#((i've actually noticed this in my past research lol but)) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gamebunny-advance · 3 months

Text

Kun3h0 Custom Doll Repaint

So, here's what I've been working on for the past month or so. I've wanted to do a custom doll project for a long time now, and I finally got the opportunity to actually do it. I don't think she's bad for a first doll, but there's a lot I feel I could do better and differently.

Once again, my pictures hardly do her any justice... mostly due to color balancing.

I tried to edit these pics to make them a little more accurate, but it also yellowed out everything else, so... yeah. A photographer/image editor I am not.

That said, aside from the poor quality of the images, I'd say that the pics capture both her good points and her jank.

(More about the process and other thoughts under the cut.)

So, she started with a Cave Club doll as the base (I believe her name was Fernessa).

I unfortunately didn't take any pics of this doll with her clothes on, but I'm sure you can search pics of the original base doll yourself.

Besides being very cheap, I really liked the proportions on this doll for Kun3h0. I like the short torso with the long legs and the huge feet. Even the face is kinda Kun3h0-esque (though, a little more on that later).

I've had the idea to customize a Kun3h0 doll for a while, and I always thought the best base would have been an LOL OMG doll since they also have the big head, small torso, and long legs. But, I was always on the fence about them because their hips are a lot wider than Kun3h0's, and I felt like that would always bother me. But once I found out about Cave Club and also found out they're bascially cheap as dirt for the amount of articulation you get, I knew that this was the best match for Kun3h0.

Sadly, the hands aren't as big, and I did consider resculpting them to be more accurate to Kun3h0, but I lack the materials to make that look good enough to be worth doing, so in the end I just repainted the original hands. So I guess this doll is gonna have the non-standard 5-fingers XP. (I forgot to take pics, but the back of the hands do have the heart detail on them. )

Because I have to tie this back to NSR somehow, I think this doll would be a great base for some NSR characters, or really any other stylized character like this. I could def see a cute Mayday coming out of one of these (but not from me~ If I made a Mayday, then I'd want to make a Zuke to go with her, and I just cannot imagine how to make a Zuke doll without him becoming way too top-heavy).

However, I did resculpt the legs to become her boots, so she stands a little taller than the base Cave Club. While I think doing this works for Kun3h0 since she's a robot, if I want to make some alternate outfits for her, they're gonna have to include these boots, or I'm gonna have to get another doll to make some alternate legs.

Unfortunately, my only material I have for body mods is air-dry paper clay, and it doesn't transition as well into the plastic the same way something like apoxie sculpt probably would have. It's not super noticeable at a distance when they're painted, but under scrutiny, you can see a clear transition. I also forgot to detail her heel, so the shoes are flat even though they shouldn't be~ They do help her to stand on her own though, so I guess it's not the worst thing in the world~

While I was doing the sculpting, I also made the wig.

Finding a yarn that would properly convey Kun3h0's hair color is nigh impossible, given the cartoony shading of them, so I settled for a median between the dark rasperry and hot pink and got this regular raspberry yarn. The unaltered pics make it look a little more purple than it actually is. It really is a warm raspberry color.

(I'd say that this is closer to the actual color, maybe a tad darker.)

Let me tell y'all, brushing out yarn wefts is not fun. I also felt like I wasn't doing it right since I lost a lot of material brushing it out. From the little research I did, this seems to be a common problem, but it doesn't sit right with me for so much of it to get wasted like that~

Another challenge I had is that there (of course) aren't very many resources for getting yarn wefts curly or how to make curly hairstyles using yarn wefts. I know that this is relatively easy to achieve with actual doll hair through boil washing, but that wasn't really a viable option for a yarn wig like this. Since I really wanted the hair to look naturally curly as opposed to looking like it was curled after the fact, I curled the hair before gluing it onto the wig cap, which was a mini-nightmare. I followed a video tutorial about how to make a pigtails wig, I just applied the methods to the curly hair.

youtube

I don't know if I just didn't make enough wefts to make the tails poofy enough, or if this method just wasn't suited for curly hair, but I just didn't get the volume I was looking for.

To achieve the fuller look that Kun3h0's puffs have, I glued some scrap yarn fluff in the center of the original puffs and just tried to manage the shape from there. It's not perfect, but I think I've more or less brought her original hair to life. It's hard to see since they get lost in the mess of hair, but I was even able to get those stray curls that she has to look nice~

However, for some reason, the wig really doesn't like to stay on. I dunno if it's the ears pushing it off, or if something else makes it loose, but it really doesn't like to stay on her head. I might try applying heat to the cap to see if I can get it to reshape around her head properly, but I don't have high hopes for that.

Overall, having made the wig and seen it in real life, I've confirmed something that I've kinda felt for a while: Kun3h0 really needs something on her head between her antenna. I feel like her antenna and the top of her head create a sort of "empty box" that is just asking to be filled with something. I recently did a drawing of Kun3h0 where I have her an ahoge, and I think it helps a lot.

