#zera writes

[hopepetal]

Welcome to villain Hotguy and the Scarlet Witch! Based off of this post by yours truly! Enjoy!

Hotguy was a very well-known hero. Not only that, but he was well-liked. So much so, in fact, that he was rarely ever out of the public eye. It was hard, after all, to be so famous and still be able to sneak around the city as he once did as a teenager. Not helped at all by his signature colours and outfit that stood out from the general populace, Hotguy always found it quite difficult to visit his boss.

Not his “boss” as the civilians of the city knew it. Hotguy felt his lips curl up in a disgusted sneer just thinking about that fraud that called himself the mayor of the city. It made him sick to his stomach just to recall those fake smiles, pressed suits, greasy hair and poisonous words.

No, his true boss was one he once greatly feared. They had been enemies at one point, even, before Hotguy had discovered the true horrors of the city's council and what they had done to Cuteguy. After a thorough butt-kicking, Hotguy had been offered a place not necessarily by her side, but still on her side. That had been enough for him and he had taken the offer gladly, working under the notorious Scarlet Witch to expose the corruption of the government.

As he walked down the darkened hallway, Hotguy couldn't help but admire the amount of effort that went in to maintaining the “villainous ambiance” if he did say so himself. He wasn't sure if it was more because of the Scarlet Witch being a moth hybrid and therefore a little more sensitive to light than most, but whatever the reason was, the whole low light kind of deal made everything just a little more spooky.

Hotguy's boots clicked against the hard gray floors as he made his way to the large, ornate door. He had never really figured out what the floor was made out of, and had stopped asking after the Scarlet Witch had responded with “the bones of my former soulmates” and winked at him. Which, one, terrifying, and two, he was dating Cuteguy. So. He was fairly certain he was not the Scarlet Witch's soulmate.

Stopping at the door, Hotguy took a deep breath. He raised a hand and knocked once, twice, thrice upon the wooden panels, grabbing the doorknob and pushing at the light “come in!” that rang out from inside. In true Scarlet Witch fashion, she was sitting in a comfortable chair behind a desk, the curtains closed tightly behind her. Hotguy did not question the decision of the builders who put windows in the room of someone as light sensitive as the Scarlet Witch, at least not out loud.

Having donned her signature red cloak and hood along with a white dress shirt tucked into black leggings, the Scarlet Witch wore a light smile on her face. The upper half of her face was covered by the masquerade ball-esque mask not even Hotguy had seen her without, but her expressions came across through her body language. She was happy, having clearly heard about the successful mission Hotguy just returned from. “Take a seat!” she exclaimed, gesturing to the chair across from her on the opposite side of the desk.

Hotguy sat, leaning back in the chair with a bright smile on his face. “Well hello there, Scarlet! Fancy seeing you here!” he said, like he wasn't fully aware that this was the Scarlet Witch's office. “I'm guessing you got the good news?”

The Scarlet Witch nodded, leaning forward and clasping two of her four hands in front of her on the desk. “You found Cuteguy and successfully extracted him from the facility alongside the vigilante Redstone Man?”

“You know it!” Hotguy's smile fell for a moment. “It was pretty bad. We got him to the private hospital though, so he'll be right as rain soon enough!”

The Scarlet Witch hummed thoughtfully, continuing to nod. “I hope that is the case. What is the status of the Listener and the Canary?”

Hotguy shrugged. “Weren't present, so I guess they had bigger fish to fry. I know something was going on downtown but I didn't really pay attention to it. Something about potatoes... Redstone Man vehemently denied any sort of involvement which makes me think he's involved, but hey, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.”

The Scarlet Witch sighed, breathing out a soft chuckle. “Vigilantes. Always so... interesting.” Her word choice left much to be said, but Hotguy could kinda figure it out from her tone.

“Yep! Life certainly wouldn’t be the same without them!” Hotguy chirped, thinking back fondly on all of his encounters with Redstone Man and Potato Boy. Despite them insisting they were not the same person, Hotguy knew they absolutely were but decided to humor them. “Right, so that was kind of about all I had for now. Did you have a next move for us, or…?”

The Scarlet Witch shook her head. “I should have a plan by our next weekly meeting with the others, but all I wanted to do at the moment was check in with you and make sure my bro- that Cuteguy was alright.” All four of her hands tightened into fists. “I swear that the ones who did this will pay,” she got out from in between clenched teeth, “no one hurts an ally of the Scarlet Witch and gets away with it. No one.” 

