#we're talking barely sentient

[batshaped]

the continued adventures of an internet user who was frozen in 2004 and defrosted in 2021: some things are just the way you left them

previous 2004 internet user comics are here: one, two, three, four, five; or just in my 2004 tag

[ckret2]

The second dimension has burned (along with half the neighbors) and now there's a bunch of survivors stranded in Dimension Zero; which means the gods have to talk Bill into letting them leave.

Which should be easy, right? They're a bunch of gods and he's just one puny little mortal. Look how small he is.

Puny little mortal. 👍

Here have a fic.

This is part 6 of an ???8-ish??? part plot about the Axolotl meeting this friendly harmless innocent little triangle in the wake of the Euclidean Massacre and then getting repeatedly slapped in the face with all the atrocities Bill's committed. If you want to read and/or look at the pretty art on the other parts, here's one, two, three, four, and five.

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It hadn't taken long for VENDOR to make preparations to receive another ten million-odd sentient refugees; but then, the Axolotl supposed it wouldn't, considering that THEY could pop out a planet capable of supporting quadrillions at the snap of a finger. (Somebody else's finger, presumably, since vending machines didn't have any.) The most time-consuming part had been determining which gods would be responsible for the refugee shapes currently stranded in Dimension Zero once they were rescued—for speaking for them, for finding out what they ate and supplying it, for finding new suitable 2D and 1D homes for them in dimensions with compatible laws of physics and chemistry. The Axolotl doubted the shapes themselves had been consulted on who they'd like to speak for them.

And then, THEY'd approached the unstable border barely holding the miasmic rubble of half a dozen burned universes inside Dimension Zero, and said, "I hope you're ready to come out of there."

And just like that, the barely visible, twinkling yellow light in the center of the dimension appeared at its border, as if he'd always been there.

Behind the triangle, deep in their "dream realm," the shapes that the triangle had kidnapped/rescued from the cosmic flames, living and dying and undying and unliving, were still trapped in their eternal dance party. How many of them were paying attention to the proceedings through their forced dance? Did any of them understand the negotiations the triangle was making on their behalf? 

The Axolotl was sure their "Magister Mentium" wouldn't allow anyone but himself to speak for the shapes, but VENDOR could find that out the hard way. The Axolotl didn't see any benefit to trying to warn THEM first.

And as expected, the triangle retorted—just as haughtily as VENDOR—"I'm ready to talk. Are you?" The triangle was swirling a drink in a red disposable cup as though he were aerating a fine wine, looking for all the world like he'd been waiting there for hours and VENDOR was the one late to an important meeting.

VENDOR grumbled something that the Axolotl didn't catch besides the word "attitude," and then said, with a diplomatic air that just edged into patronizing, "Well, as long as we're making progress. Come here, let's get started."

"Hmm... nah," the triangle said. "Howsabout you come over here."

VENDOR stared, THEIR camera whirring as its focus narrowed in on the triangle.  "Excuse me? You expect me to get closer to that thing?" (The Axolotl assumed THEY meant the entirety of Dimension Zero.) "Absolutely not. You're already right on the border; just go through it."

The triangle was, indeed, right on the surface of Dimension Zero, like a fleck of glitter stuck on a bubble. He swung back and forth along the dimension's cellophane skin a few times, as though weighing up the thought of peeling himself off of it; and then shrugged, lounged back against the barrier, and sipped his drink. "Naaah, don't feel like it. You come to me! Get cozy! It'll be intimate!" The triangle purred unseductively, "C'mere, big boy, lemme whisper in your... whaddaya got, microphones? An intercom? What are you, some kind of office building?"

"Of all the—! I'm a vending machine!"

"Wooow, really? You're yanking my chain!" He drew a ghostly blue chain out from the esophagus under his eye like a clown pulling a trail of handkerchiefs out of his sleeve.

"It says 'Vendor' on my face!"

"Really? I figured 'Vendor' was the name of the company renting you!"

VENDOR gasped. "You think a god can be rented—?!"

While THEY tried to find adequate words to express THEIR outrage, the triangle's chain disappeared and he squinted at the silver continent-sized logo listing VENDOR's name. "I don't know how you expect anyone to read that anyway; it's all one color," he said. "Well, they make 'em large where you're from! But okay, vending machine, get over here and lemme whisper in your coin slot."

"No!"

"Hey, big as you are, narrow as I am, I bet I could slide right in without even touching the sides!"

VENDOR shuddered hard enough to set off earthquakes on several of THEIR planets. "Is this how you speak to all your gods, mortal?" The two cops at THEIR back bristled menacingly—the crablike cop with two mushrooms for eyes clacking his claws, and the cop made of two interlocked flaming wheels spinning faster and burning higher. 

"Whoa, since when are you one of 'my' gods!" Smugly, the triangle said, "I thought I heard I'm in Lady Morgenstern's district."

Before they could come to blows without ever starting the discussion, the Axolotl called over to VENDOR, "He can't come closer. He's the only one able to keep his dimension from collapsing back into a singularity on the refugees—he has to stay in there in case emergency maintenance is needed."

"Ugh," VENDOR said. "Nevermind, stay where you are then."

With a singsong lilt to his voice, the triangle said, "If you insii-iist!" He settled back against his bubble and took a long, slow sip from his drink.

The Axolotl hated to admit it, but in spite of it all—the horror, the massacres, the cult recruitment, the dancing corpse puppets—he was starting to really like that triangle.

Along with VENDOR and THEIR unofficial police escorts—both of whom seemed content to do nothing but lurk behind THEM and look imposing—several of the gods involved with helping the refugees had assembled to observe the negotiation with the triangle. The storm cloud currently in charge of the Apocalyptic Threat Task Force's operations���who had less to do now that most of the cosmic fires were under control—was drizzling over several other apoc agents, and the tornado in which it carried its personal effects twisted back and forth in a figure 8 beneath the cloud, as though it were pacing in place. At some point, the barricade keeping the reporters from getting too close to the scene had been breached, and now dozens of them—messenger gods, gods of wisdom, gods of truth, twin-headed deities of secrets and revelations—circled the scene with enormous eyes and sharp ears and pens and recorders and cameras.

Until it burned down, the Axolotl had always called Dimension 2 Delta a "wall," because that was always how he was oriented to it during his daily commute—flying home with the dimension to his side—and the now-bloated Dimension Zero where the wall used to be was oriented the same way; but up and down and left and right were arbitrary directions in space when you could just rotate and change them. VENDOR and THEIR accompanying gods had reoriented themselves in relation to Dimension Zero so that it was like a floor rather than a wall—so that they were looking down on the triangle, and forcing him to look up at them.

Even the Axolotl had unconsciously reoriented himself so that he matched the other gods. He couldn't pretend he had any business in this discussion as anything but an uninvited witness; he'd been flying in nervous circles around the group, only just barely within the perimeter established by the reporters, gazing down into Dimension Zero as he did. Even though the triangle was staring straight at VENDOR, his slitted eye felt like one of those trick paintings that gave off the impression that, no matter where the Axolotl was, it was looking directly at him.

He ended up circling near the Time Giant, who was also avoiding the conversation as she worked on her official report on what she'd found in Dimension Zero. As he passed, she absentmindedly patted his head between his frills. Her glove was coated in grease, heavy metals shavings, and stardust.

The triangle said, "So pitch me your big evacuation plan."

"You don't need to worry about the details; it's our responsibility to handle the situation, not a mortal's."

"Humor me," the triangle commanded.

VENDOR valiantly bit back the urge to say something else snide. "Fine. It's a simple process, at least for you. First: you'll all be temporarily relocated to a safe world, where you'll be taken care of. Somewhere... suited to your species's anatomy, as best as we can manage on such short notice." As THEY spoke, THEY began idly flipping through THEIR worlds, juggling them between THEIR coils, apparently mentally measuring up the triangle before THEM against THEIR available selection. The Axolotl had seen THEM do that earlier. A nervous habit, he supposed. The god from the urban planning committee deciding where a few more residents could be moved.

A few of the partiers far below the triangle had apparently noticed the conversation, and had broken off from the party to fly a little closer to the barrier, eavesdropping on the discussion. There was a quiet flurry of excitement at the suggestion they might be getting a planet. (They had so little in there, didn't they?)

"Second: we clean out the rubble that fell beneath the multiverse and ensure everything is stabilized again. Third: we set off Big Bangs to put up new 1D pillars and 2D walls where the old ones used to be, and repair all the standing walls and pillars that were damaged in the fires. We'll likely recycle much of the rubble into the new dimensions. There, that's nice, isn't it? Your new dimension could be made out of what's left of your old one." THEY talked like an adult who didn't like kids trying to persuade a child that this new toy was just as good as one that had been accidentally thrown away.

As VENDOR spoke, the triangle slid off his tall black hat and held it in his hands, looking down at it. No, the Axolotl realized, not at it—into it. He was looking at his speck. The little pearl that contained the scant remains of his universe.

"Fourth: all the refugees are returned to their native dimensions or their replacements."

The grip on the brim of his hat tightened. The triangle looked up sharply.

A few of the shapes who'd broken off from the dance party to eavesdrop looked dubious of this news—the Axolotl noted the line that the triangle had been dancing with earlier among them—but the vast majority looked ecstatic. One of them—a nearly square blue rhombus—rushed back to spread the news to the rest of the party.

But he stopped without reaching them when the triangle demanded, "You think you're going to split us up?"

"Of course! You can't possibly be placed together long term—you're all from so many different dimensions that your molecules probably don't even operate on the same laws of physics." VENDOR pointedly added, "Besides, I know some gods are very eager to have their people returned to them." The Vitruvian Mandala must have talked to THEM about how the triangle got his new followers. (How many of the listening shapes were eager to return to their gods?)

The triangle stared at VENDOR, eye wide and expression unreadable; but for a split second, an inferno of absolute fury raged behind that blank white sclera. "What about me, genius? You don't have a god to foist me off on."

"No, I suppose not," VENDOR sighed. "Naturally, as the last surviving soul from your dimension, you'll be afforded a few more special protections than the others." (The triangle didn't protest the accusation that he was the last.) "Eventually, you'll have the option to move into an afterlife in whatever replaces Dimension 2 Delta, but until then, you'll have to be housed elsewhere, just like the other refugees. Did you have diplomatic relations with any of the neighboring dimensions?"

He said tersely, "No."

(Then that settled the question for good, the Axolotl thought: none of the other shapes came from his home dimension; and he really hadn't known the shapes he'd kidnapped from other universes and called "his" people.)

"Of course not. That will complicate finding another dimension to move you to, but I'm sure he'll help you with that part."

VENDOR tilted in the Axolotl's general direction. Terrific, THEY'd progressed from accusing him of being a stranger's lawyer to volunteering his services.

"Of course, you should expect to be judged and sentenced by the standards of whatever afterlife you join—"

The Axolotl cut in loudly, "I think he'd rather remain a wandering ghost." It was clear the triangle still saw himself as alive. (Maybe, to his species's culture, he was still alive. If the Axolotl had learned anything during his service as a psychopomp, it was that death was as much cultural as it was physical. Most species saw a soul shedding its body as the end, but others saw it the same way as a butterfly shedding a cocoon.)

VENDOR shuddered in distaste. "I can't believe this district still hasn't outlawed letting unruly expired mortals meander around."

Of course THEY were anti-wandering ghosts. The Axolotl didn't know what else he expected. He made a mental note to throw a campaign donation at Municipalitron before the next election. "Yes, it is still legal, and technically isn't illegal on a district-wide level anywhere in the multiverse—wandering ghost legislation is decided at the dimensional level—"

"You can explain his options after he's come out here into civilized space," VENDOR said sourly. "The bottom line is, everyone gets sent home. And that's the plan! All right?" THEY glowered down at the triangle.

With a flick of his wrist, the triangle's hat poofed out of his hand and reappeared above his top angle. "If you want my opinion—"

"There is nothing I have ever wanted less."

"—you're wasting a lot of time creating a worse solution to a problem you invented! Splitting us up, gentrifying our dream realm, forcing us back under gods and locking us up in afterlives? Yikes! We're not refugees, we're liberated—for the first time in our lives! We don't need to be 'sent home'! We're already living in our home!" The triangle put unnecessary emphasis on the word living.

The excitement slowly drained from the eyes of the listening shapes. They looked so tired. How many were already dead? How many wanted to rest in an afterlife?

The triangle said, "Look, I can save you a lot of time on red tape and bureaucracy." He gestured back into Dimension Zero. "Just give us an empty spot outside reality's butthole, we'll pack up our dream realm and fly it there ourselves, and then everything's hunky-dory!"

"Pack your— Fly it—?!" VENDOR scoffed in disbelief. "You must be mad. It would most certainly not be 'hunky-dory'! Your little organic mortal mind can't even grasp how much more difficult, dangerous, and inefficient it would be to relocate and rebuild this wreck instead of simply recycling what's left of it and setting off a new Big Bang. Is it even possible?" THEY'd directed this last question to the Time Giant.

"Hm?" It took her a moment to drag herself from her paperwork and process the question. "Hell, I hope not. It's the worst idea I've ever heard."

"See? I don't even know which district's jurisdiction such a ridiculous project would fall under!"

"So what's the problem?" the triangle asked. "It probably won't be yours! You can foist the paperwork off on some other sucker!" (The Axolotl choked back a laugh.)

"It would circle back around to the urban planning committee eventually," VENDOR said wearily. "We simply don't have room for a—" They turned to the Time Giant again. "How big is this dimension, anyway?"

"'Bout twenty percent bigger than D-2Δ was."

"Oh, what a disaster. Two dimensional?"

"Technically, zero, but it behaves like it has five or six."

"Absolutely barbaric." VENDOR rounded on the triangle. "We don't even have zoning for an oversized zero dimensional property shaped like a six dimensional property! Every last Planck length in the multiverse is already in use; this is a planned community— Are you paying attention?! Don't you roll your eye at me!"

He was indeed rolling his eye as he took a long, slow sip from his red plastic cup. He held up a finger to signal VENDOR to wait until he'd finished. This wasn't doing the triangle any favors, but the Axolotl had the sneaking suspicion he'd decided to ignore VENDOR because VENDOR had started to ignore him.

"Of all the—you're the one who wanted to waste my time finding out how your evacuation will work! You could at least listen!"

VENDOR still thought THEY were giving instructions to a mortal who didn't quite yet fully understand that it was his responsibility to simply obey, and the triangle still thought this was a parley between equals in which he had the option to say no. And, the Axolotl realized, they were both wrong.

A single reality could simultaneously operate on so many vastly different scales. The Axolotl could still hear the triangle saying that he felt every dying thing that fell into Dimension Zero; he could still see the triangle's gaze unfocused from pain and the distraction of holding up a dimension on his back. While a minor local elected official was arguing about zoning law, a mortal was suffering a trillion trillion deaths.

And on a smaller scale even than that, a trillion trillion lives were suffering death—once.

The Axolotl wondered—what justice was there in the fact that the most trivial concerns of gods were infinitely vaster than the worst horror a mortal could ever endure?

(But what justice was there in the fact that one mortal could force so many more to endure the horror with him?)

The triangle finished his drink and sighed, "Yeah, yeah, I'm listening." Like a bored child fidgeting in his seat, the triangle peeled off Dimension Zero's skin and swung backward into his dream realm, so that he was dangling over his eternal party with the soles of his feet still stuck to the bubble. "And all I'm getting out of your yammering is that you want to destroy my dimension because you don't want to deal with a little red tape!" (He stared at the eavesdropping shapes. They flinched and retreated to the party.)

"No," VENDOR said venomously, "I'm saying we can't move the rubble pile you're calling a dimension, because it would require knocking down half of existence to restructure it around your whims."

"Great! Which half do you want me to knock down?"

The Axolotl could faintly hear the click of VENDOR's camera shutter closing and reopening in horror.

The storm cloud had been brooding quietly back with the other apoc agents while VENDOR and the triangle attempted to negotiate, but now it let out a thunderous rumble as it swept like a cold front into the discussion. "Out of the question. The whole point of clearing out the rubble is to prevent any more damage to the surrounding dimensions. We're not going with a plan that causes more apocalypses."

"Oh, for— No one's talking to you, Fog Brain!" The triangle tried to wave the cloud off. "Who do you think you are, the Killjoy God of Stopping Apocalypses?"

The cloud's tornado swerved down to hold its Apocalyptic Threat Task Force badge where the triangle could see. "Yeah, actually."

He gave it a dirty look. "Okay, Officer Fun Police. Here's the deal: me, my people, and my miasma in here are a package deal. I'm not going a-ny-where without them, and they're not going anywhere without me. So if you don't want us knocking the stilts out from under your palafito, then you'd better make an offer better than Coin Slot's little refugee plan!"

"Your people? What gives you the right to speak for them!" The storm's tornado jumped in intensity from F0 to F2, and only grew faster the more it spoke. Through its clouds, the eye of the storm glared down at the triangle. "You mean the people I've watched die all day thanks to your attempts to kidnap them from their own dimensions?!"

The triangle glared right back up into the eye without flinching. "Yeah, and my attempts to rescue them from our world would have a lot better success rate if you incompetent losers didn't keep getting in my way!"

In a startling display of unity, the storm cloud and VENDOR both started shouting at the triangle, one after the other: "Rescued?! The ATTF was already rescuing them! We're professionals! You're the one mucking up all our operations—"

"And you're the only reason these mortals need rescuing! You caused this crisis in the first place; you spread all the fires—"

"—and mangled or cremated half the people you're trying to save—!"

"You're forcing millions of people to float aimlessly in an unstable, barren void! Those mortals belong out here, under divine supervision, on a real world!" VENDOR punctuated this with a rev of THEIR motors and THEIR coils half twisting forward, like THEY were tempted to launch THEIR whole stock of worlds at the triangle in anger. "I am a vending machine full of planets. Any one of these would be better than your colorful cesspit! What are you offering?!"

The triangle was glowing red-hot, trembling with rage. "Everything they were ever told they can't have," he said. "Freedom. Immortality. Utopia!" With a noise like a whip crack, the triangle snapped his arm down (up?) to point at his eternal dance party; and suddenly his eternal party was right there, and he was in the middle of it. "This is what I'm offering! Isn't that right, gang?! We're keeping this party going forever!" A loud roar of voices cheered in response. (It was, the Axolotl thought, nowhere near ten million voices. The shapes that had been eavesdropping earlier had blended back into the crowd. The only one the Axolotl could still see was the blue rhombus, glaring resentfully at the triangle.)

With an impressive synthesized approximation of the sound of speaking through gritted teeth, VENDOR said, "Why would you want to squat in the rubble of half a dozen destroyed dimensions when we could recycle it into a new dimension?!"

In truth, the Axolotl was wondering the same thing. He could understand if the triangle were just trying to maintain his independence from an overbearing god—the triangle clearly liked being in charge—but then why not offer the rubble from Dimension 2 Delta in exchange for the right to rule the new dimension that would be made with it? VENDOR would never agree to that deal—not that THEY even had the authority to agree—but that hadn't stopped the triangle from making even less likely demands. Or why not trade the rubble to the gods in exchange for an equivalently-sized stable universe to throw his unending party in? Hell, why not say he'd take a newly-vended planet as long as he could rule it without any unwanted divine intervention? His people didn't want to live like this. Why did he?

With great dignity, the triangle straightened out his hat, casually swirled his drink, and floated up off the surface of the bubble—and the Axolotl realized that the triangle hadn't been standing "upside down." All along, he'd been doing the same thing VENDOR had done to him: repositioning himself so that the surface of the barrier between the zeroth dimension and the third dimension was his floor, so that the gods he spoke to were beneath his very feet.

He didn't answer VENDOR's question. Instead, he asked his own: "Why would I want to be a dead freak in somebody else's universe, when I can be an eternal god in mine?"

So many things—his insistence that he was alive, his contempt for the gods that tried to assert their superiority, his determination to repair his own reality, his absolute control over his people—suddenly made sense.

VENDOR leaned away from the triangle. "You? Think you? Get to be? A god?" THEIR two police escorts, who so far had managed to stay silent, burst out in mocking laughter.