It's a little too late to add this to the doll (and I don't even know how I'd go about it), but I think from now on, she's gonna have a curl that sticks up on the top of her head.

Moving on: the face.

I really wish I could get some clearer pictures here, because the eyes really aren't as bad as the pics make them look.

While I am trying to keep her right covered as much as possible, I did still paint both of them with acrylics. I don't have MSC or watercolor pencils like most of the pros do, so I made use of what I had. I'm certainly not getting that "crisp lineart" look that Kun3h0 is basically built on, but I don't think the results are horrible. They're sealed with a gloss varnish, so they don't photograph well, but I do like how the texture is very different from the skin, it almost sells that they're made of glass.

As for the other details, I did do the lining in dark purple, like I usually do for her lineart. I'm on the fence on if this works IRL or not. On the one hand, I feel like the purple lineart is a part of the character design, it helps balance out all the pinks, but when I only use the purple on the doll for the face (and her stomach paneling), I do wonder if it looks strange, and if I would have been better off lining her with dark brown instead.

In fact, I did the original sketch with brown for the paneling.

(Right eye not canon.)

But when I made the actual doll, I wound up doing purple anyway to match the eyelashes, so they wouldn't look as out of place.

Other details I wanted to mention are that the upper eyelashes/eyelid is actually a piece of painted foam that I glued on. I really wanted to achieve that cartoony look of how I usually draw the lashes over her hair, even if it doesn't make logical sense.

I wasn't able to do the same thing for the brows, but I still did something a little "special" with them.

Instead of making myself cry trying to get an accurate color-match with paint, her eyebrows are actually flocked using some of the leftover yarn. I've hardly seen anyone do this for a doll repaint, but I don't think this look would suit most brows anyway~

Overall, I'm only a *little* unsatisfied by the face-up, but my disappointment is mostly in the eye-shape. I didn't want to go against the face mold too much, but that meant that I couldn't really make the eye taller like Kun3h0's actually are. If the eye was any taller, the brows would have been right against the hairline, and that wouldn't be a great look IMO. I feel like 80% of Kun3h0's identity is in her face, so having it be even a little inaccurate does bring her down a little.

Lastly, I think all that's left to talk about is clothes and accessories.

I am personally really in love with the shorts and it's why I chose them to be the preview for this project. I added the beltloops after I took that pic, and I think they turned out so cute, even if you can see the stitching of the belt to the shorts.

I went through quite a few patterns trying to get them right. The Cave Club dolls don't seem to be super popular in customizer circles, so there aren't many if any patterns out there for them. At first I was just eyeballing a shorts pattern from this video and going through some trial and error trying to adapt them to the doll's body.

youtube

I made 3 or 4 pairs of shorts this way, but they all ended up too tight. In the end, I wound up using the "wrap-and-tape" method of pattern making, and made the shorts from there. I honestly wasn't too confident in the results, so I very haphazardly made the trial pair with this new pattern, but they fit so great that I wound up using the test shorts for the final product.

The top was not as successful. Unlike the shorts, I didn't start making test tops until I'd already done the wrap and tape. So the pattern making wasn't actually the hardest part: it was putting it together that was a nightmare.

While I was making the top, I would of course have Kun3h0 put it on to test the fit, which stretched out the fabric to a noticeable degree. This was one of the last things I worked on, so I was getting really fed up with working on this for so long, so I told myself that I would probably just hide it with paint later.

That was mistake number 1.

As I should have learned from painting Green's face, the paint hardened the fabric tremendously, giving it almost no stretch. Originally the plan was to use velcro to close the top in the back, but the pattern didn't account for the lack of stretch, so it's actually too small to close edge to edge. So, I had to cut velcro to extend beyond the actual clothes to close it up. So basically, there's a gaping hole in the back of her outfit and is the main reason why I refuse to post back pictures of this doll.

For the time being, I do consider this top to be a "prototype" and I'll probably remake it in the future with some improvements. But, painting the fabric after stitching it together is not the only mistake I made.

Since this top is a prototype, there's a lot of other things that I did in a bad order: I really should have done the hemming and put on the accents before putting the pieces together, but since I wasn't sure if the pattern would fit first, and thought I would have the energy to make a second better top, I didn't bother with it. This included the cuffs of the sleeve.

That was mistake number 2.

The way I made the sleeves is that the arms are really just a large trapazoid with the shoulder shape at the top. The idea was that I would just sew the large side to a piece of shorter elastic band which would serve as the cuffs. I figured this would cause the sleeve to look "ballooned" at the end. And it kinda worked. You can kinda see how it turned out on her right sleeve in the first picture, but actually sewing it together was kinda terrible because the only way I could think of to do this was to sew the cuff and sleeve separately first, then sew them together, and that just seems ass-backwards to me, but I couldn't think of any other way to do it, and it came out with the cuff being mostly obscured anyway. I tried a different method on the left sleeve, so the cuff is more visible, but the sleeve shape is worse.