Hotguy kept the smile on his face despite the fear that ran ice cold through his veins. He held in a shudder as he subconsciously hugged himself. “Right, of course! Same goes for good ol’ Hotguy over here. No one hurts my friends! That’s the Hotguy promise!”

The Scarlet Witch gave him a wry smile. “You’re a good friend, Hotguy, and a good person to  have on my side. I’m glad I kicked your butt that day.”

Hotguy let out an exasperated huff. “You only slightly kicked my butt, and I was distracted-!”

“Uh-huh, I’m sure. Let’s go with that.” The Scarlet Witch stood, walking around to Hotguy’s side of the desk. She gestured for him to stand and follow her, and he did, following after as she walked to the door. “I’ll see you at the next meeting, then. I’m heading out myself, but I wish you a safe trip home.” She opened the door and held it for Hotguy before slipping out after him. 

Thanking her for the kind gesture, Hotguy nodded. “You as well. Don’t get kidnapped or something, m’kay?”

Although he couldn’t see her face, Hotguy knew she was giving him the most deadpan stare right now. “Yeah, because that’s something I have to worry about.” She turned and began walking away, raising a hand in goodbye without turning back. 

Hotguy let out a sigh, and began his own journey back home. He’d have to take the back alleys, of course, but he didn’t mind. He was just glad to have his boyfriend back, even if Cuteguy was in the hospital for the time being. It was a start on the long road to recovery, and Hotguy was optimistic even as he recalled how fragile Cuteguy had been, strapped to the operating table in that paper thin gown, completely oblivious to the world around him.

The image of how Hotguy had found his boyfriend and “nemesis” as the public thought, with Cuteguy being a villain, made his chest ache with a grief he didn’t understand. Cuteguy wasn’t dead, he was alive and on the mend thanks to Hotguy! As he ducked into the alleyway, Hotguy figured it was the self blame coming back to eat at him again. Logically, he knew he had done all he could, but Cuteguy’s capture had still been some of his fault-

Nope! Not thinking about that! Just get home, go pet Jellie, and cry about everything in bed! That sounded like a great plan. 

And that was exactly what he did.

[applestruda]

Impulse and the book

(based on chapter 1 of zera's bkau fic)

[lyledraws]

"Are you out there? Can you see the same stars as me?"

A followup/companion to the first Rest prompt. I'm gonna finish this marathon even if it kills me.

(Castoff Fanart Marathon #13: Rest 2)

[bipdf]

i live a life of a rapunzel, but i look like her evil mother

i can't tell you how "nice" it is to live in a little room every day of your young adult life. i spend my mornings lying dormant on my bed. my eyes glued to the white ceilings covered with cobwebs. i listen to the crunching of cheese crackers and slurping of coffee in the hall room. it's the sound of love i've never been included in. when i finally muster up the courage to abandon my bed, it's already past noon. as i let spotify play in the background, i occupy myself with the tasks of daily chores. these tasks can bring immense joy if it's done right. if not, it can be burdensome. my mind often wanders to lands far away from reality while i'm engaged in these activities. i imagine myself living in a lovely home doing everything i've ever dreamed of. i'm free to sing as loud as i want to, i'm free to cook and eat whatever i like to, i'm free to wear satin, silk and georgette dresses and dance to my favourite songs every night. there's no one to tell me what i've to do anymore. i can visit art galleries, museums, cafes and libraries on weekends. spend my evenings on the beach enjoying the sunset views. wake up early in the morning and go for a jog. frame the mundane beauties i've captured and hang them on the wall. intertwine my soul with someone and fall in love so deeply, i can tell my generation that true love still exists. all i've ever asked from the universe is to be liberated. when will the time arrive for me to leave my nest? i'm twenty-two, and i'm tired of my life getting consumed in a little room. "it's time for lunch, sona." i'm pulled back from my daydreams to my dull reality. a mother is always in her daughter's way.

[zerachielamora]

Posted 7 chapters of my Gallabin fanfic on ao3! I'll keep posting chapters on this site instead of here. I'll reblog as I update it!

