#~*~*~too good for ap stat~*~*~

[omnipotent-omnicube]

act.ually.. what if i watched. a silly little anime instead

what if i finished tuning this one part tonight

[f4ggydog]

lottie x reader: point of no return🔞

warnings: noncon, smut, force/coercion, dead dove, dark lottie, omegaverse dynamics, alpha lottie, breeding, deflowering, blood, lottie has a cock, reader has a pussy

Out of the entire Yellowjackets crowd, only two of them were alphas. Those roles belonged to Shauna and Lottie. And Shauna was the only one who obtained a breeder, which was the unfortunate Melissa who definitely didn’t consent to being picked. But in a way, despite Shauna’s undeniable brutality, Lottie still led them all.

She had the closest connection to the wilderness. She was the first to don the antler queen crown. Lottie led the ritual during Coach Ben’s feast and Lottie pushed them deeper into the wilderness’ belief system. She never wanted to return home back to her lavish penthouse. Lottie found a purpose inside of the forest that her parents nor her riches could supply. For the first time in ages, Lottie felt complete. She felt like she had a reason to continue living and her service to ‘it’ was a priority she couldn’t ignore.

It called for Lottie to have a mate. Of course you understood the possible implications of that, but you thought there was no way in hell you would get chosen. If anything, you saw the role going to either Akilah or Travis. But, your anxiety grew when you saw Travis wasn’t a part of the draw. That’s okay, though. Literally anyone else could’ve gotten selected. It was going to be alright…until it wasn’t.

You are adamant in your belief that you weren’t supposed to be picked. The cards must’ve been rigged. Van must’ve fucked up the shuffling. What were the odds that you drew the queen? God, you really wish you could’ve gotten yourself into AP Stats.

You were doing so good, evading the howling girls and managing to slip past obstacles in the snow. Your only fault was cutting your foot on a tree branch. But you recovered swiftly from your injury and ignored the blood trickling into the fluffy white. However, the chase couldn’t go in your favor for too long.

You turned one corner and found yourself getting tackled to the floor. You fell face first in the ground, the snow coating your white dress. You quickly crawl backwards until your back hits the tree. Lottie inches closer, a perverted and ominous glint in her eyeballs. She pants, her mouth watering at the thought of conquering your untouched body.

“Get back!” You cry out, shooing Lottie away like she’s a cat sitting on the counter. “I-I reject you.”

“An omega can’t reject their partner,” Lottie chuckles. “Only an alpha gets to decide if they will reject you or not. And, well, I’m definitely not saying no to you.”

“Get away, Lottie!” You shout. “I’m warning you! Leave me alone! Go hunt someone else. I’m not yours!”

“Would you rather wait until we get back to camp?” Lottie smirks. “Would you rather me breed you in front of everyone else? That would send a message, wouldn’t it?”

“No! No, what the fuck? Lottie, I’m not yours! I’m not your mate! I was chosen by chance, not by destiny.”

“This is your role,” Lottie explains. “We all have a job here. The wilderness wanted you to be my perfect little mate. You picked the queen card because it knew you would be fantastic for the job. I could sense it too.”

“What are you talking about? What is it, Lottie?”

Lottie’s smirk only widens.

“It doesn’t have to explain itself. It’s just there, guiding us through every decision and sacrifice it desires. It called on you to be mine. Shauna already had her mate chosen. I can’t be an alpha without my own personal breeder.”

“And I’m sure Melissa’s fucking ecstatic about that decision!” You say sarcastically. “Shauna wouldn’t even let that girl break up with her! Melissa tried to leave and this wolf psychology bullshit wouldn’t let her!”

“Because you can’t just leave. It’s not as simple as that, Y/N. We’re bound by a red string of fate. Once you’re tied to me, you’re connected to me forever. And I will always find you, no matter if we’re miles apart.”

Lottie makes it sound so romantic, as if you aren’t hesitant to be used like an incubator.

“It’s your choice,” Lottie states. “We can have our own private moment here, just the two of us. You become mine without anyone having to witness you at what you would perceive is your… ‘lowest.’ Or I can bring you back and let the others watch.”

Lottie pulls you from your spot under the tree and forces you onto your back. She can feel her cock throbbing in her pants, aching to breach through your pussy and put a baby inside. She squeezes her bulge to provide herself temporary relief and sighs at your mortified figure. It excited her further to see you in distress, to see you ripe for the taking and in terror.

But, you gotta admit that you’d rather have Lottie ravish you here. You can’t imagine the embarrassment of being violated in front of a crowd, them being forced to watch while your innocence is ripped away from you. Of course, if neither was an option, that would be your preference.

“You look so good,” Lottie rasps. “The way your dress gives me easy access, every quiver from your thighs, your breath catching in your throat. It’s too good to ignore.”

Lottie pins your hands together so that your crawling is worthless. Your legs aim to kick at her face, but they miss every time. You’re caught as prey in winter’s harshest hour, yet you don’t feel as frigid as you should.

You’re concerned that frostbite is out of the question. There’s a pool of heat between your legs that spreads its warmth throughout the rest of your body. You feel it soak up in your arms and legs and even your chest. Though, the heat doesn’t seem abnormal or manufactured. It’s legitimate and natural. Not understanding the source only serves to scare you more.

“Look at that.” Lottie presses her hand down on your core, which makes you yelp. Again, your attempts to kick her back are unsuccessful. Frankly, they make you look like a child wrestling with their mother over bedtime. “It knows you were the chosen one. You’re already getting so hot for me.”

You frown, shaking your head like blatant refusal will do you any justice. Lottie’s not discouraged. Your pussy’s a special place to plant her cum inside. She won’t have your fear distract her from fulfilling the wilderness’ orders. Your virginity’s a sacrifice for the satisfaction for the pack. Lottie demands your purity. And in exchange, the pack sleeps another night without death creeping closer. Your virginity’s a present to the gods who aren’t easily pleased, whether you’re an eager donor or otherwise.

“Why is my body doing this?” You whimper.

“Your body wants me just as bad as I want you,” Lottie affirms. “It wants you out of that old dress and naked before me. This isn’t a means of hurting you or punishment. It’s dedication, it’s nourishment, it’s liberation.”

Liberation? To be kept by an alpha’s chains? You almost laughed at that hypothesis. But, that confident gaze in Lottie’s eye was no giggling matter.

She removes the clothing resting on the lower half of her body. You recoil instantly at the size of Lottie’s shaft. She’s thick and fully erect, her tanned flesh twitching at the prospect of slipping inside your moist walls.

“It’s better if you stay still,” Lottie advises. “Makes the process smoother. For both of us, of course.”

You wriggle under Lottie’s grip. Her hand finds its way to the bottom half of your dirty white dress and rips it open. Momentarily, you forget that you were in such a rush to get dressed for the hunt that you didn’t even toss on underwear. Not that a scenario with you wearing undergarments would matter much. Lottie would get to your soft cunt one way or another.

“Exquisite,” Lottie comments, frothing at the mouth. “I don’t even think you need a warm up. That pussy’s ready to be used.”

“Lottie please don’t.” You know begging won’t get you proper solutions. But you’re unsure of what course of action will get Lottie’s erection to simmer down. You’ll try every option you’ve got at your disposal. However, Lottie wields determination like you’ve never observed before.

She pumps her cock in her hand, groaning at the gooey precum that oozes out. Your pussy involuntarily pulses at the sight of such a strong member. Your body’s reactions don’t mean you want this to happen. But even the most headstrong omega can’t ignore their biology.

“It’s not even gonna fit,” you remark. “Y-You’re too big.”

“A good alpha knows how to make it fit for their mate,” Lottie reassures.

Lottie teases the head of her cock against your quivering pussy. She rubs her tip against your slit, mixing it with your juices. Lottie gasps at the sensation, the intense heat overpowering any chill the winter could provide.

“Don’t do this.” Your eyes widen and you stare at Lottie with bated breath. “L-Lottie, I’m not ready. I’m not ready for this.”

“If you weren’t ready, the wilderness wouldn’t have chosen you. You selecting the queen card is sheer proof that this is the time.”

“I-I didn’t know I would get the queen card. I didn’t plan to get it. Lottie, I didn’t want to get it.”

Your pleas are useless chitchat. Lottie wants to get the show on the road. Without further questioning or attempts at distraction, Lottie sinks balls deep into your heat. Despite the warmth, she pierces through like a knife cutting through someone’s skin.

You’ve never been more uncomfortable in your life. You sob, watching as blood trickles down your inner thigh. Lottie chuckles at her work, not bothering to pull back. It hurts so fucking bad. You feel like you’re being split open by Lottie’s penis. You’re in a panicked state, wondering if Lottie’s going to tear you to shreds.

“Your blood makes ideal lube,” Lottie purrs in your ear, her thrusts slow but buried.

“N-No more,” you sniffle. “Lottie, it hurts. Please, pull out. Please, it hurts.”

“Shhhh,” Lottie coos, her cock forcing its entry. “It always hurts for a first timer. I’m sure Melissa was in pain too. You’re being very strong right now, my little breeder.”

Lottie’s told to stop, over and over again. That smile of malice and ownership covers her lips. She’s no longer wilderness grandma who goes around convincing the Yellowjackets to consume shrooms. Lottie’s a fucking queen, a future leader. She’s the child of the forest. She was offered the guiding hand in exchange for authority. Lottie’s a blessing to it and your curse simultaneously.

“Feels so good,” Lottie moans, nibbling on your neck as she rocks your body with her thrusts. “Agh fuck, you feel so fucking good. So tight and wet, shit.”

“Lottie,” you whine your alpha’s name, your pussy still leaking crimson around Lottie’s huge cock.

“That’s it,” Lottie encourages, her hot breath on your collarbone. “Say my name just like that. I know you can take my cock. I know you can handle it.”

The sound of Lottie’s hips bumping against yours makes your skin crawl. Your pussy tightens more around Lottie’s shaft, squeezing it so hard that Lottie might cum too fast. Then she pounds you harder, skin hitting skin like a depraved symphony.

Lottie’s cock caresses you deep, your pussy swallowing her flesh whole. Your head tilts back, sobs and gasps of pain leaving your throat. In return, you get grunts out of Lottie’s mouth. Her hand no longer pins your hands together. She holds you down fully, her body tangled with yours while your face is smothered with rough kisses.

“Yes,” Lottie chants. “God, yes. Fuck, fuck. Take all of me. Take all of me inside of you.”

“Lottie, fuck! I-I can’t-“

“Just let it happen,” Lottie coos. “Let it happen. Let me have you. You were made for this. You were made to be my sweet little cum dump. Your body’s been craving me and my seed.”

Lottie’s ruts grow rapidly in pace. You feel like all the air’s been sucked out of your lungs. Your toes curl as a response to the pricking. The other parts of your body lay stiff, allowing Lottie to consume you until there’s no innocence left.

“I’m gonna cum so hard.” Lottie’s eyes roll back. “Fuck, when I cum inside of that tight little pussy, I’m gonna fill you up for days. You’ll never go without my cum for too long. It’s always gonna be inside of you. Fuck, always!”

“Please, d-don’t cum. Lottie, I can’t get pregnant. P-Please, we’re out here in the middle of freaking nowhere! I-I can’t raise a kid out here.”

“You won’t be alone,” Lottie says. “It’s my child too. I’m gonna be the rightful father. And our child’s going to grow up with such a happy family.”

Lottie leans down to nip you on the nose.

“You’re gonna be such a good parent. Fuck, you’re gonna look so good pumped full of my cum. And when you’ve given birth to our delightful offspring, I’ll fuck you full of cum again. Over and over.”

You can sense that Lottie’s close to spilling. There’s nothing you can do to deter her. You can only lay down and take her cock. You can only hope that the pregnancy will go smoothly. You can only hope that this won’t be enough to create a new life form. Though you know Lottie will try again if no baby is produced this time.

“Such a good little breeder,” Lottie rasps, her cock spasming. “Oh fuck, I’m gonna cum. Shit, shit. Fuck, I’m gonna cum inside of you baby. Fuck, take it. Take my cum inside of that pretty hole. Shit, shit!”

Before you can protest, a torrent of semen splashes into your womb. Hot ropes of cum shoot inside, stuffing you like a damn turkey. You can barely move. Your world’s been turned upside down. You swear there’s stars floating above you, even though it’s the daytime.

Worst of all, Lottie doesn’t pull out. She ensures that every bit of her cum has been drained before slowly pumping into you again.

“You feel too good,” Lottie pants. “Fuck, I wanna cum in you again. I’m not ready to take you back to the others yet. I just want to fuck you so full. Baby, h-hah….”

You don’t have the energy to argue.

“So good. So fucking good.”

Lottie’s still very much trapped in the heat of the moment. And you are her victim who can’t snap her out of this.

“C-Can’t stop. Need to make sure I give you a baby. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

It isn’t long before Lottie empties herself again. She growls. More of her semen floods your pussy. She falls on top of you, her thrusts lazy and languid. Her kisses are drooly and Lottie’s saliva covers your face.

Even when Lottie’s had two orgasms, her hips won’t stop moving. Her rhythm isn’t as firm as before, but she never wants to pull out of you. Your pussy’s too snug for her. At this rate, the other will have to drag Lottie away from you.

“Good little breeder,” Lottie says dreamily. “Fuck, I knew you’d be just perfect.”

Tears stream down your cheeks. How many more rounds could Lottie possibly go?

[ashtxrie]

due 11:59 pm

— alternatively, enhypen hyungs as your typical high school crush!

PAIR. high school! enhypen hyungs x gn!reader (rest under cut) GENRE. fluff, high school au, bullet points WORD COUNT. 1.8k total MAKNAE LINE VER.

이희승 — lee heeseung

varsity jackets, notes in lockers, late night calls, secret pining, basketball games

secretly (not so secretly) an attention seeker

he's on the varsity basketball team, so by law you're hyping him up (disguised as hyping up the whole team) before the game and now he has to win!!! (plus he made a bet with jay about the team's winning streak)

i'd think that you two are closer than acquaintances but don't know each other well enough to be close friends

you guys probably met through mutual friends groups that kind of merged????

it was junior year when he signed up for every ap class you took just to look at your face more often.

horrible move for his gpa, amazing move for his mental well-being

... that was, until his mental well-being was compromised again because his ap calc grades were... not sexy

"help like actually i don't think my coach will let me stay on the team if i fail another quiz like that 0.05% grade decrease might be the end of my career"

you start tutoring him not because you're super confident about your calc skills, but because 1) you're better than him at least 😂and 2) it's a free excuse to hang out with him after school

you guys have your first tutoring sessions over discord vc btw like LOSERS

"can you hear me okay"

"..."

"dude you're muted"

IT WAS BAD

he's got the popular guy on the outside, an absolute loser on the inside persona

like he's lowkey a romantically awkward dude

but once he got to know you a bit more from your 1 on 1 time (still on discord.) you guys got really close!

would talk shit together right before basketball matches too

"[name] make sure to start booing when the other team shows up because unfortunately i think they're actually really good"

you're really passionate about how the other schools have horrible players (regardless of stats) and love to narrate a play-by-play with heeseung after the match is over

he finally confessed to you after a whole business year (jake and riki were about to dox their private dms by then)

you guys are like those stereotypical high school movie it couples, where it seems like two gorgeous popular people fell in love

they don't need to know he's just a hopeless romantic!!

