not having done so for so long, “I figured that you’ve done it to me enough times that I deserved a turn.” “Fair enough.” Daniel replied as he began to put his things away. “How many weeks?” Silas asked once his curiosity got the better of him, “Until we can leave?” He was quiet for a long while before he replied, “Six, if you mind your limitations; eight to twelve if you keep ignoring them like this.” His smile fell away, “That was a lot more than I was hoping for.” Daniel just shrugged, “You’ve been stubborn. Agitating your old injuries and coming back from your little excursions with new ones. You need to rest.”

“Fine.” He said as he made his way to the bookshelf to go through the travelers’ guides, “I’ll be a better patient from here on out.” He settled on his bed with the books he had grabbed, “Six weeks should be enough time to find a place to start.” “Of course it will.” Daniel replied with a gentle smile Silas felt like he hadn’t been meant to see. It was finally time to venture out into the world. He just hoped they found Connor and Richard before anyone else did. If he lost his brothers he wouldn’t have anyone left. There was no way he could survive that.

[divinaes-bookofsecrets]

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Techno Witch

Filed under: Pagan Life, Spells & Potions — Leave a comment

I work with technology a lot, including virtual reality, and it made me wonder what or how it could pose as some good use for magick and witchcraft.

At the start of being Pagan, many things I did were very offline. I read physical books, went to physical locations such as the library and metaphysical shop, wrote in my physical B.O.S., things like that. If anything, I preferred it that way, things were very much in reach and given the history of magick is very much more so on paper than in bytes, it made better sense to me.

But eventually, technology got better and easier. More and more resources were online, and reliable resources at that. Granted, there is still a lot of bunk and dribble on the internet. Why people like to pick up spells from random corners of the internet is beyond me. If they are easy to get and plain out there for the world to see and, even worse, come with a price tag, it is probably fake. Some witches do indeed do paid spellwork/pay for pray but not to the excessive number that exists on the internet. More on that later, but basically, tech made witchy info collecting easier. It has probably been a while since I have penned in my B.O.S. but, if anything, I have more of a Disk of Shadows (D.O.S.) now. I have particular tumblrs and tags that I follow or curate on my own that are informative and helpful to my works and endeavors. They’re sometimes really hard to find, and sometimes they are not (if you know what to look for). There are more digital groups for Black Pagans and other minorities/poc now than when I started over a decade ago. Due to the internet, there is better access to much better information about non-European cultures that is not filtered through the perspective of a random White academic slathering on a layer of their own personal bias to the details and calling it “correct, accurate and objective information”. People can do their own research and not be blocked by institutions or paywalls.

But there’s still a lot of bunk on the internet. Due to the pop culture sensation of “witchiness” (basically think of anything American Horror Story, The Craft and the Sabrina reboot has pumped out, add some culture-vulturing via “I am a bruerja” and you got it), it makes decent info still rather hard to find. Since books and old texts that may or may not be translated well or correctly are not that popular, it is easier to find people who, frankly, don’t really know much of what they are doing, they just really like sage, cultural appropriation, gothic clothing and perhaps nursing a drug habit. They’re all over Instagram with their filter-laden pictures, offering to cast spells and do divination (usually tarot, because, what else are they going to learn? Cartomancy? Numerology? I Ching? Elective Astrology? Not as popular) but don’t seem to really know much about ethics and the other boring stuff of learning actual, proper witchcraft. It’s easy to blame just about everything on Mercury retrogrades but if that person has never heard of an ephemera before, they probably are also dead wrong about anything retrograde as well. Spells are cool and mysterious (not really), reading and research is … well, how many pop culture witch characters have you seen buzzing around countless books going “I thiiiiiiiiink this is definitely super old school Congolese – liiiiike, way, way, before colonialization. And of course, it’s a half-page passage in an out-of-print book and features a next-to-dead language. So we should either pick a different spell, or start bothering really old people who may or may not remember such a language – assuming the invading White folks did not torch or steal their cultural history – oh wait, it’s sitting in the British museum, with an incorrect placard and everything. Great, now may we have to talk to stuck up, myopic, well-dressed thieves that think they’re not stuck up, narcissistically stupid, or sticky fingered because ‘I have a degree and institutional prejudice is on my side’. You know what? Killmonger had some good ideas. Someone grab some coffee, that is probably the easier option”? Outside of Hermione Granger, not really anyone in witchy pop culture is very “research is good, research is great, research keeps random entities you summoned and can’t get rid of out of your home and life.” So it can make good info hard to break through the ether. Nothing is wrong with liking pop culture depictions of magic – I get a kick out of Doom Patrol’s magnificent depiction of chaos magick – but it is a bit of a problem when people try to base their practice on movie magic. Yes, psionics is real, yes, magic is real but no, it doesn’t look exactly like the tv and movies. If anything, they can be a lot more stressful and annoying.

I think being a technology-based witch, for me, is simply involving technology in your practice. I have thought of the idea of making a virtual space for spellwork and personal practice but then I think about my track record with magick, energy movement and electrical items. VR systems are pricy and I have made electrical items go ka-put. And, again, VR systems are pricy. But others could benefit, especially those who may not have the space or safety to comfortably practice in the real world. You can make whatever you want in the virtual world and it can be your own spot. A digital altar, a digital casting circle, the list goes on and on.

At first, I wasn’t too sure of these things because, well, they are new. No one was using computers for such practices – or any practices – centuries ago. But all technology, no matter how rudimentary, was considered new at one point. All creations were considered new at one point. From the typewriter, to the wheel, to fire itself. Certainly the deities can be understanding of some of these changes. As long as the changes are relatively seamless, especially for some deities. For example, some sun gods probably would not be too keen on the use of cell phone flashlights vs. actual natural light sources, like a flame made from the sun’s rays. I imagine working with water deities would be stress-inducing unless you are very confident in the IP rating of your technology and trickster deities + internet is probably literal trouble if you do not know what you are doing.

Has all my practices gone digital? I don’t think so but I do think a vast majority of it has. It has been the easier option for me but I always bear in mind that it is good to at least have back ups and that not everything worthwhile is on a computer. There is still always going to be a need for physical things. Links die, computers break and sometime technology can over-complicate simple processes. That and not everything is on the internet, not everything has been digitized and some things are simply harder to find digitally because the metadata is not up to snuff or it is plain incorrect. Thus it is good to find a decent balance, even if that balance is majority tech with analog supports.

Source:

Source:

[manyblinkinglights]

MY PERSONAL TAKE ON UNITY-”HUMANOID” FERAL AVATAR RIGGING FOR VRCHAT

First of all: this is actually not that bad. If you avoid the many pitfalls I will lay out for you in this tutorial, the worst thing about the hookup process is the same thing that’s bad about everything in Unity: dragging the little thingies into their little boxies gets kind of tedious. 

NUMBERED LIST: 

1. Start with Rigify’s meta-human. 

2. Modify it by deleting extra bones, and

3. altering the hips and legs and shoulders for compatibility with VRChat’s full-body IK, as per Kung’s YouTube tutorial. 

4. Build your quad model around the head, neck, chest, spine, and hips of your Humanoid. 

5. Lock your Humanoid legs and arms out of weight painting.

6. Rig your quad model, and

7. Get it into Unity. 

8. Start putting rotation constraints on all/most of your quad model’s bones (I’ll tell you TWO BIG SECRETS). edit: I forget what two things were supposed to be the secrets. Pick whichever two things helped you most and let’s just call those the secrets. 

9. Build and test your avatar, then start tweaking your constraint weights until you get the effect you want!

**

ADVICE: 

part A: You can test an activated quad leg rotation constraint directly in your scene by applying it, and then grabbing your humanoid thigh or shin transform and rotating that, but YOU HAVE TO CTRL-Z IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS. NEVER apply a rotation constraint to a bone that’s been left out of its default position!

part B: Always, always, ALWAYS and only, only ONLY work on your Armature in Blender from full X, Y, or Z isometric view with X-mirroring on.  