[lyranova]

Hiya Lyra! 3, 7, and 23 for the excerpt asks please? Thank you!! 💕

Hiya Acacia! Of course you may, and I answered all of these with Zerilliam since I know you love them so much 🥹! I hope you enjoy~!

3 that encompasses my style

Tbh I don’t really know what my style is, i’ve been writing for many years and yet I still don’t know what my style is ahwjwhsjw 😅. But I guess this little Zerilliam snippet from an upcoming chapter of “Mocha Dreams and Earl Grey Realities” encompasses my sillier style 😆!

“ WHAT ARE YOU THINKING VANGEANCE?!” He mentally shouted at himself as his cheeks burned even hotter at his inappropriate thoughts. “ ZERA IS INNOCENTLY TRYING TO TEACH YOU HOW TO APPLY EYELINER AND THIS IS WHERE YOUR MIND GOES?! HAVE YOU NO SHAME?!”

“ Penny for your thoughts, William?” Zera suddenly whispered warmly into his ear, her voice sounding a little more seductive than before. William felt his heart, and his body, jump in surprise.

“ I-It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.” William tried to tell her as he cleared his throat and looked away, Zera hummed, sat back a little, and tapped the eyeliner pencil against her cheek in thought.

“ Hmm, don’t tell me,” She began after a moment, a mischievous smile suddenly worked its way onto her face. “ Were you…having naughty thoughts about me?”

“ Absolutely not! I’m a gentleman.” He quickly and firmly denied, his face turning even redder (how that was possible, he wasn’t sure), and he quickly looked away from her.

“ Ooh a quick and firm denial…that means you totally were!” She teased with a chuckle, only making him clear his throat again.

“ I…was not.”

“ You were!” She squealed in delight, making him sigh and shake his head, but also cause a small smile to tug on his lips.

7 that i nursed in a daydream before finally writing

This scene from “Dandelion Wishes” chapter 6 is a little daydream I nursed after coming up with Zera, and I was going to make it a oneshot, but instead added it to Dandelions 😁!

‘That’s it. This is where and how I die. Rika always told me my mouth and bullheadedness was going to get me in trouble one day!’ Zera thought dramatically as she closed her eyes.

But instead of feeling a spell hit her, she felt the man let go of the front of her dress. She fell right onto the ground and opened her eyes as she heard the men shouting.

“ C-Captain Vangeance?!” She shouted as she watched the man use his World Tree magic to grab the men and tie them up.

“ Get your hands off of my wife.” He told the man in front of him calmly as he used his magic to hold him off the ground, but as Zera and others noticed, despite his calm demeanor, there was a fiery anger burning in his eyes.

“ ‘W-W-Wife’?!” Zera nearly squeaked as her face turned a bright shade of red and her heart skipped a beat.

Wait, her heart skipped a beat? Just because Captain Vangeance called her his wife? No…Zera’s face burned an even brighter shade of red. This couldn’t be happening!

She couldn’t be having feelings for the Captain of the Golden Dawn!

23 that was inspired by a work from another medium (music, visual art, dance, etc.)

This Zerilliam request from my 600 event was inspired by the song “By Your Side” by Jonas Blue and RAYE, and it’s what kicked off the Gods!AU brainrot 😆!

“ You…want me to come back to you? Even though I lied and hid my identity from you?” He asked, the surprise in his eyes going into his voice, and she nodded.

“ I’m not happy you lied and hid it from me, but deep down…I think I always knew there was something different about you,” Zera muttered with a small shrug. “ And it doesn’t matter, even though I still find it hard to believe, it doesn’t matter. Because…you’re still you, and I still love you.”

William blinked when she suddenly rushed towards him and wrapped her arms around his middle and buried her face into his chest, his body stiffened a bit in surprise before he relaxed and wrapped his arms around her as well.

“ So you can leave, and take care of what you need to, and I’ll still be here,” She told him, the tears in her eyes slowly seeping through his shirt, leaving a trail of wet spots. “ Just not tonight. I’m gonna hold your hand and keep you close, and I won’t let you go, not tonight. So please…keep me by your side.”

Williams heart beat rapidly in his chest as he heard Zera’s words, she wasn’t angry, she wasn’t pushing him away like he thought she would. Instead, she was holding him closer, silently asking for him to stay with her, by her side, for at least tonight. And for now he would take it, and just relish being with her tonight, since he wasn’t sure when, or if, they would ever get the chance to be together again.