The triangle stared imperiously down upon VENDOR, THEIR hundreds of worlds, and the countless gods watching. "It seems to me like I already am one!"  Arms outstretched, he gestured around himself at Dimension Zero, at his eternal party. A cacophony of every song at once poured out into the higher dimensions and all lights shone on him like a strobing halo. "I created a universe by myself! A dream realm where ideas and reality overlap, where a thought's just as powerful as an act! A dimension of color and life that's free from all laws and restrictions—even gravity! If that's not godly, I don't know what is!"

Honestly, the Axolotl thought it was kind of impressive that the triangle had spun his failure to get the gravity working into a perk.

The crablike cop hooted with laughter and said to his partner, "How stupid does he think we are?"

"You're no creator god," VENDOR said. "Everything you have fell in from Dimension 2 Delta and its neighboring dimensions—we know that much."

The triangle was silent for a long moment; and the Axolotl got the sense, by the look in his eye, that he was choosing his next words very carefully. Like a creator god preparing to speak a reality into existence.

Voice low and hard, he said, "You don't think it got in here all by itself, do you?"

VENDOR gasped sharply. THEY weren't the only one. A crackle of thunder and a low rumble filled the still space—followed by hundreds of tiny, twinkling lights from the outer ring of gods, the flashes of the reporters' cameras. Recording the mortal who claimed he'd killed an entire universe.

The triangle, glaring defiantly down at them all, seemed to glow a little brighter with each flash.

No. Not that curious, cocky, bright-eyed little triangle. The Axolotl couldn't believe he had wanted to destroy his own dimension.

But... he did believe the triangle had done it. On some level, he'd known.

The storm cloud cut in, "Hold on, hold on, hold on." It seemed to be the only one who could find something to say. The Axolotl was sure it had known, too; it had only been waiting for confirmation. Making a valiant effort to rein in its rage, it retrieved its interview and asked, "How did you destroy your dimension?"

The triangle's hands curled into fists, crushing his cup. "I didn't say I destroyed it. I renovated." He said it so haughtily. He said it like he needed to believe it himself. "It was close-minded and claustrophobic! It needed a lotta work! The whole thing ended up being a teardown! A place like that, the only thing you can do is—burn it down and start over."

The Axolotl could hear the triangle's voice catch and fall quieter as he regretted his choice of words before he'd even finished saying them. His heart broke. No. He knew the triangle didn't mean that. He was torturing himself to keep as many of his people alive as possible, he couldn't have meant to destroy all those lives—

The triangle raised his voice again—not quite shouting, but straining to project his words, to ensure everyone, everyone, would hear him. (Over the next trillion years, the Axolotl would come to think of this as the default way he spoke.) "We're building a better world here. One where we're all finally free. Isn't that right?!" His undead, undying revelers cheered and applauded. This speech wasn't for the storm cloud; it was for his followers and the reporters. He was putting on a performance. What a show it must be through the cameras: the lights, the music, the proud glittering shape in the center of it all.

The storm demanded, "How did you do it?"

The triangle hesitated again, searching again for the right words, the right story. His eye darted to the side, toward his listening people. Like a bad radio signal, the dance music was infected by a rising static hiss.

But before he could come up with an answer, VENDOR snarled, "It doesn't matter; that's all we need to know! We don't need to wait for him to enter the third dimension anymore—" THEY turned to the cops, "—arrest him now!"

The triangle flinched. "Wait, what?" He glared accusatorially between the Axolotl and the Time Giant. "You! You set me up!"

"Did not," the Time Giant muttered resentfully. "I gave the ATTF my verbal report. What they do with the report ain't my problem."

The Axolotl didn't even respond to the accusation. Operating on pure reflex, he'd already dove in front of the triangle, gills flared and curled forward, putting himself in between the accused criminal and the gods of punishment.

"You can't be serious!" His gaze darted in disbelief between the gods he'd spoken to the most throughout this whole wretched incident. The Time Giant's jaw was set hard and she kept her face turned from the scene as she continued to work on her official report; the storm's cloud had darkened and its rain fell heavy and cold; and VENDOR—well, VENDOR still looked like a vending machine, but the Axolotl had no doubt THEY were determined to carry this through. "He's a refugee seeking asylum! You should be worried about getting him and his people to safety!"

The Axolotl felt the triangle's eye on him like a laser. "They can't do that." (He had only heard that nervous waver in the triangle's voice once before. Yesterday—before Dimension 2 Delta burned—the very first time the triangle had ever met a higher dimensional being.)

"We can." VENDOR's camera focused on the Axolotl. "Unless you have any legal objections."

He nearly demanded THEY explain what legal grounds THEY possibly had to arrest him—and then realized what an idiot he was for not seeing this coming. He'd been so blinded by the fact that he was sure the triangle hadn't meant it that he hadn't registered what the triangle had done.

The triangle had burned down multiple dimensions by ignorantly messing with the fabric of reality. He'd selectively targeted entire populated worlds—and accident or not, he'd incinerated them. On the immense scale of crimes this triangle was operating on, personally kidnapping millions and slaughtering billions who got caught in the crossfire was the least of his sins. VENDOR didn't want the triangle shuffled into some afterlife to get him out of the way; THEY wanted him damned.

But the gods had divine laws, and how they judged the mortals and sentenced the dead were among the most complex branches. What you could punish the living for, and what you had to wait until their death to punish; whether a ghost could be allowed to wander; where a psychopomp could escort the dead; when and how gods could reincarnate a soul... Rules, rules, rules.

And one rule was that a god couldn't legally arrest a mortal outside their own jurisdiction, under any circumstances, without permission from a god who did have jurisdiction.

Any gods who once held jurisdiction over the souls born in 2Δ were dead. The only gods who could arrest the triangle now were whatever gods had authority over the territory he was in.

No one and nothing had ever had authority over Dimension Zero.

The triangle had stumbled his way into the only pure neutral territory in all of reality. He could not be legally arrested.

That was why VENDOR had been so eager to get the triangle out of Dimension Zero; that was why THEY were so impatient with his protests and questions. This was all just a ploy to lure out the triangle so they could make an arrest that neither the witnessing reporters nor the neighborhood's most stubborn afterlife lawyer could legally challenge.

However... those were the rules for arresting a mortal. Arresting a god was different.

Any gods that operated on a higher than galactic level agreed that nothing mattered more than preventing divine threats to the multiverse, by any means necessary. Whoever could make the arrest should make the arrest, and they'd figure out who was in charge of the troublemaker later. Jurisdiction was irrelevant when it came to stopping a god who committed crimes against reality.

Which was exactly what the little triangle had claimed to be.

"Well?" VENDOR pressed. "Any problems, attorney?"

The triangle had the kind of eye that gave off the impression that he was always looking at you, no matter where you were; but now it felt different. Now, the Axolotl truly felt the triangle was looking directly at him.

It wasn't one of those creepy being-stared-at feelings that made his back prickle and his gills curl. It was more like the sensation he got in court whenever one of his clients was looking to him for support and protection, when the Axolotl was the only thing standing between them and death, damnation, or worse.

The Axolotl wracked his brain for any reason to object to an arrest. He was sure, he was sure, that the triangle didn't want to hurt anyone... but the Axolotl's opinions weren't relevant. The triangle was a self-professed god who had confessed to deliberately destroying his home dimension. He was more than an active threat to existence itself—the fires were still burning.

But... "You'll have to prove he's a god." Which was more difficult than one might think. A legally airtight definition of what was and wasn't a god was notoriously elusive. "If you cross dimensional lines to arrest him and then can't prove he's divine, any decent defense attorney could get the whole case thrown out." Which was maybe a slight exaggeration—any decent prosecutor wouldn't let a mortal who'd destroyed a dimension go unpunished, even if they had to hunt him down with their own scythes and fangs—but the Axolotl didn't see any judges here to call him out.

"Pinky's right," the crablike cop said—and only then did the Axolotl realize he and the flaming wheels hadn't budged an inch at VENDOR's order. "Shoulda waited for him to come out."

VENDOR spluttered indignantly. "But you don't have to prove he's a god to arrest him, do you? Just—just that you had reason to think he's one? Isn't that how it works?"

The crab's mushroom eyestalks and the wheels' hundred eyes exchanged a look. The wheels said flatly, "If we claim we had probable cause to believe the mortal's a god because the mortal himself said so, we'll be laughed out of the courtroom."

"Hey! Are you calling me a liar?!" The triangle flared red hot. Some of his shapes had stopped dancing again to stare at the argument. "I made a dimension! If that's not godly, what is?!" Frustrated, he gestured again at the party behind him and the dream realm beyond. (One of the shapes who'd stopped dancing waved.) "Were you listening to that part of the conversation? Or didja get too many retinas to leave room for a cochlea or two, Eyeballs?! How about you, Pinchers; is that gunk growing out of your shell clogging your ears?"

The rings' flames blazed a bit hotter as he seethed, but the crab's two mushrooms reeled back in offense and he clacked his claws furiously. "Those are my brains, you idiot!"

"No kidding?"

The Axolotl swore he could see the malice in the triangle's eye as he thought of ways to abuse this new information. Before the triangle had a chance, the Axolotl dove in the way of his line of sight to the cop and hissed, "Shh! Whose side are you on?" Handing his future prosecutor ammo was bad enough; he had to insult the cops too?

"I could ask you the same thing! All I hear you doing is telling them a better way to arrest me!"

"You don't want to be charged as a god—!" 

"Maybe I do!" Growing more heated, he shouted, "Nobody could do this by accident! It's impossible! Obviously I meant to do it, how could it have happened if I didn't mean to do it?!"

Oh, the Axolotl thought. Oh. Oh, no. This poor child.

The crab laughed loudly. "This pipsqueak's funny!"

"You're a mere mortal with some magic tricks," the flaming wheels said coldly. "You probably have a superpower or two. That doesn't makes you a god."

The triangle's gaze locked onto the cops like a prison searchlight on two escaping convicts. His eye darted between them, sizing them up like a predator choosing the easier prey; and then focused on the crab. "You want me to prove it?" He shoved his crumpled red cup over to one of his nearby followers. (In his rage, he didn't seem to notice that he'd shoved the cup into his follower, in the middle of his 2D organs.) The triangle pointed at the crab. "Come over here! I'll show you!"

"He thinks we're stupid," the rings said.

The crab jabbed a claw toward Dimension Zero. "If you were a god, I wouldn't have to come over there for you to pull whatever dumb trick you're trying! You'd be omnipotent enough to just do it!"

"If you're so sure I'm lying, you've got nothing to lose! So what are you waiting for?! Sounds to me like you're scared! Afraid a little mortal pipsqueak might hurt you if you step into his domain? You scared of pipsqueaks, Pinchers?"

The crab clacked his claws angrily. The two wheels' fires flared up, their furious eyes as bright as stars, glaring at the triangle with the force of a hundred steel-melting sunbeams. The crab growled, "Of course I'm not scared of a stupid little—"

"Then what're you waiting for, fungus brain?!" The triangle didn't even squint under the burning ring lights. If anything, he seemed to soak up the light, growing brighter by the second. He slung an arm around a nearby trapezoid (who started as the Magister Mentium somehow gripped her through a dimension she couldn't see) and said, "Everyone here knows that you're a big, scared coward who's too afraid to face down one puny little mortal. You big chicken!" He turned to shout to his imprisoned people, "Hey everyone, look at the big chicken who's scared of a mortal! What a loser!" 

"Fine! I'll show you what a god is—" Claws crashing together like thunderclaps, the crab stormed up to the border of Dimension Zero.

The second the crab stuck his face through, the triangle twirled upside down.

The entire dimension turned upside down with him. It ground against the nearest walls as it laboriously rotated; all of reality shuddered.

The shapes trapped inside shrieked.

The crab wobbled back.

His face was upside-down, the stalks of his mushrooms were tied in a bow, his claws were attached backwards, and his shell was unevenly coated in purple glitter glue. "Well," he said woozily, "I think that triangle's a god."

"Now will you arrest him?" VENDOR demanded.

The flaming wheels shook themselves out of their shock. "Fall back, kid," they said sharply. "I'll handle this."

"Sure, sarge." Trying to get his mushrooms untied, the crab cop stumbled sideways back toward Dimension Zero. One of the other cop's wheels hooked around one of his legs and tugged. The crab stumbled sideways the other direction. 

And then the wheels turned their full attention on the triangle. "It's too bad hubris isn't illegal here." The rings grew, and grew, and grew hotter, and hotter; until, at last, they were vast enough that one ring could have held a supermassive black hole in its circumference. "YOU COULD HAVE LEARNED THE EASY WAY WHY IT'S A BAD IDEA."

The wheels whirled like some eldritch cross between saw blades and pulsars as they approached the border of Dimension Zero. Their countless eyes opened and shut in hypnotic patterns, red and blue, red and blue. The reporters' camera flashes petered out; the ones taking notes into recorders fell silent. The power that poured off the whirling flaming wheels, both physical and psychological, was suffocating. Even as ancient and powerful as the Axolotl was, and even though the display wasn't aimed at him, he could feel it like a pressure on his lungs—feel it like swimming through water without oxygen. This was the sort of god that could incinerate a million worlds with one rotation. 

But the triangle only momentarily flinched back at the red and blue flashing; and then the display made the triangle stronger. Soaking in the heat, the light—glowing brighter, hotter, redder, angrier. "You wanna get me?!" 

The empty space around him burst into flames—pale, blue flames, reeking of burning hydrogen. Several of the more lucid nearby dancers shrieked in terror.

The helpless shapes burned up. But the triangle simply burned.

He grew in size, larger than the Axolotl, than VENDOR, than even the flaming wheels—larger than all the assembled gods combined—filled the entire visible cosmos with light. "Then come get me!"

Lightning and his knuckles both cracked menacingly; and the sound echoed across a dozen fracturing realities. Gouts of fire erupted from Dimension Zero, shooting from the second dimensions into the thirds. The gods froze as the fabric of reality vibrated with trillions of trillions of voices screaming in agony as they were incinerated.

The triangle's eye was wider than the twin rings' circumference. Dimension Zero pulled taut around him. Dimension Zero was triangular. And though it hadn't moved, it was clear that the gods were no longer looking down at Dimension Zero; they were staring up into it.

The twirling rings skidded to a stop as they realized that, in all their million-world-incinerating wrath, they were a matchstick next to this volcano. "Whoa—whoa! Stay back—"

"Whatsamatter, handcuffs? Can't handle the HEAT?!" The nauseating, kaleidoscopic miasma behind where the wall used to be lurched toward them. Every god flinched back as the formless color feigned grabbing at them. "Shoulda thought of that before you stepped into my kitchen! I'll boil you alive!" The triangle let out a terrible, hysterical, shrieking laugh that echoed between the stars. 

Columns of roiling colors, like amoeba-like feelers the size of a galaxy, bulged out of Dimension Zero, curled around the edges of the crumbling husks of the neighboring dimensions—2 Gamma, 2 Epsilon, 2 Zeta—and reached out, looking for somewhere else to get purchase. Whatever had filled Dimension Zero appeared to be trying to crawl upside-down out of its prison and into the third dimension. In all his existence, in his worst nightmares, the Axolotl had never seen anything like it before. Oozing reality dripped lava-lamplike from Dimension Zero, lurching closer to the shaking twin-ringed cop, preparing to crush them like two pieces of cereal in a formless palm—

And then existence itself let out a howl of pain.

Everyone froze.

The triangle shrank back to his usual size with the speed of a balloon popping. His wide eye darted around nervously. "What."

The multiverse was still. The triangle shook it off, pushed against the border of Dimension Zero, and tried again to squeeze his dream realm out of the bloated singularity into the multiverse—and reality screamed again, like the sound of solid metal being twisted and ripped in half. Its echoes continued long after the triangle froze again—followed up by an alarming series of creaks and punctuated by a CRACK that made everyone assembled flinch.

The Time Giant swore and muttered, "That sounded like something important."

The triangle jerked back again, and only then seemed to notice that he was still burning. He looked at his hands, coated in pale blue flames.

The Axolotl couldn't see the trapezoid the triangle had had his arm around a moment ago.

The apoc agents were already a flurry of activity. The storm cloud—so terrified that it had started hailing—shakily pulled a walkie-talkie from its tornado and demanded info on the status of the second dimensions, trying to figure out what had cracked and what they could possibly do to mitigate the devastation. Replies tumbled in, overlapping each other, frantically reporting fires in dimensions the Axolotl had never heard of before. He could already see how the line of blue fire on the cosmic horizon had grown so much brighter, stretching out into space. Please, don't let the fires have spread to the third dimensions.

The triangle was shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. Trying to sound more confident than he looked, he squeaked, "I think I've made my point! I'll let you losers off with a warning this time!"

The cops had somehow managed to put the entire line of reporters in between them and Dimension Zero. The crab ducked his mushrooms down when the triangle addressed them. The rotating rings shrank a little smaller, but muttered, "Well—we're—we're watching you."

The triangle surveyed the ring's hundred eyes. "Yeah," he drawled, "you look like you're good at that."

Voice shaking, the Time Giant barked at the triangle, "Are you nuts?" She gestured furiously toward the growing line of fire on the horizon; spurts of blue flame were still erupting into the third dimension. "I told you that moving around would damage—!"

"Don't. Don't provoke him," the Axolotl said. "He still has hostages in there."

"Hey!" the triangle shouted, and the Axolotl flinched. The triangle strained against the thin membrane of Dimension Zero to lunge at the Axolotl. "Watch who you're calling hostages! Hey, are any of you hostages?" He whipped around to stare at his people.

None answered. The ones who were lucid and living simply stared in silent terror.

"That's what I thought!" the triangle said. "Now, why aren't you dancing! Is this a party or not!" He whipped around again to face the Axolotl. "If you wanna go too, let's go. Just try to enter my kingdom, see what happens."

"No." The Axolotl could take it. The Axolotl was an axolotl; anything he lost, he could regrow. But the shapes that would be caught in the crossfire couldn't.

"Didn't think so," the triangle snarled. "If you want to kidnap my worshipers, you'll have to come in here and get them." His voice dropped to a deep, booming growl that echoed through the stars. "Because we're staying. Right. Here."

The Axolotl could hear VENDOR's motors whining in stress as THEY tensed up at that ultimatum, but THEY knew better than to argue. The triangle's eye twisted into a satisfied smirk.

The triangle couldn't leave his "dream realm," the Axolotl realized. That was why he threatened to fight anyone who crossed his borders: he couldn't attack them before then. He could crawl out of Dimension Zero, but not without dragging along the entire world he'd built inside of it. No wonder he hadn't even considered VENDOR's plan to move him somewhere else so Dimension 2 Delta's rubble could be recycled. He and his miasma were a package deal.

But—why couldn't he leave his dream realm?

"You know you can't stay in there," the Time Giant said, gently pushing aside the Axolotl when he tried to shush her. "It's too unstable—"

"I'll repair it."

"And I told you the entire multiverse will collapse if you keep making 'repairs'—"

"Your multiverse isn't my problem," the triangle said icily. "I can stabilize my dimension just fine. Maybe you need to get off my hypotenuse and worry about stabilizing your own dimensions." He was speaking past her now, talking instead toward the reporters—talking to the whole multiverse.

"It'll be your problem when the omnipocalypse crunches you, too! What'll you do when all those higher dimensions crash down on yours?!"

The triangle spread his arms and said, simply, "Welcome them to the party."

####

(Thanks for reading!! If the art lured you in and this is the first chapter you read, this is part 6 of a 7-or-8-or-9 part fic that keeps getting more parts, about the Axolotl in the immediate aftermath of the Euclidean Massacre. I'll be posting one chapter a week, Fridays 5pm CST, so stick around if you wanna watch the Axolotl deal with the fact that the sweet little triangle is, in fact, the bad guy. :,(

It's ALSO chapter 66 of an ongoing post-canon post-TBOB very-reluctantly-human Bill fic. So if you wanna read more of me writing Bill, check it out. If you're not sold on the idea of a human Bill fic, I've also got a one-shot about normal triangle Bill escaping the Theraprism if you wanna read that.

If this is NOT your first time here and you already knew all of the above: tbh this is probably all of you at this point, but I'm maintaining hope that contextless art of Bill & the Axolotl doing stuff will continue to lure in curious new readers until this arc is done lmfao.

At long last, the characters learn what the audience has known the whole time. This chapter had several big moments, looking forward to hearing y'all's thoughts!!)