So if/when I remake this top, I'm still gonna do this in my ass-backwards way, I've just got to figure out how to keep the sleeve from eating the cuff.

Otherwise, I think the top would actually be pretty cute. I was really getting tired of working on it at the end, so a lot of the details are actually hot-glued on instead of being sewn. The faux-zipper pull is a *little* large, but it's something I had that I thought would work, and I actually really like the oversized look. It works for the proportions of the doll and helps bring in the heart motif that's getting a little lost in the sloppiness of my painting~

The last thing I think worth talking about is the mini GAB.

I thought I'd taken a pic of it by itself, but I guess not. Anyway, the only thing I wanted to say about it is that there's a little "clip" on the back made from wire that allows it to hook onto Kun3h0's belt and be held in her hand. I dunno, I just really like the little accessories, and that little feature amuses me~

But that's it for now. I am actually working on two other accessories for her:

The doll came with a pet dinosuar that I'm currently turning into her GAB.

It's just about the right size to be in scale with Kun3h0, and the hair is basically already the same as GAB's. I've already modified the base with clay and cut off the bits I don't need. It's mostly a matter of sanding and painting right now. I have no idea how or if I'm going to get the collar onto it without it looking bad, but I'll give it a try. If all else fails, I'll just make a tiny bow-tie like GAB!classic~

I don't have a pic of this one, but the doll also came with some sort of flower pot thing that I'm turning into her drill using a metal piping tip for the drill head~ I'll post about them in an "accessories DLC" when they're both finished.

But wait... if you've made it this far, and you saw my preview post, then you might notice that there's one accessory missing.

Well, this mask doesn't actually fit Kun3h0...

But it does fit someone else.

#gbunny draws #gbunny makes #OCs #kun3h0 #doll custom #custom doll #doll repaint #she's 'done'#she's finally 'done'#well I seriously need to remake the top #but she's practically done #i know that this post is gonna underperform compared to the amount of work i put into it #but i don't really care this time #i'm really happy that i get to hold my second child in my hands #(the first was GAB)#but this isn't the thing that I thought was going to haunt me #you'll have to wait just a little longer for that one #and then the accessories DLC wil hopefully be coming soon #ah i didn't mention it in the main body #but the reason some pics have her knee pads and others dont #is because i literally forgot about them until i started thinking about #how it was a shame that you could see the paint chipping at the knee joints #but then i remembered 'wait. doesn't she have something that covers her knees?"#so yeah. put those on last minute #Youtube

25 notes · View notes

mrswinnie04 · 4 months

Note

Hey I'm new to J2 tinhatting and looked on your blog and noticed you're fairly new to it too. I'm like really new to it like a week lol. Do you ever have doubts about them and say to yourself this is just wishful thinking? I only say this because I've RPF before and it never ends well but I can say their relationship is quite unique to others. Like I'm also trying to look at it in a logical way, and maybe they are just like brothers, the existence of their kids also complicates things too, etc. What are you thoughts?

Hello Anon!

First off, welcome to the SPN and J2 Tinhatter Community! I think it's super cool that you found my blog and are interested in some of my thoughts :)) so, thank you for your question!

You know, this is such a good question and I completely understand where you are coming from. As a blogger, who is only 4 months into being in this community, your question is something I have asked myself constantly.

In the beginning, I struggled with constantly needing solid proof to quench the doubts in my mind of J2's relationship. Even to this day there are times where I find myself questioning my solid belief in J2's romantic relationship. I think this is because I come from a family that is so demanding of "solid" proof. My mother is an opinionated attorney and my father is a man who doesn't believe in things until he sees it with his own eyes. So, for you anon, and anyone out there who wants to believe in J2 but struggles with doubt, I understand. I have done it too.

During this past summer, when I first entered the tinhatter community, I was consumed by the need to search high-and-low for blogs that did deep analysis on J2's relationship or did Proofs of their romantic connection. I did this because, even though I believed in them, a part of me was so used to needing to have proof to believe in something. I also received a lot of hate from a certain part of SPN's fandom as well. A lot of those people tried to tell me I was "stupid" or that I was "delusional" for believing in something that wasn't real because there was no actual "proof".

In simpler terms, a lot of people around me wanted me to be doubtful. So I was.

Nevertheless, it is my strong belief that someone is drawn to the tinhatter community for a specific reason: you see the connection between Jared and Jensen.

It is true, to some extent, that one reads J2 content or is drawn to tinhatter content because you have noticed things about J2. You notice the looks. The touches. The chemistry and connection.

This idea alone is what kept me believing, because even though so many people wanted me to doubt J2, I knew I was drawn to tinhatter content/the community because I saw something and felt something about J2 that went beyond brotherhood.

