#what a whimsical name for a medication

[measureformeasure]

i'll be perfect once they up my lyrica

[marlynnofmany]

Names Chosen Carefully

I swung into the spaceship’s kitchen with plans to grab a snack before unpacking the bags from our latest supply run, but I paused. Coals was there showing Eggskin a screen of color swatches, and it didn’t look like a menu. Could have been something medical, since Eggskin handled both the feeding and the healing of the crew, though the conversation I’d walked in on said no.

“Vehicles are an option, but I don’t know what kind are popular there,” Coals said. He acknowledged me with a nod. “And an unfavorable skimmer model would be almost as bad as an activity that’s culturally iffy.”

Eggskin was nodding thoughtfully, tapping a claw against their lizardy chin. “The activities are probably easier to research. But I do think that either a generalized space theme or something referring to home would be the way to go.”

“Yeah, but which?” Coals asked with a sigh, staring at the handscreen. “Space might be too common, or trying too hard, and home stuff might not make sense to anyone there, including the kids.”

I must have looked like a confused dog, standing there with my head cocked. Coals took pity on me. “My cousin wants advice on what to name his clutch when it hatches,” he said, holding out the handscreen. Up close, I could see that each color swatch was scales. “This is their best guess about the likely colors.”

“Ohh,” I said. “Got it.”

Eggskin asked Coals, “Are they familiar with nearly-hatched eggs, and color distortion? Many new parents guess wrong.”

I reflected that Eggskin, whose full name was “Skin of the Egg that is Translucent and Ready to Hatch,” had probably thought about the concept pretty often. Their own scale color looked more like boogers than any egg I’d ever seen, but I’d never been privy to a Heatseeker hatching. I assume other colors would show through.

Coals nodded his brick-red snout. “They live near family. Plenty of chances to observe. And he’s been there for brainstorming names on the ol’ home planet, and his mate has too, but that’s not very helpful now.” He glanced up at me. “They just moved to a space station.”

“Are there not many Heatseekers there?” I asked.

“A few, but it’s a very intercultural place. That’s why they wanted my opinion, since I travel around so much. Thought I might have some valuable insights.”

I leaned against a counter, trying not to loom. “What have you got so far?”

Coals sighed deeply. “A lot of doubts. References to home could be great, but they might just be confusing to everyone. What kind of names would you expect to hear with these?” He showed me the screen again.

I was about to object that I was hardly an expert on Heatseeker names, then the palest one caught my eye and I laughed. “Humans would nickname that one Popcorn,” I said, pointing at the white-and-yellow image.

“Popcorn?” Coals looked at it. “What is—”

“It’s food,” I said. “A popular snack from Earth. I wouldn’t expect that to be anybody’s real name though; it’s much too whimsical and silly. Well. At least with my cultural background.”

Coals and Eggskin both looked at the colors without saying anything for a long moment. Then Coals turned the screen to me again. “Would humans of your background have food associations for the others too?”

“Well,” I said, wondering whether I was just hungry. “That one looks exactly like mint chip ice cream. Oh, and that one’s cookie & cream.” They really were; it was uncanny. “I didn’t know you guys had scale patterns with that many speckles.”

“You should see my cousin,” Coals said. “He looks like a starfield. His mate is a simple dark maroon, though. Between the two of them, the genetics are all over the place. What about these other three?”

I looked at the brown-with-red, the yellow-speckled-brown, and the deep purple. “Red velvet cake, dijon mustard, and plum. Or maybe grape. But that doesn’t make as good of a nickname. You aren’t actually going to suggest these, are you? Naming the kids after another planet’s food seems like everyone might expect them all to be familiar with that planet. Pretty sure a couple of those foods might actually be poisonous to you, too.” I flicked a glance at Eggskin, who was thankfully nodding in agreement.

“Naming a child after a toxic foreign food would do them no favors,” Eggskin said. “An adult might wear such a name proudly, but I would fully expect a youth to be pressured into eating their namesake at some point, especially if they lived somewhere it was readily found.”

I nodded too, looking to Coals.

“But,” Coals said. “It doesn’t have to be foreign food.”

I started to ask what he meant, then suddenly remembered a bit of cultural trivia. “It’s good luck to name spaceships after food, right? Does that go for people too?”

Eggskin chuckled while Coals stared intently at the colors. “It can,” Eggskin said. “It’s rather bold, though. An audacious claim that a set of parents can confer enough luck on all their offspring for them to always have food available. Very daring.” They looked at Coals with an amused expression, which Coals didn’t look up to see.

“That fits my cousin surprisingly well,” he said instead.

I smiled. “Are there Heatseeker foods that would fit these colors?”

“I can think of several.” Coals changed the screen to a text field and began typing. “This is perfect. Thank you so much.”

“Happy to help!” I said.

Eggskin suggested, “Be sure to remind them they should research any food they’re considering, and find out what associations their new neighbors are likely to have. Some things translate terribly.”

“No kidding!” I laughed, standing up and moving toward the snack cabinet. “I still remember the spaceships Worm Jerky and Raw Flesh.”

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[northernyogurt]

Oh my gosh! I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on Finn/Jake/Piers please!

Btw I did a quick look and it looks like there's a fic for that throuple ship on AO3, so other people seem to enjoy it too! I really wish there were a lot more content for them though. 😭

They're such a good ship!

WHEN I TELL YOU. I RUSHED TO READ THAT FIC. I GOT SO SO EXCITED I'VE BEEN STARVING FOR FOOD FOR JAKINNIERS FOR LIKE TWO YEARS AND IT'S FINALLY HAPPENED!!!!! i seriousluy feel like im going to have a meltdown im so excited i've written several things of my own on these three i just never really finish things or get them to a point where i feel good enough to publish them? i have tons of things hidden away but one day maybe they'll be finished one i was working on was some sort of fun and whimsical lawyer-esque au? where the BSAA was actually a law firm located in raccoon city and were in the middle of a long lawsuit on albert wesker/tricell for medical malpractice/unethical practices or something akin to that. and chris had taken a few people from his team on a vacation in LA to keep spirits up and have some fun, and there finn and piers (being pretty close in the firm, at that point) would get lost and meet jake, a (currently) LA 'resident' thug who knew the streets pretty well and helped them get around. i still like the concept and i've been thinking of returning but jojo brainworms are overtaking me so it's been rough to do anything resident evil related (but i may return for a short while just to get some jakinniers shit out cuz i miss them) actual rambling under the cut v

but like as for in actuality, aka the string of events ive actually procured; in of course an everyone-lives au, i imagine finn to be the one to get jake and piers to set their differences aside and bring the three of them together, in a sense. piers and finn weren't super close before the ambush in edonia, though piers still cared for finn marginally as he would any other soldier. it wasn't until they were both in recovery in a BSAA-owned lab for rehabilitating bioweapons that they actually became close with one another. they're both in there until about 2014, thanks to jake's blood being the key to manufacturing some kind of "cure", or at least something to satiate or cut off the effects of the c-virus. finn has a lot longer to go than piers - seeing as he was hit with a more crude, destructive version of the virus - but they're both stable, and that's what matters. they attend the 2014 rewards ceremony for their bravery in edonia. finn doesn't see jake there-- sherry says he didn't want to go, didn't want to make the trip, which is.. fair enough. he's still upset for a reason piers cannot understand. but in 2015, chris holds a christmas party, which is something he likes to do often. by now, piers and finn are in some sort of weird situationship that finn wants to put a name to, but piers won't budge, unwilling to admit his fear of commitment to something like a relationship. regardless they attend this party together and, lo and behold, that ginger fuck shows up. piers is greatly upset, wondering how the hell he'd be allowed when he literally shot the host of the party in 2012, but chris actually seems okay with it, so he can push aside his anger for now and let it go, just wanting to get this social event over with, aaand great finn is going to literally talk to him. amazing finn actually just wants to thank jake for what he's done, and jake is like, reasonably a bit awkward and confused, having had his cute little character arc where he's like not a bad person now, but somehow the conversation turns and they hit it off. hooray! that's how that happens. now within a few weeks finn is juggling two odd situationships at once and loves both of them but can't exactly just admit that because that would mean "choosing", or at least that's how he sees it this is getting a bit long so im going to try and speed-explain: jake pops into finn's place at some point to give him something, piers is there. cue awkwardness and tension. something snaps, piers goes off, is very upset to see jake is hanging around piers's boyfriend-not-boyfriend-technical-situationship-thingy, they talk things out after an almost-argument and discover they actually aren't too different. relationships between the three of them develop over a few months, but nothing official because nobody is really sure how to go about this, then on a semi-drunken night jake is like "what if we were just all together at once i hate monogamy" and?? they just slowly start calling each other their boyfriend. of course they don't come out to anyone for a while (but everyone has known lmao) happily ever after huzzah! that's such a quick explanation of something that in my mind is so intricate i don't really know how else to squash that down while still keeping key points. there's so much to it and i imagine it'd be a VERY slow burn that all of them get frustrated about at points (especially finn, being the most eager to actually jump into an official title of their weird relationship, but the other two being a lot more on the fence about it) you just have to trust me might go into this more and if you have any specific questions i would LOVE TO ANSWER. i love talking about them very much and all the different aus/ideas i have in my head

[meiliarotten]

Team Fortress 2 Kinktober Time Two: Electric Boogaloo

Day 6: After Party (Hate Sex)

🔞MINORS DNI🔞

Pairings: Medic x Fem!Reader

Summary: After Mann Co. is disbanded, you seek work among wealthy gala attendees, only to run into an all too familiar face.

Tags: Takes place after the mercs are fired/before Pauling finds them (comic timeline), riding, tension, teasing, rivals

Word Count: 4.3k

The Masterlist

The party was more immaculate than anything you had ever attended before, taking place in a massive venue adorned with expensive decor and buffet tables long enough to feed a small country. It reminded you of a ballroom straight out of a fairytale. Waiters wandered about in pristine uniforms, passing out hors d'oeuvres as if the buffet wasn’t enough. As for the guests, well, each one was more glamorous than the next, making it seem as if they were all trying to outperform each other, even as they made polite conversation among themselves.

In other words, you literally could not fathom anywhere you would fit in less.

You wore the nicest thing you owned, but even that seemed like rags next to the least opulent guests, at least in your opinion. You prayed that it wasn’t too obvious that you had forged your invitation to get into this place. The truth was, you were desperately in need of money ever since Mann Co. disbanded, and unfortunately murder was not considered a special skill on most job applications. In fact most employers seemed to consider it a felony. Who would’ve thought?

However, if there was one thing you learned in your years as a mercenary, it was this- the richest of society were often the most likely to want someone dead, and they most certainly had wealth to spare to hire someone to do their dirty work for them. Hence why you found yourself here, wearing a black knee length dress that you were almost certain you had only ever worn to funerals before, trying to figure out which of these pompous fools would be most likely to be in need of your particular brand of expertise.

As you scanned the crowd, searching for the most likely employers, your eyes were repeatedly drawn to the same person. You couldn’t say why- they didn’t exactly stand out, with their simple black suit and slacks- but something about them seemed familiar, his build, or perhaps the way he carried himself. It’s only when he turns around and you lock eyes that you finally put a name to the person. You’ve seen that face enough times to know it anywhere, especially since the sight usually preceded a scalpel being slashed across your throat.

The flicker of recognition in Medic’s eyes indicated that he had noticed you as well. Your initial panic began to fade slightly when you realized that causing a scene would likely get the two of you thrown out. God knows Medic most likely didn’t manage to get a valid invite to this party either. You would both need to act somewhat civil with each other, at least for now, lest you draw too much attention to yourselves. The wisest decision would be to stay as far away from each other as possible… which was why you were immensely frustrated when Medic proceeded to walk right up to you within moments of spotting you.