[space-apples]

ive done it again folks! made angst about when i laughed the hardest.

(@hopepetal )

“I’m cursed, Zera, you can’t—”

“I can.” Zera’s eyes turned purple, and Space never thought he’d be scared of them until this very moment. It was for a split second; Space’s fear dissipated as soon as it came, but it was long enough for Zera to notice.

Zera always saw everything, after all.

“I thought you said you’d do anything to survive,” he said, taking a small breath to calm themself down. Their tone was bitter, but Space didn’t care.

“I would, but why would I—” He lowered his voice, as if They wouldn’t be able to hear this conversation. They would. They always would. He mirrored Zera with his own sharp words. “Why would I want you to put yourself in danger, Zera? I— Honestly, I’m fucking fine with being red, and, you know, I’m feeling way less dizzy now.”

“You think you can lie to me, Space? Of all people— I literallycan see. Everything. It’s sickening.”

“I erm… hope you feel better soon.”

“Space.”

“What—? it was getting too serious for me,” he scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “Last session I couldn’t crack one joke cause my head was too busy cracking itself open—”

“Space.”

“Zera.”

“It’s getting serious because I need you to take this seriously.”

“I am. I- I do,” he murmured, bringing themselves to talk how they would normally; loud, with a tint of fear, light enough to go unnoticed by almost everyone. “You know that just because they’re heartless monsters doesn’t mean you are.”

“…I know.”

“Do you?” At Zera’s silence, he switched gears, trying his best to keep them as safe as possible, even though he knew it was a lost cause. “I really, really, don’t want you to do this for me. They’re going to be angry, and— it doesn’t go well when they’re angry. For you and for me.”

They didn’t respond once again. Instead, they closed their eyes, and Space knew what was coming. Zera was too stubborn to back off, anyway.

He felt the life coming back with the warmth that started sprouting in his chest. It felt like a breath of fresh air, like he’d been stuck underwater and finally got pushed to the surface.

Red Life symptoms can consist of homicidal ideation, urges, and actions towards oneself and others. Is often sadistic and reckless. Their self preservation all depends on the individual, but most of the time, it becomes much smaller. Affiliations with such people is a cautionary tale at best.

Space wasn’t red anymore, thanks to Zera, but he couldn’t bring himself up to look at the admin.

“Thank you, Watcher Zera.” Xiara. “Say hi to Jay for me.”

He didn’t hear a response, nor did he notice the full body flinch of his friend. Space finally turned around, only to find that he was now alone in the caves.

-

“Open the door, open the door, open the door now.” Space’s breath was shaky, his body racked with terror. He was so close to death, and there was a husk right behind him, there was a husk right behind him, there was a husk right behind him.

The bottom cobblestone block broke, and he ran inside, crashing into the rest of the sillies confused and concerned faces.

“Want some enrichment?” Elle said, offering some in the form of bamboo. Her eyes sparkled concern, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Space took the bamboo, smiling softly before hearing the groans of desert zombies and the rattling bones of skeletons.

“The husks, they’re— they—“ Space took a breath. “—killed me before.”

“It’s true,” Wilm whispered, as if they all didn’t see the death message on their comn. “I was there.”

Space was given cooked rabbit, he didn’t know from who (Brandy had slaughtered so many rabbits, it was probably them), but now they all were out of food.

Unfortunately Elle’s enrichment bamboo could not keep them fed.

This was stupid. Space was stupid. It was just a husk, he’ll be fine to just kill some stupid rabbits. It was fine. There was no reason to be scared of anything.

A husk appeared out of nowhere. He screamed, agony filling his chest the same way Zera had given him life before. The cruel irony of yet again being killed by the same undead creature, but this time he didn’t have the excuse of a migraine, was sick.

Zera had given Space a gift. But as everyone should know, throwing something into the void was wasteful. Space wasn’t just space, he was Empty Space, quite similar to the void. Cursed to forever take, cursed to forever lose.

Space knew that to the Watcher’s above that it was entertaining, and he could hear their laughter echoing in his ears.

[kakusu-shipping]

and y’all exclusively post Zeref/Mavis??

[cherrifire]

What is your opinion of people writing fics of your fics/AUs

Sincerely someone who anonymously wrote and sent a lamplight/leaflight crossover fic to Lew.