박종성 — park jongseong

blue ink, keyboard clicks, shared laughs, handwritten notes, guitar strings

you thought he was pretty intimidating at first ngl

first day of school and he has a whole pre-established friend group, somehow found a table to sit at, has an effortless air going for him

you were paired up with him for a group project in history and

god help this man is SO straightforward and to the point

"ok so i'll do this part and you can do those parts. let me know if you have questions."

insert working in SILENCE for the next hour and a half

at least you two got your work done though!

but then, as an icebreaker in the last ten minutes of class you asked:

"oh... so, uh, do you ever wonder how liquid soap was invented?"

girl wtf!

your internal thought processing was like ??? damn who said that??? before you realized it was YOU

fortunately for you, jay was not completely weirded out!

he even looked a bit interested!

VERY interested, actually!

and that's how he began google searching like crazy, pulling up a million wikipedia articles and scouring the internet to answer your question

because how did you know he was curious about that too!

he really went from 0 to 100 and wdym you thought this man was cold and stoic

he became a d1 yapper for a solid ten minutes, up until the second the bell rang

he was even subconsciously walking with you to your lunch spot, STILL talking about william sheppard and that day in 1865

when he stops and finally realizes where he is, he actually blinks a bit before asking if you had joined any lunchtime clubs

and you were like oh yeah!! i'm in guitar club

he looked at you with the biggest heart eyes at that tbh

HE WAS IN LOVE

wdym your interests were perfectly aligned???? was he in a soulmates au

fast forward three months, and he seriously thinks he's found The One

confesses to you after playing guitar!! and he wrote a handwritten letter too with a cheeky reference to that one liquid soap conversation that started it all

you never feel like you're being "too weird" when you're with him and you two can always be your candid goofy selves with each other :))

심재윤 — sim jaeyun

muji pens, fond eye rolls, sharing books, lunch dates, lattes, TI-84s

you already saw this one coming

physics lover jake, but you've deemed physics your number one opp

HOW can this man go "i love this subject so much omg" after you've just gotten your third 72% in a row?!

it's not like you weren't smart (the class average was a 55)

and it's not like you hated the subject itself

okay maybe you did

but you just thought there were so many other alternatives other than physics to fawn over as a favorite subject. like. ANY other subject

one day, you're seated next to jake in calc and he just turns to you and starts talking out of NOWHERE

he’s like wow isn’t this so interesting? calc is like a hobby of mine!!

and you’re like boy stfu??? i’m literally struggling how is this your pastime 

poor guy just wanted to make small talk and impress you with stuff he thought you were interested in… which is academics 

fast forward to that afternoon in history though, and tests are passed back

you're a certified humanities girl, so you got an 100!!! academic weapon

jake, however..... is kind of an academic shield in this case

on the midterm, he had written that the victorian era ended in 1592, and filled in everything else he didn't know with "mansa musa" because it was the only thing he retained from ap world

maybe you genuinely felt really bad for hating on him when he had struggles of his own, or maybe you felt really nice that day, or maybe you were secretly hoping to get to know him more....

either way, you don't know what came over you when you tapped on his shoulder

you missed how his eyes widened a bit when he turned around, and how he looked genuinely shocked that you were talking to him in an initiated conversation! maybe his rizz was working! (maybe it was)

"there's a method that i use to memorize terms that i could teach you, if you want"

IF HE WANTS??? he would've literally jumped with joy if the paper in front of him wasn't such a nuclear bomb to his gradebook

so that's how you suddenly started spending all your lunches sitting with jake at an empty table together

he tutors you back for physics and math too, so it's fair

and DAMN it works

suddenly you two are all-rounder academic weapons???? he has your back for STEM, you have his back for humanities

like that's literally a power couple right there.

only one problem.

you aren't a couple!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you confess to him after one of your study sessions, by plotting a heart on the desmos graphing calculator using the equations that he taught you

it was super cute!!

he was literally the proudest and happiest man alive he teared up a bit (he would never admit it though)

and NOW you guys are the campus power couple

“babe look at this!” and he's waving at you with his 100 on the history final

he actually started jumping and hugging you (embarrassingly) when you found out you got a 94% average in physics at the end of the semester, giving you an A in the class

you were so shocked when you opened your report card that you didn't even register it until you heard jake go "YOOO OH MY GOD BABE THAT'S INSANE I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT YESSS I'M SO PROUD OF YOU"

well maybe thanks to jake the subject isn't so bad now!

박성훈 — park sunghoon

big school, comfortable silence, convenience stores, headphones, lingering gazes

the "everything kinda sucks here, except you" type of plot

sunghoon tries to stay out of the spotlight, keeping to himself with his head down, hood up, and headphones on

you're not really sure when you met him first actually, but you're both the same type of people where you're just going through the motions

you intrigued him though-- maybe it was the slightly melancholic look in your eyes? or maybe it was the way you purse your lips when you find a particularly hard question on the worksheets in class

either way, he finds himself wanting to get to know you more

funnily enough, he sees you at the convenience store after school as he walks home, and his feet start walking him in your direction

you see him first, and give him a smile and a little wave-- and sunghoon waves back without even thinking about it

that was the entire interaction that day, but sunghoon keeps replaying that part when you smiled and waved at him

why can't he stop thinking about it?

some things definitely changed too-- you start saying hi to him in the hallways at school, you turn to sunghoon to ask questions in class, and you seem to brighten up whenever you see him

you guys start to have conversations, starting with simple small talk, then moving to longer, more random dialogue where you both just say whatever comes to mind

the two of you become so close that you decide to walk to and from school together, since you found out that you only live a couple blocks away

sunghoon likes to place his headphones over your ears to show you new songs every morning, and you like to share earbuds in the afternoon to walk home together

he also starts to slip little notes about his day in your backpack before you go your separate ways in the neighborhood, signing off with a little p.s. to meet him at the park before sunset

it takes him SO long to muster up the courage to confess to you because he keeps thinking you'd say no

but when he finally does, all his fears melt away because you looked at him in such a soft way

he's actually reminded of why he fell for you in the first place

because with you, there’s no judgment from the outside world in the little bubble that you’ve created with him

it's just the two of you against the world <3

TAGLIST : @star-sim @boyfiejay @jlheon @jwsdoll @dimplewonie @suneng @en-gelic

[utilitycaster]

I've been a pretty harsh critic of Dr. Friedman and Polygon's general Critical Role coverage in the past, and while I think her latest article for them critiquing Campaign 3 is a fairly good one, it does in many ways cast an even harsher light on her kid-gloves handling of D20 and WBN. However, I want to talk about these two excerpts, because I think she hits on something I've increasingly noticed in Actual Play:

"This is where Critical Role’s strength — that Exandria often feels like a real, complex world — collided with the needs of a D&D campaign (a clear adversary, clear plans of action, forward momentum)."

and

"But the confused way D&D handles religion and divinity — polytheism as imagined by midwestern American Protestants — turned the question of how to handle this particular cosmic horror into a glue trap, paralyzing the players for dozens of hours of circular existential debates. Gods once mechanized (or digestible) become just another power bloc, and for players used to a system where in the end you are “basically gods,” the line gets blurrier still. And as D&D’s messy cosmology added friction to much of the campaign, D&D’s mechanics also don’t have the necessary friction for the interpersonal beats that make Critical Role compelling."

I agree with both these statements, as someone who, to be clear, enjoys D&D 5e. D&D supports a range of narratives, but all are ultimately a story of gaining power and fighting off or through a series of adversaries; if your characters are not doing that, it raises the question of why you picked a system that gives you few other options. (This is also, I should note, an increasingly loud question when it comes to Worlds Beyond Number; I fell behind for personal reasons after the Coven arc, but Brennan's initial statements about D&D as scaffolding were perhaps too true; almost every interesting mechanic, in a game with minimal combat that has thus far felt primarily focused on how the three protagonists have fundamentally different adversaries, has been homebrewed, to the point where the cosmology and baggage of D&D has felt like a liability rather than an asset).

D&D also has, in part due to such programs as D20, developed a reputation for being world-agnostic, and that ultimately isn't true. D&D does struggle to make the lines between "real divinity", an archfey or similarly powerful entity, and a L20 character feel sharply defined on a mechanical level; once you give a god a stat block, it can be killed (and on a metanarrative level, revealing the gods' statblocks in Downfall serves to make them both immense, yet also more fragile. The hit points are many, but still finite.) There are a number of questions most D&D worlds simply fail to address - and to be clear, this is not a flaw provided you have buy in. A level 2 warlock in D&D is, in most societies, an one-person lethal force unless the entire town swarms them at once, knowing that many of them will lose their lives in the effort; a level 2 warlock PC, however, is almost never, in-world, treated this way, and indeed is framed as an underdog in a harsh world despite usually having the ability to destroy the entire tavern.

D&D has also developed a (not undeserved) reputation as being The Dominant TTRPG put out by a massive corporation, and has developed a (not deserved) reputation as being itself uniquely problematic as a power fantasy, particularly by people who conveniently forget where Pathfinder came from. I've previously covered that, for all people demand non-D&D actual play, the viewership drops precipitously whenever a big AP show that made its name with D&D dares to branch out, and, related to that, I've seen an uptick in people who are excited for D&D to subvert itself. They wanted Campaign 3 to subvert these norms of divinity and heroic fantasy, cheered for it...and ultimately it was unable to do so. I don't think it's accurate to say that D&D's lack of interpersonal mechanics was the problem here, given that Campaigns 1 and 2 (and again, D20) have no such issue; but rather that since D&D's lack of interpersonal/RP mechanics require more effort from the players to initiate, the debates on the nature of divinity in a world and system that could not sustain them sapped any energy for the late-night watch conversations D&D can support when you're not fighting against it.

I think one of the many lessons we can learn from Critical Role Campaign 3 is that if you go up against D&D with an attempt to destroy it from within, your story will instead find itself conforming to the shape of its container, often to its detriment.

[tojiscrack]

𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐇 𝐒𝐂𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐋: 𝐉𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐎𝐑 𝐘𝐄𝐀𝐑

summary: 13.6k words — you and your friends have returned from a vacation trip in italy! but it’s now time to go back to school and kick start your junior year of high school, but straight off the bat, megumi finds himself immersed in gossip he's usually never bothered by…

notes: welcome to the first ever main-plot-starting chapter of liar, liar! *cheers in the background* FINALLY! we’re here. isn’t it ironic how this time last year i was writing the first ever chapter of liar, liar, and now an entire year later, i’m kick starting the main plot? 😧 time flies… here's my halloween gift to you all! (it's easily my most favourite holiday EVER). and it's also been a week since my birthday, ty for the wishes, kind messages, dm's, asks, tips, etc!! now enjoy this chapter <3

tw: swearing, gossip, mention of violence, threats, and that’s it lmao

i do not own any of the characters of jjk, i only own the character of y/n and her mother. the other characters belong to gege akutami.

previous chapter :)

next chapter :)

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

september 2019 - junior year

"everyone open theirs at the same time, got it?"

"but mine's got tape on it!"

"shut up, yuji."

"i already opened mine."

you dived across the table to snatch the paper out of megumi's hands, throwing him a look of irritation because of how he'd spoiled the entire thing. it only irked you further when he had the audacity to fix you with a glare himself.

"you just couldn't help yourself, could you?" you snapped, placing his timetable face down on the table, refraining from looking at it before he could despite the devil on your left shoulder whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

you gave in and flipped the sheet over. he ruined the order of things anyway, what was the point of adhering to the rules he never listened to to begin with?

"megumi!" you gasped, feeling enraged as you stared down at his timetable.

out of the nine classes you had, pre-calculus was the only one you shared with megumi. to your disbelief, you didn't even share homeroom, so the only other chances to see him were during study hall, break, and lunch, which felt far too short to make up for the overwhelming imbalance.

it didn't make sense, now that you analysed it further. with all the classes available, how was it that pre-calc was the only one you had in common? you felt a nagging frustration, trying to wrap your head around the fact that your paths would now cross so little this year despite the fact that you used to be attached to the hip before. every other subject offered countless opportunities to stick together, yet here you were, navigating a maze of schedules that kept you apart.

you caught yuji and nobara in your peripheral vision, both comparing their own timetables and bickering simultaneously.

megumi was a genius, extremely academically gifted, especially in stem. when it came to any branch of math, the kid aced every exam effortlessly.

and you weren't the worst at it, some would argue..?

the more you thought about it, the more bewildered you became — how could you end up sharing the one class that exposed all your weaknesses, the same one that he excelled in?

he flinched when your voice suddenly rose once more:

"you're taking ap stats?" you demanded, only just realising that he had one extra lesson than you, yuji, and nobara. it was at the very top of the table, labelled 'period 0'.

"don't give him an opportunity to act more pompous than he already is," scoffed nobara, looking uninterested. you did not comment on how she still peeked over the sheet when she thought you weren't looking.

"wow," yuji began, looking pleasantly in awe at megumi's hefty schedule. he leaned back in his seat, careful not to pull himself too far back in the event that he might fall off. you secretly wished that he would, if only to stifle your current shock. "so you'll start the day earlier... won't you be exhausted when we get to football practice?"

that was a good question. since coach yaga had stubbornly given both megumi and yuji spots on the school's football team, it had since been announced that practice would take place every day after school unless otherwise mentioned. with megumi's mornings starting earlier than the rest of you, and his days finishing later, he was bound to be torn down with exhaustion. although he acted like a robot all the time (eat, sleep, make a rude comment about you, repeat) he was still a human who needed rest. more school meant more social interaction. more social interaction meant a drained megumi. things would only go south from there.

he shrugged at the question.

"i'll be fine," he answered, unbothered.

you disagreed. "you'll die —"

"— revive me with your mermaid abilities then —"

you hoped you pinched him hard enough to bruise.

"wait," you said, halting your attack on him with a slow frown. he took the opportunity to rip your hands off his ribs and shuffled away from you. you ignored him, sliding down to sit hip-to-hip with him. "if you do ap stats in the morning, we can't walk to school together."

for the nth time that day, megumi snatched back his timetable from you.

"good luck," he said, eyes half-lidded with that ever-present air of indifference. "you cross the road like you have nine lives."

"you basically just told her that you wouldn't care if she died," yuji intervened, quick to jump to your defence despite the many times you would argue with him, too.

you glanced at him, eyes naturally drifting down to the obvious tan line on his neck from the vacation the four of you had attended with your family in the summer.

nobara scoffed, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear before pointing, accusatory, at megumi. "this is what happens when you hype him up," said nobara, her finger jabbed at him with enough aggression, any outsider would probably assume that he'd committed blasphemy — you liked to think he had.

"i'm surrounded by idiots," you thought you heard him mutter, his voice low enough to almost go unheard, though the faint tightening of his jaw gave him away.

waving his timetable at him, you unknowingly creased the smooth sheet. "speak up, porcupine."

"do you hate it when he mumbles, mother gothel?" said yuji, randomly turning on you instead.

your head might have had a fifty-fifty chance of snapping right off your neck with how fast you'd turned it to face yuji with a glare. of all the things he could have thrown at you, why did he pick a tangled reference, one that barely bit at your core?

"first of all, what the hell?" you responded, visibly and audibly startled. "secondly, you were supposed to be on my side —"

"yeah i know," he replied, breaking out of his character to speak to you in that usual, gentle and low voice of his, the one you were much familiar with, "but i just remembered that megumi might leave me behind after football practice, so i can't take any chances."

"you're a traitor!"

"it's every man for himself!"

to no one's surprise (except for yuji's), nobara, seizing the moment you had created, sent his head crashing forwards against the table. she'd apparently been waiting for the perfect opportunity for it, and you had handed it to her on a silver platter.