“What the hell are you doing here?” you whispered harshly once he was within earshot.

Medic actually looked taken aback by your hostility. “I assume I’m here for the same reason as you, fraulein. Hunting for higher pay, are we?”

More like hunting for any pay at all, but you weren’t about to admit that.

“You know, I could put in a good word for you,” Medic said. “I know how good you are at your job, given that I’ve been on the receiving end of your blades and bullets multiple times.” He laughed whimsically, as if he was recalling pleasant memories rather than recounting all the times you had brutally murdered on a daily basis. Respawn certainly was a blessing, one that you all took for granted.

“I don’t need your help, Medic,” you hissed. “Did you come over here just to taunt me?”

Medic sighed, as if he was talking to a petulant child. “Actually, I was hoping we could put the past behind us, but I’m guessing from your hostile attitude that this would be out of the question,” he said, now not even looking at you as he glanced over the sea of people. Well, if he wasn’t even going to look you in the eye then you weren’t going to humor him with a response. You walked off, deciding that trying to find some work would be a more effective use of your time than trading insults with Medic all night.

You planned to make the most of however many hours you spent here, and that meant getting comfortable with as many of these stuck up partygoers as you could, praying that at least one of them was homicidal enough to hire you. Medic went on his way as well, presumably doing the same. You tried your best not to let your eyes wander to him, but it was surprisingly difficult. Now that you actually recognized him he stuck out from the crowd. Shaking your head, you made your way to the opposite end of the ballroom, as far from him as you could get. You had employers to charm, and you weren’t about to let his presence alone get in the way of that.

—

You weren’t sure how you managed to find the small parlor that you eventually wandered into, but you were grateful for it. How long had you been at this damn party? Three hours? Four? You couldn’t even remember at this point. You collapsed onto a small couch with a sigh, placing your face in your hands. Whether or not you were even allowed in this room wasn’t important to you.

You had talked to guest after guest, but trying to gauge someone’s interest in putting a hit out on someone was surprisingly hard. As it turned out, most people don’t tend to flaunt their murderous intent. It wasn’t long before faces began to blur, conversations became repetitive, and you began to feel that if you couldn’t find a place to get away you would go mad. You just needed time away from the din of the crowd. The silence was a welcome respite.

“Not having much luck, fraulein?”

“God fucking damn it,” you muttered, not even bothering to lift your head to look at him. Of course Medic would just happen to wander into the same room as you.

He chuckled. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“Don’t you have some big shot employers to talk to?” you asked. “Or are you just here to boast?”

“Nein, there is nothing to boast about,” Medic admitted with surprising honesty. “Despite my attempts to convince them, these people are surprisingly uninterested in doctor assisted homicide.”

“So, we’re both shit out of luck then,” you said, sounding woefully unamused. Honestly, you just wanted to be left alone. The events of tonight were inevitably going to lead to you walking back to the crappy motel you were staying in with some stolen food from the buffet stuffed in your pockets. Of course, then you realized that your dress didn’t have pockets, and you sure as hell didn’t have a fancy purse you could use.

Medic laughed, seeming completely oblivious of your rapidly souring mood. “I suppose that is one way of putting it. I am happy to have found you, though.” You finally looked up at him, eyebrows raised in confusion. Medic sighed, leaning against the far wall. “Talking business is so tedious. I prefer company that is more on my level, so to speak.”

“And I’m on your level? ” you scoffed. “That isn’t exactly the compliment you think it is, doc.”

“There’s no need to be so confrontational, my dear. We aren’t on opposite teams anymore,” Medic said, putting his hands up as if to show that he meant no harm.

“We fought against each other for years. All that doesn’t exactly go away just because we got fired.”

“Hm, I suppose you're right. Besides, I do quite enjoy our little rivalry, whether it’s on or off the battlefield.” Medic smirked at you, and you despised the way that look made your knees go weak. You weren’t even sure when you had stood up from the couch.

Your fists were clenched at your sides as you glared at him. He was so calm despite having found no success with employment. He seemed so perfectly confident while you were silently fretting over how you were going to cover your next rent. And even with all those reasons to hate his guts, a part of you couldn’t help but notice how damn attractive he looked in a suit- no, more like how damn attractive he looked in general. It was that last part that pissed you off the most of all.

“It was hardly a rivalry,” you said, rolling your eyes. “You aren’t exactly much of a battle medic.”

“Oh no, not at all,” he admitted with a laugh. “But I can't help but recall you having quite a few run-ins with the blade of my Ubersaw.”

“And I can't help but recall more than a few instances where you were staring down the barrel of my gun,” you said, quick with a retort. “Funny how you never seemed to learn that your place is hiding behind your teammates, not charging headlong at me.”

You seemed to have struck a nerve. Medic’s smirk faltered slightly. “You would be wise to watch your mouth, dear.” He was close now. Incredibly close. When had he gotten so near? How had you not noticed? But you’d be damned if you backed down now. In fact, you took a step further towards him, the two of you now thoroughly in each other’s personal space.

“Oh? And what will you do to me? You don’t exactly have any weapons with you,” you said. “Besides, I’m just stating facts. You’re at your best when you’re behind your team's Heavy, practically using him as a human shield.

“I certainly hope you are not calling me a coward, fraulein.” Medic responded so calmly. It was uncharacteristic of him, which put you on edge, but your blood was already boiling too hot for you to keep your mouth shut.

“Maybe I am, unless you’re willing to prove me wrong.”

You didn’t expect him to do anything. You expected this to end just like every other confrontation you’ve ever had with him- although maybe with slightly less blood than usual. Honestly you thought he would simply saunter off, leaving you fuming in that parlor all by yourself.

But then he did prove you wrong. And he did so by pressing his lips to yours. Just like that, something snapped. Something that simmered beneath every insult you flung at each other came boiling to the surface, and you kissed him back. Medic pulled you flush against him, his arms wrapped around your waist. The action made you gasp, giving him access to your mouth. He gave a gentle, questioning flick of his tongue that you quickly reciprocated. Your hands ran down his sides then up again. You could feel the rise and fall of his chest every time you parted for breath.

Medic grew more forceful, almost sloppy, but it felt so good, fueled by years of pent up tension finally getting a taste of release. After a bombardment of lip bruising kisses and wandering hands you finally parted, panting heavily. Medic leaned in until you felt his breath tickle your ear.

“I could be inside you right now.” His voice was so low, a far cry from the shouts of victory or pain you heard from him on the battlefield. It was smooth and quiet enough to ensure no one would overhear, even though you were the only two in the room. “You want that, don’t you?”

You were undeniably flustered. Never would you have thought you would be so flushed over hearing your enemy say such filthy things. “I don’t think the other guests would appreciate that,” you finally managed to respond, miraculously without letting your voice shake even once.

“Then perhaps we should take our leave, fraulein.” That little pet name he had for you was usually an endless source of annoyance, but this was exceptionally different. For once it wasn’t spoken with hatred or spite. No, it was spoken with unfettered lust, and you found that you quite liked hearing it like that.

—

You didn’t expect gentleness from Medic. In fact, you didn’t even want gentleness, and you made that clear the moment the two of you stumbled past the door to his hotel room, a surprisingly nice hotel room at that. You couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy, especially since all you had to go back to was a dubious motel that smelled of cigarette smoke and dust. How the hell did he afford this while being unemployed? You decided it didn’t matter. There was no time to dwell on that.

You grabbed Medic roughly by the lapels of his suit jacket, pulling him into a kiss that was more teeth than tongue or lips. It was aggressive, almost animalistic in its intensity. You felt him groan into the kiss, shucking off his suit jacket the moment you released your grip on it. The moment it was off you got to work on the buttons of his undershirt. You had half a mind to simply tear it off of him, scattering the buttons to the far corners of the room. You just barely managed to restrain yourself from doing so.

When the shirt was finally unbuttoned you paused to run your hands up his torso, sliding over his chest and up to his shoulders. He was very muscular, something that you had never really noticed beneath his work uniform. It made sense. He had to carry around the Medigun, and it wasn’t exactly lightweight. You were briefly aware that all the supplies and weaponry Medic had to lug around with him on the battlefield probably weighed more than you did. That thought was confirmed a moment later, almost as if he had read your mind, when he leaned down and lifted you with ease, his arms hooking around your thighs for support. You wrapped your legs around him for some stability, but even so, you nearly lost your balance when his palm came down hard on your ass, a harsh smack being followed by your yelp of both pain and surprise.

“What the hell was that for?” you asked, not bothering to hide your annoyance. Your face was bright red at this point, which probably made your glare seem more cute than menacing.

“Is your threshold for pain really so low, liebchen?” Medic asked, grinning as he reached up to grab a fistful of your hair. You knew what was coming before he even began to pull. He was truly showing off his strength now, holding you with just one arm and the support of your legs around his waist. “Given all that we’ve been through, I would have thought such a little sting wouldn’t be a bother.”

His grip on your hair released after only a few moments and he made his way to the bed, still holding you. You knew Medic could have easily chosen to throw you roughly onto the mattress if he wanted to, but instead you found yourself being gently lowered onto the bed. A shiver ran down your spine as your bare back made contact with the cool sheets, and you realized that at some point he had undone the zipper at the back of your dress. This allowed him to remove it with ease once you were comfortable. You felt relieved to finally be out of the dress, no longer needing to wear what amounted to a cheap disguise meant to blend in with a bunch of rich assholes.

You reached back to unclip your bra, throwing it to the side with little ceremony. Medic busied himself with your underwear, taking the exact opposite approach. He removed them ever so slowly, inching over your thighs as if the garment was made of tissue paper and he was trying not to tear it. It was beginning to annoy you.

“Hey!” you said, getting Medic’s attention. You sat up, grabbing his hair and pulling him forward. The soft groan you got in response was very rewarding, but you couldn’t get distracted by that right now. You kicked off your underwear yourself and glared at the doctor. “You’re taking forever. Are we fucking or not?”

You tugged on his hair, hard, and he winced before quickly composing himself. “So bold, meine liebe. I like this side of you,” he said. You only let go of him when he began to unfasten his belt, and you tried your best not to stare or look impressed when you noticed the sizable tent in his slacks. You shifted back so that you were sitting in the center of the bed. It gave you a rather nice view of Medic when he finally removed the last of his clothes, but you barely got a chance to admire the sight before he was on top of you.

He paused there, seated between your legs, simply looking at you with an expression full of lust. You could feel how hard he was against your thigh, and a pang of need almost made you beg, but you caught yourself before you did. If he wanted you to beg, he’d have to work much harder for it. “What are you waiting for?” you asked, trying to sound as annoyed as possible, but the slight shake in your voice was evident.

“I’m just admiring the sight of you…” Medic began, leaning down to kiss your neck. “ Beneath me, right where you belong.” Those kisses turned into bites, making you gasp and arch against him. You heard his breath shudder as your body pressed against his.

That was when he finally thrusted into you . You were embarrassed by the moan that managed to tear its way from your throat, being caught off guard by the sudden motion and the jolt of pleasure that shot through your body like a live wire. It felt so amazing to finally be filled, to satisfy that empty ache between your legs that had been becoming more intense ever since you left the party. Still, you weren’t about to give Medic too big of an ego boost, at least, not until he truly earned it.

“Harder!” you gasped, dragging your nails over his back, leaving stinging, raised red lines in your wake. “Come on, don’t you dare be gentle with me now.”

Medic chuckled wickedly, barely reacting to your scratching. “Oh, I don’t plan on being gentle with you, liebe.” Suddenly, your arms were pinned to the bed, his hands wrapped firmly around your wrists. His grip was rough and likely to leave bruises, and he soon set a merciless pace.