As these past four months as a tinhatter has progressed, one of my favorite bloggers has constantly encouraged and supported me in my journey with J2. @brookesallow is such a wonderful writer and person. Their content is always insightful, accurate, and encouraging. Anon, or for anyone interested, I always recommend looking at @brookesallow because their content has kept me believing in J2. This blogger always posts proofs, theories, and beliefs. They are kind and very welcoming, so definitely check them out! I feel that their blog posts do a great job of explaining J2's situation with their wives, kids, and their own romantic connection.

In the beginning, I doubted J2 a lot (even though I really wanted to believe). However, @brookesallow and so many other amazing bloggers have done an amazing job of showing me that I can believe in J2's love and not feel shame for it.

Bearding is such a big thing in Hollywood. So many actors and actresses are pressured by the industry to hide the fact that they are apart of the LGBTQIA+ community. This is beyond tragic and sad. Can you imagine how many actors and actresses we love and adore are forced to be away from the people they love?

As I've done more research, it's clear that there have been plenty of famous actors who have been married + with kids who were actually gay. But because of the movie industry and PR, they were forced to pretend they were heterosexual.

This fact has made me believe in J2 a lot more.

But I want to reiterate my previous idea that those who are drawn to J2 tinhatter content are here for a reason: they believe in something.

In the beginning, I knew I saw something about J2 that went beyond more than brotherhood/friendship. There was just something about their relationship that was infinite and beautiful. And even though I doubted them at first, what kept me believing (and continuing to believe) is the fact that I can see there is just such a powerful and timeless connection between them.

Jared and Jensen are soulmates. You can see it in the way they look at each other; act around each other; touch each other; and love each other. Jensen's first choice will always be Jared. And Jared's first choice will always be Jensen.

So, even though J2 have wives (beards) + kids, it is clear (to me) that they are together. That they love each other, more than just as friends.

I think it is natural to doubt J2 at times. We live a society that demands "proof" but as the famous movie Scarface said:

"The eyes, chico, they never lie."

Looking at the photos below, the way J2 looks at each other is enough for me to believe. In these past four months, as I've grown as a blogger and tinhatter, I know I believe in J2's relationship. There is something about them that is deeper. Something about their relationship that doesn't feel like simple "brotherhood friendship".

Jensen once said that he'd take a bullet for Jared in an interview.

Jensen once went down fighting in a bar brawl for Jared.

J2 would do anything for each other, and I don't think there is anyone I've ever met that would do that for a mere friend. Unconditional love like that stems from a type of love that goes so much deeper than friendship. To say that you would "take a bullet" for someone is serious. It would mean that you feel that, if that person were threatened, that your life (and anything you value in continuing to live) wouldn't matter in that second---you would give that all up for that person, regardless of your own happiness, because that's how much that other person means to you.

That kind of love is special.

But there are so many instances I can think of between J2 that have convinced me of their love. So many that there isn't a enough space here for me to share, but I definitely recommend @brookesallow. Their blog is amazing and so informative!

Anyway, I'm sorry I went on a rant.

Anon, I just want to say that I understand the way you feel. I have been there. The point of this post isn't to force you to believe me or anything. I think discovering your own confidence and belief in J2 (without anyone forcing you) is what makes the tinhatter journey beautiful. As these past four months as a blogger have progressed, I have found so much joy in finding my own confidence in J2 myself. By doing this, I have opened my heart to the fact that I don't need a "confession" to believe in them. I can believe in their love because I can see it. I can feel it.

I believe in it because I believe in J2.

It is my hope, anon, that you have a wonderful and welcoming experience into the tinhatter community! I hope you have a wonderful journey and please ask me if you have anymore questions!

Farewell! AND THANK YOU AGAIN for your question. I'm really honored and grateful for your curiosity.

ENJOY THESE PHOTOS BELOW OF J2 IN LOVE :))

24 notes · View notes

searsage · 3 months

Note

What would your thoughts be on a role reverse AU, where humans are the ascendant species and Robin’s the one stuck in the containment cube? I feel like you’d have some thoughts :3c

(sorry my dumbass clicked unfollow instead of ask)

I think I've seen some neat reverse au ideas floating around and i think there is a actually a fic or two about it being the other way around one ao3!

Id definitly check em out!

As for me i have considered it before tho id still have Al-an an architect and Robin a human lol hear me out.

Like the precursors were successful in curing khaara but not before the bacteria managed to make it to sol's solar system, that being the case it was discovered by Alterra and brought back to earth in hopes of weaponized.

This of course was a complete mistake, as they could not control it and the bacteria predictably goes apeshit, infecting everything on earth.

Over the years many attempts to combat the bacterium fails and pretty much all is doomed when the last attempt at a vaccine fails.