KNOWN LIMITATIONS: 

The levelling bone in your backbone always points directly back, relative to root, from the user’s hips; they twist up and leave it behind if they turn from side to side too far, all the way around, or, god forbid, hit VRCEmote 6 (backflip). You cannot sexy poledance or flop onto the couch in this style of avatar without making a spectacle of yourself. 

If there’s some crazy calculus that’d spit out the exact right leg lengths and constraint weights to perfectly eliminate foot-vs-floor clipping at every height, I do not know it. There are just too many variables at play; put whatever leg lengths onto your quad that it requires, and then try to come up with rough, biomechanically-inspired values for your constraint weights such that your quad feet wind up near the same elevation as your Humanoid core’s feet when you enter the Humanoid sit position. If you do this your end result will be PRETTY DARN GOOD at standing and bending/dancing heights, but it WILL get squirrelly as you approach crouch. That’s just the way it is; in fact I recommend replacing the prone and crouch animation blendtrees with the standing ones. While this tutorial will generate an avatar that crouches and crawls around prone okay/amusingly, you do get sent into the floor in crouch/prone and there simply isn’t anything to be done about it. 

There is also NO WAY to migrate rotation constraints from one avatar to another. You can copy a fully-constrained avatar and hot-swap in your own edited mesh, but you (basically) CAN’T EDIT bones in an already-constrained armature without turning it all into spaghetti. 

**

ONE.

You need a working, full-body-tracking compatible biped skeleton to start with. But... there aren’t any out there (that I’m aware of) to start with, so I recommend scaling up a meta-human out of the Rigify add-on for Blender... here’s a guy walking you through that bit of it: https://youtu.be/DS885Sk1gSs?t=30 (we will not be making an “animation rig,” we are just getting a human-shaped Armature into the project with almost all of its bones named correctly already. So just do that part.)

TWO.

...and then deleting the face stuff, some other stuff, and the extra four non-finger hand bones out of each hand (make sure not to accidentally nuke part of your thumb, like me, because you might not notice until way later that you’ve given yourself a stumpy single-jointed thumb). You want to go from this:

To this:

I mean, I guess you could leave them, but too many useless bones will come back to bite you later if Unity decides it can’t figure your shit out and makes you drag every. single. handbone. into. the L and R hand slots yourself. Set yourself up for success and don’t skip this deletion step. Also, now’s the time to rename your hips -> spine -> chest -> neck -> head chain, since Rigify has them all as like spine01 spine02 etc.

Your penultimate guy:

THREE.

Now modify its thighs and hips as per Kung’s tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sfTEBAl8sA

Basically, for this armature in particular you need the tops of the thigh bones to be below the entire hip bone, as follows: 

AND you need the hip bone to be above the thigh bones (Rigify’s is too far back). Personally, I got good results from just grabbing my legs and scooting them backward. 

If you DON’T do this, PC people and three-point tracking people will still be able to use your avatar fine. But full-body people’s hips will jut forward in a super fucked up way. IF YOU FOLLOW THIS TUTORIAL EXACTLY and include a BEND bone, this will be a problem. IF YOU CUT CORNERS and disregard the BEND bone (and/or you choose to lock the hips out of weight painting--valid), you can skip this step. But you seriously might as well do it. 

IMPORTANT! The lengths and angles of your bones here determine, in part, the later behavior & vivacity of your finished model. I like this modified Rigify base because VRChat’s IK makes it nice and lively. If you use a different Humanoid base, like a ramrod straight turbocompatible one, or a cool but non-fullbody-compatible style one (hey, go for it! PC and three-point tracking people have rights too!) the flavor of your animations later on will be different! 

FOUR. Build your model around the head, neck, chest, spine, and hips of your inner Humanoid! Don’t hold me liable for anything that happens to you if you change the armature proportions, but based on this one time I helped a kid hook up their quad horse, you can get acceptable/interesting non-full-body-compatible behavior if you do change them (to perfectly follow your cool dragon neck or whatever). I will continue on as if you did not change them! Anyway, do your thing. If you’ve got someone else’s mesh for this step, do your best to pose it in a neutrally upright standing position, and then put the Humanoid in it like they’re the front half of a horse costume, scaling the whole rig up and down as necessary. Again, ANY CHANGES YOU MAKE TO THE PROPORTIONS OF THE HUMANOID RIG WILL CHANGE YOUR ANIMATIONS LATER, and break full-body compatibility if you go too far!  Here’s mine, see the little guy in there? Try to pick him out from the rest of the rigging:

Your head needs to be placed so it does a good job aiming its head/so you can set the view orb so you more or less see out its eyes, and your neck, chest, spine, and hips should be in its neck and forequarters, but your legs and feet DON’T have to match up with your quad forelegs or forefeet! Your quad feet can be anywhere relative to your Humanoid ones so long as your quad is in its symmetrical, neutral standing posture. 

You can see that mine are a bit in front. It’s fine.

FIVE. Parent the mesh to the armature (or uhhh is it the other way around? Whichever way around it is, do it) with empty groups. Go into your Vertex Groups panel and lock out the limbs--that’s shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands and fingers, thighs, lower legs, feet, and toes. You want them zero and kept at zero (unless your want your arms for a taur). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG82fogtuCg WATCH THE ABOVE VIDEO IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY. :V You can run the auto weight paint from here and/or start dinking around with weight painting your quad’s neck however is most comfortable for you if you want, but you still need to

SIX.  rig your quad model! Okay, here’s the one big rule for your grounded legs (wings and funky lil extra limbs that just wave around can do whatever): 

you must leave your Rigify legs straight up and down, no angling outwards, and YOUR QUAD LIMBS MUST BE STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN, NO ANGLING OUTWARDS.  

See mine: 

You don’t have to have them all perfectly in line from the front like I do, you could have your legs be set at any widths (say, wider stance in the armature hind legs than in the Humanoid ones, if your quad has wider hips), but they HAVE to all be exactly straight up and down, just like the Humanoid legs are. I tried matching my actual gryphon limb angles like in normal rigging once, and it resulted in incorrect foot placement/limb angles when standing neutrally (because VRChat’s neutral stance is not a perfect T- or A-pose). It’s fine if they’re different heights, though--here’s a side picture where you can see that my hind legs are lots taller, and my forelegs a little taller, than those of my Humanoid core:

Okay so maybe this belongs up there under FIVE. but, since you CANNOT add any jaunty character to your quad by adding naturalistic/sideways angling in its armature, the mesh, instead, must deviate from the armature to give you the illusion of a jaunty stance, and I DO recommend doing (just a little of) this. Your bones don’t HAVE to be in the center of your mesh volumes to still work okay, especially when they’re only serving as relatively-restricted legs (knees don’t twist, and neither do a bunch of quad bones driven by them). So, feel free to “pose” your quad legs in an interesting way around their upright bones, especially when it comes to giving your hind legs a different character from your front ones. Otherwise it’ll be way more obvious they’re rigidly linked, despite their different proportions. I recommend angling the apparent set of your hind legs out just a little, so your hind feet seem to be set wider than your front ones.

Not only does this help give each set of your legs its own character, to help with the illusion that they’re actuating totally differently, and that these are definitely your own original character do not steal’s full custom animations and not VRChat’s default ones--but your back legs are going to be operating the reverse of your front legs. This means that when the wearer adopts a wide stance, with their feet well apart from each other (as in many dances), YOUR BACK LEGS WILL CROSS. The amount of space I left between my gryphons’ hind legs, above, accommodates the normal amount of moving around that people do pretty well, but be advised that making a beautiful character with its hind legs neatly, narrowly posed might hit you with some heartbreak later! (You could get around this by instead rigging your quad to have its forelegs be the reversed ones, but this might be a little disconcerting for a fullbody wearer; or you could give yourself a “pacing” gait, where both your front and back left legs step forward at once, but this is a glaringly visible design choice for the kinds of people who notice these things. If you do this, make it a choice, not what-you-did-because-it-turned-out-you-had-no-choice.) 

