#which ... I think I got the timeline right

[paintedcrows]

Some Fords! (and Martin K Blackwood is also there)

[inardescere]

@hancfubuki // Pirate!Caleb x Sea God!Rafayel, served

"At this rate, the children might be targeted next."

Deep sighs echo through the giant room, walls with a shiny blue sheen glowing under the light of the fake sun, shining brightly in contrast to the gloomy expressions on the faces of everyone present. "We've warned them not to go past the barrier, and most are smart enough not to disobey when they've seen what happened to our people." They shake their heads, some with arms crossed and their brows the arched with concern and fury, thinking back on the brave souls who had made it home, away from the insistent attacks from those... Pirates-- that's what those humans had called themselves.

"Konche still hasn't returned. He might be-..."

One figure turns, expression blank as he silently tries to walk out of the hall. But he's stopped with a heavy 'wait right there', and he gives a defeated roll of his shoulders, turning back to the elders of his kin.

"You don't know what humans will do if we attack them," the old man starts grimly. They are weaker by nature but stronger in numbers, they have always spoken this truth and he... lifts his head, eyes cold amethyst and pink, stopping any more words from the elder. He knew better than anyone here what they could do to them, the Lemurians. Because they knew this, knew of his failure, the pity in some and the understanding in others, he is able to walk out without another word. It is the rule of the Deep Sea. It is a survival of the fittest. If one doesn't attack first, they will become prey to bigger fish.

Luckily for them, in their seas, they had the advantage.

"Rafayel!"

A bluenette runs towards him from the direction of Whalefall city, stopping before him. Algie, her beautiful braid coming loose, looks up at him with the same look of hope and determination, fiery rage in her eyes just as bright as she steps up towards him. "Are you going up there? I'll come with you, help you distract them if you need! Those greedy humans, they deserve to be capsized and eaten by the sharks for taking my little brother!" Rafayel lets out a silent huff through his nose, much preferring this over the dull atmosphere within the hall. "No, I'll make a better distraction," he starts with a wave of his hand, watching as the woman looks ready to fight him in protest. "I need you to take Konche back safely while I deal with them." Since they don't know what state he is in.

With an understanding nod, they swim out towards the edge of the barrier where the usual sea creatures standing guard let them pass without a knock back behind the gates, rushing up to the top. Algie looks around, on high alert and scrunching her nose in distaste as thunder crashes on the surface of the raging sea. A perfect setting, and he signs, directing Algie to the side of the ship while he floats up, emerging through the waves and standing still on the surface as the waves by his feet go still under his power. The ship is already unstable, swaying from side to side as tall waves crash on its side, water filling the deck as it slowly sinks, and sinks. The sea knows, there is fury burning under his skin.

"There's something out there!"

Finally, he's seen. Tilting his head up with a languid toss to the side, he raises his hand and pulls a flute out from his sash. The sharp melody pierces through the storm, his eyes giving the shortest of glances towards Algie who climbs the side of the ship and onto deck, covered in a thick cloak as she blends in, hidden from the pirates running to stare at his show as she finds her brother. It is easy, to play a daring tune that weaves itself through the air, into the water which heeds his calls.

One by one, tendrils of water crash into men.

As soon as they are within the sea, no level of swimming prowess could save them from the water entering their lungs, pressure pulling them downwards as if the water was sentient and was punishing those who wronged its children. If only that were the truth.

The water calms as the sound of his flute ceases, the loud splash of water catching his attention and he sees the vibrant glow of scales as Konche is plunged into the sea with Algie's arms wrapped tightly around him. The ship now sways, eerily quiet in the night as pelts of rain continue to drip. Rafayel takes a languid stroll towards the ship, hand reaching up to touch the engravings on the side, another step as he stares at the anchor the size of a whale's child. Then he hears it, a spurting sound followed by coughs. A survivor, one that he looks down at and blinks slowly. Hmm... it wouldn't hurt to bring someone in for questioning.