Amidst this Sam a scientist once attempted to make a cure but her efforts were in vain, then turned her sights to another frontier, instead turning her talents to creating a way for man to outlive the virus by attempting to flee into stasis, new and a unstable technology but inarguably their last hope.

Yet due to the unauthorized use of materials and lack of time and general lack of support from her peers past her sibling, her creation mostly successful efforts goe unappreaciated and noticed by the wrong person.

Sam contracts khaara, infected by a jealous scientist who planned on stealing credit for her work. Buuuut before dying she managed to trick Robin into a stasis machine hidden in the lab.

Freezing her mind and body in a unstable but lucid like sleep within a cryopod

After it is implied Sam's work was stolen and the fualty prototype rebranded but as a cheap faulty series as they never fully understood Sams backwards blueprints and never discovered the self sufficient staisis machine.

This of course leads to humanity's extinction, the stasis machine failing.

Loooong time later precursors are asigned to Sol to clean up the pieces left behind by the bacteria, when Al-an comes to earth he finds a barren and alien planet, stuggling to recover, khaara has died out mostly but decontamination efforts were still required which is what lands a curious Al-an to explore the ruins of the long extinct species.

Noticing a odd energy pulse he diverges from his intended duties and tracks the tether until he ends up discovering the faulty stasis cryopad in a long destroyed laboratory.

And Robin still dreaming in the pod, but like her bodies heavily damaged from khaara and time breaching the tank.

Of course his reckless curiosity leads him to accidentally disrupting the power/breaking the tank by accident, and realizes the human's body starts rapidly deteriorating.

Without though shrimp boy ends up using alien technology to yank her mind into the his vessel with him.

Unaware that the disgruntled researcher was very much awake and very displeased, as for her one moment she was watching her dying sister scramble to hide blueprints, alterra agents tearing apart her lab, then a alien abducting her!.

In general i like to think Robin would be the one with the pessimistic outlook and internalized trauma, Al-an would likely be vary unprepared to deal with the boarderline suicidal and cynical head voice..

I like to think it would be a nice hurt comfort fic, with alot of inner healing and not only coming to terms with how ugly the world could be event at the end of it! But also learning to retrust people after the betrayal that murdered her sister!

I also want to note while the option to give Robin a body is plausible Al-An outright refuses until long later to offer her one as she has shown signs that she may be a danger to he's self.

Lots of slow steps and self indulgent fluff and validation because i live on that shit…but yeah that was it lol xD

#al an #robin ayou #al an x robin #al an/robin #Sbz #reverse au #subnautica #al an subnautica #subnatica below zero #subnautica below zero #subnautica alan #Precursor #Chem rambles

25 notes · View notes

dipplinduo · 2 months

Note

#1 - 50

no im kidding LOLLLL #25 and 34.

(Context: Questions for Fic Writers Ask Game) LOOOOOL I WAS ABOUT TO BE LIKE "DAMN OKAY" xD

25. What other websites or resources do you use most often when you write?

My toxic habit is that I go on google and look up synonyms of a word and search until I find one I like if I notice I'm repeating myself/want it to hit different. I should be using actual resources imo but I'm too lazy to go find them.

I also tend to research random things for accuracy (e.g. for S&S D, I often check what pokemon are available in certain areas for worldbuilding; for DIOH I recently went on a whole deep dive about sencha so I could incorporate cultural stuff & things like taste appropriately, etc.)

34. What aspects of your writing are inspired by/taken from your real life?

Sweet & Sour Dipplins:

I recently said this but Kieran's dialogue regarding gayness was verbatim my memory of what little me said in response to learning about gay people & a family member's disapproval of gay marriage ("Isn't love just love, though?")

Some of the highlights of Juliana's character are based on what I aspire to be/try to be, and her character flaws are based on what I know are my own.

Not really irl stuff but I lazily decided Juliana's team is legit my Scarlet team because I didn't feel like putting too much thought into it LOOOOL

I think I pull from my interactions with my irl guy friends when thinking of what Drayton would do/say sometimes. Also same with the bromance that is Arven/Crispin.

I base a lot of Sweet & Sour Applins' behaviors off of cats. Sweet Applin is more of my freinds' domestic cats, while Sour Applin is closer to a cat I grew up with and saved from the streets. She had a very big love/hate relationship with me in particular DESPITE ME BEING THE FIRST HUMAN SHE WARMED UP TO AND THE LITERAL REASON SHE GOT A HOME-

One of the S&S kissing scenes is based on something I've experienced personally. I am not saying which one. 💀

The Dichotomy in Our Hearts:

People in my personal life often describe my disposition as being "sunshiney", but I can have my own broody rainclouds when I'm down lol. I usually appreciate being able to talk about my feelings but if I'm in a particularly rare mood of total despondence nothing will really work on me other than silence and physical touch. It's my primary love language and Kieran's own despondence being broken through with it in Chapter 2 is a very ME thing in hindsight LOOOOL

Juliana hiding her feelings is something I have absolutely done with crushes growing up, and her shy but curious and caring disposition is based off of my past self. How she will deal with her secret crush on Kieran will also be dealt with in the way I have dealt with my own (although this is coincidence and is for the plot).