(I did a bunch of bogus shit to make it so I could switch between regular locomotion and a pacing gait, but that’s outside the scope of this tutorial.)

Now, your BOB, LEVEL, and BEND bones!

BOB: Somewhere on your armature, put an unparented bone (any size) along your midline called BOB. (I put mine below my hips and called it dingle.dangle.) Ever ported a model in and left something unparented accidentally? Remember how it disconcertingly gets “left behind”? Well, we’re using that phenomenon to our advantage! BOB will be our rotation reference bone for LEVEL and BEND. 

LEVEL: So, LEVEL. Your quad’s back/torso should be/have one big bone coming out of the back of your Humanoid hips, call it LEVEL. It should be the parent for all your quad’s limbs, except for anything you have coming out of the head or neck (idk, whiskers, chinwings, whatever).

BEND: BEND is optional, but recommended; a bone that also sticks out the back of your hips, and stretches out more or less to the end of your ribcage, maybe to the middle-ish of your ribcage. Mine is parallel to the floor but that doesn’t matter much, and weighted at around strength .4 to the ribcage behind my shoulders, a little bit of the back of my shoulders where they meet my body, and tapering off towards my waist. Basically when you wiggle this bone up and down, it should arch and bow your back a little bit, over the top of your other weight paints, in whatever way is visually acceptable to you. Mine does this:

SEVEN.

Now, into Unity. Navigating Unity is mostly beyond the scope of this tutorial, but if you can add a VRC Avatar Descriptor, you can add a rotation constraint. It works the same, you just go find the bone (”transform”) in the hierarchy that you want and add a rotation constraint component to it. 

So, get your .fbx out of Blender and into your Assets folder or whatever. Click on it and go to Import Settings, set it as Humanoid, apply, configure. Pick out and add all the bones of your Humanoid armature to the Humanoid panel (if it hasn’t autopopulated--it might!), reset your pose and then enforce T-pose if necessary, delete the reference to Jaw, put Chest in and make sure there’s no Upper Chest, etc., all the usual things. You should see a little green T-posing person in the forequarters of your quad! Hit Done and you’re done. (Look up ordinary VRChat avatar 3.0 import tutorials if you’re having trouble with this step; you’re Humanoid at this point already, same as anybody). Now drag your newly-confirmed-for-Humanoid .fbx into your scene. Open up its hierarchy and look for the LEVEL bone; it should be under hips. Put a rotation constraint on this bone (click on it, Add Component button, search “rotation” or “constraint,” pick Rotation Constraint). Click the little plus to add a target, and drag BOB in there from the hierarchy. Leave the strength 1 above and 1 below (the 1 below will always be left alone at 1 unless specified otherwise), and click Activate. There! You did it! Now your whole entire ass won’t wave around!! You can hop right in and Test Avatar if you want--your head and neck will be the only things that move while your legs will all be stiff like a piñata, but by god, your back will be staying level. Try crouching and going prone!

Enjoy this first, sweet taste of quad success if you’ve gotten this far, because there are many, many ways to screw the rest of this process up, and even with me guiding you, you might find some brand new ones. Applying a rotation constraint correctly is as easy as above, but here are some pitfalls: if you move any bones in Unity with active constraints on them, or bones upstream of an active constraint, they get fucked up. If you activate a constraint on a bone that’s been moved, moving the bone back afterwards will fuck the constraint up. LEAVE YOUR MODEL IN ITS DEFAULT POSE AT ALL TIMES, UNLESS YOU’VE MADE SURE TO SWITCH TO GAME MODE. (Sometimes you get lucky and you can rescue a ruined bone by deactivating its constraint and then going to Modified Component -> Revert on the transform itself. But don’t count on it.)

If you change any values within a constraint while it is active, it gets fucked up. Uncheck “Is Active” before modifying any constraint!

But wait, there’s more! If you hot-swap your model (minimize Unity, open Blender, do edits, export your new .fbx, delete your old .fbx in the save dialog and replace it with your new .fbx, WAIT A FEW SECONDS because opening Unity in the middle of the hotswap borks everything, maximize Unity, it thinks for a second, then accepts your new model while hey presto preserving your rotation constraints), AFTER ARMATURE EDITS, so, again, if yo-- if you--*about to sneeze voice*--

If you hot-swap your model after armature edits, the whole thing can get fucked up and you might have to re-apply all your rotation constraints again. 

hhhhh that’s better. Now, you MAY hot-swap your model after wholesale bone additions and deletions, but rotation-constrained armatures lose their tiny minds if you change constrained bone lengths, positions, or angles!

Moving on! You just did LEVEL, now let’s do BEND.

BEND is constrained at .5 strength to BOB. Add a rotation constraint to BEND, set the strength to .5, hit the plus, drag in BOB. (Dial your reflexes in on this sequence because you are going to be doing it a lot.) The purpose of BEND is to bring a little life to your otherwise ramrod-stiff quad spine; you can experiment with strengths (of weight paint, of constraint weight, of bone length) but I recommend you try copying me to start. So that’s: BEND, a bone sticking out to about the end of your ribcage, weight painted at .4 or so to your ribcage and gradienting smoothly away, constrained to your unparented bone BOB at .5 strength (waving around without any constraint put too much wiggle in my gryphon). 

BOB, LEVEL, and BEND are the major engines behind my quad rigging giving an acceptable effect! You don’t need to throw $90 at Final IK if you’ve got some time on your hands and BOB, LEVEL, and BEND. :)

Now for ALL THE REST OF YOUR LIMBS!

A note before we begin. Unity rotation constraints can’t ever go past 1:1, that is, there is no way to “amplify” a motion to make it a bigger one. You can only approach parity with the reference motion, never exceed it. The clearest example I can think of is a tail. My tail is six bones, and I thought I could constrain each one to the head at .1 and they’d “stack” and make it so a small motion of my head would put an attractive curl in my tail. Lol, nope. The first one rotated the tail .1, the ones that followed each inherited that .1 rotation from their parent and had their constraints satisfied, and did nothing, and I had a tail that barely moved at all. (Blender’s bone constraints work differently and allow this kind of amplification; you can also test things out in there, but I could never figure out which settings would give me Unity-like behavior.) So, with that in mind, bring up a gait cycle of your target animal. If a video is too confusing, look for some static images (like an animator’s gait cycle) that show the gait. Try to see which bones rotate the most, and which rotate noticeably less. Use this to inform your constraint weight values later. If you picked a static image, you can even measure the rotations throughout the cycle to see which move most and least! I don’t know enough to use exactly specific language here, so, to the extreme literalists in my audience.... sorry about what I just said. If you find your ability to magically pick up on what I mean is poor, I’ll just give you my gryphon numbers later! Or you could just try some stuff, like having every bone at max strength & seeing what happens, and then picking just one to turn down to .5 strength and testing again. That should clarify the concept for you quickly.

Alternatively, the quick-and-dirty “I’m NOT HERE to acquire any sensitivities I don’t ALREADY HAVE” test is to just try to get your quad feet as close as possible to your biped feet’s level/height when the biped thigh is picked up to 90 degrees and the shin hangs straight down (the “sit position”).  Here’s how mine do:

Now, that’s half of the challenge, noticing which bones in the legs ought to be more or less responsive, and then roughing out an idea of the relative weights/responsivities each leg bone needs to make that happen, deciding which bones are liveliest and should be set at or near 1 and which are stiffest, or least active, and should go around .5 (you might even dip to .3). But (you might scream) what are you weighting these guys RELATIVE to? What are their TARGETS? Well!