You struggled to contain your sounds as he slammed into you, trying to roll your hips to meet his strokes, but it was as if he was purposefully trying to make that difficult for you. His rhythm changed every time you began to get used to it. You growled in annoyance, but that only got a sly grin from Medic, proving that he was indeed doing this on purpose. Still, you tried to grind against him, at least until he released your wrists only to hold your hips still, preventing you from bucking or squirming. Your clit ached, desperate for either his touch or your own, a sensation that would have you seeing stars within moments.

“Fuck, I’m close!” you moaned, writhing futilely in his grasp, hands gripping the bed sheets to keep from just giving in and touching yourself. You wanted to get him to do it, you wanted that small victory.

“Beg for it,” Medic whispered, pressing his lips to your ear. There it was. You knew it was coming, but if he thought it would be that easy, he was a fool.

“Fuck you,” you said, glaring defiantly at him while he simply chuckled, seeming to find your defiance more as a form of amusement than a true challenge to overcome.

“Oh, you are, liebchen. However, that’s not the answer I’m looking for.” Medic stopped moving completely and you wanted to whine, but resisted the urge. You never let him dominate you without a fight on the battlefield, and the bedroom was no exception. It seemed that whether the driving emotions were that of hate or lust, it was always going to be war between you.

With a scoff, you decided to finally take advantage of the fact that he was no longer pinning your arms. You latched onto his hair again, pulling hard, which caught him off guard. He was thrown off balance just long enough for you to switch your positions, now finding yourself seated atop him while he looked up at you. He seemed bewildered, as if he was trying to figure out what just happened, and you found it adorable.

“See what happens when you get overconfident?” you said before beginning to mercilessly ride him, not wasting any time. Medic gasped, giving you a look of what could almost be considered respect before sitting back and enjoying the ride. It was actually quite attractive to see you bouncing on his cock.

You weren’t as close as you were before. The pause in the action had caused you to lose sight of your climax, but now that you were in control, it was quickly beginning to build again. However, by far the most appealing thing about being on top was the view you had of Medic’s reactions. You saw how his gaze lingered on the steady bounce of your chest as you rode him, the way he bit his lip to stifle moans whenever you did something especially good with your hips. But the best part was how you could feel his body beneath you, the way he shuddered and tensed up in response to whatever you did to him.

Your hands were planted on his lower stomach to steady yourself, and you could feel the way the muscles began to tighten. It was a sure sign that he was getting close as well. Medic wasn’t quite as intimidating like this, and it only served to make you bolder.

“I wonder what your team would think if they could see you right now, letting me use you like this,” you taunted, grinding against him to emphasize your point.

“I could say the same about you, fraulein. How would your team react if they knew I was about to make you come on my cock?” Medic’s hands latched onto your hips with enough force to throw you off your rhythm. You gasped as he lifted you slightly upwards before slamming you back down. You almost screamed as he managed to brush against an especially sensitive spot. “Ja, that’s what I want to hear. Scream for me!”

With him essentially moving you up and down on his cock, you knew you didn’t stand a chance. You surrendered, allowing him to maneuver you. If anything, it was a welcome break for your thighs. Even so, you weren’t about to become completely passive. You continued to rake your nails down the front of his body, over those tense muscles that were beginning to tremble beneath your touch. You knew he was close to coming undone, and the thought filled you with a sense of pride, because you were doing this to him. Even though he was gripping your hips with enough force to bruise, it would still be you that would eventually make him come.

“You’re close aren’t you?” you asked between moans. Medic shuddered, stammering, as if he hadn’t expected the question, and the reaction made you laugh. “Oh, you definitely are. You’re so tense.” You ran your hands over his chest and down to his stomach before leaning in to whisper into his ear, delivering the finishing blow. “I want you to come for me. I want you to come inside me.”

“Gott, liebchen!” Medic moaned, bucking up into you even as he slammed your hips against his, filling the room with the lewd sounds of skin on skin. You leaned back, one of your hands sliding down your body until you could rub circles around your clit. You threw your head back, crying out as your orgasm washed over you. Medic followed almost immediately after, the feeling of you tightening around him finally driving him over the edge, letting out a low moan as he spilled into you with a few final, frantic thrusts.

When the initial euphoria subsided, you practically collapsed on top of him, completely unwilling to move. Your head came to rest on his chest and you could hear his pulse racing, along with the heavy rise and fall of his chest. Medic threw an arm over you, gently rubbing up and down your back. It wasn’t a gesture you expected, but it certainly wasn’t unwelcome either.

“God, I fucking hate you.” You said it out of pure habit at this point, but there was no real bite behind the words, not even a hint of malice. Medic actually seemed to take it as a compliment, reciprocating with a smirk.

“Likewise, liebchen.”

The irony of the situation was not lost on either of you, so casually declaring your hatred for one another while simultaneously cuddling up after a rough fucking. You weren’t sure which of you began laughing first, but soon you were both nearly in tears, the reality of how strange this scene was finally beginning to dawn upon you. But honestly, with all the other weird shit you had to deal with during your career as a mercenary, this might as well happen. Speaking of work…

“I hope you know that this doesn’t change anything,” you said, turning to look at Medic with a challenging smirk. “I’ll still fuck you up if we ever meet in battle again.”

You felt the vibrations of Medic’s laughter in his chest. “Of course.” He flashed a wide smile. It had just a touch of insanity to it. It was a look you had seen several times before, usually right before he plunged his weapon of choice between your ribs. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, fraulein.”

[pencilpat]

What’s your opinion on the new name reveals (Herbert Ludwig, Jeremy Willis, Flo Pauling)?

I like the names, for the most part!

RED Medic fits that name to me, which I see a lot of people finding weird, even though he would've been born at a time when that name was common. Herbert is cute! And it's a good reminder of how much of a dork he is. He's silly-and-whimsical-style evil & deserves a delightfully silly name. BLU Medic will always be Fritz to me, though, I bet you can guess why.

Willis was a choice! A lot of sporty people or action movie stars have it history-wise. Other than that, I've got no idea why they chose it. But it's a pretty common surname, so it was a safe and honestly kind of boring choice.

And lastly,

FLO PAULING IS DARLING! It's just the sweetest name ever but also one of the ultimate stereotypical 'secretary' names. It fits her perfectly, even if it goes against my own prior headcanons. I thought the fact that Engie was on a first-name basis with her was interesting, and it gave me a lot of food for thought. I love her forever til the day I die.

[nursewashing]

muse bio below the cut! please read my rules for content warnings associated with this blog.

name: anya nusome gender: cis female (she/her) sexuality: lesbian (closeted / undiscovered for most of her life) age: 28 hometown: moscow, russia nationality: russian height: 5'8" occupation: nurse, trained by pony express nursing courses disabilities & conditions: anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorder

personality: anya is a passive, soft-spoken woman with a passion for helping others, but painfully low self esteem. she has difficulty standing up for herself as well as speaking up for herself. she tends to have a fawn response to her trauma, being a people-pleaser and trying to keep the peace. when she isn't feeling threatened, she has a silly and whimsical side to her. beyond that, anya has a passion for the medical field. she's a capable nurse in spite of the troubling situations she's endured. she also has a creative side to her and enjoys drawing and doodling in her spare time, as well as playing board games, listening to music, and reading. she blows off steam by going for runs. she also loves fast food and reality television, though these are guilty pleasures she wouldn't easiy admit out loud.

backstory: anya was born in moscow. raised there only in her early childhood, her parents moved around a lot through russia and various parts of europe. her family eventually migrated to the united states, where anya would spend her ensuing pre-teen years and beyond adjusting to her new home.

when she was twelve, her parents divorced after a particularly tumultuous marriage. when given the choice between parents, anya chose to live with her mother as opposed to her alcoholic father who was prone to violent outbursts when drinking.

anya always had a passion for the medical field and wanted to pursue a career as a nurse and eventually a doctor.

after graduating high school, anya applied to medical school anyway. her application to medical school was rejected - eight times, even. the debt from applying to medical school alone was tremendous and left her desperate to pay back her debt. pony express offered company-exclusive nursing classes, and she took on a job with the company to afford more applications to medical school.

anya spent about several years working with pony express before the horrific incident aboard the tulpar. the last flight she ever took in long haul space freight would be the worst ever. what started as a relatively ordinary trip, save for a new intern joining the crew, ended up being a traumatizing ordeal. amidst the flight, the co-captain jimmy assaulted anya and verbally abused her.

when anya discovered she was pregnant, she told the ship's captain, curly. curly did not protect her from jimmy, much to anya's devastation. instead, anya told jimmy about the pregnancy. he stormed off, walked away.

moments later, the ship crashed.

with captain curly horrifically wounded, anya struggled but succeeded to keep him alive in his mangled state. anya endured this for several months, though gradually her unwanted pregnancy affected her even more, making it easier and easier to get nauseous while taking care of curly. all the while, anya considered taking her own life.

it wasn't until jimmy blew up at her one final time that it pushed her over the edge. the trauma and stress, coupled with a lack of support, was too much for anya to handle. using the medication jimmy obtained from a medical supply cabinet in the hall, anya locked herself in the medical room and made an attempt on her life.

the attempt did not succeed.

the memories that followed became a blur for her - swansea taking out revenge on jimmy, a repair of the cryostasis pods, a distress signal sent out into space. eventually, it was all over.

anya returned to earth.

following the horrific events of the tulpar, anya sought out mental health care, along with getting the abortion she'd desperately needed on the ship. eventually, she returned to the medical field, albeit in a less dangerous way: she found an elementary school that had been endorsed by pony express at one point or another, accepting her job credentials, and became nurse at that elementary school.

about a year or so after the events of that horrible tulpar incident, anya is finally accepted into nursing school.

every little day is a step towards recovery, but she has a long way to go.

[some-pers0n]

hello some person. can you please give me your opinion on any fictional character of your choice whose first name is six characters or less long and starts with a letter between G and M

LUDWIG!! HAH!! Anon I win I get to talk about my favourite character, Ludwig aka The Medic from Team Fortress the Second!