[seraphsfire]

///ARCANE s2 finale SPOILERS ///

LONG POST

SO. THAT VIKTOR ARCANE LEAGUEOFLEGENDS GUY HUH.

some observations that are my personal opinion and/or interpretation of viktor's transformation and physical state. (my screenshots, idc if u repost them or whatever just don't say they're yours, etc)

minor edit: added a sentence i could've sworn i'd written that i hadn't and so my paragraph made no sense lol

love love love the aspects of body horror and character design going on with viktor's post-sourdough-starter cyborg body here, so i was trying to get a better look at it to maybe sort of figure out how his body was transformed, and what it's made of now (metal, magic, a third secret thing, idk)

so it looks like, in general, his skeletal structure and the metal parts in his back brace and his leg brace were fused together and then fused *into* his musculoskeletal structure, not just sort of copied by the hexcore. You can see here he has actual bolts in his spine before he got robot-ified, and to me it seems like this could have been a way for his brace to hook or snap onto his spine more securely to give him extra support.

I think the circles in the middle of the brace over his sternum might have also snapped into bolts in his chest, and you can see them better here

the cloth and leather parts of the brace have either dissolved or been turned into metal.

--I just want to take a side note here to note what im sure other ppl have mentioned but I haven't seen talked much about at least recently, is that viktor's disability wasn't just his mobility issues and bad respiratory health, that he must have been in terrible pain to have a procedure as extreme as bolts being put into his spine and/or chest deemed necessary / beneficial to his quality of life.

In the scene where he tries to destroy the hexcore, he can barely push himself up, and it takes all of his strength to lift a stool over his head that's only a few pounds :(

He later asks jayce to destroy the hexcore because he can't, and ive seen most people interpret that as him not wanting to destroy his life's work, but i always viewed it as him not physically being able to--the hexcore was too strong, and it snapped out at him and knocked him over just at the threat of him destroying it.

That circles over to another thing i thought was interesting, is that when he comes out of the goop he still seems very weak and unstable, even though he now has his back brace and leg brace fused to his skeleton. He still has to use his crutch to walk toward jayce and make effort to straighten his legs, because they're still twisted. It makes me wonder if the hexcore didn't so much heal him as dull his sense of pain so he couldn't feel it, and its energy forced him to move.

That's something i thought was interesting, and it made me think of his line about not feeling cold--he then says he feels something that is exactly how I'd describe coldness to somebody who's never felt it before, it just seems like now, his nervous system doesn't process it in the same way as he used to recognize the sensation of coldness. Interestingly, he still describes it as "unpleasant"

back to the design of viktor's body: what exactly is it made of? Here's where the body horror aspect of it comes in, because i think there's a possibility that's still mostly his body and what we're seeing here is exposed, preserved muscle fiber, because the hexcore either burned or melted off his skin or it literally rotted away while he was in the goop. There's a few artsy little flourishes from the hexcore magic peeking through, but except for the slightly darker color, it looks eerily like how muscle fiber on preserved cadavers looks, down to the way the little filamenty veins are. Granted it could just be a metallic structure the hexcore created, visually mimicking human muscle structure. Or the sourdough starter could have been something super gross like magic sentient cosmic energy formaldehyde--that also makes sense to me because of how when his hair grew out some of the tips had lost color, like they'd been bleached.

anyway the visual aspect of his resurrected hexcore appearance that makes me think of a reanimated cadaver most was how strange and unsettling i found it that he's completely gray and glowing with purple sparks, is that for some reason he's still got a bellybutton and almost a normal skin-like surace to that part of his stomach.

On the other hand, his hip socket and the rest of his pelvis is bony and skeletal. You can kind of see his pelvis not being attached with muscle fiber to his hip socket in that lower corner, it looks the same atp as when he's in his cosmic form.

the jokes about "jayce hugged him with his whole ______ out!!!!" just make me sad bc obviously any extraneous soft tissue was completely obliterated, (I say obviously but idk how many ppl literally believe they were censoring human body parts here.)

Like, he doesn't even have fingernails anymore. The only reason he has a stomach still is because abdominal muscles are a skeletal support structure.

That gives the he heebie jeebies so good, honestly, and what an fascinating choice by the design team instead of giving him idk, age of ultron steel robot shaped abs, which i've seen a lot in like human--robot transformations, he's this horrifying mix of petrified/preserved cadaver tissue, magic metal, and sentient cosmic energy. (Even more tragic and sad if you think about it that way and that jayce might have been hugging his dead friend's preserved, skinned corpse)

the "reanimated corpse" idea fits into the interpretation that viktor's emotions and thoughts are still his, but they've been very dulled by the power of the hexcore, because a reanimated cadaver body isn't going to be able to work as effeciently that way anymore.

or idk maybe the idea that he was still sort-of there, faintly is one i like because it makes me feel better, i can at least pretend some part of him felt comforted being held in such a horrific situation. had to post this screenshot bc that sad little face when hes getting hugged is destroying me

Anyway. many thoughts, many feelings, many possibilities and interpretations. Do with this what you will. I, for instance, will be walking into the sea and never returning probably

[evilminji]

Okay it's continued to bug me? >.>

Midi-chlorians. They exsist in symbiosis, right?

Theoretically using us as a host to live and populate in, in return for the sweet ability to feel the Force goodness? Interact with it maybe. They vibin.

But like?

....has? Has?? Anyone tried meditating at THEM?

Yeah, THROUGH them, you can connect with The Force. Cosmic Wonders etc. Taste the time particles. But that is A->B->C with you being A and the Force being C. Like connecting over the internet. But? In that analogy? Has anyone tried to talk to the COMPUTER?

They can "talk" to animals. Trees. Kyber.

Surely their OWN midi-chlorians would be receptive?

Little confused at first, probably. Because that's not how they usually function. But? Hey! New trick! We would like more iron in your diet please! And that guys Vibez? Rancid. You should get more hugs! :D ×10 trillion micro-organisms (in cheerful, teeny tiny, lil barely there Squeeky Voices, probably)

Cause like? All things are possible in the Force. But? Sometimes being IN a reality? Means you accept a certain consensus. One that might not be TRUE. Such as? "You can not TALK to midi-chlorians" and "you can not encourage them to multiply, thus RAISING YOUR OWN FORCE SENSITIVITY"

A WISE experiment? Fuck no. It was probably really stupid.

And "talk" is a strong, anthropomorphizing sort word in this context.

But STILL! For not technically sentient microorganisms? They are doing a GOOD JOB! We are very proud! And hey, it taught us so much! Like? How to ASK stuff! Such as?

"Aren't you TIRED? Just completely DONE with this guys rancid vibes and poor eating habits? Don't you want to LEAVE? Maybe make a cool new Force baby? My buddy Anikin Skywalker was a force baby! This Sheev guy keeps using you for wack shit. You gonna take that? Put up with his SHIT?"

.....heeeey, wait a minute.... O:< she's RIGHT! They DON'T have to put up with this! Thanks, bestie! We're gonna leave! *the CHANCELLOR OF THE FUCKING REPUBLIC explodes*

[thescarletnargacuga]

OOOH CARNIVAL FICS?

Boy, I have a thing for you!

I've recently fallen in love with the song "Kiss me (Kill me)," and it gave me an idea.

You know when sm-baby mentioned how Pomni may be the final boss? Well... Pomni loses control after Caine beating Kinger's level, it results in a battle between Caine... And Pomni...

Towards the very end her sentience returns for a brief moment to aid him.

But... Results in her tragic end.

Leaving Caine heartbroken.

- Fowl Anon

A/N: how devastating...