...I’m not going to try to explain this. I’ve confused everybody every time I’ve tried. :p Just start with the shoulder constrained to the thigh, then the next bone down to the shin, then the NEXT bone down to the thigh again, then the shin again, and so on (thigh shin thigh shin thigh shin). This will get you 98% of the way there because most of the bones in a tetrapod leg-chain operate in simple opposition to each other. Basically, by rotating the shoulder like the thigh, when you raise your leg, your quad will start to raise its shoulder. By having the next bone rotate like your shin, and then continuing the pattern after, contracting your knee will make your quad contract its whole leg. This breaks down a little at the paw-and-toes, or the distal complexities of the horse, but just start with this pattern by rote. Then test it, and if one of the bones is obviously backwards, swap its target to the other one and test it again.

Last concept: if you have two bones in a row weighted to the same thing (like where you’ve got two bones that do not work in opposition to each other), the second one needs to have a bigger weight to the target than its parent. Because it inherits the parent’s rotation, and then only adds whatever amount that’s bigger. So, for my forepaw, I have it at .5 to the shin, and then the toes are at 1 to the shin. The whole paw acts as a shin-unit, but weighting the hand less than the toes allows the toes a little of their own flair. :v

(Okay that was a third-grade-biology-textbook lie. I actually have my upper paw .5 to the shin and my toes/beans at 1 to the foot. I might have a little bit of weight to the foot in the upper hand/palm part of my eagle foreclaws too. But I don’t recommend you add any weighting to the foot until you’ve got a good baseline result with just weights to the thigh and shin!!!!! The foot does things that you might find confusing and upsetting and which can introduce a LOT of incorrect limb placement/clipping, especially the further up the chain you allow it to interfere; it should be used sparingly or (as in my hind legs) not at all.)

Finally, the more your bone lengths and angles resemble your target animal’s (use a skeletal reference!), and the better you are at deciding which bones should respond a lot (and be weighted with high values) and which should respond less (and be weighted with lower ones), the more visual interest and species-specific character your quad avatar will have! You can see my gryphon’s rig above; here are its constraint values (where I go LR to LR, the left bits of the Humanoid control the left bits of the quad; where I go LR to RL, the left bits of the Humanoid control the right bits of the quad):

Back: LEVEL: 1 to BOB BEND: .5 to BOB Wings: upper_arm.LR.001: .5 to upper_arm.LR forearm.LR.001: .5 to (forearm.LR .5, hand.LR .5) hand.LR.001: .5 to hand.LR Hindlegs (targeted to the OPPOSITE side human legs): thigh.LR.002: .7 to thigh.RL shin.LR.002: .6 to shin.RL foot.LR.002: .9 to thigh.RL toe.LR.002: .7 to shin.LR Forelegs - EAGLE: thigh.LR.001: .7 to thigh.LR shin.LR.001: .8 to shin.LR foot.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR toe.LR.001: .5 to (shin.LR 1, foot.LR 1) toe.LR.003,5,6: 1 to shin.LR toe.LR.004: 1 to thigh.LR Forelegs - LION: thigh.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR shin.LR.001: .5 to shin.LR foot.LR.001: 1 to thigh.LR toe.LR.001: .5 to shin.LR toe.LR.005: 1 to foot.LR Tail: tail.001: .5 .5 to head tail.002: .6 .6 to head, etc. ***

REITERATION OF IMPORTANT PROTIP: Again, the quick and dirty test of your targets and values is to switch to Game mode and hike your Humanoid’s leg up so the thigh is parallel to the floor and the shin’s straight down (the sit position). Does your quad also hike its leg up, so its foot is in the neighborhood of your Humanoid’s foot level? Are all of your bones bending the right way? (Any that aren’t need their target switched to the other kind of leg bone.) If your quad is more or less “also contracting its leg so now it’s up,” then you’re either finished, or really really close!! If your quad daintily raises up its lil’ ol’ leggy for you, test your gait in-game and decide whether it has the right “feel”. If one of the bones is too stiff or too crazy relative to your reference animal’s style of motion, change its value so it behaves better, and hang the sitpose test. People mostly spend time standing, anyway, and your quad will likely look great standing and moving around even if it doesn’t do well at the sit test. 

[khrysopoeia]

This is in super rough shape, but I've been wanting to share something from this AU for ages, so I'm going to go ahead and put out a preview. Still working on the larger plot, but it's stock fantasy/D&D-inspired FMA AU and I'm having far too much fun with it.

The Goblin’s Jig was an adventurers’ tavern, which meant the ale was strong, the barkeep was stronger, and the barmaids were less ‘feisty’ or ‘spirited’ than they were ‘trained combatants.’ The need for that skillset rarely arose, though. Teagan, the Jig’s owner, didn’t stand for the kind of adventurer who thought their line of work entitled them to special favors. He was a jovial older man -- and an adventurer himself before an infected wound had forced the amputation of half of his left leg -- who generally knew the type when he saw them.

A quarter hour ago, Roy Mustang had known none of this. Fortunately, one of his companions was a chatty drunk.

“I don’t think he wants to hear Teagan’s life story, Brosh,” said the less chatty of the two. Her name was Maria something -- Roy thought the surname started with an ‘R,’ but he wasn’t sure. She and her friend were members of the Pendleton city guard who Roy had helped out of a tight spot involving a cutpurse with a couple more friends than they’d expected. They’d offered to buy him a hot meal and a round or two as thanks. The meal had been more of an enticement than the drinks.

“He sounds like a man with some interesting stories,” Roy said. And some interesting contacts, he didn’t add.

“Adventurers get all the good stories,” Denny Brosh said. “I bet you have some, right?”

“I suppose I do,” said Roy, and launched into a well-practiced yarn about a goblin tribe and an enchanted helmet. As usual, he made sure to grin just a little slyly during the most improbable bits. You’re in on the joke, that grin said. I’m exaggerating, but not making things up, exactly. If you fit the mold people expected too perfectly, they got suspicious. Roy was careful to give his stories an edge of braggadocio. It kept people’s questions focused where he wanted them, which kept them from realizing that every one of the stories was a complete fabrication.

“Is that when your hand got messed up?” Denny said, and Roy stopped mid-sentence.

“Brosh,” Maria growled, “you don’t just ask people about missing fingers! Sorry about him.”

It was his thumb, actually, on his left hand. And Roy had gotten enough practice with that question over the last year and a half that he no longer actually flinched when someone asked it. It still threw him, though, and it was a relief when the door to the tavern swung open with a bang and a gust of cold spring air.

Three figures in patched leather armor entered. Two of them, both humans, were straining under the weight of a large chest.

“Teagan, pour a round for the tavern on me!” the third figure bellowed. He was a black-haired dwarf with no beard, but an impressive mustache. It was braided and everything. “The Company of the Golden Oak just raided a dragon’s hoard!”

The entire room heard that. Every soul in the tavern other than Roy broke into some form of laughter, be it loud guffaws, hearty chuckles or, in the case of one gnome who should probably have stopped drinking two tankards ago, manic giggles.

But no, that wasn’t quite right. One other person wasn’t laughing. A human woman, seated at the bar with her back to Roy, glanced at the three men and shook her head ruefully. Roy had noted her when she came in, more for the hand-and-a-half sword strapped to her back and the high quality of her wool cloak -- it looked about five times as warm as anything he owned -- than for anything else.

“Laugh all you like,” the leader of the 'Company' said. “We’ve got a chest full of dragon gold that says it’s true!”

Because dragons always kept their valuables in flammable wooden chests with locks sized for human hands. Right. Roy dismissed the trio and went back to his meal. The roast chicken was good, and the overcooked carrots were food. He appreciated both.

“Bullshit,” called a voice from a shadowy corner of the tavern. There was a large man, larger even than the three with the chest, seated there in full plate mail. Roy had given up trying to figure out how his chair hadn’t collapsed a while back, but he hadn’t stopped glancing over periodically. Anyone with that much steel on them in a room full of people in normal clothing was automatically dangerous.

It wasn’t the armored man who had spoken, though. A shorter figure, one Roy hadn’t spotted through the crowd, stood up, gesturing to the chest.

“That thing has to be three feet long and, what, a foot and a half wide? An inch deep in gold and you’d already have more than three hundred pounds on your hands.” The speaker picked up his tankard and made for the bar. “Hey, Teagan, you gave me watered-down ale again.”