"y/n, swap," she said, sliding her timetable down and waiting for you to make the exchange, barely registering the groan of pain and annoyance yuji had followed her demand with.

you shrugged and complied, exchanging yours for hers with pursed lips.

as you scanned nobara's timetable, you found yourself pouting less, pleased. half of your classes aligned perfectly with hers, from pre-calc to english — even p.e and homeroom, matched. the thought of surviving junior year alongside nobara was a hopeful silver lining. leaving megumi behind wouldn't be too bad, you noted in your had, glancing at his unnecessary scowl.

maybe this was done for a reason. if you spent too much time with him, the grumpy attitude would probably become contagious and you'd be the unfortunate one to catch it.

you watched him glare at nothing.

yeah, you definitely didn't want to become that.

"but we all have gojo at some point, right?" said nobara, her voice drawing your mind away from the undiagnosed disease your mind had planted megumi with.

you lined each of your timetables at the centre of the white, circular table, flicking yuji's head away to create more room for it. he lifted himself back up, scowling when you flicked at his hands next.

"we're all in different classes with him," you commented idly, tilting yuji's timetable a little further to read it more accurately.

"oh, you and i have physics with him together," you informed him, content and satisfied.

"hmph," yuji grunted, rubbing his forehead and throwing dirty looks at nobara from the side. despite this, however, you could see the way his ears had straightened up at your comment, also seemingly pleased with the shared class — it reminded you off the ash-blonde puppy you had seen last year, when you were looking for totalityfor megumi's birthday.

"i wanted ieiri," said megumi, taking his timetable back and glancing down at it, then to yuji's, and back again, seemingly making a comparison in his head.

"we all have her for chem," said nobara, leaning the upper half of her body over the table to glance over his sheet. "don't you?"

"yeah," he confirmed, sounding displeased. "and satoru for every other science. ap bio first period — no one needs to hear his voice that early in the morning."

yuji beamed, taking his paper away from the line of your timetables you'd created with it and shoving it down towards megumi's side of the table.

"don't worry megumi!" he'd said, his pearly white teeth showcased as he grinned. "we have ap biology together!"

megumi's eyes slowly shifted from yuji's overly enthusiastic face to his timetable, and then back again, completely unamused. his expression didn't change, and no words were exchanged as he remained deadpanned, yuji patiently awaiting his response; the excited sparkle in his eye dimming as each second went by in silence.

megumi blinked twice, offering a dry, "great. just what i needed."

yuji took that personally.

"hey —"

"gojo might be incredibly annoying," said nobara, cutting through yuji without a care in the world; she was frowning down at her own timetable, brows furrowed, "but i've never failed a class of his. ever." she looked up at you all with a grim expression over her face. "don't tell him i said that."

"you've got a point," you added thoughtfully. "you think he pulled a couple strings to have us in his classes this year?"

"oh for sure," said nobara, her response quick and short. "we have — what — over twenty different science teachers in the whole school and somehow every year without fail we're in his classes? tell me that's a coincidence."

as your friends discussed the things that satoru must have done in order to have each and every one of you in his classes this year, you stared down at your timetable, eyes glued down as something suddenly hit you in your mind.

you were now going to be lonely in performing arts due to the fact that nobara had switched majors. her electives were now filled with fashion design courses, her dream ever since the end of sophomore year, and you were glad she had finally come to pick something she found genuine joy in, but it still stung a little.

you sighed, almost feeling silly for missing something so trivial, but the thought of no longer having those shared moments with her in drama class left a hollow ache. it wasn't as if she hadn't told you this would happen during your vacation in the summer, yet the reality was harder to digest than you had initially anticipated.

"fashion design," you stated, as yuji and megumi found themselves immersed in a pointless argument about satoru and his questionable teaching methods. "i think mai was saying something about that the other day."

"yeah," said nobara, her voice suddenly gloomy as she deflated in her seat, eyes half-lidded and lips in a pout. "there's a workshop in the first class. the seniors are helping us."

a small, amused smirk tugged at the corner of your lips as she sulked in her seat. her exaggerated pout and half-lidded eyes made it impossible not to find the whole situation a bit funny. you rested your chin on your hand, observing the way she dragged her finger absentmindedly across the table's surface, a clear sign of how unenthusiastic she was about the whole thing.

nobara's disdain for her was no secret — mai, with her sharp tongue and competitive attitude, grated on nobara's nerves like nails on a chalkboard. they'd crossed paths during seventh grade, and from that point on, nobara had made it clear she had no interest in mai's condescending remarks or constant need to outshine everyone, especially in the fashion design world. it didn't help that they were often compared to each other when shopping, fuelling the unspoken rivalry between them.

"y'know, she's not that bad," you commented thoughtfully. you had also grown to like mai a bit better throughout the years.

megumi thought it was appropriate to intervene and add his own unwanted input (during the middle of his stupid back and forth with yuji, too).

"you're only saying that 'cause she's your blackmail partner," he'd said, furrowing his brows at you with a look of obvious impatience.

you did not even turn your head to face him when you responded.

"it's not blackmail," you countered slowly, as nobara raised her brows at you expectantly. "it's... making someone do something... by using... pieces of information... as... leverage!"

"that's literally the definition of blackmail —"

"shut up," you smiled politely.

"megumi!" yuji interrupted, shoving his phone in megumi's face with such enthusiasm, you would have thought he just found out that he was the chosen one at camp rock. "look!" he shook his phone aggressively. "brazil likes tan lines! no you have to look, megumi! it says they associate it with beach culture!"

megumi grimaced at the screen, his nostrils flaring as he slapped yuji's hand away.

"yeah, 'cause nothing says 'beach culture' like looking like a poorly toasted sandwich," he retorted, scowling when someone on the other table had shot him a sharp look.

you laughed, met with the sight of yuji in a defensive stance, eyes wide and brows furrowed at the dark haired boy sitting next to you. he was pointing at himself, at the two shades of skin on his neck, his fist clenched which only emphasised the veins running up his hand.

"you keep saying that like i didn't wear sunscreen, but i did!" he snapped, drawing the attention of the people passing by your table. megumi pinched the bridge of his nose as yuji went on, uncaring of the fact that almost every eye in the cafeteria was drawn to the four of you, courtesy of yuji and his unnecessarily loud speech. "i wore the kids one, but it's still sunscreen!"

"what brand?" asked nobara.

"nivea!"

"didn't they run tests for that one and find that it's actually a leading cause for skin cancer in its consumers?" you said, watching his face comically pale as he glanced down at his own hands, a lot darker than what they used to be like before the trip to italy.

yuji's brows knitted together, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if struggling to maintain composure, but the fear creeping into his wide eyes betrayed him. you could see the panic in the way he darted glances between his hands, his arms, and even under the table where his legs were, as though expecting to see something awful already happening.

nobara had taken the opportunity to scare him a little further, making up random statistics about non-existent kids who had reached critical condition due to the sheer amount of the product they'd used, and as she continued, his expression grew more strained, the color slowly draining from his cheeks, leaving him looking almost as pale as the white cast left behind the sunscreen he'd used.

your phone vibrated on the table, the screen lighting up with a text notification. you pressed the button to read it properly.

coffee-hose victim: Check if final pay-check was received

mandy.

you'd check later. you were in no rush, you decided, as you stared at the message briefly, feeling a dull sense of finality wash over you.

both you and megumi had been made redundant after the café shut down over the summer — an abrupt closure that neither of you had seen coming. mandy, your old manager, had been sorting out the final payments for the staff, promising to get things wrapped up even after the little shop was cleared out. now that everything was nearly done, you'd finally be able to delete her number from your phone, erasing the last trace of that chaotic job, of her.

but it also meant finding new jobs, and you refused to work without megumi by your side.

"we need to apply for jobs this week," you told him, showing him your home-screen that had mandy's notification banner at the very top. his eyes followed each word smoothly before looking back up to meet your gaze. "probably not hospitality ever again."

"i'd work at miss B's if she ever let us," said megumi, as you placed your phone back down and silently nodded in agreement. "i like her."

"mind saying that again?" you grinned, lifting it back up and having it hover near his mouth that had been set in a straight line the second he saw your lip curl. "i want to make it my ringtone."

"shut up," he snapped, slapping your wrist away quite like he had done with yuji not even five minutes ago. you laughed but complied anyway. having megumi's voice as a ringtone would make it so that you would never actually pick up the calls. he frowned at you. "come over to mine and we'll apply then."

you threw him a sideways look. "no, you come over to mine."

he furrowed his brows at you.

"what difference does it make?" he asked, his eyes critiquing your every move. nothing out of the ordinary.

you sighed loudly; someone might have assumed you were in the middle of a chore.

"if i see toji, i'm going to be tempted to make fun of him. i'll get distracted," you explained, shaking your head at your friend as though it had been the most easiest thing, and he had failed to understand. "top of the class and yet you're not the exactly the brightest crayon in the box, are you?"

"shut up," he repeated for the second time in the very same minute.

nobara turned her head slowly, deliberately, her sharp eyes narrowing as they landed on megumi. there was a brief, almost theatrical pause before her lips curled slightly at the corners, (the way they did when she was about to say something cutting) as the dim light of the cafeteria above you all caught the sharp angle of her cheekbones.

"megumi, i can not argue with idiot number one," she began, lifting her chin to gesture at a pale yuji, "when you, idiot number two, keep telling someone to shut up. how about you shut up for a change, huh?"

megumi narrowed his eyes at her. "i'm the only one out of the four of us that only speaks when spoken to."

she gawked at him. "you calling us chatterboxes?"

"i'm saying that when either of your mouths open, the stuff that comes out of it is never relevant nor necessary."

the three of you sat in silence, each watching him with different expressions on your faces.

and megumi felt the need to clarify:

"none of your statements are of any substance —"

"we get it!" snapped nobara, her gaze cutting and sharp. she took enough care to kick him beneath the table, which only began the onslaught of physical attacks, one you joined in for the sole purpose of bullying megumi. you thought he deserved it this time.

as the assault continued, something clicked, and you pulled back from the friendly fire. watching megumi's face — strained and faintly exasperated — you remembered something nobara had mentioned weeks ago about the family's international dojo business, which was the zenin's main source of income and how they were so incredibly rich.

it was easy to forget sometimes; the quiet, slightly reserved megumi you knew now didn't quite fit the image of someone being groomed to run an international dojo and martial arts empire, but as he braced himself for nobara's next jab, you couldn't shake the thought: he was taking business classes, which only further supported your idea, and for a moment, you considered the irony of seeing him here, bickering with you all instead of learning the ropes of the large business awaiting him.

"hey," you said, tapping his shoulder and flinching when he turned to look down at you so suddenly.

"what?" he snapped, but only after swiping nobara's timetable off the table and onto the floor when she kicked him on his funny-bone. he was blinking hard at you, as though trying to clear his vision of the black spots contaminating his sight.

"oh excuse me for wanting to help mr dominant-alpha-wolf out," you shot back, hands raised mockingly. when he scowled at you and patiently (yet reluctantly) waited for you to continue, you went on. "talking about applying for jobs, why don't you just get some business experience at ten shadows?"

the zenin clan's dojo, ten shadows, specialised in jujutsu — a tradition they shared with the gojo's and, of course, the kamo clan too. it was where uncle ogi spent most of his time in, and where toji spent none of his time in.

megumi didn't seem to like that idea, regarding you with furrowed brows and a scrunched nose.

"so i can spend all day with uncle ogi?" he retorted, and despite your initial idea still standing tall in your mind, you had to silently admit to yourself that he raised a good point. uncle ogi was funny when he was angry (which tended to be ninety-nine percent of the time) but you could only take so much of that in one day. knowing him, he'd probably force you to work nightshifts with no breaks. "no thanks," megumi voiced, unimpressed with the suggestion.

"why don't you just lie on your application forms and stuff?" yuji suggested, his mouth in a straight line. it seemed that he had not got over the sunscreen scare just yet. "i did."

"you lied about working at ten shadows?" you asked, brows raised and eyes wide. "that's an international dojo. they go world-wide. global. your employers will find out."

yuji shook his head, raising his hand to wave it at you dismissively. "no, not there," he scoffed, smiling widely. "what do you think i am, huh? stupid?"

no one said anything; he sat up defensively.

"hey —"

"so what place did you lie about then?" nobara cut through him, literally pulling him out of his stance by his elbow.

he shrugged her off with a scowl, but answered nonetheless.

"gojo said i could say i worked at his family's pharmacy."

everyone around the table went still, eyes widening as they processed what yuji had just casually revealed. megumi blinked, caught off guard, while you tilted your head, brows raised at his unexpected response. it was only nobara, however, who looked thoroughly impressed, her lips curling as she nudged him with a newfound admiration and yuji, oblivious to the stir he'd just caused, seemed to enjoy the brief, astonished silence hanging over the table.

"it's cool, right?" he voiced loudly, grinning. "he said i should write that i worked at one of his biotechnology firms, but if the interviewer asked me questions about it, i'd never know how to answer 'em."

megumi shot him a look.

"what do you know about pharmacies?" he demanded, watching yuji shrug confidently.

"you gotta answer some calls, make requests. er... stock up on the medicine and stuff," he mumbled, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and nodding. it looked like he was actually thinking hard about it. "deal with old ladies... and old men... er... yeah!"

"i'm putting that on my application too, then," said nobara, nodding. she made eye contact with a stoic megumi. "and you should too. only, with your family's business."

"no," the dark-haired boy responded, glowering at the three of you. "it's not genuine."

"oh here we go again," you sighed, rolling your eyes.

it had been the same situation two years ago with his easy position on the football team, when yaga offered him a vacant spot without the requirement of turning up to try-outs. megumi truly believed that if the offer was given solely to him, it was disingenuous and unfair, therefore accepting what was rightfully presented would also be disingenuous and unfair.

lying on an application form with security knowing that his family would definitely vouch for him if asked was where he drew the line.

"i'm not the serial liar here," he reminded you all, purposefully meeting your gaze to prove his point; you could have murdered him right there.

"maybe not, but you are the porcupine-hedgehog-sea-urchin breed here though —"

"you'dknow all about sea urchins, mermai—"

he left school that day with a small bump on the side of his head and a lesson still unlearned: do not mention the mermaid incident of two-thousand and eleven.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

the hallway stretched ahead, brightly lit by fluorescent lights overhead that reflected off pale, polished floors. blue lockers lined either side, their surfaces a mix of chipped paint and stickers left from previous years, giving a lived-in look to the corridor's otherwise sterile presentation.

as you and megumi walked past several groups of people — some leaning against lockers, others conversing on the floor — you nudged him on his side.

"where do you usually sit?" you asked him, turning a corner to enter the corridor with the descending stairs. the two of you walked down them with ease, careful not to trip over that one step at the very bottom that always managed to catch your undone laces and have you stack in front of everyone.

megumi lagged a step behind, and before you could question it, you felt a slight tug on your bag, shifting it side to side. as you neared his homeroom, the faint sound of your zipper sliding into place caught your attention — he'd just fastened it for you without a word.

when he came back to your side to match your pace, you grinned up at his scowling face.

"thank you, porcupine!" you said brightly.

he adjusted the strap of his schoolbag, simple and black, and grunted, his form of acknowledgement.

you nudged him again, this time with your hip. "you didn't answer my question."

he shot you a sharp look, as though warning you not to test his patience. it wasn't like you'd ever heeded the warning in all the years you'd known him for, and yet you were still living and breathing and walking, alive and well.

"shouldn't matter to you," he responded, but only when it had become clear that you were not going to budge on it. megumi continued to face ahead, watching his steps as he spoke. "we're not in the same class and you won't be allowed in."

"ah, but if my memory serves me correctly," you beamed, sliding in between several seniors who were blocking the hallway to get to his class, and he shadowed you, right by the back of your heels, "you said the exact same thing in kindergarten and then they changed my name in the register so i was in your class permanently."

"set my fate with that dumb decision."