GAME OVER

A TRAGIC CARNIVAL AU SHOWTIME ONESHOT

Carnival AU credit: @sm-baby

WARNING: HEAVY angst, hurt/some comfort, digital violence, main character death, non-sentient Pomni

~~~

The King fell from his throne with a heavy thud. It was over. It was finally over. Caine stood shakily next to the dethroned King boss. Pomni was hiding in the curtains that separated the room from the main hallway. A heavy silence filled the room as they processed what they had just done.

Caine was still trying to catch his breath when he looked around for Pomni, seeing her peak from her hiding spot.

"...you did it." She said in quiet astonishment as she stepped out into the open. A wide smile slowly grew. "You did it!" She cheered as she ran to Caine, arms open.

Caine barely registered in time she was going to hug him before impact. "Oof! Ha...yeah...I guess I did." He side eyes Kinger as he embraces Pomni. Something still felt off. He couldn't figure what was bothering him in the back of his mind, but it felt like a memory trying to make its way through the blackout.

Pomni's smile faltered. A faint green glow circled her irises before being blinked away. She couldn't move.

"What..? Oh, come on! Not again!" Sentient Pomni groaned inside her own head.

Pomni whispered to Caine. "Well done, player. Your final reward awaits you in the Circus." She gave him a seductive smirk as she pulled him towards the curtains by the hand.

"Uuugh...you know, I don't need you to keep flirting with him. We're already sorta...uh, actually, I don't know what we are-"

Caine blushed. Being completely distracted by the look in her face, he misses her calling him Player. "Of- of course, Pomni, but I feel I should tell you that I don't really care about the award. Whatever it is. I'm just happy your friends are free of the madness."

"Trust me, you'll enjoy this." Pomni stepped back into the darkness beyond the curtains. A look of mischievous glee on her face.

Sentient Pomni didn't know what the program was talking about. There was nothing past Kinger. HE was the final boss. The game credits should be rolling or something. Where were the ending cutscenes? Why did everything still feel the same?

Caine's mind raced, trying to figure out what she was talking about. He stopped himself before it went places that would defy the game's E rating and followed Pomni into the loading screen for the hallway.

Some things are too good to be true...

Caine took a deep breath, happy to be out of the Kings court, but a sense of bittersweetness hit him. He's done. He and Able can leave... but what about Pomni? She can't leave. Maybe he could come back? Maybe the game would work properly now that everyone's madness has been corrected? He squeezed his teeth shut at the overwhelming thoughts.

He needed to talk this through with her, he knew that much. They've grown close. He cares for her. He didn't want to just leave. "Pomni- ...Pomni?" He opened his teeth to find himself alone in the hallway. "Maybe she's taking longer to load in?" He waited. She never came.

Band organ music came from the far end of the cavernous hall, playing a showtime tune. It eerily echoed to Caine like a circus siren's call. Caine followed the music cautiously. "Pomni..?" It came from behind Pomni's door, light shining from beneath. With no other options on what to do, he opened the door and stepped through.

Welcome to the show

Caine entered the tent to applause, lively music playing and spotlights flashing around the unseen audience. He hasn't seen the circus so lively since his performance in level one.

Around the center ring were figures Caine couldn't quite make out, the bright spotlights blinded him with every pass. He got closer. The figure nearest him was moving erratically.

"Caine!! Caine, it's a tra-mmph!!" Able tried to warn his brother, only to be silenced by a dancer's ribbon wrapping his cards together.

The lights stopped. The music stopped. A single spotlight came on over a figure on the high tightrope. "Tsk...tsk...why must you spoil the surprise?" A high feminine laugh fills the big top.

More lights come on over the restrained figures around the center ring. Ragatha. Gangle. Jax. Zooble. Kinger. All bound in chains along with Able.

"Pomni!? What's going on??" Caine was mortified, seeing the malicious grin on her face. His head hurt. The foreign memory feels closer.

"Congratulations, Player. You've defeated everyone who stood in my way. Now, this is MY Carnival! MY SHOW! And you..." She chuckles darkly. "...are no longer required."

"CAINE! I'M SORRY! I CAN'T STOP THIS!" Sentient Pomni screamed from inside, fighting back as hard as she could.

"The secret boss..." Caine said to himself. "You....no..." It was in the game files he read before he ever entered to find his brother. Information that was stored in Bubble, but never knew the true identity of the boss. Only that they existed. "Pomni, don't do this!" He pleaded.

"WELCOME TO YOUR GRAND FINALE!!" Pomni raised her arms and the circus became vibrate neon. Every color was an attack on the senses. Loud music blared. NPC circus performers and toy-like life sized animals emerged from backstage. It was a flurry of movement that disoriented Caine.

A massive health bar, one ever larger than Kinger's, appeared in Caine's lower field of vision. She was not Pomni. She was THE JESTER.

An elephant with performers atop it rampaged at Caine. He dove out of the way just in time. He looked back up at the tightrope. The Jester was gone. He has to keep moving. Every step he took, another performer was attacking him. "POMNI! STOP! I DON'T WANT TO FIGHT YOU!!"

Multiple confetti canons aimed and fired. Caine's preacticed reflexes kept him clear of each shot as he searched for Pomni in the chaos. He dodged flying balls and colorful performing horses. He didn't see the arial silk performers swinging at him, and he was struck in the chest.

Caine rolled across the circus floor, slamming into one of the poles supporting the tightrope. He struggles to get to his feet, winded from the hit. Someone stood before him, he looked up to see the Jester glaring down at him. She grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet with unknown strength.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Please, don't hurt him!" Sentient Pomni begged.

"Then take your final bow, Player. Because everything ends here." She threw him away from her in time for a trapeze to swing low and knock him to the far side of the circus.

Caine lost a whole third of his health. Tears brimmed his eyes. This was too much. Everything was happening at once. He wasn't ready for this.

He tried to run for the door.

He slammed into it as it refused to budge.

"Nuh-uh-uh, Player." The Jester giggled. "There is no escaping me." She sent a flurry of streamers to entangle her prey.

Caine moved quickly from the door, outrunning the streamers as they reached for him.

Pomni grunted in frustration. "Stop moving!" She pointed to Caine, confetti canons ready to fire.

Caine ran around until he stood between the Jester and a canon. "I'm sorry..." He dove out of the way in time for a shot of violent confetti to smack the Jester off her feet.

"Ah!" Sentient Pomni screeched from the hit. She could still feel everything happening to her body.

The damage to the boss Jester was minimal, but Caine felt a rock in his stomach having to hurt her. Tears made it hard to focus. "I'm sorry!" He ran for a trapeze pole to get away from the chaotic movement on the ground.

The Jester wiped her lip, cackling. "Yes, Player! Fight back! Give the audience a show they'll never forget!"She raised her arm and a swinging performer grabbed her to move her up.

Caine found himself where this all started; on a small platform, high above the circus, Pomni opposing him, but instead of performing together...he was meant to defeat her. His chest felt tight. "Pomni! I know you're in there! It doesn't have to be this way! There's always a choice!"

Sentient Pomni cried from inside her prison. "Not this time..."

The Jester grinned. "Win or lose. That is your choice, Player."

Caine looked down at his brother. Able was still bound, desperately fighting the restraints.

Defeat the Jester, and he and Able are free.

Die, and Able and the others live in the Jester's world forever.

Caine clenched his fists. He glares at the Jester with mournful anger. "I'll find a way! I'm not finishing this without Pomni!"

The Jester let out a shrill laugh. "Then you are a greater fool than you seem!" She leapt from her platform to grab a trapeze. The audience cheered as the Jester did a flip to the next trapeze to get closer to Caine.

An idea came to him. He grabbed the trapeze hooked to his side and swung. The Jester spun midair to catch another swinging trapeze when Caine came up high and clothes lined her with his leg.

"Ack-!" The Jester was struck in the neck and missed the bar. She was caught by another passing aerialist.

The crowd booed and a good chunk of the Jester's health bar went down.

"Goodness, that worked!?" Caine gasped as he landed on a platform.

Sentient Pomni groans, instinctually rubbing her neck. Then she suddenly felt less restricted. "Huh?"

Green and blue pixels distorted the Jester's eyes, she shook it off. "ARGH!" The Jester growled, kicked the NPC off of her and swung herself at Caine.

Caine dove for a passing silk and arched with it at the oncoming Jester. He twisted his silk with hers, preventing her from doing anything impressive.

The crowd booed harder.

"NO!!" The Jester snarled, trying to get her silk swinging again. Her health went down more. "NO!! MY PERFORMANCE WILL NOT BE RUINED!!" She jumped from the silk to a passing elephant, doing a handstand. She got a few cheers and her health increased some.

Sentient Pomni slammed herself against the borders of her mind. With each hit she felt movement in her own fingers again. "You can't hold me! I'll make sure you fail!" One more good try and her arms glitched out on the hand stand, dropping the Jester on her face.

Caine saw the glitches. "Pomni!! Keep fighting!" He swung himself to trapeze and gained some speed to fly kick at the Jester.

The Jester sat up on the elephant in time to see a boot flying at her face. She tried to duck, but she glitched back up.

BAM!!

The Jester fell backwards off the elephant to the dusty floor outside the ring. The Jester glitched and pixelated severely. Health dropping, Pomni fought hard for control. "Caine! Please!! End this- NO! I will have what is due! I am the Ringmaster now- CAINE!!" Pomni the Jester's eyes flashed between blue and green. Glitches distort their appearance and voice.

Caine had landed nearby and watched the horrific ordeal Pomni was facing. "Pomni, I can't! You- I don't want to defeat you! Regain control!"

"She's too- YOU WILL NOT STOP ME!!" The Jester got up faster than Caine could react. Her eyes blazed green as she shoved Caine over the edge of the ring. He fell backwards into the path of the stampeding animals and performers. "NOOO!!"

Caine was trampled by zebras and clowns on pogo sticks. He crawled as far as he could out of the way but took serious damage. His health was in the red. He planted as he crawled for the pole ladder. He glared back at the Jester. "You want me? ...come and get me."

"Caine! Don't!" Pomni fought the Jester as she grabbed a circling performer to the other pole connecting the high tightrope. Glitches made her slip every few rungs, but the Jester determinedly climbed in her single minded agenda to end this.

Caine met the Jester's glare across the wire. The audience below awed at the spectacle of the two performers making their way toward the middle. Caine focused hard to keep balance. He has a plan.

When the Jester was far enough from her platform, he pirouetted, making the wire wobble. This got him applause and thwarted the Jester's attempts at a stunt. The Jester's health fell to critical and she glitched hard. She fell on the wire and koala clung to it.

Caine moved closer, ready to grab at her. "Fight her, Pomni! You can do it!"

Pomni fought with all her might, but it wasn't enough. Whatever restrictions were on the program that allowed her to maintain control were gone. The Jester was here to stay. "I-I- can't!" Pomni glitched again as the Jester fought back. She slid, hanging on the wire with only her hands.

Caine dropped on the wire and grabbed her arm. "I believe in you, Pomni! Please! I've got you!"

The failed wire stunts made the crowd angry. They booed and hissed at the "poor" performance, making the Jester screech and glitch. Her hands slipped off the wire.

Caine gripped her wrist as hard as he could. "Pomni!!"

Pomni held tight as she saw the chaos below. Then Abel. Her friends. This was bigger than her. This ended with her, one way or another. She looked back at Caine, sorrow in her eyes. "Let me go..."

"WHAT!? No! You're going to win this!"

"She's too powerful. This won't stop until it's over. It's the only way you'll get home."

"It can't be the only way! Don't let go!" He pleaded as he felt her slipping.

Pomni gave him a sad smile. "I love you, Caine Alexander Eden..." She let go of his wrist.

"POMNI!!!" He cried out as her hand slid through his grasp.

Pomni closed her eyes as she fell to the circus floor. Caine lost sight of her in the crowd of performers and made his way to the nearest platform to climb down.

A hush fell over the tent as the performers vanished. The music stopped. The colors muted. The audience went silent. The chains binding Able and the others broke.

Pomni was revealed lying face up in the center of the circus, as though she only fell asleep. Caine rushed to her, fell to his knees and held her to his chest. "Pomni? Pomni, please." He gently brushed the hair from her face. He shook with grief. This couldn't be how things were supposed to end.

He held her for a long while, part of him hoping she would just...wake up. He couldn't hold in the sorrow that washed over him. He wailed as he held her against him. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Pomni, I'm sorry!" He hiccupped as he sobbed against her face. "I love you too...I always have...I'm sorry I was too much of a coward to tell you..."

Able kneeled next to Caine. There was nothing he could say that would make the situation better in the slightest. He sat with Caine just to be there for him. The others didn't crowd, but they were mournfully silent in solidarity.

Bubble popped in, gently leaning against Caine's shoulder. His abilities calm Caine's heart rate.

Caine felt Pomni get lighter in his arms. He sat up with a gasp, a split second of hope in his heart that she was getting up. Instead, her body turned to wisps of glitter. She fell apart in his hands and flew to create a doorway in front of him.

The glitter solidified and became a bright red door with the word exit printed on it. Caine sat, mortified as the ending text appeared before him.

Thank you for playing the Amazing Digital Carnival!

[sleepyfan-blog]

Chained

Author’s Note: This is Joth’s first fic! I hope you enjoy it :D Next

Tagged: @egrets-not-regrets @kit-williams @bleedingichorhearts

Warnings: mild body horror, ask me to tag

Summary: You meet your newest foster.  He’s grumpy and injured.

"He's not… The most friendly…" Lieutenant Ollias started, the Ultramarine's hands at his side as he shifted awkwardly on his feet, looking down at you, a worried frown furrowing his brows.

You look at the Astartes he's referring to. He's a Chaos Space marine - and from his colorations, he's a World Eater. You can see the Nails buried into his skull, and he's growling at you - with both the mouth that is likely fused to the armor he's still wearing, as well as the secondary mouth on his chest, needle-sharp teeth snapping in warning at you. You had been fostering feral Chaos Space Marines for some time, and had dealt with initially hostile Chaos Marines in the past. With your years of experience, you make sure to shove the initial, instinctual panic of seeing such a large, powerful and hostile being in the furthest corners of your heart. "You don't say." You hum, going for a light-hearted tease back, managing to smile. "Is there a particular reason he's been restrained like this?"

The Chaos Space Marine's growls intensified as Ollias spoke explained "We found him while out on patrol. He was covered - and still is - in the gore of several animals. When we tried to speak with him, he attacked us. So we restrained him and brought him back to the base. When we had the apothecaries look him over, we found out that he's got several injuries - which explains the additional hostility. There's only so much room we have on the base… And if you're willing to foster him as he heals up, we're hoping that he'll agree to the Nail Removal surgery."

You hum again in thought, looking at the still snarling Chaos Space Marine over thoughtfully, and address him directly "Do you understand this language? Or do you only speak whichever Space Languages you know?" Some of the aggression might be indignance that he's not being included in the conversation. You knew it would piss you off if you were being talked at and around by a Known Enemy and Some Random Stranger.

The World Eater growls again at you before rumbling out "I speak little. Understand more. You think to handle me, human?" He bared both sets of teeth at you, as a clear threat display.

You were entirely unimpressed by his posturing. "Would you rather heal up chained to the wall and being lectured by Ultramarines all day and all night long?" You liked Ultramarines, but most Chaos Astartes really didn't.

"What is… Fostering?" The World Eater asked after several seconds of internal contemplation, head tilting a little as he asked.

"You would live with me, in my home and recover. We'd interact with each other at your pace. You'd have your own rooms and be able to come and go as you please - as long as you come back to my home every night and don't maim, kill or harm other sentient beings. If you want to go hunting, or need to spar, I know of several Astartes-grade sparring facilities that host both loyalist and Chaos marines. I also know of several nearby parks that stock prey for hunting. Both terrestrial and aquatic-based prey. They also semi-regularly release flight-based prey, but those are on special days, so that the birds don't escape and mess with the local ecosystem. You'd stay with me until the fostering period was up and you've fully healed from your injuries."

"And after? What then?" The World Eater inquired, his helmeted gaze focused firmly on you.

"You'd be free to do whatever you wanted - short of random murder and other illegal things." You explain honestly. You wouldn't be surprised if some marines did do illegal things after they were fostered, but that wasn't anything you could prove… And honestly, as long as they weren't hurting anyone without their explicit consent, it was none of your business. "I know that there are several Chaos Warbands in the area, who might be willing to take in a new member, or you can wander around on your own. Those are just a couple of options for you."

"If this is a trick, I will kill you." The World Eater threatened.

This was far from the first time that you'd been threatened by a potential foster. Chaos Space marines were a heavily traumatized lot, and many expected treachery and duplicity at every turn. It was one of the challenges of fostering Chaos Marines that you'd long grown used to. You knew that patience and showing that you were someone trustworthy, someone who wouldn't turn on them, they tended to open up to you, at least a little. "I understand that." Reassuring him that you meant no harm, that you weren't trying to trick him was unlikely to help. Especially while pinned to the wall of an Ultramarine base and unable to move. "Do you want to come with me? If we don't click as foster people, I know several others who'd be happy to take you in who have different set-ups and fostering styles."

The World Eater seemed to mull over your words as he tried to glare the Ultramarine lieutenant into submission. He eventually answered with a quiet "I go with you, little human."

You smile warmly and nod "Alright. Lieutenant Ollias, how do we get him down from the wall?" You also tell the World Eater your name, inviting him to use it to call for you, if he wanted to.

He just grins down at you and says "I'll keep that in mind, little human~" as Ollias pressed a button, undoing the World Eater's restraints.

For a moment, it seemed as if the World Eater was about to lunge for the lieutenant, but he seemed to reassess. He walked over to you, helmet tilted downward to keep you in his sight line "Let's go. Too many corpse-worshippers here. Bleh."

That was also something that the Chaos Marines accused the loyalists of. You never could get them to explain what that meant. "Alright then. Are you hungry? I've got some snacks in my bag, as well as water, if you're thirsty."

"Food? Yes! Food is yes." The World Eater trilled, moving closer to you as you lead him out of the base.

You smile as you pull out a bag of jerky and an astartes-sized water bottle out of your bag, tearing open the bag "Here you go! Beef jerky - I've been told it tastes like dried Grox - whatever that is."

He carefully took the bag of jerky from your hands and shoved it - plastic and everything - into the mouth on his chest, barely chewing it before swallowing. The water bottle followed after. You weren't surprised that he'd eaten the packaging, as other Chaos Space Marines had done that before, and had been fine. You figure it might be some sort of mind-trip thing they try to pull. You blink as you see a flash of movement behind your newest foster, noticing for the first time that this World Eater also had a tail - which was wagging ever so slightly. "More!… Please?" The World Eater asked, looking down at you hopefully. "No food while captured…" He said sorrowfully, a low whine leaving him.

"I've got a couple more snacks, and we can stop by a fast food place on our way home. What do you like to eat?" You ask, wanting to know more about your foster - and to know what you should stock your fridge with.

"I like food. Anything I can eat is good." The World Eater answers after several seconds of thinking "Rations are… bland. But I will eat whatever. Jerky good!"

This answer is also unsurprising, though you suspect as he gets to know the cuisines available to him, and the fact that there's quite a bit of fresh food available, his answer will likely change. "Alright, let's hit up a fast food place and order a bunch of things off the menu. I bet you can eat a lot, yeah?"

The World Eater nods, tail wagging faster.

[gold-rhine]

What is your fav genshin world quest? And do you think world quests suffer from not including playable characters in them? Or is it better for them to only have NPCs? Like I know some people have critiqued enkanomiya world quest with "where is Kokomi" since this is basically her place.

i think making blank statements like "world quests suffer from not having playable characters" is reductive and short-sighted. i dont care if characters are playable or not if they are well written and if they work within the quest. in fact, some archon quests suffer from having too much playable characters in them. we absolutely did not need ayaka date in inazuma archon quest. i wrote that post about collei bc i think her conflict fits aranara quests perfectly and current npc in that quest has no character and does nothing, except wake up and get dendro vision for free. its not about whether collei is playable or not.

actually enka is one of my fav world quests. and no, it absolutely did not need kokomi in it. and i rewrote entire inazuma archon quest, giving her actual character development and strategist arc, so i'm speaking from kokomi pr brigade perspective.

when we're talking if character should be in a quest or not, its not about whose place it is bc they like live here. its about what they would bring to this specific quest. what are the themes and POINT of the quest. and what is the development arc is for this character, does it fit this quest, what this character's presence would meaningfully contribute.

so like. what is enka about? its about enjou intrigues, its about lies and gaslighting, about how clever assholes like him can frame the narrative to make you see white as black and black as white and manipulate you into doing what he wants. and to echo this, the deeper, hidden narrative, is about meta players perception of the lore. its about how celestia are actually the invaders who conquered teyvat by force and then pretended to be creators of this world and killed anyone who even learned the truth, like orobashi, despite them having heavenly aethetic. how orobashi went to fight raiden knowing he will die as a part of celestia's punishment, even tho before we were told he wanted to destroy inazuma. and the deepest buried lead was that despite us being told that vishaps are evil dragons attacking humans, mindless brutal animals, they are in fact sentient beings, and in fact, real natives of this world who were invaded and then framed as evil for fighting back. like, before enka i didn't give a fuck about vishaps, but after it i became dragon lore enthusiast for this exact reason

at the core of that quest is how kokomi ancestors sucked horribly, mistreated their own people while presenting themselves as glorious empire, and also did horrible eugenics and warcrimes on vishaps, who they KNEW were sentient beings, because they could learn human language and talk. and they captured children of these sentient beings, grafted corrals into their flesh, kept them in captivity in a deepest cave for decades, just to then slaughter them and take the bloodsoaked corrals off their dead bodies to use it to revitilize watatsumi bare earth. and it was repeated again and again, generations of torture, literally soaking blood of dragon children.

and this all is kinda buried under the narrative of "defeating evil monster dragons to save the island", because this is traditional fantasy narrative and its structured like that to obscure the reality from players without ever lying to them. you have all the facts, but you need to realize that YOU are playing the villain here by yourself. just like enjou manipulating the truth without ever actually lying.

so like. what is kokomi supposed to do here. she can't realize the truth and try to make amends, bc at this point of the overall story players are not supposed to understand that dragons are people who were invaded by celestia. they are not supposed to see vishaps as sympathetic yet, enka is the first major lore drop to give this reveal foundation, but the reveal itself only happens in fountaine with neuvi.

and if kokomi doesn't realize the truth, then she's just being duped by enjou like the traveler, which makes her look stupid, and she does what? stands here and listens to the lore? kills dragons herself? so that after fountaine players could look at neuvi, realize that other vishaps are people like him too and go "wait, was kokomi doing warcrimes against dragons????" like, as of now, she has deniability bc like. she's never been in enka herself, she didn't know she's sending the traveler to kill what is basically dragon kids tortured and raised in captivity, for her its an ancient ritual to save her island. but like if you add her to the quest, it fucking crumbles.

tldr; characters should be in quests if they add something to them and have their own development based on quest events. kokomi should have had better written archon quest, she should not have been in enka. i do hope tho they revisit enka in future and then kokomi is here, bc now after dragon lore recontextualization, she can learn the truth and confront enka's legacy

[tgrailwar-zero]

Who released us from our seal??? The first thing at least I remember after our last grail war was the administrator inviting us to the 'big leagues'.

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Ugh, what a mess. Fine. To answer your first question, I don't know. We assumed you broke out on your own. We certainly didn't want you to get out. We also didn't want to begin a full-scale fight. We wanted to keep you contained, and dispose of you quietly."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "So, considering we were about to run the Grail War program, we pieced together a plan as quick as we could. Have you participate as 'Masters', as rogue formless data permanently attached to a Servant. If the Servant died, you'd die with them. We split that data between two Servants, as the magical energy strain would both weaken your selves so in the case that you didn't die with your Servant, you would be easy to delete. Furthermore, it gave us a lock on any Servants you could potentially corrupt. Any Servants in contact with you, we'd be able to easily kill or at least clear any corruption from, since they were drawing mana from you- not the Solar Cell like everyone else. I usually participate in the Wars as a 'ringer' of sorts in order to keep things moving properly, so I could keep a close eye on things."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Moving on, you got attached to Avenger. Completely unsurprising to us. Vitch gave me a virus that I installed, wiping his memory and essentially giving us a method of nudging you as quickly as possible to obliteration. The plan worked fine enough. You were 'obliterated', I was able to do a clean sweep on Avenger, the War could progress as planned. However, there were a few lingering issues."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "First issue, Charlemagne. He was not the Saber that was slated to be summoned, we were planning for Miss Beni-Enma, but he manifested at the same time we realized that your seal was broken. He instantly started going rogue, ignoring the Grail War, claiming territory, and talking about taking over the Solar Cell. He's a current problem."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Second issue, the MoonCancer. There's not supposed to be one of those. I barely know what 'one of those' is. It was supposed to be Shielder. Leonidas I. Either way, we handled that problem. Alter Ego was also an issue, frankly. Her data is problematic for its own reasons. We were planning on Xu Fu."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Third issue. You DIDN'T DIE. You came back, because apparently one of your old Servants was far more sentient than expected, and so he saved your lives. Third issue, part two, you summoned a Servant that we have no real records of."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Apparently she's Kukulkan, but there's a lot not matching up with our data."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Third issue, part three. We figured we would kill Rider, due to him affiliating with Charlemagne and potentially being corrupted by you. Diminish the amount of allies he had. I managed to do immense damage to his Spirit Core, but he got away. I'd assume he'd just die from his wounds... but Asclepius healed him, completely of his own accord. By the time I was aware of that, both you and Charlemagne's Paladins were present, and any actions I could take would most likely result in damaging the Hamlet… which ended up getting wiped out anyways, unfortunately."

TAMAMO-NO-HIME: "Fourth issue, you summoned a Beast, so that suddenly became the top priority. After that, Sigurd took you under his wing, and that heavily limited the amount of room we had to snipe at you from... anyways, we figured we'd end the War early since there was clearly something wrong with it, and now we're here."

[lavendersblues]

Okay, so we're doing this

Preview because everyone has been so supportive of the idea:

Everything felt fuzzy, but Wen Qing came to awareness in a jolt. She couldn’t feel her body, she was cold, and dizzy. And she was moving.

There was a constant swaying motion, back and forth, back and forth, and while the world around her seemed to be moving, Wen Qing felt as if she barely moved at all, gently rocked by the motion. She glanced around and saw four corners of metal, a metal roof, and a metal floor. Beyond the corners was a large brown something, and what looked like an enormous bald head -- far larger than normal.

But then she glanced to the side and saw towering figures walking past, large masks and frightful appendages, and Wen Qing didn’t need to be a genius to realize that she must be a ghost fire. She felt disconnected from reality, and the resentful energy surrounding her felt too strong to be something from the mortal realm.

“Hey!” Wen Qing shouted with all her might. Her voice sounded small and slightly reedy in this form but she was pleased to hear it all the same.

The creature that was carrying her prison jumped and whirled around, turning back towards the other direction of the street. When he saw nothing, he shrugged and resumed his journey. Wen Qing grumbled under her breath.

“Hey!” she tried again. This time her voice was stronger, a little louder, and a little more authoritative.

Once again the creature spun around and Wen Qing focused on the corners of her cage to prevent the ever present dizziness from worsening.

“Who’s yappin’ at me?!” the creature carrying her shouted at the direction he’d come from, glancing around. The ghosts closest to him all made ‘Not me!’ gestures, and a few of the shop keepers shouted back, “No one, ya moron!” before returning to their customers and duties.

“Hey, ugly!” Wen Qing tried again valiantly, and this time her voice sounded like her own, firm, strong, and alive. “I’m talking to you!”

Once again the world spun, but this time a giant hand reached out and into her field of vision, plucking up her prison with ease. The creature that had been carrying her on his back jumped back several feet and she could see a bird’s beak and small beady eyes set into his face. The hand lifted her up, up, until she was face to…not face with a fairly handsome man.

He had striking features, but most notably there was a black eyepatch that drew the eye away from his smirk, before her eyes wandered to the stunning red coral bead at the end of a braid by his ear.

“Gege, look at this,” he said, still facing the ghost fire of Wen Qing. He seemed to be talking to a figure just out of her view. “This little ghost fire has strong sentience.”

Another handsome face soon joined her vision, a handsome cultivator with his hair pulled away from his face in a half bun, a farmer’s straw hat resting on his back. He blinked his peach blossom eyes a few times as he took in the image of Wen Qing in her cage before glancing at his companion.

“San Lang, why are you so interested in her?” 

The eyepatch wearing man hummed slightly, furrowed his brow, and then turned to look at his companion with the sweetest expression Wen Qing had ever seen. After several moments the furrow returned and his eye returned to Wen Qing.

“There’s something about you,” he addressed Wen Qing finally. “Little Ghost Fire, what’s your name?”

“...Wen Qing,” she answered finally, after a long internal debate of giving her name or finding an alias. But after much internal arguing, she decided to find as much of her pride as she could and put it back into her name. She was a Wen. The best doctor in Dafan Wen. Her brother was the first sentient fierce corpse, Wen Ning. And she was a Wen who defied Wen Ruohan, her family name was important.

The eyepatch man raised his brow. “Giving a stranger your real name, that takes some guts Little Ghost Fire. I’d be careful who you give your name to in the future.” 

He paused for a long moment. “Wen Qing, what is keeping you here?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft and gentle.

Wen Qing considered her answer, feeling the fuzziness begin to fade as she remembered her brother, face to the wall, nail hammered into his skull. She remembered leaving Wei Wuxian prone in the Burial Mounds, believing he would survive another day to be with his family and Hanguang-jun. She remembered the smirking face of Jin Guangyao behind his scum father.

“There are people I have to protect in this world,” she said, finally able to feel the flickering flames of her new form, dizziness subsided, and mind clear.

A slow smile spread across the faces of her new acquaintances, one gentle and loving, and the other -- the eyepatch wearing man -- fierce and almost manic. A hand reached up and suddenly there was a burst of energy as the lantern was opened and the seal holding her inside released.