“You’re a kid, Ed,” the tavern keeper grumbled into the silence that followed. “And you already get a discount.” People began turning back to their drinks. Maria shook her head with a rueful smile and took an enthusiastic bite of chicken. The two human men with the chest put it down, one looking mournful and the other downright enraged.

“Dammit, [dwarf], you swore this was the real thing!” the angrier of the armored humans said.

“Of course it’s the real thing!”

“But how do we know it’s actually gold?” asked the mournful man. “It better be. I’ve got a tab going at the smithy on [street name] now.” Judging by his hat, which would have been gaudy even without the full rooster’s worth of plumage and was probably worth as much as his well-used armor, he also had one going at a haberdasher.

“I’m telling you, it’s gold!” the leader insisted. “Dragons hoard gold. Everyone knows that!” He turned to the tavern at large. “Any of you heard of a dragon hoarding anything other than gold?”

A couple of people nodded thoughtfully, though more rolled their eyes, and most just ignored the dwarf. There hadn’t been a dragon seen in Amestris in decades, let alone this far west. They were rare even in the desert to the east these days.

“You could just open it,” the tavern keeper suggested as he poured a drink for Ed. “If it’s full of anything valuable, you can replace the lock easily enough.”

“Sounds good to me,” growled the other armored human. He pulled a set of lockpicks from his belt pouch, which just went to show that it wasn’t wise to assume things about people’s skill sets based on their body type.

Maria and Denny exchanged looks as the man knelt in front of the chest. Those picks were probably illegal to use in the city. Adventurers tended to pose dilemmas like that for municipal guards, which was one reason you rarely saw Maria and Denny’s type in establishments that catered to them. Bringing Roy to a tavern frequented by guards would have been even more awkward, though, and those were the only other places that let you keep a weapon the size of Roy’s longsword with you. He was fairly sure he hadn’t been too suspicious about mentioning that he didn’t like to be parted from his weapon. Just an adventurer here. Not quite average, but with quirks that you can easily understand.

Before the two guards could decide what to do about this particular awkward [dilemma], though, the man with the lockpicks screamed. Roy whipped around to see his hand and wrist disappearing into a hole in the chest where the lock had been -- a hole with large, gleaming teeth.

“Mimic!” shouted the man with the hat as the whole tavern came to their feet and dozens of weapons were drawn.

[to be continued]

[cutegirlmayra]

May I request cute Tails and Amy friendship? You can choose which version just them being cute friends? Maybe they defend each other when someone tries to mess with them? Love your writing

Watch 18:19 of Pajama Blogs - Prompt Requests - Ep 1 for juicy first thoughts on this prompts! (I may divert away from it, but we’ll see :3c)

Thank you so much! I try hard to stay pumped with energy so that I can give you all reading material during these trying times, lol. So let’s hope and press our hands together in a prayer that I’ll entertain, satisfy, and bring joyful feels to everyone through my prompts and fanfiction updates :Db

Prompt:

“Still working on that observatory, eh, Tails?”

As Tails was about to hammer in on his half-finished ‘dome-effect’ he wanted for his upper-level room, he blinked a moment at the familiar voice and excitedly looked down.

“Amy!”

“The one and only.” She winked, grinning widely.

He had managed to get half the curve of the wall done, a dark, steel grey for it’s base color as it held a half-finished walled hole where the large glass would be for viewing the stars. He would insert a self-made telescope between there, and design a way to bring the view as though a holographic light performance right into his ‘black room’ when he wanted to personally ‘sit among the stars’.

“Permission to come aboard, captain?” Amy joked, placing a hand on the ladder and saluting him.

Tails’s twin namesakes wagged in joy, smiling and closing his eyes as he nodded, “Permission always granted! B-but be careful of the rickety-”

“Ah!” the ladder seemed to tilt as a piece of metal began to bend.

“Amy!” he was about to fly down but she summoned her hammer, wedging it into the place where the metal was bending.

“Phew~” she sighed out in relief, having some sweat trickle down the side of her face before climbing up again.

She removed her hammer and used it to place the metal back into the proper alignment again. “You might have given me permission, but did you consult your ship on that decision?”

The two laughed.

“Sorry about that. Everything is still a work in progress, and honestly, it’s kinda revolutionary if this actually works.” Tails scratched behind his head, then explained how new this technology and optical illusion trick really was.

“Yeah,... kinda amazing, Tails.” Amy admired the work already done to give Tails a space to mediate and enjoy the nature of wonderful night sky above him. “I remember when I first met you, that the dark used to be such a scary thing for ya.” She kid, looking to him kindly but nudging him with a tease.

He blushed slightly, looking away, “Well... then you and Sonic showed me how beautiful it was! A-an-and besides that, I’m too old for a night light.” he tried to seem so mature... but that pout made it obvious he just didn’t want to be looked down upon.

“Right. So a big sky-show isn’t the same thing?” She looked over to see he had already marked a place with some cushions, a reading-outlet to the side of the wall imbedded in with a shelf for the books, and a big fuzzy blanket. The tape read: Second Bed.

It all made her smile, “What a lovely little R&R space...” she lowered her eyes, wondering if he still got lonely like she did... and this was his way of coping.

He lived far away from the city, and although Amy lived down a winding road, she would visit the city often enough for groceries and other fun shopping sprees.

What did boys do to occupy their time?

“Heh, I wouldn’t say a 3D projected model of a precisely positioned magnifying glass and hyperized telescope make for a sky-light.” he tried to defend himself, and it was rather cute to Amy.

“Well, I bet Sonic’ll love to bunk here more often.”

The tone suddenly shifted as Amy and Tails both looked down, away from the other.

“Have you... heard from him lately?” Amy asked, almost worried that she already knew the answer to that question.

“No.” Tails sighed out, before dramatically leaning back and letting his head fall back on his shoulders, “Not since Eggman last showed up.”

“Yeah... he’s been rushing off more and more lately on some daring-dos that apparently don’t require any of us to come along...”

There was a quiet somberness...

“Yeahhhh...” Tails once again leaned properly back in place and dipped his head, scratching it softly...

He seemed friend-sick... and as Amy observed him more, he even looked starved for conversation.

“Hmph!” She puffed up the side of her cheek, “Well, we’ll have to give him the ol’silent treatment when he gets back this time too! Serve him right for all those times he’s left us behind on all the fun!” Amy rambled off, but Tails perked up a bit, looking over to her with a slight turn of his lowered head.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah! Just you wait! He’ll come back ready to tell us all his cool stunts on his new latest adventure, and we’ll be just chatting it up about your awesome star project!” She posed with her arm out and her hand upon her muscle, as though Rosy the Riveter. “That means we should wrap this little project of love up and really see what it’s made of!”

“Y-you mean it?” Tails looked thrilled by her offer. “I-I mean, if it’s not too much trouble... I could use your hammer for a few things.” He looked down at the metal that had bent out of place. “You’re strong arm means I could patch the rest of this in one hammer hit! It’ll remain sturdy if you’re strength! Ah...! Sorry!” he looked back over and saw Amy frowning embarrassedly, pushing her fingers together. He wagged his arms out to the side of her, apologetically. “I forgot... how you sometimes take the praise for your strength a little...” he felt awkward now, seeing her begin her usual spiel.

“But I’m... elegant... A-and lady-like when I do it... right?” She looked over to him as though pleading for his approval.

“O-O-of course, you are! I-I even remember Sonic saying something about it! Your hammer is super cute and only adds to your-! Uhh... c-charms!” Tails bundled his fists up and started shaking them profusely around, not sure how to convince her a ‘giant hammer’ was somehow ‘girlish’ but he did his best. “And besides, I don’t care what anyone else says, Amy! You’re super useful thanks to your strength! Just like I am with my brains.”

He was so determined to succeed in cheering her up that Amy couldn’t bear to disappoint him.