A Sugary Sweet Kiss:

One time I went on a date with someone who was really really nervous the whole time, and I pulled a littleeeee bit from him when I was characterizing Kieran. I also dressed very nicely while the other person dressed down like Juliana and Kieran did in the fic. xD

#I am happy I get to do this! :D #fun questions #<3 #asks #my fics #dipplinshipping #kieran pokemon #kieran x juliana pokemon #juliana x kieran pokemon #juliana pokemon #kieran x juliana #juliana x kieran #personal lore #theres more for 34 but I think thats good enough for now #applin supremacy #ask game

8 notes · View notes

quaranmine · 8 months

Text

The Incandescence of a Dying Light (Chapter Eight)

July, fireworks, and some insight into someone we don’t actually know much about.

Chapter Eight: 5,436

<< Chapter Seven | Masterpost | Chapter Nine >>

HEY Y'ALL! Those of you who follow me on tumblr have been kept pretty well apprised of this chapter's progress, but it's good to be back. I've struggled with this chapter a lot, not out of any fault of its own, just because real life decided to beat me over the head in July and August.

Anyway, this chapter has a few content warnings. CW for past injury, car accident, death, and as always…grief. Nothing graphic but it beat me over the head while I was writing it oof.

Finally, as a disclaimer—there is information in this chapter about wildfire survival. I’m not an expert, and some of these topics are quite literally life or death in real life. I’m an entry level environmental scientist whose only professional experience is in topics entirely unrelated to this. While I have done my research on this fic and done my best to always present accurate information, I am not a reliable source. This is a Hermitcraft AU fanfiction. Please do not take or substitute anything I say in place of information from actual professionals, lol.

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

»»———-　　———-««

July 1989

It’s July, and there’s a complete burn ban put in place for Shoshone and the other national parks and national forests that surround it. If you ask Scar, it should have been put into place two weeks ago. The scattered storms and rain in May and early June has done nothing for the landscape now, which is dry and still full of theoretical tinder from years of fire-suppression activities.

It’s July, and it’s sweltering outside. The main radio chatter during the daily weather conditions report says the temperatures have been record-breaking in the region. This is unsurprising to Grian—his cabin feels like less of a lookout and more of a greenhouse these days, with the inescapable sun taking great advantage of all the windows. He’s not really cut out for the heat of the summer. It makes the days feel listless and blend together, but at least it cools off in the evenings.

The fire season starts to ramp up in other ways too. There’s a fire reported in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, located immediately to their southwest, and officials seem concerned it will grow quickly with the hot, dry temperatures and wind. Elsewhere around the country the picture seems just as bleak: fires in the 1989 season have already burned hundreds of thousands more acres than the same time period in 1988.

Apparently, the Two Forks lookout had gone unstaffed for several years prior, before the Yellowstone fires last year caused the agency to consider hiring more staff. The fires last year also, coincidentally, increased the budget for this year’s activities.This seems to have been a prudent decision, because the season is shaping up to have a spark indeed. They’re keen to use Grian as much as possible.

Grian can’t see the smoke column from the Bridger-Teton fire on the horizon; it’s too far away. Instead he starts to notice that his visibility on the horizon is worse now, as the haze in the sky slowly grows. Distant mountains that were once brown and green are now wispy tones of flat yellow and gray. The Trout Fire still burns steadily in the distance. It’s a stubborn nuisance to the Forest personnel, but not a big enough fire yet to garner any worry. There’s more than enough worry to be passed elsewhere.

All of this would be enough on its own, but another contender has just stepped into the ring: Independence Day.

The 4th of July is on a Tuesday this year, which means Grian and Scar get the wonderful privilege of working overtime all weekend watching the mountains, and holiday pay for the day itself. In all likelihood, people will be just as likely to celebrate on Saturday or Sunday or Monday as on Tuesday. Mary, a lookout in a more northern section of the Forest, has already called in to report a few incidents in her sector. The extra pay is welcomed; the responsibility for idiots is not.

Fireworks are strictly banned, of course. The acknowledgement of that, however, requires campers to actually care in the first place. They do not.

And so the month begins.

»»———-　　———-««

Fire is, both philosophically and literally, one of the most important things humanity has ever been able to harness. It can be the difference between life and death, and yet it is both life and death. Fire fosters warmth and light and power and life. Fire caresses life and leaves behind destruction.

Shoshone National Forest exists as part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the largest mostly-intact temperate-zone ecosystems in the world. It’s part of a great chain of protected lands and wilderness spaces in the northern Rocky mountains. Shoshone is the second piece of that puzzle—just as Yellowstone National Park was the first national park to be established, the neighboring Shoshone National Forest was the first ever national forest to be designated in the United States.