“Already gaining strength from repeating your convictions,” the eyepatch man said, still grinning. “You are going to be incredible, Wen Qing. I think I’d like to help you with your goal.” His hand reached towards the open door and Wen Qing cautiously moved to hover in his palm. She could feel the power radiating from him now, resentful energy cloaking him like a king’s mantle.

“My name is Hua Cheng, Crimson Rain Sought Flower, one of the only three Ghost Kings in existence. And I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

[vikenticomeshome]

Cyberchase- Why is The Hacker Such an Ass?

So, I was on TV Tropes awhile back. I was specifically on the Wild Mass Guessing (WMG) page for Cyberchase. The WMG page is a place for people to put their head-canons and wild ideas and explain why they have those ideas.

One head-canon that struck me as a bit odd was the idea that The Hacker is infected by some sort of virus that led to him becoming a villain. The idea is that he is not entirely in control of his actions, and that much of his current personality is just the virus talking. I'm sure people have already tapped into this idea for its fan-fiction potential.

At first, I sort of laughed off the idea and moved on. However, when I thought back over the various episodes of the show, I realized that the show did poke at the idea a few times, whether it was intentional or not.

I want to talk about two cases where the show poked at the idea. However, I want to make a few things clear first. First, I don't think this theory will ever be confirmed in the show. The show-runners love him just the way is. They love how pompous and preening he is.

They love him endangering our child protagonists.

They love setting him up for the Cybersquad to foil his plans in the end.

They love embarrassing him and poking holes in his image.

While the original story of The Hacker was that he was just born evil per "How It all Started"...

... they have since expanded his backstory to include a period of faithful service to Motherboard...

...followed by a turn to villainy later on, perhaps when he realized what the Transformatron could do.

Even when he went through his inevitable villain decay due to being defeated by children so many times, they fit it into the universe. The Hacker's current arc is that no one is Cyberspace is scared of him anymore, so he's trying to restore his image.

So, no, I don't think we're going to have the revelation that The Hacker is really a good person who is forced to be evil via a sentient virus, a magic spell, or hard drive damage.

If they were to go that route, they would have a problem. They would probably have to permanently reform The Hacker. And if he permanently cures Motherboard's virus, then the show ends.

Even if they decided to reform him, but left him unable to cure Motherboard's cirus, they would lose their OG villain. Yes, Ledge and Zusk exist, but they barely exist at this point, especially Ledge, who Motherboard probably deleted off-screen after what he did to the kids and Digit vanished a few seasons ago. They can't fill his shoes. Even Wicked, who's been the main villain in a few episodes, probably wouldn't be able to come up with a new, interesting, magic spell for every episode going forward.

And if they tried to confirm this theory without reforming Hacker, then the whole dynamic of the show changes. The kids wouldn't be cyber-chasing after a power-hungry cyborg who wants to control Cyberspace. They would be trying to heal a brain-damaged cyborg who once served and protected Motherboard.

Now, let's get to the two times where I think the show poked at the idea that The Hacker became a villain against his will and need to be healed.

The first case was in Season 3 Episode 6 "The Grapes of Plath". The main plot here is that the Crab Prince was dared to go into the forbidden abyss and came out with a glitch.

He has been transformed into a compulsive liar. This would apparently up-end society in Aquari-yum worse than when Icky, the last Cyberslug, dies, and he can no longer feed on the energy that threatens to boil over the site.

So, now, the kids need to go to the Fountain of Truth and retrieve the Grapes of Plath, which will cure him.

Meanwhile, the Hacker has a problem. His chin is all floppy. It just isn't as firm and rigid as it was when he was a younger borg, and now he is self-conscious about it.

He accidentally intercepts a transmission from Motherboard. While it's a bit garbled, he hears her mention a "fountain of *unintelligible* uth". Of course, we know that it is the Fountain of Truth, but he believes it to be the Fountain of Youth. He wants to use the grapes to restore his chin.

Now, we don't know much about the Grapes of Plath. We know that they come from the Fountain of Truth, and we know that, when the Crab Prince was dipped head to toe in them, they removed the glitch that turned him into a compulsive liar.

Were these grapes specifically engineered to fix glitches that involve compulsive lying? That's a very niche use case. I can't imagine Plath gets many visitors. We don't see any evidence that they force the subject to always tell the truth like the spell from the Jim Carrey movie "Liar Liar". Are these Grapes all about restoring someone to their true self by removing a glitch? I like that explanation best.

Still, despite the kid's warnings that these grapes are from the Fountain of Truth, not the Fountain of Youth, The Hacker jumps in and covers himself from head to toe.

And he comes out of the juice a completely different Borg.

The Hacker: Happy Birthday, Princey. Say hello to your new best friend, the meanest guy in Cyberspace. When it's my birthday I want a cute little pony, no, a lollipop.

He is promptly removed. At this point, he seemingly goes back to normal, and is no longer covered in grapes.

Hacker: Follow me, ya duncebuckets!

Hold up, what the fuck just happened? We go back to the status quo almost immediately, as this is a status quo show, but the Grapes of Plath affected The Hacker. Why would they do that? This isn't like The Hacker hitting his head in Season 2 Episode 10 "Raising the Bar", and then, afterwards, he thought that Buzz was the boss, and that he was the henchman. This is more like mixing a cure for magnetite poisoning, and then discovering that the cure didn't fully work because the damage was more severe than expected.

No one ever said the Grapes of Plath make someone friendlier. No one ever said they make you want things like lollipops and ponies. We know for sure that they were able to cure the glitch that made the Crab Prince a compulsive liar. We know for sure that they have some association with truth, as they come from the Fountain of Truth. We know that The Hacker started wishing the Crab Prince Happy Birthday and asking for lollipops and ponies after his exposure. We can theorize that their ability to heal someone from a glitch could come from an innate ability to help restore someone to their true self.

We know very little about what The Hacker's personality was like before he turned to villainy. Even his expanded backstory is mostly just the villainy he did before the Cybersquad was recruited.

his plans for the Transformation (and Coop's attempt to stop him)

his poisoning of Coop (and what that did to Slider)

his theft of the Encryptor Chip (and his banishment)

his tricking of the Flying Parallinis into rescuing him from Mount Way-Up-There (and the impact that mistake had on them)

his attack on Valussa (and Digit's defection)

his action of infecting Motherboard with a virus (and the start of the series)

Maybe The Hacker enjoyed ponies and lollipops back in the day. Maybe we saw the real Hacker for a few seconds there before the virus/spell/brain damage overwhelmed the healing power of the Grapes of Plath. I wonder.

Let's move on to the second time the show implied something was wrong. However, in order to talk about that, I have to lay out two assumptions.

First, let's assume that Motherboard has a strong moral framework that leads her to always do the right thing, in spite of any personal biases. She does not seek easy ways out which would compromise her moral framework. This is what the show has been telling us for years.

I think the best example of this is probably one of the very best episodes of the show, Season 2 Episode 4 "True Colors". The Hacker calls an election for potentate and sets himself up to run against Motherboard, which is perfectly legal under the Cyber-constitution. Whether Motherboard truly believed The Hacker had reformed or not is unclear. However, it doesn't really matter. If he had won the election, she would have stepped down and followed the will of the people.

We learn that, if The Hacker wins, he will revise the Cyber-constitution to bring an end to the elections and make his rule permanent. The way he says it suggests that, as potentate, he would be able to revise the Cyber-constitution all by himself without any checks or balances.

Now, there's a whole can of worms here about a singular ruler being able to rewrite all of the laws unchecked, but I'm leaving that closed for now. However, this does mean that Motherboard could have rewritten the Cyber-constitution herself to shut down the Hacker's election plan right there. She didn't do it.

Second, let's assume that Motherboard was fully on board with the plan that Digit and the kids were executing during the episode that I am about to talk about. There are some things in this episode that suggest that the kids may have been running wild here, and that Motherboard was unaware of what was happening right until close to the end. I do plan to talk about that on another post. For now, we assume that Motherboard was on board the whole way.

Let's review:

Motherboard has a strong moral framework that leads her to always do the right thing, in spite of any personal biases. She does not seek easy ways out which would compromise her moral framework.

Motherboard was fully on board with the plan that Digit and the kids were executing during the episode that I am about to talk about.

Do you have all of that? Good. Let's talk about Season 5 Episode 8 "Inside Hacker".

So, Digit gives us the premise up front.

Digit: Reprogramming Hacker so he changes back into his good old self. Our best plan yet!

So, I think we all see the ethical implications of attempting to rewrite someone's personality against their will. Of course, that's with our world's understanding of the importance of "the self" and free will.

But hey, maybe Cyberspace has a different idea of the "self" that we would consider dystopian. Maybe borgs reprogram each other all the time without consent. Maybe the "self" is fluid here. What else does the show have to say about the concept of reprogramming someone? Wasn't there an episode where Digit was considering allowing himself to be reprogrammed to be less clumsy? Yeah, it was Season 6 Episode 1 "Digit's B-Day Surprise".

Uh oh. There are consent forms for reprogramming someone, and I don't remember The Hacker signing anything. Does anyone remember who was trying to get Digit to provide consent to be reprogrammed in this episode?

Wait, so this is a line that even The Hacker won't cross? Well, the Cybersquad's plan just sounds wicked in a bad way.

That has a double-meaning, as Wicked has repeatedly engaged in reprogramming borgs against their will. We saw this in Season 2 Episode 3 "Harriet the Hippo and the Mean Green" and Season 7 Episode 7 "Spellbound". I'm not even going to touch what happened with "Designing Mr. Perfect".

So, yeah, reprogramming someone against their will is definitely a villainous act in Cyberspace. The kids may be naive on this point, but Motherboard isn't. Even the virus doesn't eliminate her moral code, as we've seen in the other episodes. So, how we do we resolve this? Well, sometimes kids cartoons make a mess of the discussion of free will. They will claim that a "good" character being brainwashed by the "bad guys" and turned "evil" is absolutely horrible, which is an excellent point to make.

However, that same show will then claim that an "evil" character being brainwashed by the "good guys" and turned "good" is absolutely fine. As long as the character isn't evil anymore, the show calls it a win. The most famous example of this is probably the "Care Bear Stare" from the Care Bears cartoons. That was just a brainwashing attack they used on their enemies.

Cyberchase has pretty simple morality. Motherboard is the ultimate good, while The Hacker is the ultimate evil. However, we are at least a little bit above The Care Bears here. The kids are required to abide by the laws of the different Cybersites that they take action in. They aren't given easy outs like shooting The Hacker until he stops being a villain. That sounds more like a gritty reboot of Cyberchase.

So, let's add one more assumption to the board for "Inside Hacker":

Motherboard has a strong moral framework that leads her to always do the right thing, in spite of any personal biases. She does not seek easy ways out which would compromise her moral framework.

Motherboard was fully on board with the plan that Digit and the kids were executing during the episode that I am about to talk about.

Cyberchase is not The Care Bears.

So, how do we resolve the issue? Well, suppose that The Hacker started out as a good guy, who worked as a technician for Motherboard. He wanted to help make Cyberspace a great place, and all he wanted in return was to go home to his pony and lollipop at the end of the day. But then, one way or another, his personality was altered against his will, and he became obsessed with taking over Cyberspace. He became the villain he is today.

Then, perhaps the action of reprogramming him back to his original self without consent can be justified. After all, the original Hacker is not able to provide his consent. In that case, maybe it falls to Motherboard and Dr. Marbles to become his medical proxy.

Again, I don't think we'll ever see the show confirm this theory. It would just make too much of a mess if we haven't been with the real Hacker for the past 20 years. I do wonder if the implications of these two scenes were put in by the writers intentionally though.

There are other ways to look at this, of course, so let's pull our combined board here.

The Hacker acted strangely after being covered in the Grapes of Plath from the Fountain or Truth. These grapes are known to have repaired the glitch that turned the Crab Prince into a compulsive liar. The Hacker talked about celebrating the Crab Prince's birthday and wanting a pony and a lollipop for his birthday. He was back to normal shortly afterward.

The kids and Digit went forward with a plan to forcibly reprogram The Hacker against his will to turn him from a villain back into his original good self.

2a. We know that reprogramming someone against their will is a villainous act in Cyberspace. Wicked has done it numerous times. When The Hacker wanted to reprogram Digit, he would not proceed without getting his signature on the consent forms, which implies that reprogramming Digit without his consent is a line that The Hacker won't cross.

2b. We assumed that Motherboard has a strong moral framework that leads her to always do the right thing, in spite of any personal biases.

2c. We assumed that Motherboard knew what the kids were up to throughout the episode, rather than just finding out at the very end.

On #1: The incident with the Grapes of Plath could have been a fluke. We still know next to nothing about how the grapes work. It could be like magnetite, which affects all borgs differently. On #2b: Perhaps Motherboard slipped up here with regards to her moral code. Perhaps, in a moment of anger over her own suffering with the virus, she put the kids on their mission to end the threat of The Hacker via forced reprogramming. If so, this is a pretty big black mark on her record.

On #2c: Some of the dialogue in "Inside Hacker" suggests that the kids and Digit came up with the plan. We don't actually see Motherboard's face until the very end. Perhaps she didn't realize what was really going on until that point. And at that point, the important thing was rescuing Matt, not scolding the children.

[ckret2]

Chapter 82 of you can really tell the writer got a new art program this week and went apeshit with it instead of doing anything productive: the Mystery Shack is in terrible peril from the government and only one thing can save them:

Teaching Bill Cipher how to flirt with humans!!

####

The Stans explained the plan to Dipper and Mabel as briefly as possible—that Bill had to save them all by flirting with the head fed—and that was about as far as they got before Mabel started squealing. They wished her good luck with Bill, wished him good luck with Mabel, and beat a hasty retreat, with Dipper tagging along after Ford on the pretense of helping figure out how to get the flash drive out of Gompers.

"This is perfect!" Mabel slammed the door closed—and Bill had the sneaking suspicion she'd trapped him on purpose—then grabbed both his hands to drag him further into the room. "I can see it now! He'll fall in love with you, and then he'll realize that living in a small logging town is so much more emotionally fulfilling than his high-pressure fast-paced big city government job, and he'll see what a special, magical place Gravity Falls is and he won't wanna do anything that could change it, and Washington will call him like, 'Your report is late! Have you forgotten your mission?' And he'll go 'I have a new mission now: my WIFE!' And—"

"Hold on!" Bill pulled his hands back. "I think you skipped the part where you married me off to a government agent."

"No I didn't! Because he says that and everyone gasps and then he gets down on his knee in front of you and pulls out a ring and—"

"In your dreams, star girl." He dropped onto Mabel's bed and crossed his legs. "Think a little less cheesy Christmas romcom, and more noir spy movie with a double-crossing femme fatale."

Mabel measured that up against her limited spy movie knowledge, and asked dubiously, "You're gonna drop him in a tank of sharks?"

"Hey, if you have one...!" Bill laughed. "But, no. The plan is just for me to keep him distracted long enough for the nerd squad to get the flash drive, wipe any sensitive data, and leave it somewhere that'll make the agents think the goat dumped it naturally."

Mabel considered that. She inhaled deeply. "Okay," she said. "But. What if it's one of those movies where the evil girl spy has a change of heart because of the good guy's charm and you do fall in love."

"Do you remember who we're talking about?" Bill asked. "Fine! If we fall in love, you can be the ring bearer, best maid, and officiant—but don't start stapling together a white dress just yet."

Mabel completely skipped past his main point. She whispered, "You'd let me make your wedding dress?"

"I'd turn down every fashion designer in Milan, Paris, New York, and London combined."

Her eyes widened. "I've gotta start drawing wedding dresses." She rummaged around the floor for an unused piece of paper and the nearest crayon and/or marker box.

"Draw me as a triangle," Bill said automatically. "So there, you're caught up on the plan!" He slowly slid off Mabel's bed toward the door. "So if you'd let me out so I can prepare..."

"Ohh no. Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford brought you to me to learn how to flirt, and I'm going to teach you how to flirt."

He groaned, but plopped back down on Mabel's bed. "I don't need to be taught how to flirt! I'm a pro! While your universe was still gearing up for a Big Bang, I was fending off marriage proposals from lovelorn generation ships and sentient oceans."

"You're not seducing ships and oceans." Mabel had already flopped onto the floor and drawn a triangle with an eye, and was trying to figure out how to put a dress on it. "You're seducing a man."

"Which is even easier! You people barely last a century, you're desperate! Humans fling themselves at me left and right!"

"Then you'll have no trouble passing my love quiz."

Bill automatically frowned. There was a part of him that still tensed up at the word "quiz" even if he did know more about romance than the entire human race combined. "What, like the one you put the guys through on your dating show?"

"Yes, but with all new questions! So you can't just copy all of Soos's answers to get a perfect score!"

"Psh! Like I need to copy anyone's answers," said Bill, who had never taken a quiz in his life without copying someone else's answers and had been planning to do just that. "All right, hit me."

"Question one! Uh..." She tapped a crayon to her chin as she thought. "What's the best gift to give on a first date? Jewelry, chocolate, a wedding ring, or flowers?"

"Ooh, we're starting with bribery, huh?" When in doubt, the right answer was usually C; but "jewelry" and "wedding ring" seemed kinda redundant. Well—cheating had never failed him before, why stop now? "None of the above! I've got a better answer than all of them!"

Mabel lowered her crayon to give him a skeptical look. "Oh yeah? What?"

"Sneak into their dreams the night before, find out their heart's desire, and surprise 'em with that," Bill said. "That's not even a romantic move. It'll let you win over a human in any context! Birthday parties, baby showers, job interviews, criminal trials, hostage negotiations..."

"What if you don't know their heart's desire?"

"Then you're not me."

She set down her crayon, laced her hands under her chin, and said, "Okay, then. If you were trying to win me over, what's my dream birthday gift?"

"Replacing your bedroom with a bouncy castle with inflatable furniture."

"Ha! No it's n..." She trailed off. "Wait. Ohmigosh."

"Told ya."

"I've been dreaming too small," Mabel whispered. She shoved aside her first drawing and started drawing her fantasy bedroom.

Bill picked up one of Mabel's dolls—a floppy tiger—and started talking to it like he was lecturing it. Forget this whole "taking a quiz" thing; he was much more comfortable in the roll of the teacher than the student. "And if it's a blind date and I can't stalk 'em beforehand, nobody's ever disappointed by a solid gold brick," he told the doll.  "It's both practical and pretty, and it appeals to humans' natural greed without making them feel sleazy about accepting a wad of hundreds from their date."

"What's Agent Powers's heart's desire?"

Heck. He didn't actually know. He'd ducked in on the guy's life a handful of times, but he'd never needed to pay that close attention to him. What did boring people like? "A really nice leather wallet," Bill said.

"Okay, you're off to a strong start," Mabel said. "Question two: what's the ideal location for a first date?"

"What are my options?"

"Fooey to the options! I wanna hear your thoughts."

"Then that's easy: anywhere they can't escape from until they love you," Bill said. "Even better if you can serenade 'em."

Mabel nodded in approval. "Perfect answer, full points! Every Inkwell princess movie and vampire novel on the market agrees! Question three: best first date outfit?"

"Sexy."

"Okay—yeah," Mabel said, "But specifically, what does that look like?"

"Tallest hat you can find," Bill said.

Mabel waited. Bill didn't say anything else. Mabel said, "What about the rest of the outfit?"

"Bow tie. Outfit complete."

"That's just what you wear."

"And it's always sexy!" Bill insisted.

"Maybe in Flatworld, but this is earth! If you go out dressed in nothing but a hat and a bow tie, you'll be having your date in the back of a police car!"

"Fine," Bill huffed. "Fifty pairs of gloves—and the more of them you have hands to fill, the better! A dress made out of blank checks! Two snakes! A fur coat made out of live kittens!" Bill shook the stuffed doll emphatically with each point. "Good enough?!"

Mabel squinted thoughtfully at him. "The kitten coat has potential."

"Damn me with faint praise, why don't you."

"What about more traditional romantic outfits? Like... a red velvet suit with a leopard print shirt? Or short shorts that say 'too hot' on the butt?" Mabel asked. "Or a t-shirt with your date's face on it in a heart! That shows your date 'I'm here to focus on you!'"

"What if my date's face is ugly, did you think about that?" Bill asked, mainly to cover up the fact that he was chagrined he hadn't thought of the velvet suit himself. "Forget about fashion. Next question!"

"Okay, how would you prepare yourself for the perfect date? Aside from finding a tall hat and stalking your date's dreams."

"Hygiene's the most important thing," Bill said. "Humans are very attuned to pheromones. It's one of your base instincts."

A look of relief cross Mabel's face. "Yes! Good start. So we're talking a shower, or...?"

"Oh yeah, if you're going on a date in this country, you've gotta scrub that skin raw. There is no smell Americans hate more than the natural smell of other human beings." 

Mabel nodded enthusiastically. "Right!"

"And once you've gotten rid of your real scent you've got to make sure you smell appealing. And that means making sure you smell the most! Cover up any competing suitors' scents with your own!"

Mabel made an uncertain hum. "Okaaay, sooo... what would you call an appropriate fragrance for a first date?"

He wasn't sure he liked the sound of the hum. "First date? You've got to make a strong impression, and set the mood for romance," he told the doll, so he didn't have to watch Mabel pass judgment. "So, I'm thinking... decaying salmon, deer pee, and ambergris."

Mabel was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Bill glanced at her. She immediately pulled her sweater up to hide her mouth. Voice strained with suppressed laughter, she said, "You don't think, maybe... floral scents...?"

Who did she think she was laughing at! He directed his attention back to Mabel's doll. The tiger didn't judge him. The tiger thought all his ideas were brilliant. "Is this guy looking for a garden or a girlfriend? I know ninety percent of the soaps and shampoos on the market are designed to make you smell like a fruit salad on the beach, but you humans don't know the first thing about what activates your own monkey-brained reproductive urges! Trust me: decaying salmon, deer pee, and ambergris! They reek of raw sex appeal!"

"What's ambergris?"

"It's a staple fragrance in the perfume industry! Some of the most popular scents in Hollywood have ambergris base notes!"

"Okay," Mabel said, "but what is it?"

"Okay so," Bill said, "when a sperm whale gets so constipated it kills 'em, the rest of its body rots off while the turd floats to the surface, and after it's bobbed around baking in the sun for a few decades—"

Mabel lay a hand on Bill's knee and gently said, "No." 

"Hey, I'm not the one who invented ambergris, that's your species's idea!"

"Bill, I'm sorry. But you've got the best and worst romance ideas with no in between, and you don't know the difference," Mabel said. "But I promise you're in good hands! I'm the best matchmaker in Gravity Falls! I helped hook up Soos and Melody, Robbie and Tambry, Waddles and Gompers, the Hand Witch and that hunky hiker guy..."

He threw Mabel's doll down on the bed, slumped back against the wall, crossed his arms, and sulked. Then he muttered, "But I've got the best ideas?"

"Oh yeah. You're like an untrained romance prodigy! You just need a liiittle help filtering out the diamonds from the coal."

He grunted. Then he grudgingly admitted, "Getting Waddles and Gompers together is pretty impressive. They have complete opposite political opinions."

"See? I'll have you date ready in no time!"

Bill heaved a frustrated sigh. "Fine. But I'd better at least get a killer makeover out of this."

"Definitely! I'm getting an expert on the case!" She pulled out her phone to send a text. Plus, whatever you're wearing tomorrow? I'm bedazzling the crap out of it."

"Good!"

"But first," Mabel said, "Let's talk about your technique."

####

"Lesson one of Mabel's Guide to Flirting With Humans: pick-up lines! First impressions are super important!"

"Pick-up lines are easy," Bill said. "I know a million of them!"

"That's great! Then this should be easy." Mabel pointed at the picture of Creggy G in the middle of her Sev'ral Timez poster, whom she'd designated as their attractive human for Bill's flirting practice. "Try one out." 

Bill sized up Creggy calculatingly, and said, "You know, your eyeballs are so beautiful."

"Yes!" Mabel cheered. "It's romantic! I love it!"

"—and they'd look even better in my mouth."

Mabel stared at Bill.

"What?" Bill asked. "Too forward? Should I save that for the second date?"

The flirting lesson quickly switched track from teaching Bill how to use a pick-up lines, to teaching Bill what pick-up lines not to use.

And from there, the conversation drifted to a list of subjects Bill wasn't allowed to discuss with the federal agent, which necessitated relocating to the living room so Mabel could set up an easel pad and record all the banned topics. Partway through, Stan drifted in and started throwing in his two cents.

The list of banned flirtation topics included: eyeballs; cannibalism; squid kings; dragonfly mating habits; mandibles; the time and method of living people's future deaths; the cold and lonely heat death of the universe ("Why?! It's a perfect excuse to suggest cuddling for warmth!"); fun get-to-know-you questions like "would you rather kill your mother or your father" or "which conspiracy theories would you most hate to be true"; which conspiracy theories were true; the agent's embarrassing middle school secrets that Bill shouldn't have known about but did; the agent's bald spot; cancer flavors; pending global disasters...

Bill flung his hands in the air. "So what does that leave to talk about?!"

"Anything else," Stan snapped.

"The Chuquicamata open pit copper mine."

"Anything normal."

Bill gave him a look akin to that of a vegetarian who'd just been asked to discuss his favorite cuts of beef. "Have you metme?"

"Try topics that get him in the right mindset for romance," Mabel said. "Like, 'what do you want your future wife's favorite color to be?' Or 'you look like dad material!'"

Bill nodded slowly. "So we're aggressively leading him on. I can work with that. I've never been a fan of subtlety."

"And call him charming," Stan said. "Guys love hearing they're charming. Oh, and tell him his jokes are funny."

"What if he doesn't tell jokes."

"All guys tell jokes when they're flirting! If he's not telling jokes, you're doing something wrong."

"It's true," Mabel said. "Watch any high school romance!" Bill gave them both a dubious look.

Stan glanced up as Ford and Dipper walked by the doorway with Gompers. "Tell 'im, Ford."

"What?"

"All men tell jokes when we're flirting! It's probably in our DNA or something."

Dipper thought about that, and nodded. "I tell jokes when I'm flirting."

Mabel shouted, "You try to tell jokes when you're flirting! Heyooo!"

"Hey."

Ford grimaced. "Usually when I'm flirting, I forget every joke I've ever heard and start asking as many questions as I can think of."

Bill said, "That's because you only flirt with things you want to add to your bestiary!"

"The point still stands." 

Dipper had leaned into the room to read the banned topic list. "Why are conspiracy theories off-limits? He came to Gravity Falls in the first place because he was looking for a paranormal conspiracy."

"Dipper's right," Ford said, "he'd probably be interested in the topic."

Bill flung his hands in the air. "Thank you! That's what I was saying!"

Stan shook his head, "Too close to discussing politics. What if they believe in different conspiracies!"

"Plus, watch this," Mabel said. "Hey Bill, what do you think about Flat Earth theory."

Bill groaned. "I was drunk, those statements were taken out of context, and I can't be held responsible if some idiot with a boat misinterpreted me."

Mabel looked at Ford and Dipper.

Dipper grimaced. "Got it."

Ford nodded. "Conspiracy theories are off-limits."

"This is why you're all single," Bill said.

####

Stan said, "And if you're gonna lie about your job—"

"Which you always should," Bill cut in.

"Obviously! But make sure it's not something too easy to verify. Like, you can't claim to be the governor, what if your date actually voted and knows who the governor is?"

"That's a good point! Margaret was not impressed."

"You're telling me! My suit smelled like broccoli cheese soup for weeks!"

"You shoulda suggested she get the house salad."

"Yeah, I—" Stan cut off. "Wait. How do you know about Margaret? That was twenty years ago!"

Dipper and Ford were in the kitchen, looking for every ingredient they could find that might coax Gompers to release the flash drive the old-fashioned way and listening to the discussion in the living room. Gompers nibbled at a dish towel, oblivious to the fate awaiting him.

Mabel trotted in and patted him as she passed. "Hey, you! You're giving us major trouble, you rascal!"

He bleated at her.

Mabel pushed up to the open fridge next to Dipper, and when he stepped aside to make more room for her, she stepped into his personal space again and leaned into him with her shoulder. "Why are you in the way, bro, jeez!"

"You're in the way!" He leaned against her in turn. "What are you doing in here? Aren't you supposed to be training Bill?"

"Grunkle Stan's taking the lead right now," Mabel said. "My talent is helping people find true love! But his talent is suckering someone into liking you for a day. So I think he's better suited to the task at hand."

"Oh, yeah." Dipper chuckled wryly. "His advice will get you a first date, but not a second date."

Ford muttered, "His technique hasn't changed since high school, I see."

Dipper found the bottle of prune juice he'd been looking for, pulled it out, and stepped back. Mabel yelped when her counterweight disappeared and stumbled sideways into the fridge door.

As Dipper emptied the juice into a mixing bowl, he said, "I'm not sure about this plan. Even with both you and Stan helping. I know Bill's good at tricking people, but... he's so annoying. And not in a lovable way."

"Don't undersell him!" Mabel said. She'd retrieved a pitcher of Mabel Juice and was dumping a full bottle of sprinkles into it—hardcore romance training required high stamina. "He has the potential to be a dreamboat!"

Ford muttered, "He's a manipulative, murderous monster." He was searching through all the cans they'd moved to the kitchen counter for beans.

"Those don't have to be mutually exclusive," Mabel insisted. "Serial killers get girlfriends. Sometimes after they're arrested!"

"I'mmm not seeing a dreamboat," Dipper said. "More like a shipwreck. I mean, when you were trying to come up with a list of romantic date foods, he suggested blood licked off your date's teeth."

"And he was right!" Mabel said. "Vampires, bro-bro!"

"Okay, but I don't think he was talking about teeth that were still attached to his date's skull!"

"He didn't say they weren't attached," said Mabel, with flagging conviction that suggested she hadn't considered that and was realizing Dipper was probably right.

"And five minutes ago you and Stan told him he should pretend to be a princess, and he told you he'd be great at that because he started an Internet dating service that matches up lonely widows with overseas con artists pretending to be deposed princes."

"Well," Mabel said sheepishly.

"And then he tried to talk you two into investing in a pyramid scheme to fund his dating service."

"But we didn't invest!" Mabel said.

"Only because you looked it up on your phone and discovered he'd made it up!"

"I mean, until then, it sounded romantic!" Mabel flung her hands out in a wide shrug. (Something about the gesture looked strange to Ford.) "Finding a second chance at love with a mysterious foreign criminal with a glamorous false identity? That'd be great if it was real!"

"Mabel, it's a scam," Dipper said exasperatedly.

"And do scam artists not deserve love, too?!" Mabel pounded a fist on the table emphatically. "What about Grunkle Stan! He deserves love! A rich overseas widow would be perfect for him!"

"That's not— The point is, Bill's not romantic!" Dipper said. "This plan isn't going to work!"

Ford set half a dozen bean cans next to Dipper's mixing bowl. "He doesn't need to be romantic," he said. "He only needs to be charismatic. And for all his flaws, he's certainly that." Planets will orbit stars and black holes just the same—and not even realize the difference. "He doesn't have to actually win Agent Powers's heart. He only has to keep his attention for a few hours. By the time Bill stops dazzling Powers long enough for him to see the red flags, we'll have the flash drive." He nodded toward Gompers. "If we get it before the agents return with a warrant, we might not even need Bill to distract him."