Hmm...what to say that I already haven't implied or outright said before? I really love him a lot. He's my favourite character probably.. ever, tbh. He's really fun to write. He's exceptionally silly and goofy. You can do a lot with him character-wise, between making him a whimsical goober or inflicting him with Angst. Etc and etc. He's really just a Cool Guy to me, which is something probably evident by me writing a longass fic about him

[nursewashing-a]

muse bio below the cut! please read my rules for content warnings associated with this blog.

name: anya nusome gender: cis female (she/her) sexuality: lesbian (closeted / undiscovered for most of her life) age: 28 hometown: moscow, russia nationality: russian height: 5'8" occupation: nurse, trained by pony express nursing courses disabilities & conditions: anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorder

personality: anya is a passive, soft-spoken woman with a passion for helping others, but painfully low self esteem. she has difficulty standing up for herself as well as speaking up for herself. she tends to have a fawn response to her trauma, being a people-pleaser and trying to keep the peace. when she isn't feeling threatened, she has a silly and whimsical side to her. beyond that, anya has a passion for the medical field. she's a capable nurse in spite of the troubling situations she's endured. she also has a creative side to her and enjoys drawing and doodling in her spare time, as well as playing board games, listening to music, and reading. she blows off steam by going for runs. she also loves fast food and reality television, though these are guilty pleasures she wouldn't easiy admit out loud.

backstory: anya was born in moscow. raised there only in her early childhood, her parents moved around a lot through russia and various parts of europe. her family eventually migrated to the united states, where anya would spend her ensuing pre-teen years and beyond adjusting to her new home.

when she was twelve, her parents divorced after a particularly tumultuous marriage. when given the choice between parents, anya chose to live with her mother as opposed to her alcoholic father who was prone to violent outbursts when drinking.

anya always had a passion for the medical field and wanted to pursue a career as a nurse and eventually a doctor.

after graduating high school, anya applied to medical school anyway. her application to medical school was rejected - eight times, even. the debt from applying to medical school alone was tremendous and left her desperate to pay back her debt. pony express offered company-exclusive nursing classes, and she took on a job with the company to afford more applications to medical school.

anya spent about several years working with pony express before the horrific incident aboard the tulpar. the last flight she ever took in long haul space freight would be the worst ever. what started as a relatively ordinary trip, save for a new intern joining the crew, ended up being a traumatizing ordeal. amidst the flight, the co-captain jimmy assaulted anya and verbally abused her.

when anya discovered she was pregnant, she told the ship's captain, curly. curly did not protect her from jimmy, much to anya's devastation. instead, anya told jimmy about the pregnancy. he stormed off, walked away.

moments later, the ship crashed.

with captain curly horrifically wounded, anya struggled but succeeded to keep him alive in his mangled state. anya endured this for several months, though gradually her unwanted pregnancy affected her even more, making it easier and easier to get nauseous while taking care of curly. all the while, anya considered taking her own life.

it wasn't until jimmy blew up at her one final time that it pushed her over the edge. the trauma and stress, coupled with a lack of support, was too much for anya to handle. using the medication jimmy obtained from a medical supply cabinet in the hall, anya locked herself in the medical room and made an attempt on her life.

the attempt did not succeed.

the memories that followed became a blur for her - swansea taking out revenge on jimmy, a repair of the cryostasis pods, a distress signal sent out into space. eventually, it was all over.

anya returned to earth.

following the horrific events of the tulpar, anya sought out mental health care, along with getting the abortion she'd desperately needed on the ship. eventually, she returned to the medical field, albeit in a less dangerous way: she found an elementary school that had been endorsed by pony express at one point or another, accepting her job credentials, and became nurse at that elementary school.

about a year or so after the events of that horrible tulpar incident, anya is finally accepted into nursing school.

every little day is a step towards recovery, but she has a long way to go.

[glassedplanets]

hi. zosan tattoo!au. a) no sensible chuckle here I'm fucking cackling b) love the paired sword through the pec tattoos they've got!!! love that detail!! c) does sanji have one of those butcher "heres where the different cuts come from off a pig / cow" guide tattoos or was that too cliche and d) how inked is the rest of the crew or were the brainworms contained to these two

this is a full ensemble cast AU baybee!! everyone's in it!!!!! the art is biased towards zosan because i myself am biased :^) but to give a very brief rundown: luffy's the owner of thousand sunny tattoo & piercing and the IRS would have his head on a pike if nami didn't have her shit together

everything luffy does is completely off the cuff, vibrantly colorful, extremely dynamic, zero guarantee that you'll get what you ask for bc he decides what he wants to do on a whim. his booking list goes like, almost two years out.

zoro's style is predominantly traditional japanese, will sometimes do reproductions of woodblock prints; very seldom goes back to traditional mediums but does so occasionally (this is a backstory to be unlocked)

nami is their piercer! she also has a backstory to be unlocked! she handles their licensing, inspections, and finances. they would all be dead without her.

usopp has a background in illustration (for children's books!) and loves to do both fun, imaginative, whimsical art and technical illustrations of plants

sanji does american traditional with unusual motifs (often food), still takes shifts at the baratie every so often, zeff has his paintings hung up, sanji finds this soooo embarrassing (endearing)

chopper is slowly working his way up to apprenticeship, was going to go into medical illustration And Then He Met Luffy

robin does extremely detailed and highly technical (body) horror

franky does sickass biomechanical type stuff

this is a direct quote from giffy because it's so fucking funny i can't bring myself to summarize it: "brook was a big name in the 80's and then luffy met him at like. a denny's parking lot and was like hey!! want a job. the denny's is run by moria, it's the closest place to undeath i can imagine"

jinbei does really bold, intricate geometric blackwork, guested a couple of times, and then luffy sniped him for permanents from big mom's for-profit college scam

i'll be real with you i am SO BAD at coming up with tattoos for characters but i think sanji would have something to do with different cuts of meat in some way tbh. the minute i posted this blue hit me with "okay please tell me sanji has a mermaid tattoo somewhere" and my jaw dropped bc i didn't think of that myself but it's absolutely correct, he does (either on the side of his ribs or on a thigh, idk). also glad you brought up the Tiddy Tattoos because now i get to make another bullet point explanation!

luffy has given everyone on the crew a tattoo over their heart (or like, as close as possible if they already had something there)

zoro was first, so his is the simplest: an anchor, for steadiness

sanji's is a reflection of where luffy met him: the way the baratie feels like for luffy via synesthesia, lots of colors and waves and love, very abstract yet vivid

zoro and sanji exchanged those right about when they both realized they're in it for the long haul re: luffy and originally it was just an acknowledgment of what each of them means to luffy

the italicized oh moment came later. everyone else continues to find this immeasurably funny.

(robin's is two hands: one reaching out for help, the other reaching out to offer it)

(usopp's is the shape of his kabuto with a bright burst of vivid green in the middle)

(chopper's is a caduceus staff with the wings bursting outwards in a spray of color, the edges fading out to cherry blossoms)

[the-fort-official]

THE CITIZENS:

PRIME APPLES: great and powerful leader of the fort. He may not be fair, or mature, or kind, or just... But honestly who cares he is funny sometimes.

Robo-Prime: he is back from the grasp of the average arcade owner in whatever fucked up sub-multiverse the text doctors live in. And by average I mean only, apparently. Anyways, he is basically prime but with more offense and less defense. Yes, the robot can take less hits than the human. Ironic, I know

Robo apples: head of engineering, and avid hater of fazbear entertainment. His past with them is spotty at best. Also, he doesn't like pizza. Which is weird. Probably trauma...

Control Apples: head of science and with the ability to express himself as well as a cardboard cutout. He does feel emotions, he just cannot show them. At all. Something about one of those therapy beds that was a O.O.P. (Object Of Power). He also likes burning things. Like, more than most Versions.

The tank (formerly known as Fallout apples): bright green power armor, yet blends in better than some people with stealth boys. Want to try to silence a fat man? He's your guy. Also for drugs. He makes all the drugs. ex-soldier of three wars. One for Alaska. One for Vegas. One for Boston. All three for his survival. And maybe fun on that last one.

Felix (fur-merly known as Fursona apples):, Engineer, former leader of the Regrettables (both the faction and the band). He got his time in the limelight. Now he is a actual character! And with the free trauma too. Also he made a lil ring to propose with so... don't tell Will.

Looper: robotic* mercenary for hire. Hope you got the gold! Also there are hundreds of him running around because of time loop shenanigans. Some of them even canonically fuck. Do with that information what you probably won't. (*He isn't a robot, technically. It's a techno-organic virus. He still has all the bits, just robotic. Minus nose, unless it's a snapshot of him with a snout. )

Fog killer: Also known as the apple themed streamer, the apple themed mayor, and the guy with a bigger arcade than @the-arcade-doctor, he is a totally normal and sane botanist trust me bro. Ignore the vines slowly leeching all your blood that's natural. (Now available to talk to on the @evil-group-that-hates-the-fort blog :3. )

Fog survivor: He is an engineer. He solves practical problems. Also works as a medic. He used to be scared of his own shadow. Now nothing phases him. Except getting stabbed because that still hurts.

Clone 007: traumatized asshole with no sense of friendly fire. He will kill anything in his way, no matter if they are helping him or not. Also he has extreme trauma, abandoned issues, and mood swings. The last one isn't related to his past, it's related to his very DNA.

Cashew: A young creature in an old automaton. He is basically a nutcracker from lethal company with some damages. And shorter. Still taller than the average dude, but small for a nutcracker.

Zweifel: What happens when you put a teen so far in the closet he tricked himself into thinking he isnt gay, into a endless colorful hell of wacky whimsical adventures? A hatred of the circus and a fear of vr.

The Angel Of hypocrisy, Nicholai: A homophobic and transphobic douchebag who should eat shit and die. Depending on which version you meet, the name makes more or less sense. Because post time skip, he gets a trans-mask boyfriend who he loves with all his heart. Even ignoring the fact his boyfriend is a serial killer. (If I reference El Carnicero, this is who I'm referring to)

Pixel: Kleptomaniac heister with more kills from just using the environment to his advantage than with his actual weapons.

Stuffie (Formerly known as Monster Apples.): see @plushiemonstervoid I ain't repeating myself.

Satchel: living puppet made from old junk like torn towels and potato sacks. He is tall, lanky, and overall intimidating. He is also a complete pushover who literally can only attack with yarn. Normal yarn. Not exactly lethal.

Demons-Bane: a demon that kills demons. Simple as that.

Warface Apples: currently turned into an anthropomorphic raven for fuckin with... I don't remember, one of @ignisuada 's characters. Generic military dude #171. Nothing special.

Warframe apples: Sneaky, but like stealth in the Deadpool game. He has lore, I just forgot it.

Metal gear apples: god im not even going to bother trying to tie this fucker in with all the bullshit lore this game has. He is a super-soldier. He has a flamethrower. That is all thats important at this point in his non-existent lore.

More to come. Check for edits. Lore is ever-changing after all.

[xtruss]

This Doctor Pioneered Counting Calories A Century Ago, And We’re Still Dealing With The Consequences

When Lulu Hunt Peters brought Americans a New Method For Weighing Their Dinner Options, She Launched a Century of Diet Fads That Left Us Hungry For a Better Way to Keep Our Bodies Strong and Healthy

— By Michelle Stacey

Illustration By Zoë van Dijk

In 1909, more than a decade before the 19th Amendment would grant her the right to vote, Lulu Hunt Peters had already achieved a rare status for a woman of her time. She earned a doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, when fewer than 5 percent of American medical students were female, and she was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital; she led its pathology lab for a time and later served as chair of the public health committee for the California Federation of Women’s Clubs in Los Angeles. The role, wrote the Santa Cruz Evening News, came with “more power than the entire city health office.” She lectured frequently about public health and child nutrition.

Over the next decade, though, what Peters came to regard as her greatest triumph was more personal than professional. As she entered her 40s, Peters used stringent and unrelenting discipline to slim what she described as her “too, too solid” body by dropping 70 pounds. That was what she really wanted to tell people about, with a fervency that approached the messianic. She began tailoring her lectures toward the holy grail she had discovered, a tool that she saw as the key to her weight loss: something called the calorie.

Familiar territory even to schoolchildren today, the calorie was, more than a century ago, a niche concept just beginning to emerge from the laboratory and into public view. Peters was about to supercharge that evolution, in the process turning the meaning and use of the calorie on its head and spurring its transformation into one of the most enduring and significant health concepts of the modern day. The calorie gave the public its first penetrating view inside the foods they ate, providing an elementary understanding of nutrition. But it would also go on to torment millions, enrich corporations, inspire generations of advertising campaigns, provoke widespread guilt and pride, and even, some argue today, lead Americans, fat gram by carb gram, calorie by calorie, into epidemic levels of obesity, by instructing the masses to focus on calories rather than on nutrients and steering them toward highly processed carbohydrates.