"hey," you frowned, looking at him from over your shoulder and furrowing your brows, lips set in a straight line. "that's rude."

megumi didn't grace you with a response to that, only following in your footsteps as you managed to squeeze past the groups of people huddled in the middle of the narrow corridor.

"besides," you began, once the two of you were walking side-by-side again, "if that decision wasn't made, you'd have a boring life, porcupine."

as the two of you neared megumi's classroom, the energy of the hallway shifted — voices grew louder, students lingered in clumps near the door, waiting to slip in just before the bell rang. it did tend to annoy you when they'd stand in a huddle and make it difficult to walk properly, but you'd gotten used to it after the first couple of weeks starting high school for the first time.

the sharp lines of megumi's face settled into something halfway between annoyance and resignation, his brows pinched, and his jaw clenched slightly as though he were biting back a retort. he shot you a sidelong glance, and for a moment, a split second in time, his expression softened — if you didn't know him that well, you might have thought you imagined it — almost as if he were mulling over what you'd said before huffing quietly, that familiar scowl reappearing on his face as he straightened his posture, ready to brush you off as he always did.

"you don't believe me?" you questioned, amused.

"it'd be stupid of me to believe someone who has a criminal history of lying," he grumbled, eyes half-lidded as though the answer had been obvious enough for a five year old to guess. arguably, you thought the five year old version of him probably would have said the exact same line, word for word. he had been too grown to actually be a kid.

"lying is part of my major," you reminded him, brows raised. "that's why i'm always the lead in the plays."

megumi averted his gaze, grumpy. "my bad. i thought you threatened everyone for the role —"

"i'm not a delinquent like you," you told him, smiling, and when he made a move to pinch you on your side, you dramatically flattened yourself against the lockers."i'll yell for help!" you hurriedly warned him, eyes cautiously wide as you followed where his pale hand was left outstretched near you.

he narrowed his own at you, contemplating. you could see the cogs turning in his head, thinking, deciding. you helped him make his decision faster by parting your lips, a silent threat. wisely, he retracted his hand, walking to his classroom which was at the end of the corridor, not looking back to see if you would catch up to him.

you did, in fact, catch up to him, if only to prove your initial point:

"if you weren't friends with me, what would you keep yourself entertained with, huh?" you asked, slapping his bag. he threw you a dirty look despite the fact that the hit wasn't enough to even make him stumble. "your non-fiction books? oh, i know a great non-fiction joke for you!"

"leave me alone," said megumi, glowering. "isn't your class down there?"

he gestured to the other end of the corridor.

you ignored him.

"why can't you trust an atom?" you asked, and when he refused to answer, instead choosing to duck under miss zaid's oustretched arm to go inside his class, you answered anyway, halting by the door because she stepped in front of you. "because they make up everythi— oh hey miss zaid!"

the teacher in question took back her arm and folded it over her chest, leaning against the door frame to block your entrance. you looked around, over your shoulder and around the corridor, before looking back up at her and smiling.

"who are you standing guard for?" you asked brightly. "can i help?"

"you can," she nodded, jutting her chin in the direction of the end of the hall, her expression half amused and half firm. "by making your way to mrs jenkins's class."

you shook your head firmly.

"but mr gojo said i could stay here instead," you said, expression grave. satoru had said no such thing, but that didn't matter, not to you at least.

"okay," said miss zaid, letting out a long exhale through her nose. "and is mr gojo part of the student advisory?"

your eyes darted left and right, momentarily speechless.

"he owns the pharmacy down the block," you tried, smiling pleasantly.

"and what does that have to do with the school?"

"erm... the first aid stuff in the school —"

the more you blabbered, the more unconvinced she became. you raised your brows at her, stern and serious.

"but my timetable's changed," you informed her, watching as the crease between her brows began to deepen as you spoke. "yeah, it says i'm in this class now."

miss zaid stepped aside to let two other students through. you took the opportunity to try and follow in right after them, only to be stopped when she rapidly stood back in that defensive position again. you frowned — what were you, a danger to the class?

"does it say my name on your timetable?" she asked you, curious.

you nodded.

she extended her hand, making a come hither motion.

"show me your timetable," she'd said, and at that, you froze.

it had been a lie after all. you were hoping to gain entry without the necessary proof. it had, after all, worked last year.

you watched her brows unknit themselves, tilting her head at you expectantly.

you paused.

"miss i really like the colour of your hijab today —"

"go," she interrupted loudly, pointing at the room you were meant to be in, all the way on the other side of the country, "to class, y/n." she looked up and nodded. "hi, yuji — come inside."

you turned and looked over your shoulder. sure enough, yuji was right there, walking alongside junpei, a tall, skinny boy who you had met during middle school in one of yuji's classes. the two were close, and when neither you, megumi nor nobara wanted to watch the weird movies yuji was always invested in, junpei had always been his go-to.

junpei was also in your homeroom class with nobara.

"what're you doing here?" yuji asked you, nodding at junpei when he walked off in the direction you were meant to be going in.

"what am i—" you repeated with a scoff, looking around as though that had been the stupidest question ever asked. "this is my class!"

miss zaid sighed. "y/n," she uttered your name sternly.

"miss, i can knock her out and then carry her to her actual class," yuji offered seriously.

you turned slowly, fixing yuji with a look that could curdle milk, disgust etched across your face, brows pinched and lip curled as though you'd just been asked to eat a pile of socks.

without missing a beat, yuji assumed a playful but overly dramatic fighting stance, feet squared and fists up like he was in some action movie. he bounced lightly, eyes narrowing in mock seriousness as he sized you up. perhaps it would've been almost intimidating if he hadn't grinned halfway through, flashing his teeth in a way that revealed he was completely unserious, and only had you staring at him with that unmoving disgusted expression.

"i appreciate your efforts yuji, but that... won't be necessary," miss zaid added, stepping aside to let him go inside.

"you have a bunch of weirdos in your class," you told her, scowling at the top of his pink head as he ducked under her arm and waved enthusiastically at megumi, who was slouching in his seat at the back of the classroom. "that's why i'm not in it."

and before she could order you to leave again, you stood on your tiptoes and waved at your grumpy friend, blowing kisses and beaming at him.

"bye megumi elizabeth fushiguro!" you yelled, smiling from ear to ear, and bouncing on your toes excitedly. "i'll miss you megumi elizabeth! bye megumi! i love you megumi! i'll miss you megu—"

"all right, i think he heard you," miss zaid nodded, looking over her shoulder to be met with the sight of the dark-haired boy facing the board with such seriousness, it appeared as though the class had already started and he was listening attentively to the non-existent teacher. his eyes would dart back to meet yours, and each time they did, his gaze would harden and his scowl would deepen.

"did i tell you how much i'll miss you, megumi?" you added loudly.

"y/n, don't make me write you up and give you a detention," said miss zaid, watching as you waved a hand at her and walked off.

"all right, all right, i'm going," you grumbled, turning on your heel and strolling down the hallway.

as you moved farther away, miss zaid's voice echoed faintly behind you, catching you off guard as she questioned whether megumi's middle name was actually elizabeth, her tone somewhere between bemusement and scepticism.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

the boys' locker room was a space with rows of navy-blue metal lockers, their surfaces chipped and dented from years of use. megumi unlocked his and shoved his school pants inside, the overhead fluorescent lights casting a sharp, sterile glow over the room, bright enough to reflect off the scuffed tiled floor where several of his teammates were sitting, tying their shoelaces. other members of his team, including yuta, yuji, and toge, sat on the wooden benches that ran parallel to the lockers, worn and slightly uneven in places, each spot marked by countless cleats and gear bags left by players.

chad had been complaining about the faint smell of old sweat and disinfectant that clung to the air, mingling with the metallic scent of the lockers, and despite megumi not conversing with the rest, he silently agreed.

where the few hooks were attached along the walls (each draped with stray jerseys, hoodies, and extra uniforms) megumi glanced down at his own, a slight frown tugging at the corners of his lips. he would need to get a new one — he had outgrown the one he'd just got over the summer.

he didn't know whether he should be pleased or annoyed: perhaps both.

"yaga's gonna murder you if you don't have that game plan ready for today, todo," one of the guys — oliver martin, megumi realised — had said.

todo had been quick to retort:

"this was way more important!"

in the back corner where todo stood tall, a whiteboard was propped up with play diagrams still faintly visible from last practice, but the deep lining of blue marker that formed a surprisingly accurate drawing of nobuko takada (a japanese pop idol who todo had mentioned several times that he'd die for) took up the rest of the board.

he kicked a couple of duffel bags that slouched nearby, stuffed with tangled shin guards, socks, and forgotten water bottles, before speaking in that excessively loud voice of his.

"if any of you, except for my brother yuji, can give me your type of woman that's valid," he began, only warranting several groans and protests from every member in the room, "i'll come up with a game plan so you don't have to!"

kamo, who had been minding his own business up until now, slammed his locker door shut and stared up at the demanding team captain, eyes half-lidded.

"you did this last time and then tried to attack chad," he reminded him, and chad, who had been sitting on the bench slouched over, sat up and shook his head, disappointed.

"yeah, dude," he spoke breathily, visibly upset, "and that wasn't cool."

"YOUR TYPE ISN'T COOL —"

"relax," said kamo, which prompted everyone else to follow and agree.

todo's gaze snapped towards kamo, lingering a beat too long, his eyes narrowing in an expression that balanced somewhere between irritation and threat, his jaw clenching as he sized him up, lips pressing into a thin line, as though silently daring him to say more.

"what's your type then?" demanded todo, pointing at an unfazed kamo who simply raised a brow and turned away, seemingly uninterested in participating in this game todo enjoyed so much. "HEY! I'M TALKING TO YOU!"

kamo stared at him again, deadpanned. "sorry, didn't notice."

"every single one of us have said our type except for you, man," andre johnson added, momentarily shirtless just to speak before pulling his head through his blue jersey. "just say it."

"i actually wanna know what your type is," said yuji, interested. "i can't imagine you with anyone, kamo."

majority of the guys in the room collectively voiced their agreement. megumi silently agreed too — kamo never showed interest in anything other than his hobbies, like football. the hum of the vent overhead was steady as the low, animated chatter continued, todo waiting for an answer impatiently by the whiteboard.

"loner."

kamo placed one foot on the bench, bending down to tie his laces together. "liked you better when you were mute, toge," he said, though not unkindly.

"he likes a tall girl with a big ass, okay?" logan parker intervened, sighing audibly. "he told me, all right?"

kamo turned to logan, his expression deadpan, unimpressed by the sudden revelation. the lack of humour in his gaze spoke volumes, making it painfully obvious to megumi that kamo had never confided in logan about such a preference.

his straightforward nature, megumi had decided, left no room for such casual gossip, and it was hard to believe that he would ever engage in a conversation about his personal preferences with someone as prone to exaggeration as logan.

"is that true?" todo demanded almost immediately after logan had added his false input.

kamo tied his hair back, looking uncaring and tired. "no."

todo clenched his fists.

"your type can't be that bad," he said, looking around before his eyes landed on megumi, who was now sitting on the bench beside yuta, staring at nothing in particular. "bet it's not like fushiguro's — which is BORING,by the way!"

megumi looked up at the mention of his name and scowled.

everyone had immediately come to his defence, telling todo to 'cut it out' and to 'leave him alone', but it still didn't remove the absent sting he felt on the side of his head when todo had made an attempt to attack him (and had also been very nearly successful in doing so).

during freshman year of high school, when the football team had been formed and established, everyone was made to introduce themselves to each other, which was where the drama had begun. long story short: todo had asked for megumi's type in women, megumi answered unsatisfactorily ('i don't have a preference, so long as she's compassionate and has an unshakeable character') which resulted in a traumatic experience of attempted murder — as yuji had called it.

"todo, get over it!"

"yeah, dude, you literally pressured him for it!"

"it just wasn't cool, dude..."

"man, you a weirdo!"

"HIS TYPE IS BORING!" todo roared, throwing the marker he had in his hand somewhere behind himself. "NO IT'S STARTING TO PISS ME OFF! NO IT'S STARTING TO— I SHOULD —"

he rolled his sleeves up threateningly.

megumi furrowed his brows at him as everyone scrambled to stop the team captain from making a decision that would get him suspended from the school entirely.

"WOAH, WOAH, WOAH —"

"— TODO MAN —"

"— BRO CHILL —"

"— CALM DOWN —"

"stop, you're gonna make megumi sad!" yuji added fiercely, before extending an arm past both toge and yuta to grab his arm. todo had turned away, chest heaving and shoulders shaking as logan and chad patted his back as though trying to silence a wailing baby. "are you okay, megumi?"

the exaggerated, pouting look on yuji's face made megumi want to punch him.

"i'm fine," he grumbled, shrugging yuji's hand off of him, but yuji had remained persistent, forcefully gluing his palm on his front and deepening his look of pity. megumi glared down at his pesky hand.

"it's okay megumi," yuji sorrowfully informed him.

"i said i'm —"

"you don't have to be sad, megumi —"

megumi took his hand and twisted it; yuji yelped and snatched his hand back, frowning as he threw his grumpy friend a pained look.

"little harsh," yuta commented, rubbing the back of his neck with a sheepish smile.

megumi averted his gaze, half annoyed. "he deserved it."

when toge let out a small chuckle, megumi looked up at the scene before him, half-listening to todo's persistent questioning (he seemed to have got over megumi and his type), the chatter weaving through the room in an easy manner, almost as though megumi hadn't just been targeted for no apparent reason at all two seconds ago. his gaze drifted over to kamo, who, as usual, remained largely unfazed, his expression somewhere between calm and indifferent as todo's relentless interrogation continued.

watching them, megumi's mind wandered slightly — his teammates' voices ebbed and flowed, equal parts curiosity and exasperation filling the space. it was only towards the end of the conversation did megumi actually find something he believed he had mild interest in...

"what's it called when someone doesn't like anyone?" saidoliver, holding his helmet against his side, beneath his arm. "like, when a person just doesn't feel anything?"

"depression," megumi answered bluntly.

every head in the room turned to look at his, some were laughing and some looked unsurprised.

oliver furrowed his brows, disappointed. "dude."

"stop projecting, man."

"bro, you good?"

megumi ignored them, mentally cursing himself for participating in the stupid conversation to begin with. he silently reminded himself to never do so again. perhaps he would note it down somewhere when he got home.

"nah, i meant when like — y'know a guy or a girl — like when they've never liked someone. or had a crush," oliver continued, turning to kamo with a shrug. "maybe you're that. whatever the hell it's called."

"not good enough," todo shook his head, arms folded over his chest in another obvious attempt to look intimidating. "if all you PATHETIC excuses for men, EXCEPT MY BROTHER YUJI, won't give me a valid type right NOW —"

"i like someone," said kamo, pinching the bridge of his nose with an obvious scowl.

everyone froze, looking up at him as though the mere idea of kamo showing interest in anyone was foreign. megumi believed they all had a right to act shocked, not that it was any of their business to begin with.

because it wasn't.

and yet, even to him, it was surprising.

a few of the guys exchanged wide-eyed glances, eyebrows raised, and mouths slightly open, the disbelief clear in their expressions. even todo, typically unshakeable in his boldness, seemed momentarily thrown off balance, his stance faltering as he processed the unexpected confession. a hush seemed to settle over the group of boys, broken only by the quiet sound of kamo's gear as he slung it over his shoulder and moved towards the exit, leaving a wave of curiosity and shock in his wake.

"c'mon man, you can't just say something like that and then leave!" andre said, hurriedly collecting his own gear to follow the stoic boy out of the locker room.

"it's mai, isn't it?" said ethan miller, slamming his locker door shut and staring at the back of kamo's head.

yuji looked at megumi and then back up at ethan. "mai zenin?"