She took in a deep breath and got over herself, straightening up. “Yeah... well, I have to be strong, to look after and protect you and the others.” She ruffled up his hair and he laughed lightly, slightly moving away from her touch as a brother would to his older sister.

“I’m sorry that you’re sensitive to that.” He admitted, “You really are super cool when you hit a robot miles away!”

She flinched.

“I-I-I meant that in a good way!” he shook his hands out again, “Honest!”

Amy just laughed, “I can cook too, you know. Why don’t we finish building this thing and then I’ll make us something good to eat. We can turn it off with some smores and maybe crackers or something too later tonight!” Amy’s usual optimism was restored and Tails immediately caught on to it’s wave.

“Woah! You mean it! T-that could take all day...” His ears lowered just slightly.

“Pfft!” Amy turned with a proud look upon her face, placing one hand to her hip as she sat off the edge with him and then slammed her hand to the top of his head again, making him flatten slightly as he was sitting slightly on his knees. He looked uncomfortable, like her force had made him do an unwilling ‘split’ sort of with his knees being parted and he looked as though in strained pain. “Think nothing of it, Tails! As you said before, my hammer strikes are good on one blow! We’ll have this done in no time, so..? Can I stay the night?”

He continued to flinch and twitch in the pain, “S-sur-sure, I-I-I don’t mind... mmm...” he had a small tear forming at the right of his eye.

A few hours passed as the two worked hard, and finally, the dome was done and the telescope he had already completed for the room was successfully moved up to the upper-room... with a lot of back-strain and power from the two working together. Tails had to really test his twin-propelling tails’s weight limit on how fast they could twirl to lift something, and Amy’s powerful arms and back were put to their ultimate test as well!

But somehow, the two worked great together, though bickered and taunted the other at times...

“You can fly higher than that, Tails!”, “D-don’t act like I’m the only one lifting my weight here!”, “AH! What is that supposed to mean!? I’m as light as a feather! And this is... nothing... compared... to what I can lift!”, “Then push harder!”, “You fly harder!”, They both ‘ggrr’d and finally got the massive telescope up that ladder...

When everything was set up, Amy put on a movie for Tails to rest and started cooking up some dinner. She wanted to leave room for the late-night snacks, and coming back in, noticed Tails wasn’t watching the television.

“Huh?” She looked up the ladder to the room and smiled, seeing the computer light on as he must have been programming the telescope and other functions. “He works so hard... he must be excited to show it off to Sonic.” she felt a slight bit of envy. She sighed, “Not like girls and guys can have that strong of a bond... botherhood and sisterhoods are really exclusive, huh?” she frowned, not liking the idea that she could never be as close to Sonic or Tails as the other was with them.

She called down Tails though, and they had a nice dinner together, complimenting their success as Tails hoped it would all work, but Amy told him not to worry.

“You’re incredibly good at designing these technological masterpieces, Tails.” Amy scolded him for about to open his mouth to answer with food in it, and seeing her hand raised and her eyes closed while one opened slightly, he chewed and swallowed before continuing.

“W-well, that doesn’t mean that their isn’t going to be some error on my part involved...”

“I’m sure Sonic will love it. I know I’m excited to see it.” She picked up his finished plate, going to wash them and as she removed her apron...

“Sonic? I was building this for us to view it together, tonight.”

Her face shot up, touched.

Her heart seemed to rise up as though being elevated to a status it thought unattainable.

“R-really?” She always had felt a distance between the boys, and found it just seemed easier and less forced when interacting with Cream... but Cream was still so young too. She loved picking flowers! Don’t get her wrong! She had just gotten really, really good at making flower crowns for so... long...

She placed her apron that she had borrowed from him down, planning to wash it if needs be as well, but turned back to Tails.

He didn’t seem to notice how much that meant to her, already wiping his hands on his white fluff like he would if he was greased up in oil or gunk stains from working on his pet-projects like the X-Tornado and this Observatory. She puffed up her cheek, “I still need to teach you proper manners, huh?” she whispered under her breath, but smiled and touched her heart.

He was already racing up the ladder, and she immediately went into mother mode.

“Ah! Tails! D-don’t move so fast after eating!” she reached a hand up but he called down to her.

“Bring up the treats! I think it’s loaded all the settings in by now! ... Yeah! Yeah it has!”

His excited voice sprang her into an excitement, “W-well, hold on! I’m coming!” It was like he just called out that the fireworks were gonna start...

She rushed through the cleaning and threw the plates into the dishwater, a little rougher than she usually would like to and washed herself up before charging up the ladder. “Don’t let it start without me!”

“Hurry!” Tails called, and she immediately started to leap passed rings on the ladder to just reach out and jump pass a few steps.

“I’m here!” her quills looked a mess as she clung to the edge of the room, Tails rushing over and helping her up as she huffed and puffed in her strain to get there in time.

“Haha, and you tell me not to rush.” He teased her back.

“Hmph.” she blew up her bottom bang of the three quills on her forehead and then smiled to him, cheekily, “If I get stomach cramps, I’m blaming you!”

“Over here!” He laughed a moment at her response but was too excited to show her what he had set up.

“Ah... Tails...” Amy felt so important and loved then, seeing he had taken the large fuzzy blanket and got in it, opening a space for her to join him.

“S-sorry, is this too... um... close?” He squinted an eye, lowering his arm that was gesturing for her to intimately cuddle up within it and watch the show together.

She shook her head, holding back tears and hoping to not confuse him. “Absolutely! I-I mean, it’s perfect! Don’t change a thing!” she crawled down and got into the blanket, taking the other side as she felt Tails bouncing in his seat.

“Okay, good. Three... two... one... Ehem,” he cleared his throat, like a child about to press ‘liftoff’ on a rocket. “Computer! Activate Spatial Definity Mock 5 Advanced Overhead Project 3.2.7.”

Amy blinked her eyes rapidly at such a long line...

“What? You couldn’t have called it, Sky-light?” she teased again, “For nightlight?”

“Quit it...” He nudged her lightly, embarrassed she kept teasing him on that one. “It sounds cooler this way... and it reminds me how long it took to set up the program and make it run right. I haven’t tested this final version yet, so SDM5AOP 3.2.7 is a perfect name for-!”

“O-okay, as long as it makes sense to you.” she decided not to question it.

The whirling of a computer was heard and the two waited anxiously for the results...

“It has to take a second to go through all it’s processing. Lots of... kinda like doors to hurdle through and collect data for.” He explained.

“...Do you... wish Sonic were here instead of me?” she looked away from him for a moment. “I mean... not that you would have a preference b-b-but...” she thought this was a bad, killing the mood he had tried to set up and wish she didn’t say anything. “Nevermind.”

“No, I think you’ll appreciate it more than he will.”

She felt that ranking skyrocket again, as though her tiny significance in life was suddenly bumped up again to a higher sphere of importance in this little fox boy’s life.

“W-... What makes you say that?” she was trying so hard to hide the sparkles in her eyes, but her quivering voice gave away how happy she was to hear that. No, not happy, overjoyed to know she was considered such a special friend to him.

“You actually helped me complete it!” He spread his arms out as the first little light formed in the blackened room.

“Ah!” Amy saw it first, marveling as it faded and then grew brighter and brighter to show the actual dimensions of the star that was currently in the sky, or at least, the radiance of it.

She marveled as he continued to talk, not noticing multiple other little constellations starting to form over his literal head and scattered all throughout the room. Accurate and pronounced, their distance was a miniature diorama of the actual space of the universe...

“I knew you’d want to see it... I’m sure he would too, but Sonic would rather be in the stars then just viewing them... though he does all the time. Heh, I guess you’ll be able to brag about how you were the first to see it! I-if it works or not... It’s still a longshot, s-so... don’t get your hopes up too hig-”

His face was yanked towards the direction of the star, then Amy started shaking his arm. “Ah-AH-AHHHH!!!” she freaked out as a very distinct cosmic entity was defined in the space.