It doesn't matter if he dies, or lives. If left here to fend for himself, he would easily be eaten up by the waves in seconds before the fish even got to him. But out of curiosity and the lingering anger running through his veins, he crouches down, feet balanced on the surface of the water as he reaches out, tilting the man's face up by the chin like one would to a pet. He was a bit ugly, but not as much as the others he saw knocked off the ship.

"Do you want to live?"

No matter his answer, Rafayel simply shrugs and picks him up by the arm, tossing him into the Deep Sea.

[nikolas-ghostbusters-fixation]

Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is how everyone thought Egon had gone insane. What Happened that made them think that. They've fought a gigantic Stay Puft Marshmellow Man TWICE (counting the 2009 video game because iirc it's canon? Correct me if I'm wrong), fought an interdimensional god, fought a blood thirsty ruler that killed thousands and was hated by all that was trapped in a painting (and managed to get in to beat him by making THE STATUE OF LIBERTY start walking down the street with slime that reacted purely based on vibes), found an underground abandoned transit system full of the moodslime, had a bathtub try to eat Dana and her baby, fought a giant murderous black widow lady, fought the fisherman ghost who turned an entire hotel floor into the bottom of a ocean, and that's not even mentioning them getting trapped on an island that randomly raised up from underwater that had been abandoned for decades created by Ivor Shandor who worshipped Gozer. So what did he do or say that made everyone else think he'd gone insane?? All I can think is maybe he was acting strange / eratic before, but he's always been like that to some degree.

I don't know. It's something that I've been thinking about. The correct answer is 'it's not that deep and they needed a reason that the others weren't together anymore and weren't aware of Egons death or know what was going on,' but also. What Was He Saying that prompted everyone, including Ray, to think he lost his mind when he'd been right almost every time before that.

I'm genuinely so curious as to what he was up to before this. What was he doing. What insane idea was working on prior to this or was he even working on anything at all??

Also want to clarify this post isn't negative 😭 I really love the newer movies and their lore / the newer storyline / characters, I just like thinking about small stupid things like this. Gives me something to think about / speculate about / figure out an answer to.

[flowering-darkness]

In a turn of events that probably surprises no-one, I am once again having a Reborn moment

[lucksea]

more mad prince astra trying to figure out the details of his design. it might change more

[quibbs126]

You know a while ago, I had an idea that if I were to properly make a megop kid, Nova would be a good name for them (or at least that plus maybe another word)

Since you know, novas are related to stars, like how Orion is the name of a constellation, nova in Latin means “new, strange”, which I think would be befitting of most interpretations for megop and this new development (though note I was mostly thinking of TF One at the time), and there already exists a character called Nova Prime so it kind of fits in with Prime’s name. Also, Anodyne 2’s protagonist is named Nova and I really like that game. Also she can turn into a car mode, just like a Transformer

Only for me to find out later that Nova seems to be a semi-common megop fankid name. Like I swear I’ve seen it 2 or 3 times elsewhere by other users. So like, I’d have to come up with something else to be more original

Goddamnit, and I had all those cool reasons to use the name too

[eggsistential-basket]

thinking about the person i could have been if i tried a little harder to find my own way

[pixelfont52]

earthbound

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to

[windupaidoneus]

really funny to me that ppl perceive emets solus body at like 60s. he looks blatantly younger than varis or like, the same age. varis is 46

[misiahasahardname]

when i saw fries interact with evil leafy for the first time i went ohhhh that's a lesbian.

i'm still thinking that now

[girlivealwaysbean]

wow when i think about it maybe this year wasn't that bad

[imitor]

houyi ..... i think i love all my bsd ocs on a degree that has me frightened

[couldntsave]

thinking abt gwen and hobie and what his community means and meant to her, how cool she thinks he is, how kind, how fucking smart. she ADORES hobie, dude. she thinks he's the coolest ever. he's her best friend, right alongside miles. she'd do just about anything he asked and considers him the best person she knows

[princekirijo]

I really wanna sit down and make a proper timeline of events for Captain AU, it would def make it easier to talk about stuff then

[stonedsoul]

oh yh here's my last.fm 'wrapped' :)