Dipper sighed. "Then let's hope Gompers likes prunes."

"Come on! Show a little faith!" Mabel said.

Ford muttered, "The last time I put my faith in Bill..." Dipper gestured emphatically at Ford in agreement.

"Not in Bill! In me! Mark my words, Grunkle Ford—I'll get this Cinderella ready to meet his Prince Charming if I have to summon every mouse in Gravity Falls to help sew his ballgown!"

"Please don't summon the wildlife again," Dipper groaned. "The last time you did that, huge spiders kept appearing in our room for a week."

Mabel's pocket vibrated; she pulled out her phone and gasped. She chugged down the rest of her juice in three sickly sweet gulps and bolted from the room. "Biiill! Your personal style consultant texted back!"

"My who?"

She dragged him out of the living room by the wrist. "Come on!"

Ford watched them run up the stairs, then started searching through their cereal boxes for the high fiber one. Tentatively, he asked, "Mabel doesn't actually think we're trying to get Bill and the agent together, does she?" The Prince Charming comment was concerning.

"I don't know," Dipper sighed. "A few days ago she started talking about trying to get Bill a love life? Maybe she sees this as a practice round."

"Really? Why, did he say he wants to date people?" If he wanted to get out of the shack to emotionally prey on the locals one-on-one without supervision...

"I don't think she's even told him yet. It's part of her project to... reintegrate him into society? She probably thinks the power of love can rehabilitate him." Dipper sighed. "She's setting herself up for disappointment. He's been conning people into thinking he's a good guy for billions of years, right? If being loved could fix him, he'd be an angel by now."

"Instead, he's just gotten better at pretending to be an angel," Ford said ruefully. "I'm inclined to agree with you." He found the cereal he'd been looking for and set it on the table by Dipper. "But then... we let him live, didn't we? Because we all hope we're wrong. I suppose that doesn't make us that different from Mabel."

Dipper shook his head emphatically. "Not me." He dumped one of the cans of beans into the prune juice a little harder than necessary. "I let him live for two reasons: because of Mabel, and because of that prophecy. And he doesn't have to change to fulfill some prophecy to save us—when it comes, he might just be trying to save his own stupid butt, too."

"I suppose so." Right—of course, even if he'd agreed to spare Bill, Dipper still didn't have any real hope for him beyond his usefulness.

Over the past month, Ford hadn't seen anything more sympathetic out of Bill than Dipper had. He wondered at himself for even being willing to consider Bill might change. When had Ford changed enough to consider it? Or was he just more susceptible to Bill's same old tricks?

"You don't remember the whole prophecy yet, do you?" Ford asked. "What if this is what it was about? Saving our family from the government because he's the only person the lead agent finds attractive enough to distract him?"

Dipper pulled a face. "I hope not," he said. "After everything he put us through? He owes us a fight to the death with an interdimensional eldritch god."

"Now that's a sight I'd pay to see."

####

MABEL: Heyyy Paz, can I ask for a small favor. I have a friend that needs a MAJOR MAKEOVER!! 😿 Like the FULL PRINCESS TRANSFORMATION treatment!! Can you help him?

PACIFICA: Can't, I'm suuuper busy today. I have the lunch shift AND grooming day at the ranch.

PACIFICA: Plus, why would I help some total rando? 😒

MABEL: Because it's my friend with the beautiful golden hair.

PACIFICA: asldkfggh

PACIFICA: OK fine come by the ranch after work

PACIFICA: and send me a picture of his skin next to a white paper so I can grab some foundations to try out.

####

Bill took a piece of paper and a marker, wrote "Make me beautiful!" and dotted the I and the exclamation point with hearts, flopped the least sunburned part of his arm next to the paper for Mabel to take a picture, and leaned away to keep his face out of it.

As Mabel snapped a couple pictures, she said, "Okay, before we visit Pacifica, I have to warn you. She can be a liiittle bit mean when it comes to fashion. So don't get mad at her, okay? It's how she shows she cares!"

"No it's not," Bill said.

"No, it's not," Mabel conceded. "But it doesn't mean she doesn't care. That's just... how she relates to other people! By insulting their fashion, style, and body. And family. And finances."

"Don't worry, star girl. I can take it."

"But I mean, she might be really, really, super mean about your looks," Mabel said. "And you cannot curse her or threaten to turn her bones into flutes or do anything Bill-ish like that. Promise me."

"Hey, bone flutes! That sounds like a fun arts and crafts project, right?"

"Bill!"

"Re-lax, it'll be fine," Bill said. "She's just your garden-variety pageant girl with an overly-critical mom who tried to relive her glory years through her daughter! I can handle a teenage ex-beauty queen. I'm an expert on those types."

Skeptically, Mabel said, "Really?" She was slowly coming to realize that, in Bill's opinion, he was the expert on everything.

"Oh yeah. I spent years eyelid deep in the pageant scene."

"You did?" she said, surprised. "How come? Did you try to trick a beauty pageant into building your portal or something like that?"

Bill stared at Mabel.

####

Outside the flat hospital, it was a beautiful, peaceful morning. The air was clear, the unseen sun was shining brightly from some unknown dimension, and some 2D equivalent to a bird was chirping in some 2D equivalent to a tree.

And then the hospital doors crashed open with such force that passing shapes momentarily suspected that someone had set off a bomb.

"—don't give me that look, if you'd hustled your hypotenuse and had your birthday yesterday, we wouldn't be in such a rush! You're just lucky you came out so cute, or—" An exhausted, dull pinkish triangle charged out the doors with a very tiny, squishy yellow triangle in her trembling arm. She turned to shout behind her—"Hurry up! There's only two hours until the Best Baby Pageant and he is not going to miss it!"

—and was followed closely by a horrified blue triangle carrying a hat in one hand and a cane in the other. "But Scalene, the doctors still have to do those tests to check for—"

"They can test him later! If he's got some horrible birth defect, he'll still have it after he's won a trophy!" Without slowing, Scalene turned and held the baby out toward the other triangle. The squishy new shape gawked at him in mild befuddlement. "Look at this kid, Euclid! Most newborn brats look like cranky raisins, but he's less than an hour old and he's already bright-eyed and smooth-sided! He was born with the face of a pageant winner—"

Not looking where she was going, she ran into a tree. The bird flew off in a panic, Scalene lost her balance, and she nearly dropped the baby. Euclid caught him, caught her, and held her steady while she leaned dizzily against the tree. "Lene. You should be on bedrest right now. Maybe we should just, you know, take a moment to process..."

"Process what! We have our little angle. Am I supposed to sit in a hospital bed staring at the afterbirth?!"

While Euclid stared at her in shock, she snatched the child back, pushed him away, and wobbled back upright. "What kind of a lazy mother would I be if I was sleeping instead of making my child a winner! You want him to start off life on the right foot, don't you?"

Defeated, Euclid said, "All right. I'll take care of the... the paperwork. At least bring your cane."

"I don't need it. I'm fine."

"Fine?! You just..." He gestured at her, gestured at the brand-spanking-new baby, gestured at her again, then flung his hands up in defeat. "If you drop our baby, I'm divorcing you."

She sighed huffily. "You're so dramatic." But she snatched the cane out of his hand anyway and stormed away, declaring loudly enough that shapes on the other side of the street turned to stare: "If the mayor doesn't declare my Billy the greatest baby in the whole godforsaken world, I'm grabbing the biggest trophy in the room and bashing his eye in!"

####

Bill shrugged at Mabel. "Sure," he said. "Something like that."

####

Gompers stared down at the bowl set on the floor in front of him.

It contained black beans, broccoli, coffee grounds, fiber-enriched whole-grain cereal, oatmeal, and an avocado and half a sweet potato mashed together into an orange-green mush, all stewing in a prune juice soup.

Gompers looked up.

Dipper and Ford were crouched across from him, watching expectantly. 

Gompers bleated balefully at them.

"Go on!" Ford nudged the bowl closer. "It's good for you."

Gompers knew a lie when he heard one. He turned his nose up at the mix.

"I don't get it," Dipper said. "He eats everything. What's wrong with this stuff?"

"I haven't a clue."

"Maybe it's the broccoli?" 

Ford gave him a quizzical look. "Why broccoli?"

Dipper shrugged. "I don't like broccoli, I don't know why he would."

"Hmm." Mystified, Ford propped his chin in his hand and stared into Gompers's eyes. Gompers stared back. Gompers stared into his soul. Gompers didn't blink.

Ford was dragged from this session of nonconsensual soul-searching by the sound of footsteps and Mabel's voice drifting down the stairs: "Listen, you know I love your sense of fashion! All I'm saying is everyone loves kittens, but snakes? That's a pretty niche fashion market! You're not gonna get a lot of takers."

"No, hey, hear me out," Bill said. "I listened to your professional matchmaker advice, now you've got to listen to my professional heartbreaker advice. You'll thank me for this one day! This is my number one romance tip: if you wanna impress a date, strap cobras to your arms and call yourself 'Johnny Cobra-Arms.' It works every time. Guaranteed."

(Dipper snorted.)

"Whaaat? No way," Mabel said. "Seriously, what?"

"It's true! I workshopped this! I've experimented across parallel timelines! It works."

"Quit messing with me, Bill."

"You think I would ever mislead you? No. Picture this." As the pair turned the corner on the stairs, Bill was spreading his hands in front of himself as though gesturing to the scene he wanted Mabel to imagine. "You see a guy, maybe a year older than you, kinda cute but nothing to write home about, maybe a 6/10. Got him in your mind's eye?"

A look of intense concentration crossed Mabel's face as she engaged her Imagination. "Yeah?"

"Okay, now imagine he—" Bill reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around. "Where are my shoes." He raised his voice, "Who moved my fisshoes! I left them right— oh, there they are." He disappeared into the living room. "Imagine your 6/10 has two big snakes wrapped around his arms. And he catches your eye from across the club, comes up to you, and says..." Bill's voice dropped to a pitch that was nearly in the range of an average adult human male, "'Hey. Name's Johnny Cobra-Arms. What's yours?'"

Mabel thought about it. Her eyes slowly widened in amazement. "Oh my god, it would totally work on me."

Bill re-emerged into the entryway, fish shoes donned. "See?" 

"It made him hot! What the heck, how did that happen!"

"See?! It works every time!" He shouted toward the kitchen, "Hey, we're leaving for Alpaca's! I'm taking the car!"

"No you're not," Ford said.

Bill spread his hands in a shrug. "Worth a shot!" He grabbed his umbrella and the magic friendship bracelets from the coat rack and waited for Mabel to open the door. "See, it's the best possible first impression. It shows he's got a sense of humor, he's quirky, he's a little bit dangerous, he's got a great sense of fashion, he's a world traveler, he's good with animals..." The door swung shut behind them. 

The way Bill had shrugged stuck in Ford's mind. 

In his true form, Bill didn't have shoulders. His arms extended out of his sides like the trunks of saplings extending from the surface of flood waters, and they glided around his perimeter in a way that defied conventional physical biology. No joints. 

When he shrugged in his human body, sometimes he'd bob his shoulders up and down in a deliberate mimicry of how humans performed the gesture; and lately, as Bill got used to moving his new body, Ford had seen him sluggishly raise a shoulder when he was too exhausted to gesture more expressively. But most of the time, he shrugged like he still didn't have shoulders. He'd spread his arms, bend his elbows, usually forming a W shape but sometimes when he was particularly emphatic forming a shape like football goalposts, and if he really wanted to make his meaning clear he'd twitch his upturned palms up the way a human would twitch their shoulders.

He did it all the time. He'd done it just now. The gesture was so natural on Bill that Ford had never realized how unnaturalit was on a human—until he'd seen Mabel make the exact same gesture earlier.

She was copying Bill's body language. He wondered if she knew.

He'd have to keep an eye on that.

"Hope Agent Powers is into snakes," Dipper muttered.

Ford laughed—then wondered whether someone pulling the Johnny Cobra-Arms trick would've worked on him. If by now nothing had made him take an interest in a basic, garden-variety human being, he doubted anything could... but, admittedly, he'd at least consider hanging out with Johnny. He sounded like an intriguing character. "If that's the worst thing Bill subjects him to, he'll be getting off light."

With a twinge of guilt, Ford realized just how true that was. Ford was no stranger to having to turn down the volume on his conscience for the greater good—and there were few greater goods than protecting his family—but...

He might not know Powers, but he did know that, whether Bill succeeded in seducing him or not, the man didn't deserve what he was about to be subjected to.

####

(Now that this chapter's finally out, may there be no further delays for a good long while, ugh.

Here's your "what was changed in the wake of TBOB" update: obviously, since we got five whole pages on Bill's beliefs about romance, a lot of that got incorporated into this chapter—the first and last scenes were basically written entirely in response to TBOB.

The scene with Scalene & Euclid, obviously, got their names & descriptions from TBOB & TINAWDC (and yeah, yeah, i'm eventually gonna go back to earlier chapters and edit out Bill's mom being a line so it matches up with canon), and it's obvious what the "best baby pageant" is a reference to (so you can guess whether Bill won)—but Bill being a pageant kid due to his mom was already part of the plans long before TBOB, so I just stuck a couple canon details into the story I was already writing. We were already gonna get into Bill's childhood this chapter & next (as you'll see next week).

Beyond that, most of the chapter was already in its present form before TBOB—up to & including Bill having a list of topics he thinks are acceptable for dates that no rational human would agree with—and all TBOB added was a couple tiny details (like... "mandibles".)

The fact that the list of things that were influenced by TBOB is so much longer than usual is part of the reason this chapter's two whole weeks late lmao.

Anyway, hope y'all enjoyed, happy new year, and I'm looking forward to (finally) hearing your thoughts on the first fresh chapter of 2025!

[fandomwe1rd0]

I swear Rickdepedence Spray is such a horrible episode like oh my fucking god. Angry rant about this nightmare episode under the cut! TW for inc*st because well we're talking about this episode

Oh my fucking god this fucking episode is so fucking horrible like oh my god fucking god. I love Rick and Morty but why just so much why!? Like why does the episode exist, DAN WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!? My major problem with this episode, well my two main problems is Morty's sexualization and the fact that it has WAY TOO MUCH incest like WHY!? Wait that would imply that there is ever the right amount of incest- But yeah there is a LOT a LOT!

Butttt every Rick and Morty episode has positives! And I refuse to not mention the ones in this one! Don't worry there's not a lot! Uhm...I uh...laughed at like...1 of the jokes. Uhm...Beth, Jerry, and Summer were...ok. The President was also okay...they weren't at their best, but they certainly weren't at their worst, so uhm that's...fine. Butttt I REALLY LOVE RICK IN THIS EPISODE LIKE OH MY FUCKING GOD :D Yeah him uhhh with a CHUD is weird, but I mean they are sentient and she seems to be of age, so I can't judge. (Also I assume the age-inappropriate thing isn't talking about Princess Poneta being underaged, but talking about Rick being literally 70) BUT HE'S LIKE ACTUALLY NICE TO MORTY IN THE EPISODE! Like I give him WAY too much credit but the "Oh, hello kiddo, how's your Saturday" IS SO FUCKING CUTE LIKE AWWWWW! HIM ACTUALLY BEING NICE TO MORTY WHEN HE GOES IN THE GARAGE AND HIM HOLDING ONTO MORTY PROTECTIVELY THE SECOND THE PLANE STARTS GOING DOWN AWWWW HE LOVES MORTY SO MUCH!

Okay time for me to stop foaming at the mouth over Rick not being a complete ass to Morty and start suffering when I list everything bad about this episode!

Here's a fun drinking game! Take a shot everytime they say "incest"! Like I understand that Morty and Summer didn't DO anything (Thank GOD) But why was the incest baby thing even needed??? Like why??? Who in the writer's room was like "Hey y'know what would be GREAT for this episode?! What if Morty and Summer had a baby!" And everyone else in the writer's room were like "Yeah! What a wonderful idea! Let's bring it up mutiple times because why not?! Besides all the OBVIOUS reasons why not!"

Alsoooo the humor isn't even that good, like I will admit I did laugh at one of the jokes. It was the "He (The sperm monster) had a gun!" I dunno, I found it funny, but the rest of the jokes are incest jokes or sexualizing Morty, incest and sexualizing minors isn't funny. Moving on!

So, the elephant in the room, well the other elephant in the room besides all the incest, all the sexualization of Morty! I mean literally all the episode was started from Morty...uh...ahem...let's just say...enjoying himself with animal equipment. (Gross) I mean it doesn't SHOW anything, but still. ALSO! Later in the episode, it barely covers him uh...ahem...with the animal equipment again! As we hear him...uh...making noises no sane person wants to hear come out of a minors mouth, ik the voice actor is an adult but still, STILL! He's trying to sound like a child, which makes this soooooooo distrubing. Ik it's not supposed to uhhhh make anyone excited, but STILL! Nobody wants to hear that, like that scene is SO awkward like ughhhhhhhh. I hate it

Anyway, that's it! Fuck this episode!

[klm-zoflorr]

Marley incorrect quotes: Partie Onze

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Armin: If Hange was turned into a sentient Titan, do you think she would eat one of us just to try it out?

Mikasa: Without question, without hesitation, and without remorse.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reiner: Gabi, I heard from Magath you got kicked out of a class for using the c-word. That wasn't clever, was it?

Gabi: No, it was cunt.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Connie: Jump out of a plane with a parachute and you'll be happy for ten to fifteen minutes

Connie: Jump out of a plane without a parachute and you'll be happy for the rest of your life

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Petra: When are we gonna kiss?

Levi: What?

Petra: Oh sorry autocorrect. When are we gonna hang out?

Levi: First of all those two words aren't even close to each other. And second of all, this is a verbal conversation.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reiner: Instructor Shadis, can you assist me? All of my clothes keep disappearing for some reason and I don't know where they went

Historia, wearing a white button-up shirt that's twice her size: Huh, spooky.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reiner: I’m in love with you.

Porco: We called off the prank war last night at midnight, dork.

Reiner: I know.

Porco: Ah. Okay. Um. Cool. Neat. Very cool. Cool. Cool. Coolcoolcool-

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Marcel: Love story for the ages! Enemies to lovers, 150k, slowburn! Buy one get one free!

Porco: Why are you promoting us?

Marcel: Well someone has to have more than two braincells in this relationship, and it's not gonna be me, so I'm finding you an investor.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mr. Yaeger: Remember Zeke, never talk to strangers

Young Zeke: Does this include Mom and Dad?

Mr. Yaeger: I-

Zeke: Does this include Mr. Xaver, the man who practically raised me one baseball game at a time?

Mr. Yaeger: Well-

Zeke: What about if the police arrests me? Should I not talk to them either??

Mr. Yaeger, wiping away a stray tear: You're way too bright for your age, way too aware. Oh, my brave little soldier...

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Porco: Pieck's dog died

Porco: So to cheer her up I'm thinking about getting her an identical one?

Zeke: What is she going to do with two dead dogs??

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Zeke: Well I was just thinking, if we're all sterile the other countries won't want to attack us since we wouldn't be a threat anymore-

Hange/Historia/Eren/Any Eldian with a goddam ounce of sense and no self-flagelling tendencies: Is it crack? Is it crack you smoke?? Are you fucking serious?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mikasa: Annie! I don't want to fight you.

Annie: I wouldn't wanna fight me either!

Armin: Annie!

Annie: Sorry. Yes you can use my shampoo.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Yelena: I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy

Yelena: I would wish it on Eren tho. Fuck you, Eren. You know what you did.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reiner: Sorry if I'm not your cup of tea.

Historia:You're not even your own cup of tea.

Ymir: You're barely a cup and you don't like tea.

Historia:You're more like a rusty bucket of haunted bog water.

Reiner: Sorry if I'm not your rusty bucket of haunted bog water.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Zeke: *at Magath's funeral, kneeling and whispering at his coffin*

Zeke: Who's thinking outside the box now, uh?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hange: Wait, how many kids do you even have?

Erwin: Biologically, emotionally or legally?

Hange: Well now I'm curious...

Erwin: Biologically: Too many to count. Papa's had his adventurous youth...

Erwin: Legally: About the entirety of the Survey Corps, plus a few strays from the Military Police. I have to feed, house them, and make sure they don't get their heads bitten off by titans after all... Plus, half of them are orphans already and I am their sole provider.

Erwin: Emotionally: I don't like any of you bitches.

Annie: Wahh, wahh. So sad.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha: You’re my closest friend. I mean, we share a toothbrush.

Connie: I was not aware of that.

Sasha: We do!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Annie: Hey, you guys wanna play a game?

Annie: *serves everyone a cup of coffee*

Annie: The game's called "Don't Let Me Down". Don't drop anything *runs towards Mikasa*

Mikasa: *catches Annie, managing to balance out both the chick and the coffee perfectly*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren, running towards Jean: Hey, catch me, horseface!

Jean: *Panics, drops coffee and doesn't catch Eren*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Connie: *drops coffee and grabs Sasha*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ymir: *dives out of Reiner's way*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Armin: *Tries to save both Historia and the coffee, ends up spilling it all over himself, transforms into a titan, blows everything up in a one-mile radius*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Gabi: Hey Pieck, do you know where I've put my socks, you know, the green ones with little grenades?

Gabi: Wait.

Gabi: Are you making Sims of the entire Warriors unit??

Pieck: Yes, I'm also going to recreate the compound to house them all. Do you want to join me?

Gabi: Scooch over I have an idea for one of Magath's outfits

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Colt: Guys we need to- what are you doing?

Gabi:

Pieck:

Colt: Is that us as sims?

Pieck: ... Might be

Colt, sitting down next to them: Who's in the lead for most fires started while trying to make a garden salad?

Gabi: Annie's Sim, with 12 times so far

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Porco: Just so you all know what you're dealing with, I'm the kind of guy who saves manually before hitting "save & quit" when I play the Sims

Gabi: ...you could have "saved" this one for your therapist, we don't want to hear about your mental illnesses

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Zeke: This is such a stupid game.

Pieck: I had us go on a date chasing vampires and defeating a giant basement plant and then kissing under the moonlight. You're wearing an integral bear costume and using your extreme charisma to scam people out of money. Try again?

Zeke: It's... alright, I guess.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hange: Why isn’t there a pregnant barbie doll?

Hange: Because Ken came in a different box

Erwin: grOss-

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Annie: I feel like doing something stupid.

Armin: I’m something stupid. Do me.

Mikasa: Aw, Armin, you're not THAT stupid...

Armin:

Armin: ... What do you mean, not "that" stupid??

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Kenny: Why the fuck did the government put out a ‘Flee on Sight, Do Not Engage’ order about me for the whole populace??

Kuchel: I don't know, why would they be afraid of a man nicknamed "Kenny the Ripper"?

Uri Reiss: You terrify them. An Ackerman with guns and no regard for casualties is too much for them to handle.

Kenny: What a bunch of bitches. Don’t they know I only go after the Military Police?

Uri Reiss: Yeah. But according to sightings, you always look like you want to shoot whoever you come across off. No one wants to chance it. See? *shows picture taken when Kenny last went to get groceries*

Levi, peering at the picture, confused: That’s just Kenny’s normal face. Why would they think he wants to shoot them?

Kuchel: Because Kenny always looks like he wants to shoot someone.

Kenny: I have resting sniper face.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha: You have never seen Star Wars? Bro, the only people in the universe who haven’t seen Star Wars are the characters in Star Wars and that’s cause they lived them, Historia! That’s because they lived the Star Wars!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Connie: I'm selling my pet python. Anyone interested?

Jean: Is it massive?

Connie: It's huge

Jean: How many feet?

Connie: None. It's a snake, you twat.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Pieck, putting her hands over Annie's eyes: Guess who!

Annie: It's either Pieck or the cold, clammy hands of death.

Pieck, pulling her hands away: It's me!

Annie: Dammit.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mikasa: You can’t shoot and kill Sasha just like that!

Gabi: Actually, I can. I totally can. I have guns and hands and a total lack of self preservation and everything.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren: I'm not mean. Name one mean thing I’ve ever done.

Armin: When we were younger, you convinced me eggs weren't real.

Eren: They're not.

Armin: Haha, very funny.

Eren: I'm serious. Didn't you hear?

Armin: No... what happened?

Mikasa: ...Why would you fall for this again-

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren, working as a cashier: *Ringing up Jean's groceries, a banana, an apple and two eggs* You must be single

Jean: Wow, how did you know that?

Eren: Because you're ugly.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reiner: Time to do some sketchy shit ~dah-daaaaah-dah-dahhhh-doooooh~

Berthold: Hope we get away with it ~dah-daaaah-dah-dahhhhh-dooooh~

Annie: Stop singing and come help me with this gate you morons, old McDonalds' farm isn't gonna sabotage itself

Marcel: ...~dah-daaah-dah-dahhhhh-dooooh~

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jean: All women are queens

Eren: If she breathes she's a hoe

Mikasa: *pointing at Eren* I want this one

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jean: Is that you who tagged "tw animal abuse" under the selfie I just posted?

Eren:

Eren: ...no

Jean: Why'd you do that?

Eren: Builds character

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Grisha: Hey son, want to hear a pizza joke?

Grisha: Nevermind, it's too cheesy

Zeke: I am selling you to the authorities first chance I get Father.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Grisha: Don't be pepper-phony, don't betray your old man like that! It's the yeast you can do.

Zeke: I don't know whether to scream at you or never talk to you again

Grisha: You know what happened to the last guy who was indeSLICEsive like that? He pastaway.

Zeke:

Grisha: There’s mushroom for improvement, son

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Falco: When I eat alphabet soup, I only eat the vowels

Colt: Why?

Falco: Sometimes.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha: Why are you on the floor?

Historia: I'm depressed.

Historia: Also I was stabbed, can you call an ambulance please

Ymir, barrelling in: You were WHAT?? Whose ASS do I need to KICK??

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Grisha: I forgot my pizza in the oven

Grisha : Burned 2000 calories today

Zeke: AAAAARGGGGGG

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Grisha, at a restaurant in Paradis: Is my pizza gonna be long?

Carla: No, all our pizzas are round.

Grisha:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren: I love the pizza jokes, Dad! More!

Grisha, patting his head: That's why you're my favorite son. You're such a fungi.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren: Favorite? Dad, I'm your only son.

Grisha: ...yes, I meant between you and the dog- Mikasa. Between you and Mikasa.

Eren: Oh, okay.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mikasa: You’re alright for an old guy.

Levi: I’m not really that old.

Mikasa: ...You keep telling yourself that.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Gabi on her first day as a vampire hunter: Wow this is easy

Gabi on her first night as a vampire hunter: Oh no

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha: *jumps out of a huge cake* Surprise, my Queen! It is I, your most loyal vassal!

Historia: I was expecting my husband.

Sasha: Twenty years we've known each other, Historia, and now you don't want to see me pop out of a cake. I'm offended.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Levi: Oh, right, I should have mentioned this at the beginning.

Levi, leaning in like he's about to tell a secret: I solve my problems through violence.

Erwin: *gesturing wordlessly at the pile of bodies he left behind*

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren: Dad, can I eat the last piece of cake in the fridge?

Grisha: Sure.

Grisha: But the dining room would probably be more comfortable

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Eren: I like your smile.

Mikasa: Hn.

*Later*

Mikasa: What does it mean?

Armin: That he likes your smile?

Mikasa: But like in what way? Platonically? Affectionately? Romantically?

Armin: I don't know!

*Much later*

Eren: You know Mikasa best-

Armin: No I don't. I've never met her.

Eren: What does it mean when she says "Hn." After I tell her I like her smile? Is she starting to forgive me?

Armin: *sighs*

Armin: It means she appreciates the compliment.

Eren: But in what way? Platonically? Affectionately? Romantically?

Armin: I DON'T KNOW. Go bother your brother, relationship advice is what older siblings are for!!

Eren: The last time I asked Zeke he called me a moley dumbfuck and asked for Levi to come execute him

Armin: I'm sure he didn't mean it. Ask him again, he probably changed his mind.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Ymir: People like to say, “you can't love someone unless you love yourself first". Well I call bullshit on that. I have never loved myself. But Historia? I love Historia so much I forgot what hating myself felt like.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Carla: I brought Eren to the park this afternoon.

Grisha: So?

Carla: While he was on the playground, I saw he was about to hit his head so I told him to duck.

Carla: He quacked at me. And then hit his head.

Grisha, holding a crying Eren: Oh.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

*Jean wakes up in the hospital after being in a vertical maneuvering equipment crash*

Hange: I have some good news and some bad news.

Jean: Okay, what's the good news?

Hange: We managed to save your penis

Jean: That's great. And the bad news?

Hange: It's in this jar

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha, trying on Hange's glasses: How do I look??

Hange, squinting: I have no clue

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Sasha: Please don't make jokes about crucifixion.

Sasha: Unless you really nail the execution.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Floch: Your insolence has gone too far!

Connie: Wrong. It can go a lot further.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Historia: I just realized that the word “seven” has ‘even’ in it.

Historia: That’s odd.

Erwin: Get out.

Historia: I'm the Queen! Hey! *She gets thrown out the room*

Historia, grumbling: I'm gonna make this our motto just to piss him off

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

*Preparing for his date with Levi*

Mika Zacharias: Final question. Your dinner date starts at seven. What time do you arrive?

Erwin: Seven. A.M. Case the restaurant, run background checks on the staff. Can the cook be trusted? If not I gotta kill him. Dispose of the body, replace him with my own guy no later than 4:30

Mike: You’re ready

Erwin: Really?

Mike: No. Everything you just said was insane and we are out of time.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hange: I think it has its charm... Levi would love the attention to details.

Nanaba: Nobody asked you, you're cackling-witch-level insane on a good day.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mikasa: Are you guys flirting or fighting?!

Hange: Flirting

Zeke: Fighting

Hange: ...Right. That's what I meant to say.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Marcel: I’ve come to offer you some friendly advice.

Annie: I really don’t want your advice.

Marcel: ...Well then consider it unfriendly advice.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Commander Magath: I'm Commander Theo Magath.

Gabi: Theo Magath? That's your name?

Commander Magath: Uh, yeah...

Gabi: You could do so much better than that. I’m going to call you Sparkle Sunshine.

Reiner: Gabi, that's rude

Gabi: ...Sorry. Commander Sparkle Sunshine.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Zeke: After Pieck found my letters I had to come clean and tell her I was cheating

Zeke: She said she'll never play scrabble with me again :'(

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Yes, Grisha really is a lucky guy. Lost his old marleyan pun-hating family, found a new one who appeciates him and his pizza puns. Goals!

More incorrect quotes

[thescarletnargacuga]

Oh, hello! My first ask on this site, so I don't really know how to do this. My apologies ^^". Harlequin au has literally been eating my brain for weeks now! I've been reading your writing, and it's so inspiring! I hope to reach that level of writing someday. Anyway, I wanted to ask; we've already had Pomni protecting her little bean with teeth and nails, but what about Caine? I think it would be so interesting to see Caine in action, whether to protect Pomni or Cade, or both! (And English is not my first language; sorry for any grammar error.)

A/N: all I can say is practice! And read. The writing style of other authors will inspire your own, and don't be afraid to take constructive criticism

A/N: on to the request! How about protecting Cade and Anya?

THE DRAGON'S ROAR

A HARLEQUIN AU ONESHOT

WARNING: distress, family dispute