I LOVE when people make fics based on art so so much. I dont think anyone has done it besides Zera for a Crane Lives piece but I cherish it so dearly. The way I see it, I make fan art for fics sometimes so I love it when it happens the other way around. So if you do write something based on my art, PLEASE share it.

[hopepetal]

“Most angels fall for their sins; he falls for Death.”

I’m a little nervous posting this, because it’s not my normal type of content and everything, but I worked really hard on it and wanted more people to see it.

[applestruda]

Boatem Knights AU Masterpost!!

a silly knights au i made that started as a joke, but now has quite a bit of lore, worldbuilding, and lovely writing behind it! I will hopefully continue to add to this as more gets developed.

Character designs

The Knights:

old designs - boatem (impulse, grian, pearl, scar, and mumbo)

new designs - boatem (impulse, grian, pearl, scar, and mumbo)

vex scar

watcher siblings (pearl and grian)

Big Eyes:

the big eyes crew (tango, bdubs, keralis)

bdubs design breakdown

tango design breakdown

Dogwarts + Doc:

Ren

Martyn

Bigb

Doc

Misc Folks:

Cub

Jimmy

Joel and Lizzie

Skizz

Gem and Etho

Art

Campfire song

Knights portraits

Company car scheme

Scar and familiar Jellie

Impulse sketch

Desert duo sketch (1)

Desert duo sketch (2)

Pearl sketch

Grian and mumbo sketch

Healing (mini comic)

Vex scar

Vex scar comic

Boob-window comic

Vex cub + convex doodle

Ancient paths

Impulse doodle

Team rancher doodle

Four armed Pearl sketch

Strongest knights sketch

Scar and Jellie

Only Human chapter 1

Only Human chapter 2

Only Human chapter 3

Only Human chapter 4

Mumbo and sunsets

Rancher hug

Ranchers and Jimmy's wings

"That's awkward" (mini comic)

Hunter joel

Perfect impulse (mini comic)

Inn fight

Asks and Textposts

(I'm probably only going to include important worldbuilding or character related asks here, also, there's gonna be posts here that mention having "no idea" for backstories and the like, but by now those have been developed.)

Convex canon + familiar Jellie

Vex magic

Grian and Impulse backstory ideas (starter concepts)

Vex scar (1)

Vex scar + evoker cub

"Freelance knights" + weapons

Convex

Traces of magic (scar + jellie)

Shape shifter mumbo

Impulse is just a guy

Boatem knights design breakdowns

Horse marriage

Fics!!

These fics are written by the lovely Zera Hopepetal and Elle Periwinklemoonlight, and are canon to the stories of the knights and the other folks in this au

Boatem knights writing masterpost (Zera)

Somewhere only we know (Elle)

little sunshine (Elle)

[appystruda]

if i post here and ramble about hermits here zera cantfind me and tell me to work on my writing assignments

[eyeodyssey]