Left: The cover of Lulu Hunt Peters' book Diet and Health. Right: Having lost 70 pounds, Peters wanted to help others reduce.“I will save you; yea, even as I have saved myself and many, many others,” she wrote. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters ended up distilling her passion for calorie counting into a slim handbook, which was published in 1918 and went on to become the first diet best seller in history. Titled Diet and Health With Key to the Calories, Peters’ book did not stint on humor and playfulness. She engaged her 10-year-old nephew (“the little rascal”) to contribute whimsical stick-figure illustrations, and she made up satirical names like Mrs. Ima Gobbler and Mrs. Tiny Weyaton for hapless members of what she in later works would call the “Friendly Fat Fraternity” (epithets and terminology that would not go over benignly today). But throughout, she paid constant obeisance to the invisible, ineffable calorie. “You should know and also use the word calorie as frequently, or more frequently, than you use the words foot, yard, quart, gallon and so forth,” she wrote. “Hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350 calories of pie.”

The idea had a novelty and simplicity that sparked a movement. By 1922, Diet and Health reached the best-seller list and remained there for four years, nestled among works by Mark Twain and Emily Post. And just like that, a century of calorie-counting began—for better or, as it’s become increasingly clear, for worse.

When Peters Started Proselytizing For The Calorie In The Mid-1910s, the concept was so new to the general public that she had to tell her readers how to pronounce the word. (Kal’-o-ri, she explained, adding coyly that yes, calories are kosher.) But researchers had been studying the calorie for decades, for reasons that could not have been more different from Peters’. The calorie, based on the Latin root “calor,” meaning heat, was first identified and used by the French chemist and physicist Nicolas Clément, who described it in the 1820s as a measure of heat that could be converted into energy. Specifically, it was defined as the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Centigrade. Clément was not concerned with food or body weight, but with how to measure the steam energy needed to operate engines. In the decades that followed, though, other European scientists extended the idea to the human body, using the logic that the body is also a machine that burns fuel (food in place of coal) to create energy. By the late 1800s, German physiologists were measuring the energy values of foods using Clément’s methods, and using a “respiration calorimeter”—an enclosed chamber that measures an animal’s oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as heat given off—to track how that energy was actually processed in the body.

Beginning in 1869, and again in the 1880s, a New England chemist named Wilbur O. Atwater went to Germany to study the emerging science of nutrition. He returned with an idea that would revolutionize how Americans view food. The calorie, he believed, could help improve dietary health at a time when malnutrition, not obesity, was the greater problem. And as a fitting addition to the ongoing Industrial Revolution, which was showing how science could transform daily life, the calorie could also make American workers ever more productive—and at a low cost.

Chemist Wilbur O. Atwater built the first American respiration calorimeter, a copper-lined box that estimated a person’s calorie expenditure by measuring the heat they produced while living inside the device for as many as 12 days at a time. Right: GL Archive/Alamy; Left: Volgi Archive/Alamy

The “father of American nutrition science,” as Atwater became known, wrote fervently in the 1890s about improving “the intellectual and moral condition and progress of men and women” by establishing a standardized formula for deriving calories from various foods, calling them “physiological fuel values.” This would allow Americans to choose their foods by the numbers—rather than by guesswork or emotion—and thereby get the biggest nutritional bang for their food buck. “In our actual practice of eating we are apt to be influenced too much by taste,” he wrote. The solution was to “regulate appetite by reason,” aided by his lists of calories. His work has proved so durable that nutritional labels on every grocery-store item today hark back to it. Calories are still based on the heat they generate, though scientists no longer subject food to a calorimeter, because their nutritional contents can be calculated by the “Atwater system,” which assigns a calorie value to each gram of protein, fat and carbohydrate found in foods.

In 1894, Atwater’s nutritional guide became the first published by the United States Department of Agriculture. Hammering the economic point, it was filled with price calculations for various foods factored with the calories they provided. A section titled “Cheap vs. Dear Food” compared the “calories of energy” available from, say, 25 cents’ worth of oysters with 25 cents’ worth of wheat flour (news flash: the flour was less “dear”). This little-known economic aspect of the calorie likely reached its apex in 1920, when former Michigan Governor Chase Osborn proposed that international trade should use the calorie rather than precious metals as a universal currency: The value of an item, he proposed, would be based on the calories required to produce it. For example, the cost of a wool coat would depend on the calories needed to raise the sheep, shear the wool, sew the garment, transport it to market and so on. Unwieldy to say the least.

The Progressive ideals of the age, which fixated on science, rationality and quantification, were pervasive, and the nascent food-marketing industry saw a possible bonanza. As early as 1915, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company seized upon the calorie. “Pure Beer Is Next to Milk as Energy Builder,” Schlitz proclaimed in a newspaper ad. “A glass of milk yields 184 calories; a similar glass of pure beer, 137 … And Doesn’t Make You Bilious.” An ad for Presto Quick-Flour compared a pound of prime beef with a pound of its flour—1,000 calories versus 1,600 calories—and their respective prices, 25 cents versus 6 cents. “Presto is thus proven four times as good value as beef—just ponder on that!”

The excitement was also filtering into academia. When Peters was earning her medical degree, she likely would have studied Atwater’s writings and his calorie guides as a tool in determining children’s nutritional needs, one of her areas of expertise. (Atwater died in 1907, while she was still in medical school.) But her novel insight was to look at the calorie the other way around, by hypothesizing that it might be used not only to guide healthy weight gain but weight loss as well. “Peters was part of a movement of food reformers in this time period who were turning toward making food more rational,” says Helen Zoe Veit, a food historian at Michigan State University and the author of Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early 20th Century. “The idea was to eat, not because of tradition or god forbid for pleasure, but according to science and numbers, and to the new knowledge about nutrition.”

Having struggled with what she felt was her own excess weight, Peters made her body her first research subject, and she interpreted her 70-pound loss as a resounding mandate.

Peters Was A Savvy Promoter, but she was also lucky. The decade in which she launched her calorie crusade was uniquely suited to her skills as a communicator—and to her message. A tsunami of social transformations had been building from the turn of the century, including a shifting cultural preference from the curvy Gibson Girl of the 1890s to a whittled-down, boyish silhouette that would become the 1920s flapper. Through the second half of the 19th century a certain plumpness, especially in women, had been seen as charming, healthy and feminine. It also served as a signal of wealth and abundance. As the 20th century began, however, excess weight came to be associated with the lower classes and the poor, while slenderness became counterintuitively a sign of affluence and status.

To explain the shift, many historians point to the ideas of the American economist and social scientist Thorstein Veblen, presented in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. The new upper-middle class that arose in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, he posited, displayed not only “conspicuous consumption” but also “conspicuous waste.” And what said “waste” better than being food-secure enough to turn away food? A starving person would never diet, but a debutante could if it meant slipping into a form-fitting ball gown.

In addition to her Diet and Health book, Peters penned a daily newspaper column with the same title, often responding to readers’ letters by sharing her own weight-loss struggles. Newspapers.com

That shift is illustrated in a study of dieting among women at Smith College, published in the Journal of Women’s History in 1995, which documented how body weight was seen between the 1890s and 1920s. In the earlier years, students wrote home about the wonderful feasts they enjoyed at school, and even about their goals to gain weight. A student weighing 135 pounds wrote to her mother in February 1892: “It is my ambition to weigh 150 pounds.” Educators and social pontificators had fretted that academic life would take a toll on young women’s health and, importantly, their feminine appeal and future reproductive capacity. Packing on a few pounds, rather than wasting away, was seen as proof of robustness.

By the early 1920s the script had flipped. Dieting culture became so pervasive that a letter to the editor published in the Smith College Weekly in 1924 was titled “To Diet or Not to Die Yet?” Written by three Smith students, the letter warned against the obsession with weight loss: “If preventive measures against strenuous dieting are not taken soon, Smith College will become notorious, not for the sylph-like forms but for the haggard faces and dull, listless eyes of her students.”

Fashion followed a similar trajectory. Nineteenth-century designs had exaggerated female-specific roundness, first with hoop skirts and later with bustles, although the generous bottom halves were balanced out by a nipped-in waist, courtesy of corsets. But by the late Victorian era, doctors were railing against the garment, and what was coined the corset controversy arose. Almost a century before the so-called bra-burning movement in the late 1960s, early feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward wrote, in 1873, “Burn up the corsets! … Make a bonfire of the cruel steel that has lorded it over the contents of the abdomen and thorax so many thoughtless years, and heave a sigh of relief; for your ‘emancipation,’ I assure you, has from this moment begun.”

Fashion finally began to loosen its hold on the corset in the first decade of the 20th century, only to usher in the hobble skirt—a straight, narrow silhouette that replaced the nipped-in waist with a hem so tapered that the wearer’s legs could barely move. Fashion designer Paul Poiret, the hobble skirt’s inventor, wrote of this era in his 1931 autobiography, “It was in the name of Liberty that I proclaimed the fall of the corset,” while adding that though he “freed” the bust, “I shackled the legs.”

After World War I ended, Peters (front row, center with glasses) traveled to Serbia with fellow women doctors and dentists on a Red Cross humanitarian mission to deliver food and treat disease. Tango Images/Alamy

The irony was that while women were giving up the torments of corsets and hobbles, they substituted a form of internal torture to control their bodies: what became known as “reducing.” To that end, they were aided by another innovation: the bathroom scale, which appeared on the American market in 1913. Until then, people had their weight measured only at doctors’ offices, or at public “penny-slot” scales found in movie theaters and department-store restrooms. When medical advances like sanitation systems, vaccination and pasteurization presented the promise of better hygiene and longer life spans, people began to feel that their health was in their own hands. A personal scale, like the calorie, offered would-be reducers a magic number, a way to quantify their success, or failure, and a sense of control over the process of reducing—or, as Peters came to call it, “Petersizing.”

Into This Newly Weight-Conscious Landscape Stepped Peters. She began her book by being daringly honest about her frustrations with her weight, even as many other details of her life remained in shadow. We know that Peters was born to Thomas and Alice Hunt in 1873 and reared in the small town of Milford, Maine. She attended Eastern Maine State Normal School and then moved to California, where she married Louis H. Peters in 1899. Several years later, she began her medical training.

Louis Peters plays nary a role in the history books, and he rarely appears in Lulu’s writings. What did he make of her growing fame—and of her hard-won smaller silhouette? Was part of her impetus to lose weight a desire to please her husband? On the contrary: In her book, Peters wrote that once you start reducing, you will have to combat “your husband, who tells you that he does not like thin women. I almost hate my husband when I think how long he kept me under that delusion. Now, of course, I know all about his jealous disposition.” She also mentions that she was near her heaviest when the two married, so presumably her plumpness was not a deal-breaker.

Veit, the food historian, cautions against drawing conclusions about Peters’ marriage. “She does make sure to establish that she is married, because that would be a sign of status,” Veit says. “For a single, middle-aged woman—what was then called an ‘old maid’—to write a book like this would have been a mark against her. So she makes clear at the outset, ‘I have been successful on the marriage market.’” Other writers of weight-loss narratives in the 1920s, who were enjoying their first boom thanks to both Peters and the new flapper ideal, were also explicit about slenderness being “part of maintaining the chemistry in your marriage,” Veit adds. “At that time, attractiveness was being more and more linked to a certain kind of figure.”

In the early 1900s, fashion trends evolved from tight-fitting and often uncomfortable corsets that exaggerated women’s curves to looser flapper dresses that created narrow, almost boyish silhouettes. Left: Smithsonian Libraries, American History Trade Literature Collection; Right: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

In a presage of a confessional media environment still far in the future, Peters’ struggles with weight were part of her public persona—and, as with Oprah Winfrey and Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch, key to her business pitch. Of her pudgy childhood and relentless weight gain, she wrote, “I never will tell you how much I have weighed, I am so thoroughly ashamed of it,” only to add “but my normal weight is 150 pounds, and at one time there was 70 pounds more of me than there is now.” The use of the word “ashamed” to describe her 220 pounds was no accident. Peters believed that shame was a strong motivator, a notion that comes up repeatedly in her works. (She later wrote a newspaper column titled “A Disgrace to Be Fat.”)