"there's only one mai in the entire school," said ethan, nodding. he called out to kamo again. "i saw you and her speaking like a week ago or somethin'."

kamo turned around, his back to the door as he furrowed his brows, seemingly offended by the accusation.

"no it's not —" he began, letting out a sigh of exhaustion before rolling his eyes. "it's not mai."

"give us SOMETHING, then, and i'll take it!" todo demanded, slamming his hand on the whiteboard with takada on it. uncoincidentally, it landed on her behind.

kamo considered the proposal for a moment, his eyes glancing over every face in the room, nearly all of whom seemed relieved at todo's statement, before he sighed again, muttering something under his breath.

"you know her pretty well," he said, glancing at yuji and then megumi. they barely had the time to register his response before he turned away, pulling open the door to leave. "and that's all you're getting out of me," he added calmly. "so don't bother trying for more."

he left without another word.

the entire room shifted their attention to megumi and yuji, eyes darting between the two as if expecting one of them to unravel kamo's cryptic hint. a few of the guys raised their eyebrows, curiosity and intrigue plastered across their faces. logan nudged chad with a knowing grin, while toge and yuta exchanged speculative glances.

megumi could feel their gazes like a weight, pressing him to acknowledge that he, along with yuji, might know the answer everyone was dying to hear.

he turned his head to face his friend: yuji simply blinked, apparently still wrapping his head around kamo's words. but megumi believed yuji had a better shot at guessing who the mystery girl was. yuji was, after all, a million times more social than him.

as the silence lingered, megumi found himself lost in thought, trying to recall any recent interaction that could hint at kamo's mystery interest. he sifted through memories, wondering if there had been any subtle clues he'd missed — any glances, moments, or lingering exchanges that might narrow it down. kamo's calm, almost detached nature made it hard to picture him in the throes of a crush, but megumi couldn't shake the curiosity that now gnawed at him.

he only knew two girls 'pretty well', and that was you and nobara, but he could not imagine either of you hanging off of kamo's arm. in fact, if anything, he imagined kamo hanging off of nobara's arm (which didn't make sense, seeing as that would be out of character of him). similarly, megumi couldn't imagine you willingly being held back by his arm, instead choosing to skip off into the distance which would surely annoy the serious, long-haired male.

but he was well aware of the fact that nobara and kamo had shared several classes together...

he could still feel everyone's gazes burning holes all over his face, and he scowled, unwilling to give anyone the satisfaction of entertaining the idea too openly.

but it seemed that the team captain did not happen to agree with this sentiment.

"right, new task!" todo called out, clapping his hands to draw everyone's attention away from an unwilling megumi and a confused yuji to himself instead. he had already rubbed out the takada drawing and had begun the game planning. megumi had not realised it until now. "FIND KAMO'S GIRL! and this time next week, we'll gather 'round and narrow it down!"

as everyone nodded and cheered, some making their way out of the room while others lingered and chatted, he called out to both yuji and megumi.

"BROTHER!" he bellowed, pointing at him with the blue marker. "i'm leaving it to you and fushiguro!"

a pause.

"mainly you because i don't trust fushiguro!"

yuji and megumi had already stood up by that point, and megumi's scowl had deepened. it wasn't as though he cared enough to be part of this operation anyway. it was something he'd most likely think about alone, where no one could put in their unintelligent claims and disrupt his wise way of thinking. what did todo know about that anyway?

he looks like a pineapple, megumi thought to himself as he watched him demand both himelf and yuji to deal with the stupid task. and he's about as smart as one too.

"UNDERSTAND?"

"yeah!"

"sure," megumi answered, but he hadn't been paying attention at all.

todo had left the changing room, followed by majority of the team. yuji was the only one left in the room with him.

"i think it's nobara," he said, placing his helmet on his head. "she's extra mean to him 'cause he acts like he knows everything. she hates guys like that."

"that... contradicts your point," said megumi, furrowing his brows.

"no, don't you know that girls act really mean to the guys they like?" yuji chuckled, shaking his head at him as if megumi had very little knowledge. it made the dark-haired boy want to attack his friend. "hey... maybe that's why all the girls on the cheer team are so mean to me! yeah!"

megumi did not remind him of the time yuji had accidentally flashed the cheer team, and that from then on, every member, including the substitutes, would be extra harsh towards him.

"yeah," he said, putting his own helmet on and following yuji out of the room. "that's the reason."

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

exiting the theatre classroom, you caught sight of megumi waiting on one of the benches outside, still dressed in his football uniform, his untamed hair still findings ways to stand up on its own despite the fact that it must have been forced down during practice. you almost laughed out loud at the broad shoulder pads and the snug navy-blue jersey that made him look slightly out of place in the hallway, but it was the way his helmet balanced awkwardly on his lap as he stared down at it, clearly impatient, that had you grinning.

you couldn't help but laugh, your voice echoing lightly off the walls as you made your way towards him, amused by how tense he looked even off the field. he looked up at the sound, his eyes narrowing in mild annoyance as he rose to meet you, a faint crease forming between his brows.

"you look angry," you commented teasingly.

"shut up," he muttered, scowling as he lifted the helmet and carefully placed it over your head. it wobbled slightly, oversized and unsteady, making you nearly lose your balance when he gave it a firm pat on top — a solid thump, just hard enough to send a warning, though not enough to hurt.

"it's so uncomfortable," you said, as the two of you made your way to the school gates to leave. "how the hell do you football players wear this for hours on end?"

"with breaks," he answered, and you had to physically move your head upwards to actually be able to see his face, for the lines going over and under the front gap limited the scope of your vision. "you get used to it."

you hummed in response, looking over your shoulder and around the area with curiosity.

"where's yuji?" you asked casually.

"ran for his bus," said megumi, as the two of you had gone past the gates and onto the main road leading to your neighbourhood. "said he didn't wanna take the late one 'cause then he'd have to sit for most of it with todo."

"should've made him late so he'd have to take the late one," you tutted, nearly walking into a lamppost — it was megumi's quick actions that had saved you, tugging you away by your elbow.

"the hell's wrong with you?" he demanded harshly. "your vision isn't completely gone with that on. you're not blind."

"it takes a while to get used to!" you protested, rubbing the top of his helmet as though it were your own scalp. "you said so yourself!"

megumi's expression hardened, his brow furrowing as he shot you a look that seemed to question every life choice that led you to nearly walking into a lamppost. he didn't need to say a word; the look alone was enough to convey his frustration, his mouth set in a thin line as he continued to stare at you with a sort of weary patience that he seemed to reserve just for moments like this.

"stop acting drunk," he ordered, walking a step behind you now. it was as if he assumed that watching over you would prevent your free will from prevailing over his demands.

at some point during the walk home, the conversation had shifted from the limited vision with the helmet, to gossip you had heard during stage practice, to toji and the unethical ways he kept a steady income, to what his teammates were saying in the locker room earlier, something you found yourself quite fascinated with.

"i'd hate to be you, not gonna lie... but what would you have done if todo did attack you?" you asked him, drumming your fingers on the helmet which you still hadn't taken off despite how uncomfortable it felt wearing it. you turned your head (fully) to look at your own reflection in a car mirror by the crosswalk.

you thought you looked ridiculous.

you didn't care.

megumi placed a hand on the centre of his helmet and forced your head to face the front again.

"this is how you end up walking into lampposts," he lectured with a scowl, before placing his hand in the pocket of his shorts and answering your question. "i would've defended myself."

"against todo?" you gaped, stupefied. "no offence, but he'd crush you. he's — like — your dad of our generation."

"don't ever say that again," megumi had been quick to counter, and though you couldn't see it, you knew he was glaring down at you. despite the thick material of the helmet you were wearing, you felt the heat of his gaze, like lasers burning holes where they landed.

he did not like that comparison at all.

you apologised. "sorry. you're the only copy of your dad there is —"

"watch it."

"am i just not allowed to say anything then?" you snapped, your arms flailing about dramatically.

"it's a preference," megumi began, the tone of his voice sly in a way you were very much familiar with and did not like at all, "but i know you won't do it."

you raised a pointer finger defensively. "megumi, if i could see you right now —"

"— it's not that hard —"

"— and if i was as tall as you," you continued as though he hadn't interrupted, "i would head-butt you so bad, you'd wish todo was the one dealing with you."

as the two of you stepped up to the crosswalk, megumi reached out and firmly took hold of your hand, steering you with a purposeful grip so you'd follow his lead across the road. his hold was steady, guiding, yet the pointed glare he cast downwards made it clear he wasn't thrilled with the direction the conversation had taken. even as he glanced from you to the road ahead, his gaze lingered, sharp with irritation, and each time he looked back, it was as if he had been silently reminding you of the absurdity of comparing him to todo — or worse, his dad.

his hand stayed firmly around yours until you were safely on the other side of the street. he let go, only to hit you on the helmet again.

"ow!"

"shut up, that didn't hurt."

you ignored him.

"what happened next?" you queried as you tugged on his jersey and pointed at buttercup brew where miss B was waving at the two of you from behind the glass, entry doors.

you waved back, making sure megumi had too — he was much less enthusiastic, but it was still enough to please miss B, who went back to working, leaving the two of you to continue the short walk home.

megumi answered idly. "kamo said he likes someone."

your eyes widened, and if it hadn't been for his outstretched arm once again, you would have tripped over your own foot.

"WHAT?"

"for fu— be careful —"

"noritoshi kamo?" you gasped, walking alongside megumi in visible and audible shock.

the best way to describe noritoshi kamo, you decided, was a guy who had no care in the world for anything: he lost a shoe? he'd buy a new one. you lost his homework sheet you'd been copying from? he'd quickly make a new one. he lost a football game? the next one would be better.

noritoshi kamo was no optimist, but he was definitely not someone capable of romantic feelings for anyone.

or so you had thought...

"everyone just started guessing who," megumi added, frowning.

"and did they guess right?" you pressed, intrigued. "who is it?"

your dark-haired friend shrugged, which resulted in your shoulders deflating, immediately disappointed before he'd even said anything.

"that's the thing," megumi said, unbothered. "he didn't say anything about it."

"well that was anti-climactic," you mumbled, turning a corner and seeing both your houses in the distance.

the walk was nearly over, so you lifted the helmet off your head, shook your hair away from your face, and held it beneath your arm. you appreciated just how large your field of vision was now. the helmet had been pesky, hot, and annoying.

"and i'm out of gossip," you sighed, allowing the summer breeze to flow past your face, the air feeling nice against your skin. "wish nobara was here. she always has something to talk about."

"he said something in the end though. when todo forced him."

you were surprised your head hadn't popped right off your neck with how fast you'd turned it to look up and lock eyes with him. megumi needed to work on how he told and relayed stories — this was by far the worst one he'd ever done.

"well?" you prompted, stressed that the walk was shortening the closer you got to your houses.

"yuji and i know her pretty well," said megumi at last, brows furrowed as you handed him his helmet. when you raised a brow at him, visibly confused, he scowled. "his words, not mine."

the thought lingered, growing heavier as you replayed kamo's words in your mind: someone yuji and megumi know pretty well...

your brows knitted together as you tried to piece it together, replaying moments you'd seen kamo interact with people you that were close with both yuji and megumi. the issue here was that megumi's anti-social nature narrowed it down to two people:

you or nobara.

you knew with certainty it couldn't be you. you had had a fair few conversations with the male, but nothing that you could pick apart and decide that he had any interest in you. it was mostly just random, fun situations, like the time you had accidentally triggered malakai and requested kamo to support your statement that it hadn't been you, only to blame it on him (kamo) in the end.

that should make him dislike you, if anything. at the time, however, he didn't seem to care.

could nobara be the girl he liked?

that was something you'd have to ask her, though you highly doubted it. you knew her quite well, and no guy had caught her interest. at least, not at jujutsu high, where she mainly criticised the male gender and grew new icks every day that went by.

for the fun of it, you still asked megumi whether it could be possible that someone could have a crush on you.

his reaction, however, had you visibly startled.

he averted his gaze, his shoulders stiffening as though unsure of how to respond. you waited, but his silence lingered, and his eyes seemed to dart briefly to the ground, almost as if he'd been caught off guard by your question.

your brows raised as you bit back a smile. it was rare to see him hesitate like this — normally, he'd offer some blunt response or scowl and move on, but now, an uncharacteristic awkwardness settled over him, and it looked almost as if he was bracing himself, unable to fully meet your gaze.

"no," he finally settled on saying, walking you to your door as he always would when going home together.

"you hesitated," you informed him knowingly.

"i was thinking of how long it'd take for you to scare them off," megumi shot back, ringing the doorbell for you.

you watched him walk off the porch, hearing footsteps echo from behind the front door as you hummed, nodding.

"nice save," you told him, relishing in his scowl, the last thing you saw on his face before your mom had opened the door and allowed you in, closing it behind you after telling megumi to come inside — he had refused like the delinquent porcupine he was.

and as megumi made his way over to his own porch, he realised that for the first time ever, he couldn't help the feeling of relief after ending a conversation with you.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

bonus scene:

the helicopter incident of 2016...

"what the fuck?"

megumi staggered away from the three of you —yourself, yuji, and nobara — craning his neck in a desperate attempt to peer over his shoulder at his own backside. bewildered, he muttered to himself, trying to comprehend why his so-called friends had just collectively ambushed him, each having touched his bottom once before guffawing loudly. what had you all done to him?

he made his way to the back door (but not before throwing the three of you a menacing glare) using the reflection of the glass as a mirror.

he was left horrified at the sight of three different handprints made out of neon paint colours (bright yellow, vibrant pink, and an intense lime) on the most compromising part of his pants:

his ass.

"shit — look at his face," you gasped, chest heaving at his expression. "take a picture with — catch it! — my phone."

you tossed your phone to nobara, who, unlike you and yuji, had the least amount of paint coating her delicate hands. meanwhile megumi's had shot to cover his behind as he whipped around, fixing the three of you with a glare so fierce, it might have turned a lesser person to stone.

flash! flash! flash!

nobara had captured his expressions, postures, and stances before he had a chance to compose himself into something less revealing.

as you took your phone out of nobara's hands, your attention had been drawn to a growing commotion behind you, distant shouts and laughter cutting through the playful chaos around megumi. you tossed a quick, amused glance back at nobara and yuji, both of whom were doubled over in laughter, still entirely focused on your collective attack on megumi, before aiming the lens on your phone not at your porcupine's flustered face, but at the source of the noise in the distance, recording just in time to capture a particularly raucous burst of laughter that had echoed around the backyard.

toji, towering and muscular, stood with his arms flat against his sides, looking both impatient and exasperated as satoru (in front of him) and suguru (behind him) launched paint-filled balloons at him. each balloon splattered bright colours across his chest, only to be rebuffed by his broad, muscular torso in what seemed like a defiant bounce.

splashes of paint exploded across his 'man-tits,' as satoru had so eloquently called them, left bright patches on his shirt as he glared at the two childish men surrounding him, chest heaving and fists clenched.

"shit!"satoru took several steps back, looking down at his own chest where the balloon he'd thrown at toji had bounced back at himself instead, splattering his white shirt with bright blue. he looked up at suguru, eyes wide behind his glasses. "that one came from his right titty —"

suguru laughed, throwing a paint balloon up in the air, catching it, and then launching it at the oddly-silent toji.

only for it to bounce back, just as expected. he had stepped aside just in time. "and that one came from his left breast —"

the veins running up toji's hands and arms grew more prominent as the two continued.