It is also, like the other lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, fire-dependent. Plants and animals living in such ecosystems are often adapted to their local fire regime, which is the expected pattern, frequency, and intensity of the fires in their area.

Lodgepole pines dominate the middle elevations of the Shoshone National Forest, and are the poster child of a fire-dependent species. These trees produce cones that are sealed with a tight resin that relies on fire to melt it. Fire is, therefore, essential to the reproduction of the species. But fire is also essential to their life cycle in another way: just as fire is necessary for the baby trees to sprout, lodgepole pines are very easily killed by fire.

And if the fires kill the weaker Engelmann spruce found in Shoshone’s higher elevations, that’s okay too—it just leaves room for the much more tolerant whitebark pine trees to grow without being outcompeted. Fire similarly benefits wildlife in Shoshone by diversifying the forest understory, encouraging growth of new plants, and providing dead tree snags for shelter.

It kills, but it also supports life.

The history of Shoshone National Forest and fire has its bleak moments. In 1937, a lightning strike started the Blackwater Fire in the Absaroka Range, a range of mountains located predominantly in the national forest. Dry weather and high winds turned the fire into one of the deadliest wildland firefighting stories in American history, with 15 firefighters killed and 38 injured.

Labor laws are written in blood. Safety rules and best management practices are, too. Although no fault was assigned for the tragedy—a rigorous investigation deemed the situation was out of anybody’s control—the Blackwater Fire would ultimately change the landscape of wildland firefighting. It is remembered in the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders, a set of systematic guidelines developed by the US Forest Service afterward to reduce danger for firefighters.

These orders are still in use today.

So what is a lookout’s role in a wildfire, other than keeping watch for it? Historically fire lookouts were used as firefighters themselves—expected to hop on a horse and head straight to a fire after seeing it, tools in hard—but in modern times lookouts are primarily used for providing updates. A lookout’s job is not complete once a fire is spotted and reported. They are expected to provide constant updates on its size and location, as well as assist firefighters and smokejumpers from their position. This work is very important—so important that sometimes fire lookouts don’t evacuate the scene until a helicopter is required for their rescue.

And what if you’re a hiker? What if you’re on the ground? The prospects aren't good: hikers should just avoid being caught around a wildfire at all costs. Survival odds are, unfortunately, low.

But what if you can't avoid it?

Try to determine which way the wind is blowing and remain upwind of the fire. Fires also burn fastest uphill, so seek lower ground. Fires will burn cooler and slower downhill. Try to find a safe spot from the fire, something that would burn less easily such as a rock slide, a large meadow, or a lake. Crown fires burn tall and hot in the tops of trees, so even a meadow will be safer than a forest. Cover your nose and mouth with clothing to protect your airways. Huddle close to any large object that can buffer the ambient heat. Lay face down. Don’t attempt to outrun the fire.

Sometimes, setting your own fire is an option. Burning out an area large enough for you to lie in can allow the wildfire to move around the already burned spot—but this attempt is best saved for a grassland. Forests take too long to burn. And if the fire is close, and if you can see a safe, already burned spot through it, and if the flames are less than five feet tall, the best option might be to just run through the fire.

Jumping in water is an option, but that might not save you. Superheated air, smoke inhalation, and lack of oxygen in the area is a primary concern. Fires move faster than most people can imagine. Fires can create their own wind, their own weather.

Fire, above all, should always be respected.

»»———-　　———-««

“Draw something for me,” Scar says suddenly into the still blue air of the dusk. “And, dude, turn your light on already.”

“Huh?” Grian says. He frankly doesn’t mind sitting in the dark while there’s still a little light left in the sky to adjust to, but his hand reaches automatically for the lantern’s switch before he even really processes Scar’s words. With a soft click the cabin is bathed in warm tones. Really, the reflections on the windows only obscure their visibility now that it’s mostly dark, but it’s undeniably more cozy now.

“Ah, it’s good to see your little light in the way over yonder,” Scar says. “You’re like my little firefly in the mountains!”

Grian rolls his eyes at that. “What did you mean by ‘draw for me’?” he asks, blocking any spontaneous attempts at poetry Scar can make.

“I mean, I’m bored. And I know you’re bored. It’s been a long day.” He hums a little to himself. “Figured you might wanna do something to pass the time.”

Scar’s right, it has been a long day. It’s the 4th of July, and they’re in it for the long haul. Grian thinks they should have just been allowed to sleep and clock in later in the day—who sets off fireworks at 8 AM?—but the fire season doesn’t rest and neither do they. Now, it’s evening, and this is where the real monitoring begins: after dark.