“AH-! AHHH!! IT ACTUALLY WORKS!” Tails flipped out as they both cried out-

“EARTH!”

Then, one after another...

 “The Milky Way!”, “It’s the galaxy from Chris’s world... and look! Here’s our constellations!”, “Ohhh! It’s our solar system! Ahhh! It’s so bright!”

“...Do you think Cosmos seeds found good land to grow on?”

The two suddenly stopped gawking...

Amy couldn’t even look to him, and him the same.

Instead, she scooted closer to him in the blanket, felt his tails solemnly wrap around her for support and comfort, and placed her arm to his opposite shoulder to pull him into the gap of her neck.

He laid his head on her shoulder, tearing up.

“Is... is that why you made all of this?” Amy’s heart tugged on her vocal chords, making them choke slightly.

“...Yeah.” he admitted. “If this was Sonic, I don’t think he’d be willing to talk about it... not like you.” he looked down a moment.

“No, don’t look down.” Amy’s voice plucked up an octave. “Look at your amazing work, Tails. Look at how vast... how beautiful the universe is... I’m sure you’ll see evidence of Cosmo’s seed blooming all over the place. You know why?”

She ducked her gaze down slightly, moving her head to make sure she didn’t obstruct his view.

He smiled lightly through his tears.

“Because life never quits, that’s why!” She pulled him into a half-hug and continued to snuggle up in the blanket. “Hehe, because Cosmo would want you to look at these stars and know that she’s everywhere. Smiling just as brightly as any of these ol’stars and wishing you the best forever!”

She felt his shoulders bounce a little...

She knew Sonic would have done an alright job if he were here too, but...

She was so glad...

Holding him and tucking him in better into the blanket...

That she was the one he shared this whole project with.

That she was the one... who could dry his tears tonight.

-Author: And now I cry, wow, hands slapped together in a prayer really did wonders for myself in this prompt, how about you? lolol To those of you who actually did the gesture and wished me the best, this one’s for you.

[visionsofus]

Wanda and Vision's Mixtape

track #2: Infinity by Jaymes Young

| read on AO3 here | mixtape playlist | send me an ask with your song/prompt request | synopsis: In which Wanda and Vision sneak out of the compound and go on a date and just revel in the act of being together in public. The rest of the team doesn't know yet so they're working had on keeping everything a secret. When they arrive back Vision is so enamoured with Wanda that he trips the Compound alarms, waking everyone up with the fear of a break in at the front of their mind only to find the pair in a compromised position.

darling my soul, it aches for yours

Wanda had lost track of time in the hours that she and Vision had been away from the compound. Around 5pm she and Vision had snuck out of the compound in one of the cars from the garage. Wanda had insisted on driving in order to preserve the secret of where she had planned their date. A forty-minute journey later and she was pulling into the busy car park of an annual attraction along the Hudson River: a month-long winter market.

Wanda undid her seat belt with a slow click and hesitantly looked over to Vision. They didn’t often come out into public like this, just the two of them, but she was hoping it would add a sense of normalcy that neither of them really had in their day to day lives. Plus, she’d brought a disposable camera with her and knew the photos would look gorgeous with the dark expanse of river behind them and the twinkle of fairy lights overhead.

“This is exciting, I’m surprised you managed to keep it a secret from me,” Vision said as Wanda pulled two tickets out of her pocket that she’d ordered in preparation for tonight. She grinned and waved the tickets before her in anticipation.

Vision made to get out of the car but paused and looked down at himself. He was dressed fairly regularly; Wanda had warned him that they’d be walking out in the cold, so he had on a navy sweater topped with a thick black wool coat. The only difference was that Vision was a synthezoid and his complexion was, well, blue and red and silver. Wanda’s heart dropped a little and she watched as Vision closed his eyes and, in a moment, assumed his human form.

“I’m sorry, Vis,” Wanda murmured, almost crushing the tickets in her hands in frustration. Here was the main reason they never went on dates in public – Vision always had to hide himself.

“There’s no need to apologise,” Vision said catching her hand and pulling the two tickets away. “I’m just as much me as always.”

Wanda hummed contemplatively and tried to keep the disappointment from her face, she didn’t want to ruin tonight, not when they had finally managed to make enough excuses to get away unseen by the rest of the team.

“Here,” Vision said pulling her hand up to his forehead. “It’s just me.”

“Yes,” Wanda said brightening at the warmth under her hand and the feeling of his consciousness below that. Somewhere deeper the stone was there for sure but these days she was taking less and less notice of it.

“Now let’s go and have a wonderful time, I have no doubt you have all sorts planned.”

Wandahad planned a fair bit for their date and had been looking forward to participating in the many fair-like activities that occupied the bustling wharf. But, as it always seemed to end up, they instead spent their time at the quiet end content to listen to the sound of each other’s voices and take in the interesting space around them. The bustling market was made up of a collection of stalls featuring independent artists displaying a variety of artisanal foods, art work and other creative wares. Vision was a constant warmth at her side and Wanda realised how much she missed having him pressed to her like this. The constant physical connection between them was usually hidden back at the compound given that they hadn’t found the right moment to tell the rest of the team they were together. Now that they were out away from the watchful eyes of their housemates, they were free to just be themselves together.

As Wanda sipped on the warm cup of mulled wine Vision stuck to her side, one of her arms tucked into his as they walked along the creaking planks of the wharf.

“Have you thought more about telling the team about us yet?” Vision asked casually as Wanda hovered before a handmade jewellery store. They’d both decided to wait but Wanda knew it was beginning to wear both of them down. If being out on this date was telling her anything it was that they both wanted to be this way all the time, and it was getting more and more difficult to hide that.

“I know we said to wait,” Wanda ran her fingertips softly over the pendant of a necklace, not unlike the one that hung around her own neck. A deep red gem hung encrusted in brushed bronze from a silver chain. It was a beautiful piece, even if the price was hefty enough to make her stomach drop a little. “But I don’t know how long we can keep it up.”

“Let’s go over the pros and cons again,” Vision said as Wanda led the way to the next stall. Their list had been growing over the main conversations they’d had on this very topic.

“Well,” Wanda began squeezing a little closer to him as a breeze blew through the stands, making merchandise flutter atop unsteady tables. “Con: we don’t know how the others will react.”

“Based on watching them all react to Mr Stark’s announcement I can’t imagine they’ll disagree with us.”

“Hmm but Pepper and Tony have been together for years.”

“We’ll be together for years.”

Wanda smiled at the warm feeling blossoming in her chest and leant her head against his warm shoulder.

“Con: them knowing could change things between us.”

Neither of them had much to say to dispute this one as it was a common fear for both of them. Deep down both knew that there wouldn’t be backlash to the news of their romantic attachment except perhaps to the newness of it. But things would no doubt change once those they lived with learnt of their relationship.

Wanda was first to break the silence, “Pro: no more hiding.”

“Con: no more hiding,” Vision countered with a conspiratorial smirk.

She looked tilted her head in question at him.

“Oh, come on you have to agree that it’s a little fun keeping this a secret, right?”

Wanda laughed and pushed his shoulder lightly. There was a level of entertainment to the sneaking around they’d had to keep up for the past months, but she couldn’t deny the relief that would come with letting the rest of the team in on their new status.

Before the conversation could be debated further Wanda caught sight of a bench pressed against the railing of the board walk, a backdrop of inky water and dark horizon line lay behind. It was the perfect opportunity for a photo.

“This way, come on,” Wanda said dragging Vision in the direction of the bench. On the way she snagged a kind looking man and asked if he wouldn’t mind taking photos of her partner and her. She relished in saying it out loud.

They posed together, sitting on the bench with arms around each other, Wanda’s head again resting against his shoulder. A few snaps of the disposable camera and the man handed it back to them before returning to his own party of friends.

“Why are you using this one instead of your phone?” Vision asked turning over the camera in his hands.

Wanda thought for a moment. “There’s convenience to instant photos but there’s an excitement to taking a photo of a memory and going to get the photos developed once the camera is full. It’s like saving bits of memory away for later.”