MOON AGE 15 : DAMNATION (English Translation) Moon Age 15: Damnation is a 1988 short comic by pseudonymous author Not Osada, who openly drew influence from the Tokyo Grand Guignol's work in such a way that can arguably give a loose insight to the TGG's mysteriously anomalous works. While only a slight window into what could've existed in Ameya's vision, each contemporary rendering of his world of gore-soaked medical equipment and rusted metal is valuable in what it represents. As mentioned in my prior Litchi essay, the fragments of the Tokyo Grand Guignol we have now are descendants of a cultural phantom, standing as shrouded windows to a strange intangible stage that's positioned somewhere between post-Maruo inferno, industrial subculture and decadent poetry. While Osada’s manga featured notably grizzly and cruelly morbid scenarios, his stories were made explicitly for the shoujo market with a distinctly shoujo-influenced art style. Characters appear almost doll-like with their visual perfections, all while they’re often dismantled and reassembled in bizarre surgical practices by sadistic doctors. Much like how Zera expresses horror to seeing his own imperfect organs in contrast with his youthful appearance, our pristine victims share the same internals as any other slaughtered cadaver, all in a maddening spiral of narratives that contemporary readers often described as resembling descents to insanity. This fixation of the contrast between perceived beauty and grotesqueness is arguably traced back to the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s own works, with lines accentuating the youthful features of certain characters while audience members were known to fondly look back on the actors’ appearances. Litchi himself was described as being a “cute” robot despite the violence it was programed to carry out. It’s possible that this collision is inherent to Ameya’s conceptual destruction of the TGG. A known detractor to poetic writing, he called on a romantic author to pen the screenplays to the TGG’s first three plays so he could “destroy” them in his direction. The use of beauty could arguably be a mockery of it, taking these idealized dolls and leaving them trapped in worlds of fascism and hospital rooms that are haunted by the stinging stench of antiseptics and blood. Plastic hospital drapes were used in place of stage curtains and autopsy films were shown to the wide-eyed characters, who spoke of pure blood and dirty blood, the antithesis of blood, mercuro. What is beauty a representation of in the Grand Guignol’s works with the prominent fascist leanings of the protagonists? Considering the perspectives of our characters where the Hikari Club and the deranged teachers and Nazi doctors are treated as protagonists rather than explicit antagonists, the plays could arguably be read as the decay of a self-convinced beauty under fascist rule. Songs of the pure-blooded ubermensch fading into silence as the singers all collapse, lost in their own delirium as they pump mercurochrome into their hearts and try to rationalize their own organs that resemble the internals of the so-called ‘landraces’ they rendered into lifeless meat. It’s the natural conclusion of fascism, a collapse that occurs in demented violence to the face of a denial of death. I was originally split on publicizing my translation due to copyright-related complications, but after seeing the increasing gatekeeping of TGG materials at the hands of a rapidly growing market riddled with competitive spending and scalping, I feel obliged to share it to the public who (like myself) can’t afford to spend the now literal hundreds that are required to access angura ephemera that was meant to be openly available to the public to begin with. When originally finding this story, the book it was featured in was only 5 dollars. Now it goes for 60 to 200. That's ridiculous. With all the preamble out of the way, the story is under the cut...

While I made my best effort to maintain accuracy to the source material in translation despite my practically nonexistent understanding of Japanese (my translation method is a Frankensteining of language learning videos, a Japanese to English dictionary from the Internet Archive and Google Translate with a lot of localizing and dissection in between), there are several details I feel I should note for the sake of transparency. One smaller one was the inclusion of the term l * lita. It was in the original text, and I was honestly very unsure of including it in my translation as it’s a term I’m personally icked out by. While I was ultimately recommended to keep the line as is for accuracy, I wish to state that it's a term I'm personally very uncomfortable with in what it represents. The other note, which is the more prominent one in the final product, are the references to The Last Attempt at Paradise. In the original text the club members solely refer to their hideout as paradise and Eden, leaving a lot of excess space in the speech bubbles after translation when making the shift from Japanese text to English. The Last Attempt at Paradise was the name of S.P.K.’s 1982 live album that documents their set at the Off the Wall Hall venue in Lawrence, Kansas. Often considered one of their best concerts and a highlight of the industrial genre, the S.P.K. Appreciation Society of Sydney in their All The Way With S.P.K. / American Tour article describes the concert as being the group's “best performance to date”, further adding that they “Flattened (an) enthusiastic audience with massive P.A. amplification of FX bass regeneration”. This insertion wasn’t done at random, as the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were heavily engrained in the original industrial scene of the 80s. Both the 1985 and 1986 performances of Litchi began on a playback of the S.P.K. song Culturcide (from their 1983 Dekompositiones EP), and it was likely that use of the track that led to Not Osada’s early fixation on S.P.K.’s music. At the end of Blind Beast, in a sort of reader Q&A Osada is questioned about some of his favorite music. At the top of the list he features the tracklist of the Dekompositiones EP and the track Mekano from their 1979 Mekano / Contact / Slogun single. Interestingly enough he states that he only likes those four songs from the band, following the text with laughter in regards to their remaining discography. I’m unsure if this means he was unimpressed with their noisier work (which would be curious knowing his liking of Mekano with how it originated from their earliest noise-adjacent album) or if he was directed to their later Machine Age Voodoo material and was alienated by it. In the same Q&A he also mentions the band Funeral Party, who featured specially commissioned art by Suehiro Maruo on their Dream of Embryo single. It's apparent that he also had a copy of the compilation album Vision Of The Emortion, as the list also includes C·C·Mekka and Ego'n Mole, who were both featured in the album alongside Funeral Party's only two other documented tracks, Das Sunde and Gears - Night. S.P.K. references are sprinkled throughout this story along with Osada's other Litchi-adjacent entries. Aside from one of Zera's henchmen being named after the Mekano track, it's very likely that the frequent references to Eden are in homage to the lyrics of Mekano. The first lines of the track include the verses "One by one, odd to even. Break the scenes, rudely eden...".