Today we would call this language fat-shaming and recoil at the words, says Chin Jou, an interdisciplinary food historian at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food With Government Help. And yet, while we may not use such blunt language, Jou says, Peters’ “underlying fatphobia is still very much a part of dominant American ideas about what constitutes a healthy and aesthetically pleasing body.” As for the word “fat,” she continues, today’s self-described “fat acceptance” activists and advocates are trying to reclaim it by untangling it from ideas about morality and self-control.

For Peters and others in her time, though, the supposed immorality of plumpness was intimately bound to her message. She compared keeping up dieting to keeping up “other things in life that make it worth living—being neat, being kind, being tender; reading, studying, loving.” Veit says, “Being fit was seen as the visible expression of moral issues—having to do with self-control, being smart, ambitious, efficient. All of these virtues from the era were tied up with not eating too much.” Moreover, Veit goes on, “She felt that she was speaking with authority: ‘I’ve done it so you can, too.’ And that gave her license to be really outwardly, explicitly bigoted against fat people. Today, it’s become socially unacceptable to say that fatness results from personal failings, but there remains a tremendous amount of moralization of thinness and fatness that’s part of mainstream culture.”

Peters, ever the intuitive marketer, also linked what she saw as the inherent morality of slenderness to another high-profile virtue: patriotism. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal government promoted cutting back on consumption with the catchphrase “Food Will Win the War.” Colorful cookbooks and posters extolled flourless “victory meals” and “sowing the seeds of victory” by growing your own vegetables (“Every Garden a Munition Plant!”). One leaflet explained the value of self-sacrifice more explicitly. “Sugar Means Ships: The sugar used in sweet drinks must be brought to America in ships. … These ships must now be used to carry soldiers to the front. Drink less sweetened beverages. We are at war. Every Spoonful—Every Sip—Means less for a Fighter.”

The U.S. Food Administration urged Americans to cut back on sugar, wheat, fats and meat during World War I. © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved. Gift of John T. Spaulding/Bridgeman Images

Peters put her own spin on the calories-patriotism equation. Barely four paragraphs into Diet and Health, she wrote, “In wartime it is a crime to hoard food. … Now fat individuals have always been considered a joke, but you are a joke no longer. Instead of being looked upon with friendly tolerance and amusement, you are now viewed with distrust, suspicion and even aversion! How dare you hoard fat when our nation needs it? You don’t dare to any longer.”

Peters advised rounding up one’s overweight friends and forming a Watch Your Weight Anti-Kaiser Class. The class should invest in a good accurate scale, she explained, and meet once a week to weigh themselves—an idea (minus the kaiser element) that found new life in the early 1960s when Nidetch launched the neighborhood weight-loss clubs that would become Weight Watchers. To her credit, Peters put her own boots on the ground in Europe after the armistice. In 1919, she joined a Red Cross medical delegation to the Balkans and stayed there for almost two years, earning decorations from the Serbian and Albanian governments for her child welfare and public health work amid the devastated postwar civilian population. Peters later wrote about “medical calls on foot in the scorching sun over unkind cobblestones, long-distance calls on unkinder mules, long hours in nerve-racking clinics [and] ferocious man-eating mosquitoes.”

She returned home in 1921 to find her book going into multiple editions, and on April 25, 1922, she debuted a daily “Diet and Health” column in the Los Angeles Times, which propelled the book to the best-seller lists. The column would ultimately be syndicated to newspapers nationwide and continue until her untimely death, from pneumonia, in 1930.

From the start, Peters’ column put her talents as a sprightly and engaging writer on display. She addressed the reader as a friend whose struggles she understood. She was also shrewd, in a surprisingly modern way, about the power of the come-on—and the cliffhanger. Titled “What’s Your Weight?,” that first column walked readers through the various ills, such as diabetes, that could be attributed to excess weight, before ending with: “Do you want to reduce? Foolish question number 13,579. Why, you want to reduce more than you want anything on the face of the globe or the feet of the gods! We’re going to show you how. Tomorrow’s the day. And it’s oh, so simple!”

The simplicity was the draw, in the same way that modern-day diets promise “easy” weight loss. What also likely kept readers coming, though, was Peters’ frankness, her willingness to get into the trenches with other “fat friends.” One week into her column’s run, she wrote an entry titled “My Most Embarrassing Moment.” In it, she described an incident when she was about 50 pounds overweight, and she stepped into an elevator. “No one got out, and I got in,” she wrote. “The operator shut the door and pushed the lever of the car. No response. Back and forth he pushed. … Car did not quiver.” A “gracious gentleman” got out; the car didn’t budge. Another gentleman followed, to no avail. “Blushing, but game, I said with a wan smile that I would get out. The car shot up”—but not fast enough for her to miss the “imbecilic laughter” of those inside. It was “embarrassing,” she admitted, but also “invaluable. … I reduced.”

The resulting “victory meals” left more supplies available to feed both members of the military and starving civilians in Europe. Tango Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Peters urged her readers to “send in your most embarrassing moment!” in the style of a modern-day master of social media soliciting likes and comments. And it worked: Eventually she was receiving thousands of letters, which she often used as material in her columns. To “Mary,” who wrote to Peters saying how much she was encouraged by her personal story of weight loss, she replied at confessional length. “It’s a continuous fight, Mary! … I find that if I get started on candy nuts, I’m just like a drunkard with his dram. … It was only last week that I had my last gorge. I had had a good dinner, but I had a longing for those pernicious candied nuts. I bought a pound, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t eat the most of them myself. … When I averaged my calories for that day, they mounted to nearly 4,000, almost enough to keep me going for three days!”

Peters Was A Product Of Her Times, with flapper-style bobbed hair, fringed headbands and plucked eyebrows, but she was also a harbinger of the future. Many modern marketing ploys echo Peters’ methods—for instance, the fixation on 100-calorie portions. Peters organized her “key to the calories” by units of 100 calories: For that number, you could have one and two-thirds ounces of chicken, three ounces of lean fish or one average-size apple. Today, a vast array of snack items, from pretzels to mini-protein bars, are offered in 100-calorie packages. And Peters’ instructions are familiar to any contemporary dieter: “You may be hungry at first, but you will soon become accustomed to the change,” she wrote. Elsewhere, a warning: “Don’t ‘taste’! You will find the second taste much harder to resist than the first.”

Generations of Americans have adopted Peters’ idea to count calories, encouraged by a public health infrastructure that instructs us to “eat less and move more.” Unfortunately, the fruits of this advice have been dismal. The vast majority of calorie-restricting diets have been shown to fail in the long run and in fact often result in a weight regain beyond the starting weight. Numerous studies over recent decades have shown that taking in calories and burning them (that is, eating and exercising) are not separate processes but are instead intimately related in a complex dance: Cutting calories triggers a cascade of hormonal reactions that increase hunger and fatigue while slowing metabolism, making it more difficult to lose weight. One research analysis in the journal Public Health Nutrition describes attempts to achieve and maintain a calorie deficit as “practically and biologically implausible.” New weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic appear to interrupt that cascade, by manipulating hormones in the gut and the brain to decrease appetite.

Peters’ focus on units of 100 calories still influences today’s food industry. Snacks of all stripes strive to project a healthful aura by touting their calorie counts and designing serving sizes that hit that magic number. Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty

Meanwhile, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 42 percent of American adults are obese, compared with 30 percent just 20 years ago. (In 1962, it was 13.4 percent.) As these numbers rise, along with rates of Type 2 diabetes, the edifice that Peters—and Atwater, in his own way—constructed around the calorie has begun to crumble. Increasing amounts of research suggest that the mathematical equations they promoted are drastic over-simplifications. Consider Peters’ calculations, outlined in her book: “Cutting out 1,000 calories per day would equal a reduction of approximately 8 pounds per month, or 96 pounds per year.” Under this logic, one could continue to shrink away to nothing by simply continuing to cut out 1,000 calories per day, but it doesn’t work that way. Peters herself discovered the limits of her body’s ability to shed pounds. She longed to break through her own plateau and dip down closer to 150 pounds, but despite a draconian regimen limiting her to about 1,200 calories per day plus regular exercise, she never succeeded.

The error in the “calories in-calories out” equation may boil down to this: Human bodies are not coal-burning machines, and food is not coal. Rather, the body and food are both vastly more complex, and they interact in complicated ways that have evolved in humans over eons. Researchers are finding that body weight and virtually everything that influences it—hunger, satiety, metabolism, fat storage—are affected by a broad range of factors that were a mystery 100 years ago. These include hormones, such as insulin, which increases appetite and promotes fat storage; ghrelin, the “hunger hormone”; and leptin and peptide YY, which are called “satiety hormones.” We are also still learning about the microbiome—the unique population of bacteria in an individual’s digestive tract—and how specific bacteria can powerfully affect weight loss or gain, as well as mechanisms like the parasympathetic nervous system, which can affect energy expenditure (the “calories out” part of the equation).

Numerous factors inherent in foods affect how many calories are actually retained in the body, and whether those calories are stored as fat or, for instance, burned for energy or used to build tissue and muscle. Highly processed carbohydrates break down almost instantly in the body, prompting insulin release and fat storage; protein breaks down slowly and requires more energy to do so, essentially “using up” some of its calories just in digestion. Some foods, including certain types of nuts, have considerably fewer calories when measured in the body than they have in lab tests. And food when raw yields fewer calories in digestion than the same food cooked. These anomalies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Ozempic and similar drugs, first prescribed to regulate diabetes, have reshaped the debate around losing weight through will-power alone. George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images

No surprise, then, that a 2013 book titled Why Calories Count faces off against another from 2021 titled Why Calories Don’t Count, and that nutritional conferences have become hotbeds of argument and contention. Some experts on the anti-calorie-counting side believe that, beyond being a disappointment for generations of dieters, calorie-reduction regimens and their promoters bear some responsibility for the obesity epidemic. Jason Fung, a nephrologist and expert in obesity and Type 2 diabetes, writes in his book The Obesity Code that calorie reduction is a “cruel hoax.” By prioritizing calories over other considerations, such as macronutrient makeup (proportions of carbs, fats and protein) and the effects of industrial processing, the “just cut calories” theory fostered the idea, he writes, that “100 calories of cola is just as likely as 100 calories of broccoli to make you fat.” Making calories the kingpin also helped lead to the low-fat-diet movement, which Fung and other experts blame for ushering in our current age of obesity. The medical establishment decades ago prescribed reducing fat intake in favor of moderate protein and plentiful complex carbs. In practice, that advice seemed to give many people license to load up on simple, processed carbs in place of satiating fats. That in turn leads to more insulin release, in order to move sugar out of the bloodstream and into storage—which leads to more hunger, more snacking and bigger fat stores on the body.

There are signs that the “calories aren’t everything” message may be seeping into the public consciousness, but many of Peters’ talking points about obesity and weight loss still linger: for one, the obsession with quantification. While fewer people may be counting calories, Veit says, “Whether it’s our weight, our BMI, clothes size, life expectancy, cholesterol levels, there are all these other numbers we associate with our bodies.” Not to mention replacing counting calories with counting carb grams, as some are now doing. And while the overt fat-shaming of Peters’ era is now more frowned upon, striving for slenderness seems to retain a moral dimension. In some ways, says Jou, “Feminine diet culture today can be even more taxing on women. Not only do participants of diet culture manage their food intake, but they also tend to undertake considerable exercise regimes to achieve a ‘toned’ look. The women following Peters’ diet program were just trying to be thin.”