"HA!" satoru pointed at his chest. "toji? more like titty —"

suguru shook his head with a sigh. "satoru, don't be childish," he said, and his best friend actually paused, brows raised in surprise. that was before suguru had clarified: "he's big titty toji —"

SPLAT!

when satoru swung his arm around in a dramatic manner while laughing, he had accidentally released another paint ballon straight at the ticking time bomb that was toji fushiguro.

he only laughed harder at that.

"look guys!" he called out to the rest of you. you zoomed in on the scene — satoru's arms were outstretched, presenting toji as if he was some special, endangered animal, rare and one-of-a-kind. "it's toji titty-guro—"

without warning, toji's arms shot out, his hands seizing both satoru and suguru by the collars of their shirts with effortless strength. you couldn't see his face, so you were unsure of whether he had been grinning, or neutral, or angry, etc, but you watched in both horror and amusement as he began to spin, dragging them with him in a rapid, dizzying circle.

every other commotion around the backyard had stopped, everyone turning to look at the odd scene, equal parts confused and terrified.

toji's feet dug into the ground, kicking up small clouds of dust, while satoru and suguru both flailed helplessly at his sides, their limbs whipping outwards as if they were rag dolls caught in a whirlwind.

a whirlwind...

"it's a tornado!" you yelled, looking around and trying hard to keep your phone steady, but the scene was so funny, your hands were shaking with the effort.

toji's powerful grip and force turned their attempts to wriggle free into nothing more than frantic gestures, their faces a mix of shock and a hint of terror as they were spun around faster and faster...

you zoomed out to capture mamaguro at the back, watching the scene with narrowed eyes and furrowed brows.

"are you gonna stop your... husband...?" you heard your mom question, sounding completely weirded out. and honestly — who could blame her?

what the hell was happening in the fushiguros' backyard?

"i... would," mamaguro muttered, carefully watching the scene continue to unfold before her, getting worse as time went on, "but... how?"

there was no opening for her to enter, you noticed. if she tried, she'd get caught up in the spinning andget severely injured too...

you couldn't believe what was happening before your eyes. you didn't know what was happening before your eyes. you didn't think you'd ever know what was happening before your eyes.

from your peripheral vision, you could see a stick of yellow just lingering awkwardly, and when you turned your head to glance at it, you nearly face palmed when you realised it was your father in his banana body-suit outfit. the only thing visible about him was the gap where his face rested. everything else, from his head, to his figure, to his shoulders, to his thighs, and to the majority of his legs, were all concealed by the thick material.

"that looks fun!" he commented brightly, a dopy smile over his face. he made an attempt to waddle over to the unnatural disaster. "i'm gonna join —"

"no, no," your mom was quick to hold him back by his banana-shaped body. she ushered him to the side, shaking her head violently. "no, honey, no. just... you're not going over there."

surprisingly, despite several minutes having gone by, the disaster was still going. in fact, everyone had believed it to be finished when toji had stopped (revealing the other dishevelled men stumbling over their own footsteps) only for the man to spin himself around only and charge at the duo again.

violently.

"round two!" you called out, startled. "round two or — or — er — round one point five since it never... it never finished, technically — oh my god —"

you focused your camera around the backyard, spotting mai climbing over the fence. her eyes met your phone, and she disappeared behind the wall without a second thought.

wise, you thought to yourself, wondering if mimiko and nanako had done the same, for despite several pans of the large area, your camera could not seem to find them.

a bellow erupted across the scene, stopping everything and everyone cold in their tracks. you turned, a jolt running down your spine at the sight of ogi and the sound of his voice thundering through the air — you fumbled to stop your recording in a panic, heart pounding.

a wave of silence blanketed the chaos.

toji froze mid-spin, his arms still outstretched, while satoru and suguru, dishevelled and breathless, stared up from the ground, shock and trauma wiping away their usual confidence. megumi, still clutching his rear, went pale, his expression stiffening as he shrank further into his hiding place. your dad, in his ridiculous banana costume, managed a sheepish, guilty smile, while mamaguro blinked, bewildered, glancing between her husband and the mess of people sprawled about. tsumiki giggled softly in the corner, the only one unfazed, her amusement uncontained. in the abrupt stillness, ogi's glare was sharp enough to cut through steel, as if daring anyone to make the next move.

"WHAT," he demanded, voice booming, "IS GOING ON HERE?"

there was only silence that followed his question as he slowly entered the backyard, paint and balloons all over the grass and fences, a mess.

"AN EVENT ORGANISED TO ENCOURAGE NORMALCY, AND THIS FAMILY CAN'T EVEN DO THAT!"

his eyes, cold and sharp, darted to megumi, whose back was flat against the fence.

"THE VERY PROGENY OF THE ZENIN CLAN — WITH RAINBOW HANDPRINTS ON HIS GODDAMN ASS!"

megumi's cheeks burned as he scowled. it didn't help that yuji and nobara were still holding back their laughter too.

"AND YOU!" ogi turned to a normal (now?) toji, looking him up and down with such disgust, you'd think he were staring at a homicide scene. it might have actually been one, to be fair. "I CANT EVEN SAY THAT YOU'RE PART OF MY BLOODLINE! WHAT WAS THIS, A RE-ENACTMENT OF KAMIKAZE?"

toji scoffed, throwing satoru a glare. "he was the pilot —"

satoru stood up almost immediately. "you were the helicopter —"

"SIT DOWN."

despite his obvious reluctance, satoru silently complied.

ogi took this as a sign to continue, glowering menacingly at the white-haired, dark-haired duo. now, literal partners in crime.

"WE GOT SPONGEBOB AND PATRICK OVER HERE, DOING GOD-KNOWS-WHAT. WHY IS YOUR HAIR A MESS AND WHY ARE YOUR GLASSES BROKEN?"

satoru reached up to take his glasses off, hanging in an odd, desperate position over the bridge of his nose, a pout on his face at the sight of the irreparable damage.

he glared at toji from over his shoulder. "HEY —"

"OI LEAVE HIM ALONE!" ogi was quick to add, irate. "IF YOU HADN'T BOTHERED HIM, MAYBE HE WOULDN'T HAVE MADE AN ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE THE TWO OF YOU FROM EXISTENCE!"

he rubbed his hands over his wrinkled face, before starting at the two men again.

"NO, I'LL TELL YOU WHY THE BOTH OF YOU LOOK LIKE THIS, IT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE BEHAVING LIKE MONKEYS — I DON'T WANNA HEAR IT GETO!" he added harshly, for suguru had an oddly deep hatred for the animal and whichever family it comes from, and had seemed particularly offended with ogi's comment. "I MEAN LOOK AT THE STATE OF YOU! YOU LOOK LIKE MAI'S FIRST GRADE ART PROJECT THAT I THREW IN THE TRASH —"

maki, who had been lingering at the back with your mom stepped forward despite your mom's silent actions not to.

"you threw that away?" she questioned, eyes narrowed behind her round, clear glasses. "she spent years attacking me for it —"

ogi's hardened expression had faltered slightly, a look of pain crossing his features. you were certain it was more about getting caught than the actual issue at hand.

"yeah, yeah, it was you that threw it," he mindlessly replied, before his jaw had clenched harder than before. "SPEAKING OF, WHERE THE HELL IS YOUR SISTER?"

maki sniffed, irritated. "i don't —"

"this has that luke kid written all over it," ogi interrupted, uncaring of maki. "GREAT! SO I'VE GOT A RUNAWAY BRIDE, AND TWEEDLE DEE AND TWEEDLE DUM ARE MISSING. PROBABLY AT THE ZOO ACTING LIKE THEIR FATHER — SHUT IT GETO."

he swivelled on the spot, his long hair whipping behind himself as his eyes zeroed in on your father, still in that banana costume of his.

"AND YOU — GET RID OF THAT RIDICULOUS COSTUME! THEY MIGHT WANNA EAT YOU NEXT — TRYNA JOIN THE HELICOPTER WITH HIS IDIOCY!"

your father frowned, but still made an attempt at trying to unzip himself. his arms, however, were much too short to go around the costume and reach the zipper.

"well it's kinda..." he murmured, bending his knees for a better angle, "stuck... i need some... help... here... honey?"

your mom turned away, drinking her lemonade with raised brows. "who's honey?"

uncle ogi had had enough. "G-GET BACK HERE AND TAKE HIS STUPID COSTUME OFF OF HIM!"

your mom turned back around, but her eyes were darting over the place as though ogi was speaking to anyone but her.

"IT'S YOUR CARELESS BEHAVIOUR THAT'S MADE HIM BELIEVE IT'S OKAY TO WEAR STUFF LIKE THAT. I'M GETTING A HEATSTROKE JUST LOOKING AT HIM!"

she glanced at her husband, watching him fall backwards due to his failed attempt at bending his knees to reach his own zipper.

she muttered under her breath: "you'd think that men would have a mind of their own..."

"YOU'RE NOT OFF THE HOOK EITHER TSUMIKI, I EXPECTED MORE FROM YOU. LAUGHING — ENCOURAGING THIS BEHAVIOUR?" he started, typically unusual, for tsumiki was never the one in trouble. today was full of surprises. he raised an accusatory pointer finger at her. "YOU WANNA BE A MOTHER SOMEDAY? YOU BETTER HOPE THEY DON'T TURN OUT LIKE THESE IDIOTS."

his eyes darted over you all in one massive circle, his mouth in a straight line.

"THIS FAMILY'S A DISGRACE TO THE ZENIN NAME —"

"not even a zenin," satoru grumbled to himself.

"yeah, neither am i," suguru agreed, blowing his bangs away from his face.

"i'm literally a l/n," you mumbled to yourself.

toji dusted himself off. "my son's not a zenin."

"THE POINT IS... YOU'VE SUMMONED THE WHOLE OF BIKINI BOTTOM TO RECORD US!" uncle ogi roared, pointing at the neighbours peeking over the fences with their phones at hand. you couldn't bring it in yourself to blame them. if you had seen the same scene happen elsewhere, you would have recorded it too.

you had recorded it, not that uncle ogi needed to know that...

"WHY ARE WE LETTING PEASANTS MAKE A LAUGHING STOCK OUT OF US?" he demanded loudly. he aggressively turned to mr smith, a white, bald man from just down the block. "OI YOU, GET RID OF THAT CAMERA BEFORE I GIVE YOU A REASON TO TAKE ME TO COURT!"

he turned to mamaguro, eyes widening at the sight of her.

"i nearly forgot about you..." he began, before taking everyone by surprise by the sheer volume of his voice, as though he hadn't been speaking that way for the past five minutes. "YOU WERE THE BRAINS BEHIND THIS ALL. WHAT MADE YOU THINK THAT THIS FAMILY COULD DO ANY EVENT WITHIN THE REALM OF HOW NORMAL OR MESSY IT SHOULD BE? THAT THEY WOULDN'T PUT THEIR STUPID TOES OUT OF LINE? THAT THEY'D BE SENSIBLE —"

"now hang on a minute," said mamaguro, her kind voice shaky, "this is not my fault! my colleague recommended a —"

"WHAT DOES YOUR COLLEAGUE KNOW ABOUT THIS FAMILY?" ogi snapped harshly. "NO BETTER THAN YOU, CLEARLY!"

he let out a deep exhale, but the tension in his temple and shoulders remained as he slowly turned around to face you. you were stunned in place, unmoving, unsmiling, unsure of what to do with yourself, in fact.

you only carefully made sure the camera was out of his sight, hidden in your back pocket where he'd have no clue that you had been recording earlier.

"AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE-TIME, THIS ONE WASN'T INVOLVED IN ANY OF IT!"

you nodded proudly, mimicking his words silently behind him, pointing at satoru, pointing at suguru, even pointing at your mom.

"DIDNT EVEN START IT!" he continued loudly.

for this one, you specifically made sure to mouth the words to megumi, who you could tell, just from his cruel facial expressions, wanted nothing more than to out you right then and there, but for the first time ever, it was your word against his, and with the way things were going, you were bound to win, no difficulty.

"THIS WILL GO DOWN IN THE HISTORY BOOKS, I TELL YOU! how SHE became the role-model for you dimwits."

"role model," you mouthed, pointing at everyone. "for you, for you, and especially," you made sure to swivel your finger in a circle this time, "you."

toji gritted his teeth at you, but said nothing. you grinned confidently.

uncle ogi turned away again, eyes closed shut as he sighed audibly, a vein on his forehead threatening to burst. it only popped up again when he found yuji and nobara staring back at him.

"AND WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TWO?"

"damn... you'd think he'd know our names by now," yuji commented, rubbing his neck with shame.

"right," nodded nobara, shaking her head. "so rude."

"friends of yours?" uncle ogi turned to you, speaking in that gruff tone he usually had. but it was significantly different to the way he had been speaking to the rest of the family today. you mentally giggled to yourself as you nodded. "fine."

he glared down at satoru and suguru, eyes twitching at the mess of pain all over their white shirts, brows furrowing at the mess maid of their hairs, and lips pursing at the broken glasses satoru was still clinging onto.

"you two..." he began, voice rough and firm. "go to shoko, just go."

satoru sat up defiantly. "i don't need —"

"NOW."

satoru and suguru did their walk of shame out of the backyard.

everyone had done theirs at some point.

everyone, you noted with a pleasant smile, except for you.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. .・。.・゜✭・.・

notes: the scariest event for halloween imo, is the helicopter incident. the zenin-fushiguro-gojo-l/n-geto family would agree. wbu guys???

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taglist (send an ask or comment to be added):

@1l-ynn @shaigimo @shuupiu @nappingnai @momoewn @xbarrjallenx @reinaswrld @anintrovertedechoe @cherriee-ee @hfuensiekabhsufnd @k0z3me @laughingfcx @jelly-fsh @anonymity-222 @blubearxy

© tojiscrack (previously ack4rwoman)

if you enjoyed my writing, i’d really appreciate it if you tipped me — tumblr no longer has the tip function, so maybe here in my tip jar :)

i do not own any of the characters of jjk, i only own the character of y/n and her mother. the other characters belong to gege akutami.

[tainbocuailnge]

just really sucks that fgo is not a good game. there's never anything to do in fgo. there's a pretty hard plateau on how far player power scales within the gameplay system even accounting for blatant powercreep in servants so there's a pretty hard limit on what they can do to keep fights interesting too. new chapters don't actually pose any significant new challenges or goals outside just getting to read the story because your power plateaus so hard so they need to lock events behind story completion to get people to bother at all. the only thing to do outside events is farm and the only thing to do during events is farm because there's almost no content that actually employs your full roster and even less of it is permanently available to replay.

if you put granblue down for a few months you can pick back up where you left off and there will be new goals to work towards and anything you missed will come back around sooner or later. if you put fgo down for a few months there won't really be anything new to do save perhaps a new main story chapter to do your one-time completion of but you'll have missed several event stories that you'll never get another chance to read ingame. if arknights is having downtime and you don't feel like just dumping ap to farm you can go fuck around in its multiple alternate gamemodes or you can cook funny challenge clears of various bossfights or whatever because almost every single map in the game is permanently available to replay whenever. if fgo is having downtime and you're caught up on the story all there is to do is farm. and because it's been this way for years every endgame player has piles and piles of resources already so they keep having to invent new ludicrous resource sinks to keep those players busy.

in several ways it feels like fgo is just running into the limits of its own approaching 10 years old system and that's why they're struggling to figure out how to keep a sense of progression in the game. stuff like lv120 grail cap or the OC class networks being these huge resource sinks for minimal stat gains feel like they're scared to expand player powerlevel too much because at a base level there's just so much rng involved in the combat that any stat increase has the potential to spiral immensely. but they also just keep making absolutely baffling decisions especially regarding content availability. in fgo if you start playing the game because you were enticed by the bodacious bikini babes on the summer banners you won't ever actually get to play the event they feature in because it's locked behind catching up with the entire main story and will never be available again past its initial runtime. this cannot be a good business model. fgo fans can't read but at this point you can hardly even blame them when the game won't let them read.