“And this is a memory that you want to save?” It wasn’t really a question, but he waited for her confirmation anyway. “Well, we’ll have to capture some more of this moment then.”

With that he lifted the camera once more and wound an arm around her shoulders. Wanda grinned and leaned in for the photo. They took one of themselves smiling beneath the twinkling lights and then another of Vision kissing her cheek. Though she wouldn’t see the photos for another month when she finished up the roll of camera, Wanda knew how she looked in them and knew that the light shining from her eyes had nothing to do with her powers and everything to do with who was beside her.

Two hours later the market shut for the night and the patrons were directed back to waiting cars. Wanda had had a couple of cups of mulled wine, so she let Vision handle the car – though she preferred driving it automatic, Vision had no trouble setting the Stark car to auto drive and letting the vehicle take them home. It left them free to talk more on the drive.

“We probably should tell them sooner than later,” Vision murmured as he rubbed a gentle thumb over the back of Wanda’s hand.

“I know,” she said gazing at the road ahead of them.

“But we should wait a few more weeks,” Vision said, “I don’t want to share us just yet.”

Wanda smiled and leant over to kiss him tenderly. It was exactly what she felt. There was a distinct special element to their relationship that was being protected by their secrecy and she knew that they’d be under scrutiny the moment the rest of the team were in on it. The more selfish part of her, that she didn’t take a lot of joy in acknowledging, knew that she also didn’t want to have to share Vision. It took a sharp mental reminder every now and then to not be possessive, but the plain truth was that no one at the compound knew Vision like she did, and no one else came close to understanding her the way he did. It was no surprise that their feelings had transformed from platonic affection to romantic. Not with their nearly instantaneous bond and the way it had only been strengthened by a year and a half of living with each other. Wanda’s body and mind and very soul called out for Vision in a way she wasn’t sure she had believed was possible, certainly not since she was very, very young and still believed in happy endings.

“You have reached your destination, please present for identification,” said the mechanical voice of the car as it rolled to a stop before the gates to the Avengers compound. The drive back had been far too quick for Wanda’s liking, but nonetheless she reluctantly displayed her key card to the machine outside her window.

The car had deposited them on the steps of the compound’s residential building that housed the two of them and the rest of the team who lived onsite. Wanda’s hand remained held tightly by Vision as he directed the car to take itself back to the garage and the vehicle trundled off.

“It’s too soon,” Wanda said swinging their entwined hands between them as they turned to the front door.

“Before we go in, I have something for you,” Vision said.

Wanda watched in surprise as he fished around in his coat pocket before eventually presenting her with a small jewellery box. She took it gently in her hands and gasped as the box flipped open to reveal the pendant that she had been admiring at the young jeweller’s store back at the pier.

“How–”

“I saw you looking at it and I know how much your necklace means to you,” Vision said lifting the gift out of its box and Wanda turned around slightly, still shocked, as he placed it to rest around her neck. “I thought you could wear it on missions or when you’re worried about losing the Sokovian one.”

“Vis,” Wanda murmured, fingers running over the fine jewellery. It was funny that this piece, which cost far more than her original necklace, could act as a replacement for the cheap pendant that had come with her from Sokovia. His sentiments were sweet, but she was just as unlikely to want to part with it as the original, now that Vision had gifted it to her.

“Beautiful,” Vision replied, kissing Wanda’s forehead and she knew that he wasn’t talking about the necklace.

A light flicked on a few floors above and they both froze, breaths held, in moments it had gone off again. Wanda let loose a relieved breath and started to laugh.

“What’s so funny,” Vision asked grinning with her as, instead of opening the front door he phased the two of them through.

“Oh, Vis it’s just so silly, all of this,” Wanda said wiping tears from her eyes as she shook with laughter. “Here we are, in a superhero base hiding around corners like scared teenagers, we’re even sneaking in after midnight like we’ve missed our curfew.” She dissolved into hushed laughter again as they made it into the entrance hall.

“Hush, hush,” Vision said as he pulled her down the hall but was trying not to laugh himself, his eyes gleaming in the unlit entry.

Wanda kept laughing despite his hurried attempts to stay quiet and instead pulled him against the wall of the corridor.

“What are you–”

“Shush.”

Wanda kissed him as she’d wanted to all night. Starting softly, he pulled her closer as the kiss deepened. One of Vision’s hands strayed up to brush against the base of her throat, brushing her hair aside. A shiver ran down her spine that was entirely involuntary and nothing to do with the cold. The feeling never got old, and it always left her breathless for more.

“Who’s there?” Came a cry from the end of the hall, leading to the kitchen.

Their heads parted in surprise and they turned towards the voice, squinting as the lights flickered to life overhead.

Wanda’s was still somewhat pressed to the wall and one of Vision’s arms was holding her waist loosely and it took a moment for her to process what was happening.

They’d been caught.

A small crowd had gathered at the end of the corridor, Steve, Tony, Bruce, Rhodey, Clint and Natasha were looking on with a mixture of surprise and amusement. All were in a varying levels of disarray, half clothed in pyjamas and hair tousled from sleep. Bare feet slapped on the stairs as Peter Parker ran down, tugging a sweater over his head and almost tumbling the last few steps.

“Woah what’s going on, I heard the alarms were going off and–” Peter broke off mid-sentence when he caught sight of the scene before him.

“I did not wake up for this shit,” Natasha said turning tail and heading back upstairs before anything more could happen, but Wanda was relieved to see a smile on her face.

“And here I thought it was the teenager causing all the commotion,” Sam chuckled stepping in to join the scene from the kitchen. He nursed a warm mug of something and the dressing gown hanging loosely around his shoulders was cinched at the waist.

“Well, this is unexpected…” Bruce trailed off rubbing at the back of his neck. “Sorry for disturbing you.”

This was perhaps the most awkward thing that anyone had said so far. Wanda didn’t really know where to look but was conscious of Vision taking a step back as they submitted to the mixed emotions of their friends.

“I called it, Cap owes me 100 bucks,” Tony said crossing his arms before him and turning to Steve who still was struggling to process what was before him. “Pay up.”

Steve didn’t appear to be listening properly and was mumbling, “I never knew. How did I never know? I trained them?”

“Well, this has been sufficiently uncomfortable,” Rhodey said rubbing at his forehead in a way that made it clear he was looking for any way out of this situation. “I guess everyone back to bed. False alarm?”

“Yeah, next time please use the door normally and don’t set off half the alarms in the building. Friday thought someone had broken in.”

“That was my fault, it won’t happen again,” Vision saw owning up to the phasing incident earlier.

“Sure, sure,” Tony said waving his hand and turning to go back upstairs, pushing Peter in front of him.

“But Mr Stark,” Peter whispered, struggling to get another look at Wanda and Vision “what’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

The others followed suit, either too tired or baffled to deal with the present situation. They all retreated back upstairs until only Sam was left sipping at his tea with a mixture of amusement and something akin to disbelief.

“Uh… congrats?” Sam grinned tipping his cup to them.

“Yep, yep ok good night, Sam,” Wanda said waving him on his way as he turned back to the kitchen.

She slumped against the wall, glad to be alone with Vision again. He hadn’t moved since pulling away from her and was staring at the ground.

“You ok?” She reached a hand out to his shoulder cautiously. This definitely wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

“Of all the ways I thought they would react, the probabilities I ran, that was certainly not one of them.”

This time it was Vision who broke out laughing and soon they were both close to tears of laughter once more. Wanda clutched at her stomach and hung off Vision’s arm as they headed upstairs together. The delivery certainly hadn’t been ideal, but it was one worry out of the way, one less complication standing between them. Wanda put an arm out to stop Vision as they reached the top of the stairs which lead to the communal living room and various bedroom suites.

As though thinking the same thing, Vision stopped and held his hand out. She didn’t hesitate as she grabbed his and pulled him the rest of the way, their hands intertwined in a way that had Wanda thinking she’d never need to let go.