~~~

Deep in the heart of the City of Circuits, the occupation of sentient puppets was bustling with activity. Construction, trading, and just general life was being lived in the newly repurposed city. Amongst the milling crowd were two smaller puppets, no more than five feet tall each, running and weaving through an active construction site.

Cade ran up a stack of bricks to swing from a beam of wood being hoisted by a mechanized crane. He trapezed himself over the heads of some of the workers and dropped to the other side. Landing in a ruck and roll, he kept running. "Come on, slow poke! You'll never catch me at that pace!"

A few seconds behind Cade, Anya ran around all the obstacles. Taking the long way through the construction zone, she weaves her way through the workers. "Pardon me, excuse me, very sorry. WAIT FOR ME!" She calls after her half brother.

Cade parkours his way to the top of a stack of crates and sits like he's been there for hours as his sister catches her breath when she finally catches up. "I'm telling you, Anya, you aren't taking full advantage of these new bodies. We're TEENS now! We can run faster, jump higher, and actually fight now!"

"You've had one lesson." Anya rolled her eyes and adjusted her teddy bear in her small cross body bag. She had to make sure he could see out. "That hardly makes anyone a warrior."

"Maybe not yet, but it does get you THIS!" Cade unsheathed his wooden training sword. "You don't need to cut something to make a strike hurt! Ha!" He stood on the pile of crates and swung his sword in a practiced figure eight. However, his motions made the stack away and he lost his footing.