Today’s strivers may talk about eating “clean” and improving their health, but the ideal baseline is still to be lean, and those who are heavy frequently continue to be quietly judged and found lacking in simple willpower. Will new drugs like Ozempic, which demonstrate the biological underpinnings of obesity, begin to lift that blame? Possibly. But for many people, there appears to be an inherent logic to the idea of simply buckling down and cutting back.

Decades later, Peters’ belief in willpower over want still resonates. “Your stomach must be disciplined,” she wrote in 1918.

What could be simpler?

[claire-starsword]

Shining Force Pre Release Coverage Part 2

"Claire didn't you just say you didn't have time to look at this now" didn't I also say recently I have no self control? Exactly. Also there's not much new so I might as well just get it out of the way.

Part 1 here

This time we'll be looking at recently scanned volumes of another magazine, Mega Drive Fan. Scans are here and here. Also despite the obvious enthusiasm I sure am busy lately so I won't be pointing out everything, I'm here more for translations as you can see the pictures yourself.

November 1991

okay I lied I need to start with the most important pictures

Meow

They owe me this so bad.

Also it has its tail up like in the final unused version, I don't know what's the deal with that footage I showed at the end of the previous post.

We get a better scan of Max's beta portrait. He has no Egress, which I think I have already pointed out in the previous post, I don't know it was a big post okay. He has a short sword with a weird icon, and two iconless items (the placeholders seem to be showing the item's index): the Hex Whip from Shining in the Darkness, and, uh,

"Ring of Infidelity".

Care to explain, Max???

According to my searching this isn't any carry over from SiTD, but I haven't played that in japanese yet so, grain of salt here. I was gonna say, why is a likely joke item so early in the game, and then I remembered the bunny girl in SFII so yeah, this is regular SF dev behavior.

[Edit: I'm reviewing this now and I might have misread the ring's name, it seems like the うわき (infidelity) is directly applied as an adjective so Infidel/Cheater/Fickle Ring would be better translations, which matches the japanese name for the Hex Whip, which is something like Fickle/Whimsical/Moody Whip, but with a different word that has no "cheating on your partner" connotations as far as I know. So maaaybe it's just implying the ring is cursed and does effects of its own, but by all my searching うわき is still far, far more associated with these cheating connotations at least nowadays, so either the word's usage changed a lot in the past decades or it's still a cheeky joke name]

Also, in the previous post I was clearly too taken by Mae's smile to do my job and didn't talk about the items there, so let's talk about them, or rather it, now. Max and Mae in those screenshots have the inventory full of item index 9, "Old Medical Herb". Perhaps there was some sort of expiring mechanic for the herbs. Max also has the same Short Sword and Mae has a Bronze Lance with a sword icon.

In the final version, the indexes 7, 8, and 9 became the Legs of Haste, Turbo Pepper, and Bread of Life respectively.

The item shop has a different sign. Also it seems to be just an item shop, while in final Guardiana the item and weapon shops are combined, with two sellers.

The other magazine showed yet another item shop and sign, either these are actually different towns, or different builds, which actually they sure are given the next picture.

I have been long looking for you... I have heard of the situation. Please, you must let me join you.

While both magazine issues are from the same month, here we have Arthur portrait for this character instead of Varios, and more than that, he is joining the team, there's even another screenshot in the magazine with the "has joined the force" message. Given that this is Arthur's map sprite, and Mae has been described since the start as having a dead father, I feel this is the intended version. Perhaps Varios' portrait was done first and used as placeholder?

Also I need to correct something from the previous post. This isn't a generic NPC sprite, it's just Arthur's knight sprite. The generic centaur NPC sprites are... Arthur's paladin sprite. Like, the exact same sprite. I never looked too close so I assumed there had to be some small difference, but no, they can reuse whatever sprites they want.

Arthur is not given a profile in any of these magazines so it does feel he started as a very generic recruit. Very funny considering he's now the specialest most magical centaur in the block.

Character profiles this month don't have much so I won't translate them in full. Max is referred to as capable of using magic. Lowe is again referred to as a dwarf even though the magazine points out how similar he is to Milo, and wonders if he's an ancestor of him. No mention of Mae's personality, Gort mentioned as an old servant of hers again. Hans' bio states many elves who live in forests choose bows as their weapon because they have excellent vision. This a regular fantasy thing but I don't remember seeing it in Shining content before.

There's one battle screenshot where Max has less HP and is named Hans so I feel his battle sprite wasn't done at this point. Also I didn't bring attention to it in the previous post but a lot of these battle scenes have misnamed enemies as well, it seems this skeleton was a placeholder for a lot.

December 1991

Again Max has his final portrait at this point. He has 99MP and Blaze and Heal 4, Heal having a placeholder icon. He carries the Sword of Darkness, which has a different icon, the Power Ring, and the Forbidden Box, a well documented debug item.

Nothing new in character profiles, Guntz is again referred to as a beastman, Tao is again referred to as a forest elf unlike the others. I will again bring up that the term is used for Nigel in Landstalker, and Tao and Princess Lara there have basically the same art. Does this mean something? Likely no.

Also something I failed to notice in the previous post: at this point, Tao's shoulder gems are miscolored in her portrait. Her art is already done so I assume it's a small mistake.

Enemy descriptions are mostly the same, and again the Mimic shows up.

Again there's a section dedicated to Yogurt, which is mostly the same. It specifies he eats bugs besides berries, and says he "understand human speech, but can't (won't) talk". In the JP version he does say only a single sentence, "I don't get it", so perhaps this was dropped, or he is learning.

It is also said that he's kinda popular with the force members, especially the girls, but again no one could make him a pet. We then get doodles of his secret events, and yes different doodles than last time.

January 1992

This issue gives a good look into the beta menu icons. I won't show them all here, but the icon for putting characters on the active team shows a centaur which, really gets what the game's about i guess.

There's a screenshot with Earnest's portrait but the name is actually Vankar, perhaps his portrait wasn't done yet. Or these guys changed names during production.

On the screens showing off battle graphics, Hans has Diane's palette. That is to say, the exact same palette but pink hair.

Also not to get distracted but I took a quick look at the editor and yes, despite being one of the first characters, the archer sprites are index 9 in the data, preceded by Gong and Khris, and more curiously, Guntz and Domingo, who are at index 3 and 5 respectively.

February 1992

This one was already scanned in Sega Retro and is actually how I started looking into these things. The new scans are likely better quality though, they're really good.

March 1992

The game's released, but unlike the other magazine, early build material still slipped into this one.

"Am I being of service to you? Since I'm fighting to the ends of my MP..."

Tao had this goofy, less immersive line at HQ (remember to compare it to the final JP one, the english version is its own beast). Curiously, the GBA version changed her first line back to a question. Note also that she still has the wrong portrait here.

Veeeery small detail but there's a screenshot of the Rune Knight at the first battle talking only to goblins as opposed to goblins and dwarves. Coupled with all the screenshots we see from this battle it's safe to say the dwarves were a late addition.

Finally, minister Ward had his own portrait.

[privilege-rpg]

ISOBEL ST. JAMES

☆ FULL NAME: Isobel "Izzy" Kate St. James ☆ GENDER: Ciswoman ☆ PRONOUNS: She/Her ☆ AGE: 32 (January 31st, 1992) ☆ BIRTH ORDER: Third ☆ TYPE: Full sibling; twin ☆ HOMETOWN: Los Angeles, California ☆ JOB: Drama Professor at PSU; part-time children's guitar and voice instructor; minor role voice actor ☆ SCHOOL: PSU Alumni ☆ SEXUALITY: Lesbian ☆ FACECLAIM: Anna Kendrick

ABOUT ISOBEL

It's unclear which cloth Isobel St. James was cut from. She was never going to be a dutiful housewife like her mother, nor did she necessarily plan to follow in her father's footsteps. Izzy was just Izzy. As a child, Izzy was hyperactive and outgoing, if not impulsive and indecisive. A later in life diagnosis of ADHD would explain a lot of this away, though a younger Izzy did find it difficult to process her big emotions. Often, this would result in less than impressed teachers removing her from their classrooms for "causing a distraction", or her parents becoming irritated with her when everybody was trying to wind down in the evenings. Their frustrations led to frustration for Izzy, too, who sought solace in notebook after notebook, color coded and annotated after scribbling down her feelings.

Easily sidetracked, however, what should've been more like journal entries became whimsical tales and rhyming lyrics, until she realized the latter was exactly what they were—lyrics. Thus began a lifelong enjoyment of writing songs she would never actually share with the world, because for all she was outgoing, Izzy was never the type to literally go looking for attention, not when it always so easily found her anyway. Upon realizing she was a mini lyrical genius, Izzy asked her parents for a guitar and lessons, both of which they were more than happy to provide. The learning part not moving quickly enough for her liking—one lesson a week? Lame—she taught herself what she could on the side, and soon Izzy was putting music to her lyrics. This was how she really discovered her singing voice, and how for such a little body, she had a huge set of lungs.

In an effort to redirect their daughter's abundance of energy into something else productive, her parents signed her up for acting classes. No, maybe Izzy didn't necessarily want to act in movies or TV shows or anything, but she certainly enjoyed the drama of it all. In fact, were she not so uncoordinated and quick to fall over things that weren't there, her parents would've loved a triple threat. Singing and acting were plenty enough, though, and when Izzy's ADHD diagnosis did finally come during her teens, she mellowed out enough with the help of a psychiatrist and medication that she was able to focus on the two without that overwhelming urge to impulsively embark on discovering new talents. Izzy enjoyed playing the guitar and singing covers of songs for her friends and family, then for the local preschool for a little voluntary work in the summer between high school and college, but her originals were just for her, and remain so to this day.

Speaking of college, with music already down pat as far as she was concerned, Izzy decided to study drama. Again, she wasn't necessarily trying to be an actor or anything, but she was good at it and she enjoyed it, and she knew she wanted to go to college, so she figured why not? She didn't necessarily need the money, but for something to do alongside her classes, she decided to offer guitar and voice lessons to children, something she still does now. While her past voluntary work and current side gig have given her plenty of experience with children, and she is actually really good with them, she simply cannot imagine anything worse than having any herself—Izzy is thankful she is a lesbian, and has no chance of an accidental pregnancy. She'd be very happy being the fun aunt to her siblings' children, though; that would enough for her.

Following her college graduation, Izzy became a little lost. She wasn't entirely sure what to do career-wise; she didn't want to act, and she didn't want to sing professionally—hogging the karaoke mic was just fine for her. For a little while, she got a job helping out at a drama program, where she delivered sessions to teens and young adults only slightly younger than herself. With her father's name attached to her, people understandably hung onto her every word, and Izzy found that she actually really enjoyed teaching an older age group than those she taught guitar and voice to. With that in mind, she set out to gain an official teaching qualification, and as of two years ago, has been working at PSU as a Professor of Drama, where her easygoing teaching style helps her to build a good rapport with her students. Sure, most of them tower over her, but she's good at gaining their respect, so it isn't a problem.