[bored-trans-orchidsexual]

Darumi Amemiya mechanical musings

Darumi was an immediate favorite for me, and many others who come from Dangonrompa. She's clearly based on the Dangonrompa fandom, and used to both make fun of themselves as well as make meta commentary on the players depending on the moment. She's an unapologetic weirdo, obsessed with porn and murder, and she's so vibe.

Her character design is *busy* in the way a fangirl's would be. Meticulous makeup not just to change her appearance, but also basically doodling on her face, with extra teeth and a random heart. Random oversized pins attached to her clothes, oversized sleeves, mismatched patterns, it all screams "look at me" while her attitude screams "ignore me!" In a way only an edgy teen could combine.

Her specialist skill is surprisingly complex for a starting character. Where most characters in the game get fatigued while acting, thanks to "Special Sick Day" she uses exhaustion as a form of tempo. Her attacks function differently depending on if she has fatigue or not, and two of them even remove her own fatigue, the only character in the game who can remove fatigue while attacking. It's also worth noting her attacks often have a high voltage rating, so frequent use of her is a great way to build voltage fast, snowballing into extra stats and actions.

Her first attack, "Homicide", is a fantastic cross-shaped ranged attack, hitting up to 5 spaces and has a high voltage rate, even having flight +2 to deal more damage to flying foes. It's low-power variant does even more damage, so with enough attack power Darumi can clear entire groups at once while racking up voltage just with her basic attack. Her second attack, "Stay with me", is a pure debuff, dealing no damage (even with attack buffs) but lowering movement with the high-power form and *insert low-power later*, it's pretty handy when controlling a group you don't have time to kill in the same turn. Her third attack, "I feel fine", is a straight-line attack that deals a little more damage than her first, while also restoring 1 HP. Depending on position/exact foe health, this might be the better call, but honestly Homicide does such a good job this is just extra tech. As a ranged fighter she can also get early strike, which does use her cross-shaped attack pattern.

Her special attack, "You'll get what you deserve", hits a wide area, deals a good amount of damage, and even inflicts bleed for more damage on the tanker foes. Considering the more nitche patterns of other characters, hers is pretty reliable.

Darumi's Kit makes her a formidable force on the battlefield. With upgrades/attack buffs, she can take down an entire side during a defensive battle by herself, while pumping up your voltage. Foes she can't finish off she can render immobile while hitting them with early strike, even restores her own health and removes her own fatigue, making her easily gobble up AP while the rest of your forces sit on the sidelines.

While her personality isn't for everyone, it's worth noting that (small spoiler, so stop reading if you want to fully experience this game yourself) this is intentional. Darumi is genuinely into her hobbies but jacks up her personality to be annoying, so she can keep people at a distance. Don't have to worry about rejection if nobody likes you to begin with! ...a little too relatable.

But what do you think about your girl, Darumi? I'll need to edit this a little when I'm home so I can fill out the parts I can't find online I'm just posting these while bored at work.

[pinkpinkmermayyy]

How different members of The Avengers play Project Sekai (Hatsune Miku Colorful Stage)/Sonolus [Part 1]:

Tony Stark: Is an absolute MVP. Always gets APs even on the VERY difficult songs, always gets "S" scores because of his team stats, has a bunch of gems (tokens used to "pull" for characters, as it is a gacha game). But his pulling luck sucks ass, and he never gets the four stars he actually wants. Also the type to do the weirdest shit with the game, like playing it on his TV or something. He prefers Sonolus over Project Sekai though. Will skip through all the stories just to get the gems and music cards.

Steve Rogers: He thinks expert mode is on the same difficulty as Sonolus. Has a pretty good team but there's always one moment at the end of every song where he misses a note, especially when he's had a full combo the whole time. Falls for those "breaks" in the song and panics when he misses a bunch of notes because of them. Will actually be interested in the storylines (Tony makes fun of him for that).

Bruce Banner: Starts the entire song over if he even misses one note. Will crash out and maybe even turn into the Hulk if he misses a note at the end and loses his combo. Doesn't play it much because he hates how it makes him unnecessarily stressed out. Fucking DESPISES Sonolus and never touches that game.

Natasha Romanoff: Is pretty good at both Project Sekai and Sonolus, doesn't have a preference for either game. Is AMAZING at appending, like it just comes naturally to her. Hates flick notes though, those always throw her off. Will actually read the stories too and be invested in them (if she saw Mafuyu's mom irl she would hurl a truck at her). Her favorite band would be 25:00 and her favorite character would be Mafuyu or Kanade.

Thor: Gets frustrated whenever he so much as loses his AP streak and starts over all the time. Will search up the meanings behind every song he plays (and gets traumatized because of it lmao). The type to have the mv in the background in FULL BRIGHTNESS and still be able to see the notes and even get full combos. Will crash out whenever lag makes him lose his combo.

These are the ones I actually had ideas on, I might make a part 2 lolol

@sh3s4k1ll3rqu33n @lunadensmidnightprowl @itsfrthebirds

[would-this-pokemon-be-a-friend]

Would Pansage or Simisage be a good pet?

[As per usual, I flipped a coin! Pansage it is!]

Pansages would make great pets!

They’re around the same size as real-world monkeys, which means that they’re not going to be too much of a problem for any home. It’s important to point out, however, that pansages cannot be said to be “pretty much just a monkey”: in the real-world, there are many contexts in which apes are not the best pets. Unlike real-world apes, however, pansages are significantly less dangerous to have in the home. Real-world monkeys can be quite dangerous due to their formidable nails and sharp teeth, whereas pansages seem to have neither. Monkeys living as pets tend to develop mental issues as well, since they require socialization with other monkeys and often become antisocial towards humans who try to domesticate them. While pansages may indeed benefit from spending time with other pansages, there is no indication in the pokédex that implies that living with humans would be detrimental to their mental health.

Pansages are exceptionally friendly and generous. The leaves that grow on their heads are actually edible, and pansages have been observed as having no problem sharing them with other species, especially those who look weary (White). The leaves on their heads have a peculiar medicinal effect, relieving stress and boosting the energy of anyone who eats them (Black, White). Pansages aren’t greedy with their food either: these berry eating pokémon share their gathered food with friends all the time (Black2/White2). Don’t be surprised if your Pansage tries to share the berries you feed them with you, or any other goodies they’re able to get their hands on.

As for your home, you’re going to want to be aware that pansages are active climbers. In the wild, this pokémon makes its home in the forest (Black), so their bodies are well equipped for an arboreal lifestyle. It would be a good idea to keep this in mind when finding places to store food where they can’t easy access it, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to provide them with safe climbing spaces to play on, like indoor cat trees or a children’s playground. If you let your Pansage play in an actual tree, just make sure they aren’t able to escape and get lost on accident!

As far as their moves go, there isn’t too much to worry about. Pansages don’t have any move with a power stat higher than 80, which, given their size, means they can’t hurt you too terribly bad. Unlike a lot of grass-type pokémon, pansages don’t produce harmful spores, which is a definite plus. Considering their gentle, friendly, demeanor, you won’t need to worry too much about your Pansage attacking anyone, but even if they do it would be unlikely to result in anything lethal.

Overall, unlike many real-world apes, pansages would make great pets! If you are someone who struggles with low energy or high stress, a pansage may be a particularly good choice for you. In fact, I’d wager that pansages would make great support pets for people with mood disorders and other disabilities like myself. I don’t mean to over-editorialize, but I’d love a pansage for this very reason!

[cellarsnserpents]

The Gibbering Mouther. A monster of such eldritch design, it'll drive your DM mad.

The Gibbering Mouther! A freakish thing as twisted as any DM could hope for. A screaming sack of flesh, muttering the last thoughts of countless souls as they were wrought anew by some debased wizard? Yes please! Now I'll be honest, when I was a wee boy, obsessing over my 3rd edition monster manual (the only ttrpg book I had for many years), I doubt I ever even read the stat block for this thing. But I remember this art vividly.

Look at this fucking thing. Pure meat horror.

Well, this lovely little freak kinda sat in the back of my mind, just waiting for the right moment to be unleashed on my unsuspecting friends, and finally that day had arrived. A perfect scenario for some eldritch abominations. A derelict ship, drifting aimlessly after two different evil cults each killed each other to the last man on board.

So I pull out my 5e monster manual, leaf to my big mouthy boy with anticipation, and read the stat block...

What. The. Fuck.

Saves. Saves. Saves and more fucking Saves! How many rolls could you possibly need? Lets break this down, because I can't quite believe this is a real stat block. This is a horror monster, presumably it should try and ambush the players. I mean with an Int of 3 it's dumber than an ape, but still. I want to spook my friends, so I'm gonna have this thing jump out of some hole or slither up through the floor boards or other equally freaky shenanigans. So we'll assume at least one character is starting their turn within 10 feet. So they start with roll 1. Strength save.

Next they hear its horrible gibbers and screams. make another 2. Wisdom Save. Better not fail this one, or the DM must now, 3. Roll d8 to determine what that character does, 50/50 it's nothing (players love not playing right?), or 4. Roll another d8 to determine a random movement direction (again probably nothing if your in a cramped space and just walk into a wall), or 6. Roll to attack and 7. Roll to damage a 8. randomly picked unfortunate...

That's 8 potential dice rolls, on every turn, before the thing even takes an action, half of them the DM has to track and do themselves, only for either nothing to happen, or the Barbarian turns around and punches the hapless wizard in the face.

What kind of masochistic, dice fetishist would put themselves through this nonsense? Not me, that's for sure. But I'm too fond of this guy's design to just toss him away, so I'll have to commit the perennial 5e DM's task, fixing something for free that a professional game designer did for money. First lets set some goals.

No "Save at the start of your turn". I dislike saves in general. Roll a dice so that the cool thing doesn't happen, sucks. Let the thing do it's thing, and let the players figure out how to deal with it.

I like the concept of it's maddening wails causing random chaos and fear, so let's lean into that. But 1 dice roll = 1 result, none of this roll to roll to roll again crap.

It spits flashbangs? Why? Toss that, redo entirely. Lets give it something freak to do.

First. It's an ooze so obviously it should be Amorphous.

Next, no saving throw to get your feet stuck, difficult terrain is enough to track.

Now the good stuff. The Gibbering! No saves, instead nearby characters can choose. Listen to the thing's raving (and maybe even get something good) or give up the use of your hands for the turn. This still hits the effect of madness inducing chaos, but with 1/8th the dice rolls and a lot more flavor. And why would all the poor souls trapped in the mouther be malevolent all the time, sometimes they might say something nice, or reveal some impossible truth. More eldritch that way.

Last the blinding spit is gone, I get that it was another way to immobilize prey, but it was lame and dumb, so now the thing can scream the molecules around it into entropic sludge. Some saves here, but at least the effects are now suitably horrifying.

You can find the stat block here: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/xlKWKatH_HYg

[wirewitchviolet]

Solo Tryout of Vice & Violence (Part 1- Background/Character Creation/1st Example Dungeon)

I like playing tabletop RPGs. Also designing them, GMing them, and just kinda reading through the rulebooks. I've done a surprising number of these things professionally. Really professionally even. And I have a good number of Opinions about things. One of those being that people have some real dumb hang-ups about comparing different games and editions of games and really need to get over their weird console wars mindset and vary up their diet.

Another rather strong Opinion I have is that people have terrible terrible blind spots about the things they don't personally need out of a core RPG book. Just about everyone leaves out SOMETHING big. TO play a game you need basic general rules, ideally some weirdly specific ones, stuff on how to build up a setting, NPCs to populate it, enemies of some kind, rules for making characters, some real sense of flavor in terms of "hey, what's the deal with the PCs, what sort of adventures are they going on, and why?" and all sorts of stuff about interactions between players and the GM and how to pace things out. D&D tends to give you so many granular character options and monsters but handwave the actual roleplaying bits. A lot of indie stuff just kind of assumes you want to ad hoc ALL the rules. So many things have a cool setting and forget to explain how you interact with it... but the other day I somehow randomly stumbled across something that's super good at presenting the total package. Really everything you need, nice and concise, smart design decisions, cool rules, really good GMing advice, sample adventures, a bestiary, the works!

There's one catch though, and it's why I'm not going to link to the game directly here, nor show much of the actual contents. The cool game I found, Vice & Violence, is a single-person project with a lush 200 page free PDF of a core book, illustrated by the creator... and the creator's day job is drawing REALLY extreme fetish porn. Whole book is SUPER NSFW.

Now, the game itself, it should be noted, isn't inherently porn-y. There's a couple details about the core setting that tie into the creator's general proclivities. To use the example the author promotes it with, the main central city has a taxi service where your party pays a giant to climb into their mouth and safely get across town riding in their stomach, so, that's a thing, and there's totally rules for having sex in here, but they're a pretty dry "OK so if the slutty bard wants to seduce the guard and the rest of the party slips past, here's a chart to roll on for how much time they can buy, and here's a stat for how long the bard needs to rest for before they can try that sort of thing again. Text-wise I've seen much worse in some Pathfinder APs and official D&D splatbooks. The actual big thing thematically is this very Darkest Dungeons flavor of adventuring being an inherently traumatic business and having to balance scoring treasure hauls from dungeons so you can keep buying food and water with being so harrowed by the experience you develop drinking and smoking habits you then need to deal with.

The whole thing IS illustrated though, and while some of these are just gorgeous spreads like this , most of them are A LOT.

You'd think the easy fix for this is, find people willing to play it, copy all the text out of the book, make some tasteful edits, and run it with some friends. However, all the text in here is baked into images, so, I can't really do that, and even if I could, it'd feel way too disrespectful? This is someone's passion project, released for free, and I don't wanna go being some censoring prude bootlegging it. Plus there's a culture war going on. This art is not at all my thing, but I can hang, and I'd like to get an impression of it all as-is. I ABSOLUTELY don't know anyone willing to play the RPG with the giant bare boobs and anatomically correct satyr on the cover though, so the only recourse I have is to roll up a whole party, GM it for myself, and see how it goes!

Character Creation

A LOT of this game's flavor is 1st Edition D&D, which includes character creation (and most other things) being really really dice based. Not only are you encouraged to roll your stats (for your first character anyway), you also roll your race, some background traits, your starting equipment, and your birthsign, which isn't your class (you don't even get one of those at level 1) but points you towards it.

Here's the party my dice spit out at me:

Whut'en Otherling (Effectively a tiefling but the actual deal is VERY mixed ancestry) Traits: I'm fascinated by stuff from the Imperial age. I came from a Dragonkin egg. It was weird. Stats: Smarts +0 Brawn +1 Moxie +0 Hotness +3 Combat Gear: Glass Bow d8+3+1 Medium Armor d6 Life: 6/6

Knocks Klunkin Alloyan (Half-human half-dwarf) Traits: I have dwarven tattoos all over my arms. My butt often gets stuck in doorways. Stats: Smarts -1 Brawn +0 Moxie +1 Hotness +2 SPELLS: Shield (2d8 armor bonus 1 round or barrier) (1/1 uses) Combat Gear: Wood Short Sword d4+1 Full Armor d8+1 Life: 7/7

Swift Dasherskin Centaur Traits: My fur is turning grey. I want to go out in a blaze of glory. My eyes are two different colors. Each. Stats: Smarts +0 Brawn +0 Moxie +2 Hotness +2 SPELLS: Fireball (3d6 damage+burning/set fire) (3/3 uses) Combat Gear: Bronze Axe d8+2 Medium Armor d6+2

So'Ranfi Dragonkin (Quetzian) (Mostly the obvious, some neat/weird biology) Traits: [Exact wording's a tad spicy. Let's just say jiggly.] I have an annual duel with my own father. Stats: Smarts +4 Brawn -1 Moxie +0 Hotness +3 Combat Gear: Bronze Spear d6+2-1 Medium Armor d6 Life: 6/6

Everyone also has a bunch of random stuff they started with like "a very harshly worded employee evaluation" and "a half empty bottle of banana daiquiri," but you don't need to see that. And I skipped over everyone's birthsign. While you do roll those, you then get a pretty signifcant choice of perks from them. Here's what Swift got for example:

Poison comes up a lot, so being immune to it would really help, and make sense for a party animal (his full set of starting gear suggests a bit of hedonism), but casting spells when you don't have the right stats or gear can have Very Bad results, and he has a deathwish, so I went with the spell. All of these I had to think about a bit like that. It's interesting as the one way to really guide your character at level 0.