Moon Age 15 was originally printed in 1988 as a two-part miniseries in the horror magazine Complete Collection of Horror and Occult Works - HELP, namely in volumes 5 and 6. While being an early work that derived from the TGG, it still wasn’t the first comic to adapt the Litchi stage play, with Das Blut : Blood and Eternal Girl preceding it with their 1986 publication in Osada’s debut anthology Night Reading Room, sharing the same year as the TGG’s early closure following creative conflicts between Norimizu Ameya and K Tagane (the group's author, who remains anonymous to this day). It’s to be noted however that while Das Blut and Eternal Girl were the first stories to feature the Hikari Club as antagonists, they are only tangentially related with Moon Age showing more distinct Grand Guignol archetypes (musings of the full moon, examinations of the Hikari club’s misogyny, idealization of technology, and even an early rendition of the Litchi robot itself). First kept solely as a brief serial, Moon Age was later reprinted in abridged form as a short story in the 1996 Blind Beast anthology. While copies of HELP are notably hard to find and demand high prices, I was given an in depth view of both volumes that featured Moon Age’s serialization by a collector earlier last year. While the drawings are still the same on a rudimentary level, the length of the serialized version is notably longer than the later Blind Beast variant, with the HELP serialization being over 40 pages while Blind Beast’s is only 24. This was the product of the manga being entirely revised for Blind Beast’s print, with the layouts being drastically altered along with basic revisions of the line art. Certain scenes that would usually take 2 to 3 pages in the HELP version were condensed to 1, resulting in a unique tradeoff where one version feels unusually spacious in its framing while the other is heavily condensed and almost chaotic by comparison. It’s only a thing that springs on you once you compare the two variants, I saw the revised version first and originally didn’t pay any mind to it. One thing that is certain is the polishing of the art. The brush work in the Blind Beast version is refined with a more elaborate sense of weight and flow while the HELP version is notably rough with the prominent use of rudimentary screentones. It reflects as a somewhat rougher variant of the art shown in Night Reading Room. It feels strangely digital, like it’s the product of early computer art. The line-by-line reuse of the decapitation scene from Eternal Girl being shown on the TVs further adds to the strange digital feel of the art style.

Similar to Moon Age, Osada's other stories of the Hikari Club featured the members luring girls to their brutal deaths. In Eternal Girl the members bring in a student and film her mutilation for a snuff film that acts as the story's namesake, in Das Blut they corner another student to the woods where they hang her, and in Jinta Jinta they kidnap a student who bullied one of her classmates to suicide before trepanning her with a strange device that's somewhere between an electric chair and a drill. Not Osada was very recently namedropped in the concluding essay of an English print of Kawashima Norikazu’s Her Frankenstein under the alternate Nagata Nooto anglicization of Osada’s pseudonym. Their name is a curious case as while there is a prominent written variant (長田ノオト), it’s seen numerous English iterations. In Osada’s own English signatures it is written as Not Osada (with the name apparently being derived from a German phrase), but other variants include Osada Nohto, Osada Nooto and Not Nagata. If I'm not mistaken, it could count as one of the first English acknowledgements of Osada's works in print.

[periwinklemoonlight]

I'm looking DIRECTLY at your attributes au...

if you ever need a fic writer to write smth for it.... all I'm saying-

thank you! i really appreciate the offer, but zera @hopepetal is the official fic writer and co-creator of our au! he's super amazing, you may know him as the fic writer for the boatem knights au by our friend bee applestruda :D

so far, the plan is for the attributes au to be a multi-chaptered fic with more designs and tidbits coming out in between parts. we've got a big story planned!

however, please don't let this stop you from writing your own fics in the universe - we'd really love to see it!! if you do end up writing something, please ping us :DD

[mochiwrites]

Hi mochi I'm not part of Plume's army but I wanna be nice sooooooooo your writing is awesome and you are amazing ok goodbye runs off

zera beloved, hello!!!!

ueueue ty ty and I will uno reverse you because YOUR writing is awesome and you are amazing :D