It was a student during her first year of teaching that put the idea of voice acting in her head. "Did you know, when you do that voice, you kind of sound like a cartoon mouse?" It wasn't meant with offense, nor did Izzy take it as such. In fact, she ran with it, and figured that while she had no interest in showing her face on screen, using her voice was a different matter. So, for the last year, alongside teaching at PSU and delivering guitar and voice lessons to younglings, Izzy has been dabbling in a bit of voice acting. So far, she hasn't been in anything big, just a few kids cartoons and a one-line bit part in a Pixar movie, but she wouldn't mind venturing into something more "main character". For now, though, she's perfectly content with the pace things are going, and is very much enjoying a more low-key life in the arts than the St. James name could technically afford her.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

The St. James family is well regarded among Hollywood circles for their undeniable talent and incredible work ethic. The St. James men have been acting in movies since the time of silent pictures and eventually the talkies. Marlon St. James, current great-grandfather of the St. James kids in game, was a Hollywood heartthrob actor and won several Oscars for his roles. Lance St. James has been known in the superhero universe for years in his role as Gambit. Recently, he took on a part as Walt Disney in a movie musical version of his life, showing the world that he could be fearsome in his Louisiana accent and throwing playing cards, but also sing the pants off of any Pasek and Paul harmony. His relationship with his wife, Genevieve, has been rocky since his fame skyrocketed and the rumor mill states that they're on the outs. Genevieve keeps popping out kids and adopting them in hopes of keeping Lance.

[lunastarhawk]

Her Name, a Riptide

Part 11 of Julian post-route Tides of Memories (on AO3)

Who needs canon when you can have... *gestures vaguely* whatever this is becoming.

Summary

Haunted by the devastation wrought by the Red Plague, and shunned by the medical community over her unconventional experiments, Julian's former apprentice nonetheless carries the key to the final piece of the puzzle to Julian's missing memories of Altheia. And as he coaxes it out of her, it threatens to tear Julian's world apart.

*~*~*~*

Excerpt

“Can we uhh… can we sit somewhere, hmm?  Please?”  Julian dared to step to the side a little, holding one hand towards the waiting room door.  “I saw you have a cosy waiting room here, and we can sit and catch up and… I’ll explain everything.”

Selina remained utterly expressionless, save for a tightening around her eyes, one spilled tear streaking down her cheek.

“Oh, no.”  She hissed.  “No, no.  I’ll not fall for that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”  Julian was completely baffled.  “Fall for what?  I just want to talk.”

“Yes, yes, I know.  You love to talk.”  Her smile was humourless, bitter.  “I had a friend, once.  She was your partner.  She loved you very much.  You loved her, too.”  The smile, bitter though it was, dropped, along with her voice.  “She died.”

Julian’s breath caught, and it carried a tremulous whine when he exhaled.

“I know.  Please let me explain.”

But how could he even begin to explain, really?

“The Doctor Devorak I know wouldn’t have loved again,” she said.  “You loved her too much.  You were hers. That’s how I know you’re not him.”  She gave a twisted, whimsical smile.  “That, and your neck is straight.”  She took a step back.  “Please leave.”

“You don’t understand.”  Julian pressed his lips together, scrunched his eyes tight shut.  There was only one way he could make her listen.  He opened his eyes and fixed them on hers as he blurted out, “Altheia’s my partner now. Again."

Selina spluttered a laugh.  Theo gasped.

“Miss Theia?  But she-”

“She died,” Selina said, through gritted teeth.  She stepped up to Julian, toe to toe.  He resisted recoiling as she craned up to look at him through steely blue eyes.  His chin was almost on his chest as he looked down at her.  “Do you know how she died?”

“I… I do, yes.”  Julian spoke very carefully.  

“Do you know where she died?”

Julian exhaled a choked sob, and whispered, “No.”

He didn’t want to know.  Not yet, not like this.  But it didn’t matter what he wanted.

“In my arms.  At the Lazaret.  I put her body into the furnace.  As you told me.”

Julian’s head whirled, as that wave that crashed over him threatened to drag him out to sea.  He shook his head, over and over.

“I didn’t know…”

Selina barked a laugh.  “Ah, there, now I know for certain.  You know, you almost had me convinced.”

“What? ”

Julian could barely stand upright, barely see, barely think.  His only remotely rational thought was an inability to comprehend how Selina somehow didn’t believe that he was who he said he was.

“Doctor Devorak was there,” she said, a chill in her voice.  “He watched her collapse, outside the clinic. She never regained consciousness. I held her, on the ground.  He took her vitals.  He pronounced her dead.  She wasn’t dead yet, mind.  But she would be soon, he said.  He scribbled out the death certificate.  Saving another doctor the job, he said.  You know, they came pre-printed then.  With numbers.  We didn’t ask names anymore.  So he didn’t write her name.  Her number was 2-03-13.”  The sound that came from the back of her throat was something like a sob caught within a laugh.  “Take her to the Lazaret , he said.  And while you’re there, offer your help.   And then he left.  Like he never even knew her.”

Julian took a step back.  His chest constricted painfully and breaths would scarcely come, his lungs burning as if the air were fire.  His vision blackened around the edges.  He leaned his weight on one hand on the wall.  

“No,” he whispered.  “I… I wouldn’t… I couldn’t… please believe me…”

It was ridiculous, he knew, because she’d been there, and she remembered, which was more than he could say.  But his heart broke as surely as if Altheia were there on the floor now, taking her last breath.

“He went back to the palace,” Selina went on coolly.  “He called for me later.  I was his brightest apprentice, he said.”  She laughed suddenly.  “Which was true, in as much as all his others were dead.”

Julian’s legs could hardly take his weight.  “I… remember you…”

“Do you?  Yes, I suppose you would.  He would.  But he never spoke of her again.  Not once.  It wasn’t from loss of love, I knew that.  I know that.  It was shock, I was sure of that.”

“It wasn’t…”

His voice was barely a whisper, he couldn’t catch his breath for speech.

“So you see, you can’t fool me.  You need to leave, now.”

*~*~*~*

The beautiful banner is image is by ladywarlock03.

[for-the-sake-of-color]

For Crisis Company + Nihlus (is he officially Crisis Company? or is it Crisis Company and oh god their weird little sith that the captain has on a thin -looking leash?): Snapdragon , dandelion, marigold

LOL! Thanks so much for the ask!

Yes, Nihlus is officially Crisis Company, he holds the rank of Specialist (akin to a corporal). djghadgj They're collectively known among the GAR as 'that squad with the crazy sith' and it's rumored his antics are the cause of their squads name, which annoys his Captain to no end. "We are Urban Crisis Response!" Jet shouts to the no one who is listening.

All of Crisis Company though? this is gonna get LONG, HA!

Under the cut for convenience

SnapDragon: What is your OC's most used phrase?

Captain Jet: probably something along the line of *Deep Sigh* or "No sir, I have no idea what you're talking about, my squad would never!"

Margo: "If it works..." said in all sorts of situations. Her life is already so goddamned weird this may was well happen

Cynic: "Or blow it up" said hopefully by the heavy weapons specialist. Cmon guys, let's do something to get the heart pumping. "No," is usually Jet's reply. "This house is a fucking nightmare" Cynic sulks

Nihlus: well once he joins Crisis Company his most used phrase probably becomes WWJD or "What Would Jet Do" because the answer is definately not 'start killing until you get what you want' unfortunately for him (and fortunately for everyone around him)

Torch: "Next target," said to his spotter, Lake. You may think, given his generally attitude, it would be something closer to "my bad," for some sort of shenanigan, but he's actually an excellent sharpshooter, a fact which cannot be overlooked, even given his otherwise whimsical nature

Lake: "now do a backflip" he says from his perch with Torch, often acting as overwatch as their squad moves forwards. It is said anytime one of their squad starts bragging about a shot they made that he knows he could do better. So far Nihlus and Margo have been the only ones to be allowed continued bragging rights cause they actually can do a backflip

Heron: "It's not that bad" Listen, he's a medic. and sometimes... all you can do for a fallen soldier is a comforting lie. And luckily sometimes its just a trooper who wont stop bitching about their broken toe. Get over it, Herons missing his damn leg.

Sprig: as an E.O.D specialist he has a tattoo of the motto, "either I'm right, or suddenly it's not my problem anymore," on his shoulder in bright orange over a tattoo of a detonator. He likes to quote it whenever he's making optimistic bets

Dandelion: Does your OC get overwhelmed easily?

Captain Jet: No, mans has the task managing and organizational skills of a god. He may have gotten the rank of Lieutenant by being the last one alive, but he earned his Captains rank and his Urban response force

Margo: She doesnt get overwhelmed easily, nessesarily, but she does get frustrated quickly and it can quickly build into an overwhelming situation

Cynic: No, Cynic is as cool as a cucumber in any situation. it would take an avalanche of situations to phase him

Nihlus: Yes, easily. Frequently. He is... erratic, temperamental. It's not entirely his sith nature, either. Telepathy can be an overwhelming thing if you aren't careful about your mental barriers. too many minds thinking too many things on a war ship, like yelling in your ears but you cant cover them if you're too tired.

Torch: in professional situations, no. in personal situations, if he cant laugh something off, it'll eat at him. and like margo, a lot of little somethings can add up.

Lake: Lake has a much higher threshold than Nihlus for taxing situations, but a significantly lower one than Torch. it takes a lot less of those little things to add up for him.

Heron: No, He's a medic, he's as steady as his scalpel hand. in an Emergency he is Decisive, if we're being kind, and Ruthless, if we're being honest. He is very quickly overwhelmed by affection, though. Softness is not his usual forte

Sprig: The longer the war went on with him as a front line bomb diffuser, with each loss of another just like him to being vaporized, the more easily things began to overwhelm him. Sprig has settled more comfortably into himself with Crisis Company. Suddenly, big things aren't so terrifying anymore, when he has his family at his back.

Marigold: Describe your OC in three words or less

Captain Jet: Eldest Daughter Syndrome

Margo: Dearest Lady Fratboy

Cynic: Ride or Die

Nihlus: Suddenly, murder

Torch: We stay Silly

Lake: Anxiety with Legs

Heron: Unexpected Serial Killer

Sprig: Ankle Biter

[mickmundy]

I was wondering if there's any songs you associate with bushmedicine (or medic or sniper individually, or any of the mercs rly) or listen to when writing as a way to get into the zone? Im always curious about songs people link to characters because I do it a lot myself ahfjjdjdk

YOU KNOW WHAT I REALLY WISH THERE WAS.. i mean i have a couple but i really am SO abominable at making playlists and cultivating like. "ship" playlists... :'( PLUS when i write/create i have to do so in dead silence LOL 💀 music distracts me too much!! but a few songs that To Me are very bushmed are....

craw fever - elvis presley <- this is the song that my fic name came from... the tune and melody of it are very them to me... whimsical but also Dark.,., Very Sexual but in a kind of playful/sinister way... very much Romantic/Sexual Tension song imo.... mwah. this is Thee bushmed song to me and anytime i listen to it i am Immediately Inspired to write about them! SKDFKSDF jack-a-lynn - jethro tull <- ah.... a song about yearning and desiring and Wanting.., this song is very them, i think mostly from the perspective of sniper longing for medic... honeybee - steam powered giraffe <- so tender.,., oughhh.,., so them.,., oughhhhhhh.,., this one just hits the spot for them for me personally! jesse's girl - mary lambert <- this cover specifically guts me... this is a very sniper pining song too imo.. obviously medic isn't With anyone in my fics (and with the mercs i don't usually care much for love triangles tbh). but the Tone and Vibe of the song + the Palpable Raw Love you can hear combined with the Emotional Defeat of like oh... we could never be together.. is very sniper to me! apricots - sally robinson <- not da apricot symbolism..... yeas... god.... another tender one...

these ones are a bit more on the playful side.... not to be taken So Literally. HEHE

i put a spell on you - screamin' jay hawkins <- medic to sniper.,,. very playful, insane vocals... i love screamin' jay hawkins.. again, the playful melody is very flirty and fun! the masochism tango - tom lehrer <- fun, playful upbeat song about how falling in love can be a bit of a pain...! but you just can't quit it! :-)