Adventure #1: Clearing out some zombies

This book has a LOT of stuff for first-time GMs, including a nice series of pre-written adventures which start off extremely detailed and handhold-y and slowly give way to providing looser tips and charts to kinda take the training wheels off. We start of very easy, just beginning our campaign with the party getting briefed about an adventure and dropped off at the location, which conveniently has a little shopping stall out front with someone to recommend some general supplies people may not have, what with starting with a bunch of random crap and a handful of coins and all.

One of the things that really grabbed me here is how granular this gets about time management. As you can see here, you basically do things in boardgamey 15 minute turns. Enter a room, do a thing, whether it's search it, talk to people, or get in a fight, that's 15 minutes. Walk in with a lit torch, it's going to sputter out about 8 rooms in. Random encounter chances get rolled on the hour and climb up. It's pretty easy to manage, it adds a sense of time pressure, and some risk to stopping and resting for a bit. I may steal this bit for other games.

Anyway, this setting has a ton of undead, mainly due to the death goddess not wanting to rush people through the process and leaving people waiting. Most of these are perfectly kind and civilized zombies (and indeed, the rules for PC death involve making a roll to see if you actually die/spend the rest of the adventure as a ghost/just get up as a zombie and have to deal with the social ramifications). But some end up as the mindless violent sort, so here, some zombies are hiring the party to put down some other zombies. Mostly it's a straight shot through some quick combat bits, with a couple set pieces, a friendly NPC encounter, and a nasty boss fight at the end. Rooms where a fight is set to break out in particular have a lot of attention called to environmental features the party can use to get an edge, and encourages, this being a bit of a tutorial, for the GM to really point them out proactively. Solid design.

And combat is... pretty solid here. Attacks always hit, you just roll damage and subtract a roll for armor. Initiative depends on what you're fighting mainly rather than stats or a roll-off. Dumb cannon fodder zombies just go last, things that come charging in lead with that, unless you sneak up on them, some things actively go between PCs' turns. Since you're basically guaranteed to do SOME damage on a hit, it's pretty easy to predict who needs to hit what how many times to take it down, so you can coordinate and prioritize targets pretty well. It's all theater of the mind based so there's generally no awkward positioning to worry about (although the first combat in here has a narrow bridge if you wanna force something there). PCs can go down QUICK, particularly when starting out, but you've got a hero point sort of resource to auto-dodge catastrophically damaging things, you have to spend 3 rounds at 0 HP before death is on the table and getting people back on their feet just takes the equivalent of a move action, so barring a TPK or getting really separated, you're not going to die unless the circumstances are REALLY deadly or it's a TPK, and even if you die, you might be able to walk it off, and if you're really attached to your character, there's also this fun option to just kinda sell your soul to the first random freaky fae lord to take interest and really mess your character up forever as you work for/get your body reshaped by your new weirdly alien boss! So that's rad.

As things went for me here though, there were a couple pretty close calls, but nobody actually dropped at any point. A couple people got down to about 1 HP, everyone got stat penalties from the PTSD of some magic door demanding embarrassing stories from them, and Swift got groped and thrashed about for a while by a mimic he woke up by not thinking to be stealthy when entering new rooms at first, but people pulled him free before it got too freaky with him, and his insistence on taking a shower to get the slime off when they stumbled onto a shower room gave everyone a good excuse to take a half hour break and heal up before the final boss. They also made a friend who helped tank it a bit and... frankly got lucky because the boss kept rolling 1s on damage. I could see that being a real nailbiter otherwise though.

Oh and experience is handled by GM fiat. There's a suggested point n here where everyone levels up (just before the boss fight), and some pretty simple choices (more HP/MP/get-out-of-bad-free points on the odds, HP/stats/spells/safer casting on evens).

Leaving the dungeon, the tutorializing kinda pushes the players towards heading across town and finding an inn to crash in to end things off, and suggestions on whether to have everyone walk, take the bus (a very very crowded wagon) or a taxi (AKA pay a giant to swallow you and spit you out at your destination). And here's where I hit the first real snag with the book as written (worth noting it's officially listed as a work in progress still, to be fair).

We've got price lists for taxi and bus rides, a schedule for when buses arrive, and where they stop, but for travel times, all we have is "walking from point to point on a city point crawl map takes 15 minutes each. Each district has its own chance for being Mugged (attacked by urban creatures such as bandits or fae) or stumbling into a Random Encounter." Plus this map, and its additional note on travel time that doesn't fit with that one.

The implication here is that we should have kind of a hub and spoke design. Here's the bus stops in each district and the bus route. Here's some points of interest clustered around each bus stop making it clear how many steps it takes to get from point A to the nearest bus or directly to point B (which would presumably have some extra steps strung between bus stops for extra encounter potential). We also don't have notes on the time saved if any by paying for either form of transit (I could see both still just being walking speed to be fair), and while each district does have chances listed for encounters, in a surprising omission for how detail dense the rest of the book is, we don't actually have any random encounter tables in here.

Now, the simplest solution would of course just be to say screw it, they all just take the taxi then (it's pretty cheap and avoids all headaches, but my premise is this is a GREAT game for first time GMs, mechanically, so it'd be nice to have a clearer handle on how those other options work.

Similarly, there's this whole downtime system where between adventures everyone can go party down or advance a class or whatever off camera, which I THINK everyone has the chance to do here, but sample adventure 2 IS an immediate follow-up introduced with notes being stuffed under inn room doors, so, worth double checking. Regardless I'm going to hold off on the downtime stuff for the next post here because that was a long intro.

EDIT: So funny thing about doing this with an indie project that's an active work in progress is, sometimes you wish something was in the book and then like 2 days later, bam-

Final Thoughts & Questions

Overall: This seems really solid in play like it did in my read-through. Character creation feels like being handed a prompt to work with, you can still customize what matters, it really nails that "we are squishy wimps in over our heads" level 1 D&D feel without actually being super deadly. Even without class abilities, you have a good range of options. Nice and snappy. Really like the time management rules.

With Sexy Results? Swift got grabbed by a mimic, which could have gone in kinky directions, but didn't under these circumstances. The party ran into a zombie taking a shower but the framing didn't really feel sleezy. Oh and I guess So'Ranfi just kinda came out of chargen in a very trashy form. Still all typical D&D session levels of sleaze I'd say.

Travel rules and random encounters need beefing up a little. Minor criticism, but it feels like an odd gap.

+1 Endurance feels like SUCH an obviously better deal than +1d6 HP. This is just general design advice, but, I feel like that needs a hard cap on how much you can take.

Are spell failures based on the raw roll, or after adding Smarts? I'm assuming the latter, wording's slightly vague. Also an 8 on the table is spell fails+lose an Exertion, but the Exertion rules specifically call out spell failure rolls as something you can convert to successes by spending a point, so... why would you eat the cast failing there?

Do glass weapons break when used? Feels like including it as a material was a roguelike nod.

Are these first two sample adventures meant to be back to back or is there a downtime slot between them? I'm assuming there is, but if it were me I'd mention it.

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

[the-knights-of-rohan]

14/100 days of productivity.

Today was a pretty chill day in terms of homework, but pretty hectic in terms of schoolwork. I did my spoken word presentation for AP Lit today, felt pretty good about it, seeing the rest of the class. Also finished preparation for the fundraiser my club is hosting tomorrow.

(We must bid farewell to the glass o' juice, as it has returned from whence it came. Also, I need to take care of my teeth.)

Today’s productivity:

Did some extensions on AP Computer Science .vtt file parsing, extended it to an entire directory and better organized the input and output.

Integrated Chapter 14 Japanese 4 vocab into my phone study flashcards after looking over them, there's nothing too crazy there.

Did AP Stats notes on Matched Pair experimental design

Self Care:

You know the drill at this point. The Vim be vimming.

Didn't have much stuff to do at home today, so I continued preparation for the college interview I have in a week. (AAAAAAA)

Future Goals:

Find out more information for US Government final project

Do US Government test corrections when the breakdowns are released

Song of the day:

Name: Amsterdam

Album: Pink Is Better

Artists: Token ft. Benny the Butcher

[xenodile]

@stasisarbiter This is definitely worth a full ask, because it's a bit of a mixed response. Nikke does a lot of things really good, and a lot of things really bad.

So. The gameplay IS fun. Like really fun. The PVE gameplay is like Time Crisis shooting, you have your team of up to 5 characters where you're directly controlling one at a time while the others are on auto target and tap/click to shoot, and automatically take cover and reload when not shooting. Enemies flash red before they attack and put markers on characters that are being targeted by particularly powerful attacks. Characters have different styles of guns, Assault Rifles, Machine Guns, SMGs, Shotguns, Rocket Launchers, and Sniper Rifles, that all handle differently, and some characters have uniquely functioning versions of those 6 archetypes. You can also order all characters to take cover and stop shooting until you give the order to attack again, and switch between which character you're controlling while doing so.

You also generate meter whenever your characters hit something, and when the meter fills you can use their Burst Skills. You can use up to 3 Burst Skills in sequence, as each character's skill is Phase 1, 2, or 3, and building a team involves getting characters whose skills compliment and chain together. When you do a full chain of 3 skills, you activate a Full Burst for 10 seconds, during which time you directly control all of your characters at once.

When your characters are strong enough, any stage becomes a cakewalk, but when you're playing at a power deficit is when things get really interesting, because the amount of precise manual control you have over each of your characters means you can overcome very high stat differences by prioritizing targets, using the right skills, and taking cover efficiently.

The boss fights are also really, really cool. Bosses have multiple parts that can be individually targeted and broken to alter their behavior and deal extra damage, they have special attacks where you have to do precision target shooting to interrupt them, and long multi phase fights. It's really fun stuff.

But as I said, Nikke does some really bad stuff too. For one, it has PVP, and there is no justice in a gacha based PVP game. PVP is an auto battler where certain teams are just invincible without an equally specific counter pick, all of which are locked behind SSR gacha rates, so that blows.

Leveling and upgrading characters is weird because there's a system that makes it so you only have to level up 5 characters and then every other character you have will be automatically synced to those 5, which is really nice. But that system has a hard cap that is not high enough to get through every part of the main story, and is only unlocked if you get FIVE SSR characters to max limit break, so depending on luck and spending habits, could be a very significant wall to progression for a lot of people.

Dailies are easy to complete and only take like 30 minutes tops, and there's no stamina or AP system so you can play as much as you want, but all experience and money games are time based. You CAN'T grind for experience or money or upgrade materials, you get them at a fixed rate per day. So it respects your time per day, but it WILL take months of playing to upgrade your characters, and even that is locked behind whether you get lucky on the gacha.

So like, the gameplay IS fun, but your ability to actually access that fun is locked behind really scummy monetization. It's a weird case where I've really been liking Nikke and having a ton of fun with it, but I would not ever recommend it to someone because the ability to make meaningful progress is luck based. It's why I started doing my story write ups because I think there's legitimately good stuff in Nikke that people should see and be able to enjoy without getting roped into its bad gacha shit.

Short answer, yes it's fun but it's not worth getting into, so enjoy it vicariously.

[star-lights-up]

we’re coving shakespeare in my comp class and someone cast ian mckellen as the soothsayer in julius ceaser so that’s how he came up

also I have forty mins left in my ap stats class and I wanna go home so badd

-🧲

😂😂😂 gotta love our favorite thespian. classically trained actors are so cool they should be cast in superhero movies more.

have to admit that I know very little about shakespeare's julius ceaser. I DO however know a lot about the taming of the shrew because ten things i hate about you is based off of it and i love that movie.

pretty sure i was supposed to do shakespeare in my english class this year. Instead, we made a rube goldberg machine representing slavery and a board game about cyrano de bergerac.

i don't even know.

(i will say, i did find out once we started reading cyrano (it's a play) that james mcavoy has acted in a very nice contemporary version of it. small world lmao. i guess english classes caught the x men brainrot this year too).

THAT IS SO REAL OH MY GOSH. I'm in algebra two but we're starting probability next week and i'm scared. Stats scares me. You are so brave for undertaking an AP MATH CLASS!!!!! SERIOUSLY!!! you should be so proud of yourself that's not an easy thing <3 good on you for powering through.

[poisons-productivity-palace]

Guys…. Predicted exam scores time </333so I’m doing this before and then after the exams and gov is tmm….

AP us gov- ok so I took this class over the summer and into the start of the year so I don’t remember too much on the writing so I’m kinda cooked? But also I hear it’s REALLY easy and I’ve done so much review and heimler so maybe I’ll be ok. Idk the amendments that well 😭 but ik the cases so I’m thinking a 4. If I REALLY lock in maybe a 5🤞🤞🤞 but I hate saying that 😭

AP Micro economics- ok so this class is so hard to me bc I just hate paying attention 😭 also I finished it like January so I don’t remember much writing wise, but all my friends were still in it and I helped them a lot so I kinda know it. The graphs I think I can do, so?? 4??? But like give or take a score point, like maybe a 3 or 5 😭 that’s such a margin tho

AP stats- this class…… I did not pay attention all year….. kinda cooked but I did a really good review, so maybe a 4? If they ask me how to find outliers I’m good 😎

AP lit- ok I think a 4 MAYBE a 5 but only if the multiple choice questions are easy and so is the poem question. I love writing but I HATE analyzing poems bc I never get it 🥲

AP computer sci A- … 3 but if the stars align and the MCQ is easy 4… the FRQs are so easy at least

AP calc BC- ok so I love this class and if I don’t get a 5 I will be devastated BUT I HATE POLAR CURVES AND UNIT 10😭😭 so maybe a 4 🥲 if the unit 9 FRQ is parametric or only one polar I can do it I think

AP research honorary- 4! I liked my paper but I just hope they do too. My teacher LOVED my presentation so I’m not worried on that

[youngerfrankenstein]

So I did check BG1 out a bit.

Pretty slim pickings for PC portraits (checked for packs but it was mostly AI slop) but I liked this one, and she looks like a Ranger to me so that’s the class I picked. I prefer to play RPG’s as a goody-two-shoes anyway (I like being nice…) so it works. Not sure if the stats were randomized or automatic but hey, charisma is a dump stat anyway right? Wasn’t sure what weapon proficiencies would be good but these seemed fine. Playing on easy so I’m not too worried.

The tutorial, uh, kinda sucked, and I think the randos in green in the prologue explained things better but:

I’m gonna recruit him.

And speaking of the randos in green:

Heh.

The slow movement speed, seeming lack of fast-travel, circle of sight and initially blacked out maps are really annoying, I won’t lie. Dunno how much was hardware limitations back then, how much was trying to ape D&D rules… guess it doesn’t matter really.

Other than that, decently fun! Got through the prologue, met up with Khalid and Jaheira, not sure how much I’ll play around with it in the near future, do want to finish the ME trilogy first.