Anya grimaced as she watched her brother fall with the crates. She checked on him when the dust cleared. "You alright?"

Cade kicked a broken half of a crate of his leg. "Yeah. I meant to do that, by the way."

"Suuuuure." Anya offered her hand to help him up.

Cade swatted away her hand and got up before his pride was further damaged. "Whatever. You need to hurry up and get training too. There's still a lot of marionettes on the loose."

"I am training. Mom is teaching me the art of artifact reading and the science of soul magic. You'd benefit from a lesson or two."

"Ugh, you know I don't do books. They're boring." Cade walked with her beyond the busier central hub of downtown. The crowds thinned the further out they wandered.

"There's power in knowledge. More than any blade." Anya lifted her skirt before she jumped over a large puddle.

"Ragatha teach you that too?" Cade idly dragged his training sword along a ruined wall.

"Of course. The world has many things to teach us. There's more to know than physical prowess-"

Cade yawned obnoxiously loud. "Uh-huh. I know. Souls. Ooooh. Magical. Mom barely uses any soul magic and she overcame every obstacle in her way. I'd argue the sword is mightier than the soul."

"But Caine-"

"Don't get me started. Dad talks a big game but all he does is teleport around like an unpredictable jackrabbit. I've never seen him do anything actually impressive."

"Cade, it's been a time of peace since before we were born. He hasn't had to use his powers. He was the first sentient puppet, he saw the human-puppet war, he saw the creation of the marionettes. That doesn't garner respect?" Anya clasped both of her hands on her bag strap.

Cade thought a bit longer before answering. "Sure...It's just, he doesn't do anything but work with the council and builds. Does that even require soul magic?"

Anya shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe. He builds things super fast. Like magic." She emphasized the last word with a smirk.

"Funny." Cade deadpanned. "Just wait until- what was that?" Cade stopped, sword held high. There was shuffling from the ruins to their right. "Who goes there!?"

A rat sprang from the debris and scurried away, causing Cade and Anya to jump. "Ha! Just a stupid rodent. Come on, let's catch it." Cade ran off after the rat.

"Wait! Cade! We shouldn't go too far out!" She called after her half brother, but he was already far ahead. Not wanting to be alone, she ran after him. "Wait for me!"

The rat race became another game of keep-up. The young puppets zig zagged through the maze-like ruins of the outskirts. The bustling and booming construction of the inner city grew faint.

The rat ran under a massive debris pile of an old mansion, shaking its pursuers. Cade hit his wooden award against the debris. "Dang it! Lost him! Oh well....ooo! Look at the size of this house!"

Anya came huffing up to Cade, "Why...do you...always...go so...fast? Where are we?"

Cade scoffed, "No idea, but check this out! It's almost as big as our house!" He climbed the partially collapsed west wing to the exposed broken staircase in the center of the mansion. "I think It would make a nice upgrade as a clubhouse, wouldn't you agree?"

Anya looked around tentatively, "I don't know... We're pretty far out from city center. I don't know if even the patrols go out this way. This is dangerous, Cade. We should head back."

"Danger? I laugh at danger! HAHAHAHA!" Cade exaggerated a defiant laugh.

Maniacal mechanical cackles echoed around them. Anya froze in place, petrified by the sudden realization that they weren't alone. Cade slid off the debris pile quickly, rushing to Anya's side. He had his sword drawn, held with both hands.

From the shadows came more laughter, broken and screeching. A tall, hunched, digitigrade figure lumbered into view. Then another. And another.

Six dog-headed, bipedal marionettes with blazing red eyes encircled the teens. The mechanical whistling and whirring from their bodies sounded like horrific cackling laughter.

Cade's soul shuddered in his chest. There were so many and they looked strong despite their rusted and withered frames. He spotted a weak support beam barely holding the second floor up over two of the marionettes. He grabbed a stone and chucked it at the beam. "RUN!"

The stone broke into the beam and brought down the second floor. The flying dust gave Cade and Anya an opening to escape between the confounded machines. Cade held Anya's hand, practically dragging her with him through narrow alleyways.

The half dozen marionettes dropped to all fours and ran after the fleeing prey. Three jumped to the roofs of rowed building and three stayed on the ground.

The mechanical barking and cackling of the marionettes made them feel only a step behind. Twisting and turning through the city, the teens met a dead end.

"Come on!" Cade climbed the broken wall and turned to help Anya up. To his horror, Anya's bag was grabbed by one of the marionettes and was dragging her back down. "No!" He threw himself at the marionette, bringing his hard wood sword down on its half broken head.

The marionette staggered and let go of Anya. She was in tears fiercely climbing away from the mechanized monster. Cade kicked away from the marionette he attacked and jumped to the other side of the wall with Anya.

They didn't even have a second to catch their breath. The marionettes clawed over the wall and snapped at the puppets. Anya grabbed her teddy out of her bag as she ran and squeezed its little hand three times.

The marionettes were closing in. Gnashing, cackling maws open wide, hungry for D.I.Es. One marionette pounced at the puppets. Cade caught it out of the corner of his eye and shoved Anya away. Its claws caught his leg and he stumbled. The young puppet was easily pinned, but he managed to keep his sword between himself and the marionette jaws. "RUN, ANYA!"

Anya crawled under an old iron cart that kept the marionettes at bay. Clawed hands reached for her as she squeezed the teddy bear's hand over and over and over. She couldn't watch Cade struggle against the marionette. She buried her face against the bear, screaming.

The clouds overhead darkened rapidly. Blue charge ran along the sky and gathered at a single point before striking the ground. In an explosion of blue light, all six marionettes jittered and shook in place. Their circuits fried and their fluid lines split open, leaking thick red fluid down their bodies.

The cackling stops. The machines fall to the ground, completely deactivated and smoking. Cade shoves off the marionette that was on top of him. Anya looked up to see Caine standing stoically amongst the carnage, not a speck of dust on his coat.

Anya runs to Caine and embraces him. "Thank you! Thank you!" She cries, black tears streaking down her cheeks.

Caine hugs her back, holding her until she was ready to let go. He looks up to see Cade wiping red fluid off his training sword. "Are you alright?"

"We're fine. We had it handled." Cade said coldly, kicking a marionette's head.

"You're not supposed to be out this far." Caine said firmly. "You're not ready to-"

"I just-!" Cade tried to start.

"You deliberately disobeyed me, and what's worse, you put Anya in danger!" Blue static rippled down Caine's body, his eyes flashing dangerously. "We are going home." He held Anya's hand and grabbed Cade's arm before blinking to the manor.

Upon arrival, Cade jerked his arm away and he marched to the training ground set up for him in the courtyard. He didn't look back.

Caine put a comforting hand on Anya's trembling shoulder. He was about to escort he inside when Ragatha came flying out the front door. "Oh my god, Anya! Baby, are you okay?? Caine rushed off in a hurry when you activated your beacon. What happened?"

Ragatha looked to Caine for answers, but he was focused on the direction of the training grounds. "Please, excuse me." Caine walked away, leaving Anya with her mother.

Cade was swinging his sword wildly at a dummy. He shouted his frustration with every swing.

"You know, enemies are typically easier to defeat when you don't announce the fact that you're attacking."

Cade swung around, pointing his sword at his father's throat. Caine didn't flinch. Cade glared at his father, breathing heavily. "Here to yell at me some more?"

"No. Your leg is still bleeding."

Cade looked down. His pant leg was torn open and there was a nasty gash down the back of his calf. Black blood seeped out slowly. "It-...it doesn't hurt. I'm fine." He grumbled and turned away to swing at the dummy some more.

"Why were you out that far, Cade?"

Cade scoffed, "Oh, now you care about why. It doesn't matter."

"You have very little combat training. Anya has none." Caine kept his tone even, but there was an underlying aura of anger. "Being out that far was reckless and stupid."

Cade swung his sword so hard, he decapitated the dummy. "You think I don't know that!? We were just having fun! Going on an adventure! As mom would say, shit happens!"

Caine bristled. "Your mother is also exceptionally experienced in reckless behavior, but she also does everything in her power to keep those around her safe. You want to put yourself in harm's way, that's one thing, but to endanger Anya like that-"

"IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!! I WOULD NEVER INTENTIONALLY ENDANGER HER!!" Cad got in Caine's face, enraged. "I WOULD HAVE FOUGHT THOSE THINGS TO THE DEATH FOR HER!! They were ambushed, we ran, you saved the day. Congra-fuck you-lations. You're the hero. Is that what you wanted to hear? An ego stroke?"

Caine and Cade stared each other down. Both silent in their rage. Until Caine swept Cade off his feet in the blink of an eye. Cade dropped his sword and Caine held Cade down with the end of his cane. Blue static pulsed through the cane and into Cade's body, mildly stunning him.

Caine's voice struggled to hide his anger. "There's a lot about this world you don't understand. Training takes time. You want adventure? You want to be the hero? Lesson one: be patient. Ambition left untempered leads to self-destruction." Caine lifted his cane and walked away. For the first time in a long time, he needed a drink.

Cade sat up, glaring after his dad. As he got up, he noticed his leg didn't ache. He looked to see the gash was gone, his leg repaired seamlessly. His face relaxed some. Silently, he picked up his sword and practiced the readied stances his mother taught him.

[ciaossu-imagines]

Hi! I was wondering if I could ask for a Class of the Titans Pirate AU? Thank you!! :))

Of course you can get this, anon dear! Thank you so much for the request and I hope you'll enjoy the headcanons, late as they are!

Okay, so I had a lot of conflicting ideas for this one. There was so much temptation to take it into traditional pirate territory, adventures on the high sea, Pirates of the Caribbean and One Piece inspiration, peg legs, etc. And I did have a lot of ideas of what I could do with that one.

But hear me out, guys…SPACE PIRATES! I've been a fan of Firefly, of Treasure Planet, and things along those lines for so very, very long, and in the end I thought that was a more fitting and fun Pirate! AU, plus kind of a fun twist on it.

So, we're setting this in a place far into the future. Space travel, between multiple planets and even between different galaxies, is not only a reality but quite commonplace. The world we're stepping into is also so much more technologically advanced. Oh, and Cronus? In this AU, he's this huge power. An alien lifeform that seems to possess immortality, Cronus has established a dictatorship after a war in which he took over multiple planets. With an army on his side, still waging a campaign to extend his reign of power, his government is ruthless and brutal. He and his army rule with an iron fist, with the people subjugated but with little opportunity to do much more than survive, and with no power to rise up against him. Besides, any uprising against him (and there was one, a major one) was quashed and struck down hard.

That uprising that was quashed. A lot of the major players were either killed or they scattered, fled and hid out in the furthest reaches of space. Seven of them in particular, the main source of the uprising and the real face of the attempted revolution, good people who fought hard to end Cronus' dictatorship, who helped people wherever and in whatever ways they could while fighting him and recruiting, were given extremely public executions, broadcast to all the planets and all the galaxies. It was a clear message - 'there is no possibility of escape. There is no possibility of resistance. Submit or die.'

Cronus' only real regret from that? The crew's ship, the Argonaut, could never be tracked down and destroyed along with its crew.

And maybe it's good that it couldn't be. Because fourteen years later, Amalthea, who was the wife of Jason, Captain of the original crew of the Argonaut, sent her now teenaged son on a dangerous mission, to the deepest reaches of their planet, through nasty and treacherous territory, to the location of the Argonaut.

Jay, Jason and Amalthea's son, finds the Argonaut. It's not in great condition, barely functioning at first, but he finds it. And once he boards it, he tries powering it on. But it doesn't really work…not until he gets frustrated at his lack of success and, when slamming his hand against a wall, ends up cutting himself, deeply enough to make him bleed.

See, The Argonaut is a ship, yes, a mechnical and technological thing…but it's also a sentient being and, upon Jay's blood being spilled on it, it reawakened as it was programmed to do. At first, I had thought of the idea of a holographic video popping up, but after thinking some more on it, I developed the idea a bit more…it's more a video that plays inside of Jay's head. It's his father talking to him. The crew had known they weren't going to survive, that they were boxed in and would be captured…and each did their part before they were, preparing their families, hiding the Argonaut and doing these videos. Jay's father tells him everything, from fatherly, personal, and sentimental stuff down to the solid facts and the plan - recruit the children of the passed crew members. Each of them has a role to play. Complete the reawakening of the Argonaut and follow the plan; battle Cronus and his army, small at first. Gather your forces and find allies. Then bring the uprising again…there's a plan that, for some reason, Jason and his crew are sure will work. Not for them though but for their children. Cronus will fall; the uprising will conquer.

And so Jay follows the plan. Dedicates himself to honouring his father and the fallen members of the crew and to bringing peace back to the various planets. And I will tell you, as with the video that plays in Jay's head, as each new crew member comes on, as their blood (just the tiniest bit) helps rewaken the sentient being part of the Argonaut, they each get their own video, which nobody but them can see, playing in their head, with messages from their own parent who passed. And Jay himself, while unsure how well he could do as Captain, proves himself to be a natural leader and gains the trust of not only his crew, but the many allies they make along the way.

The first member that Jason recruits is Atlanta. He finds her on a planet, thick in forests and dangerous wildlife. She joins his crew readily - she loves nature, her planet, her father, stepmother, and step-siblings, but she's always yearned for adventure. And hearing her mother's will and words…how could she refuse? Atlanta follows in her mother's footsteps, becoming the crew's tracker and bounty hunter, a role she grows into with a great deal of ease and quickness.

The next companion to be gathered? Herry was left in the care of his grandmother, as both of his parents were part of the crew. He doesn't really even remember them, to be honest, and the memories he has of them are hazy. Herry is part of an alien race known for their giant, beefy bodies, superhuman strength and berserker rages…however, Herry honestly seems to be a gentle giant, for all accounts and purposes. It's only at his grandmother's urging that he follows Jay and Atlanta to the Argonaut, where he gets to really see and have a solid memory with his parents through their holographic video. He won't discuss everything they said but, through his tears, he willingly and happily joined the crew and the cause and, though he's still gentle overall, if his crew are in danger or if he must fight to fulfill the crew's destiny to overthrow Cronus and his forces, Herry can and will enter that berserker rage his race is known for and can slaughter entire battlefields of enemies single-handly.

The crew finds Theresa next, in a surprising place. Her father, who had taken residence on his wife's planet, as she was the planet's princess and future ruler and he her consort, abandoned that planet when his wife died. He blamed the crew harshly and not only moved to a planet and grew his own influence, but became high level in Cronus' army. Theresa is spoiled, far safer and wealthier and better off than 99% of the population on any planet Cronus had conquered. And it's not that she hates it, but her father is gone so much, she's raised by servants, and to be honest, she's rebellious and bored. While the crew taking her is technically a 'kidnapping', she honestly kind of helps them kidnap her, even if she doesn't really show it. She becomes the ship's navigator and one part of a tactician duo, due to her excellent sense of direction, knowledge of various mapping techniques and the layout of several galaxies, and knowledge of how Cronus' army and infrastructure works.

That second half of the tactician duo? It's found in Archie. Archie is a child prodigy, and he's one of the few, thanks to the way his brain works, to really remember much about his lost parent. His father, Achilles, had actually raised his son aboard the Argonaut. He had had little choice, honestly, what with Archie's mother dying in childbirth. He'd raised his son with a love of the history of the cosmos, cut his teeth on bed-time stories of tactics, war, and battle wisdom. Had encouraged a love of learning, of literature, of facts and knowledge. And when Archie was left abandoned on the doorsteps of a university on one of the more obscure planets, his love of learning served him well. He becomes the crew's main tactician, the man who not only knows most of the facts, but isn't too bad in a physical fight either, thanks to some bad childhood bullying that forced him to toughen up and learn to fight for himself.

Another genius the crew gains? Odie, son of Odysseus, the man responsible for the mechanical ship that houses the sentient being that is the Argonaut. He build it from scratch, knew it better than anyone else and his son seems to have inherited that trait. Odie joined the crew mostly due to his extreme interest in the Argonaut and, like his father before him, he seems to almost bond with the ship. He can fix anything to do with the ship, improve it, add to it as his brain is always coming up with ways to make the Argonaut better, to not only fortify it but make it more comfortable. He's a mechanical wizard…but even more so, he's the one to pilot the ship and honestly, he has a bond with the Argonaut itself that none of the others do and the ship would not sail as gracefully and faithfully as it does without him.

Not going to lie, unlike Theresa, where her kidnapping was really helped along by her, the last member of the crew was just plain out kidnapped. Neil is the prince of his father's planet, a spoiled brat who only thinks of himself and has the highest opinion of himself. The inhabitants of his planet are expected to worship him and exalt him and he's a dictator in his own right. None of the crew understand why it's so important that they find him and none of them really want him as part of their crew at first. Until they find out that Neil was, as all members of the royal family are, blessed with God's own luck and the ability to vaguely warp reality to favour them. He does it without even realizing he's doing it either, making him rather a genius at the technique. Though things are rocky with Neil at first, and it takes him the longest before he sees his father's video, once he does, things kind of change. He stays with the crew willingly for one, and though his kind of spoiled attitude never fully changes, the longer he serves on the crew and becomes a part of them, the more adventures they embark on and the more of the cosmos he sees, the more he starts to not only genuinely care about his crew-mates, but about all life in the universe. Not as much as he cares about himself, but he definitely starts to really hate Cronus for what he's done to people and the more he genuinely wants to help bring peace to people.

And the story is really just the adventures of the crew, various bits and bobs of them not only having amazing battle scenes but also helping people out as they go along, discovering the beauty in the vast expanses of space, but also the horrors that Cronus has truly brought about, and their efforts to gain allies and lead that uprising to the successful completion their parents could not.

[theneighborhoodwatch]

I been having so much fun thinking and looking up things with this new update, I have a big theory about the bugs and some though about some of the glitch that happens in the audios on some of the official content (maybe we have to form a phrase or hints of the next update, posible through Eddie, as wally asking for purple in the "just so" segment) but with way

Soo I know a ot of people say much about how Wally's message talk to us directly bc he's being sentient and trying to reach us (posible through the red book) and the QA can hear his callings through the phone, much of this is how Wally is trying to interact with the REAL world, with US the humans. (Also as the message progress he sounds more distorted and in distressed)

So that made me think about the bugs tapes and how different they can be compared with what we seen only the public knows, for instance they sound more clear, like your hearing a recorded video or passing conversation, but my point is that they sound so free and casual like just living in their own world,

I think (besides the point that they're maybe in a capsule world unaware of all this) I have two options:

1 this are the first time when wally start to being more self aware of his surrounding, friends and his world making him disassociate bc some of the audios sounds more fainted that the other and as they progress they were becoming more clear and loud

2 OR we're seeing through him, like asides of him just being there it looks he barely moves and speak zero times until someone else call him up (I think they don't notice much bc he's normally a calm fellow and just interact when spoke too) like he's snapping up to them again (I mean he could just being in his own head I been there before and now but something about us seen and hearing this, I don't think it was supposed to)

Either way I believe this moment all were from the same day (Barnaby and Eddie telling thing that happened in other tapes) I'm unsure if this are from the past or recent time but something is clear for sure: he's getting distant and quiet and something is coming (maybe he's getting more focused on seeing and start to get distracted from his reality)

At least Barnaby and Home start to notice.

On a side note I don't think neither wally or Home are evil or the villains from this story but I do think something sinister and dark is influencing on them big time (the black mold maybe)

If this has been sent to you before feel free to ignore I been having so many thoughts about this and just wanna see what you think

See ya!

i don't have much to say to this that you haven't already said yourself, so just imagine that i'm nodding along emphatically. as sweet as it is to see the neighbors freely interacting with each other, there's also this sort of. aimlessness? to it all. the reason behind their world being constructed in This Very Specific Way is no longer there, but the universe still functions as though it is, so you have these characters acting out the general structure of a typical episode, but there's no actual overarching plot or lesson (at least, none that we see) because who's gonna be there to see it anyway? but - if you were made for that kind of show, what else are you going to do? can you do anything else? is getting the show back, or at least an audience, really the answer here? questions that i think the neighbors will have to grapple with once more of them start to Notice Things.

as for what is actually going on in these videos, i think i lean more towards the first option. i don't see wally or home as particularly villainous, either - but desperation can drive well-meaning people to do some terrible things.