Unfortunately, it’s also when the morale to keep sitting at the desk is starting to dip precipitously. Firewatching after dark is difficult and typically something they aren’t required to do. As a lookout, he primarily looks for smoke, not fire. Fires themselves are often too small or too tucked away for their light to be seen, and at night the smoke blends into the dark sky. But fireworks, fortunately, tend to announce themselves gaudily.

Mostly, it’s the sheer personal resolve to pay attention that takes the greatest hit. Scar’s idea isn’t a bad one, there’s just one significant snag:

“I don’t draw,” Grian reminds him gently.

“But you used to,” Scar persists.

“I drew houses,” Grian corrects, even though he knows that his drafting is far from the only thing he’s practiced over the years. “For work. It’s not the same.”

“Well, then draw your lookout,” Scar says and then seems to almost cut off his own thought with a—”Ooh, maybe draw mine instead!”

“I can’t do that.” It’s a black and white statement of fact, but Scar doesn’t agree.

“C’mon,” he says. “You definitely brought your materials with you, I know it.”

“You don’t have any way of knowing that.”

“You have to have a pencil and a notebook, right? How do you take your notes for the morning reports?” Scar says this in the sort of way where he knows he’s right. He says it playfully, like it’s a silly mistake right under Grian’s nose.

“Okay, fine,” Grian says, trying to imbue an eye-roll into his words. “I get it.”

He’s not really sure why he picks up the yellow legal pad from the corner of the table, or the pencil in the cup. He tears the top sheet off where he had, in fact, scribbled some notes earlier about temperature and wind speed.

The thing is, Scar can’t even see him. He could lie to Scar and say sure, of course, I’ll do it, and Scar would be none the wiser, miles away on the horizon.

He picks up the pencil. The notebook stares back, blank except for the faint lines.

He does try to draw his lookout first, from memory. He thinks of it the way he always does in memory—a snapshot, perfectly clear image his mind took one day. In his mind's eye, the lookout starts to rise over the horizon in the late afternoon sun while he hikes up the hill towards it. He doesn’t have a ruler in the tower, so he carefully uses the spine of one of the old paperbacks as a straight edge to run his pencil against.

It just…doesn’t look right. First of all, angles are off. He’s messed up the two point perspective somehow and he doesn’t have his usual drafting materials with him anymore. But it’s more than that. The lookout, despite being bathed in golden light in his visual memory, just doesn’t feel inviting. It’s just intimidating. A place where, despite its natural beauty, Grian just sees his worst days play out over and over again.

He crumbles the paper again and tosses it to the side. He grabs the radio again.

“Scar, you paint don’t you?” Grian says. “You’re an artist.”

“Well, I guess if you say so,” says Scar slyly, “one could refer to me as a bit of an artist.”

“Why?”

The bluntness throws Scar. “Huh?”

“Why do you do it?”

“Why am I an artist?”

“Yeah. What made you start?”

Scar is quiet for a long time. Not too long to be worrying, but enough to seem…contemplative. He finally replies, “You know, I always liked it. In school I’d always get recruited to help with posters and stuff ‘cause I was one of the better ones at art, which maybe said more about them than me because I wasn’t an artist then. I didn’t practice. I didn’t know anything.”

There’s another pause, but not as long. Grian doesn’t interrupt.

“It wasn’t really until after my accident that I started pursuing it more. It was somethin’ to do! And one of the nurses told me it might be meditative. Help me out a little.”

“Did it?” Grian asks softly.

“I think so,” Scar says, and then with a little bit of a chuckle he adds: “But I don’t think I have to tell you though that sometimes a drawing frustrates you so much you want to throw it across the room! It isn’t all meditation. But I think that’s the point.”

Grian flushes a little. Scar’s comment is truer than he knows; the crumpled evidence of his most recent drawing attempt still sits on the floor by his chair. He reaches for the pencil again, and looks at the page once more. Maybe he will try to draw Scar’s lookout. He won’t tell that to Scar, of course, because he’ll be insufferable about it, but maybe he’ll try.

Grian doesn’t really know exactly what Scar’s lookout looks like. It’s far away, and he’s looked at it in the binoculars a few times, but the details are always fuzzy and hard to make out; each shake of his hand jolts the image at that level of magnification. And it’s far too dark for him to look again, so—so he improvises. Scar’s cabin is not on a tower like Grian’s is. It's situated on a large piece of rock at the top of a mountain. It doesn’t need to be on a tower, because there’s nothing around it tall enough to block the view, unlike the trees next to his tower. He fills in the details as he remembers, and creates new ones in the place of things he forgot.

The soft scratch-scratch of the pencil is lost to the noise of the radio again. “I broke my arm pretty badly at the time—needed surgery on that—but it wasn’t my dominant hand so I still painted. I like doing landscapes, mostly,” Scar says. “Pretty things. I grew up in nature. My dad and I went camping a lot. I missed it. I…wanted to do that again. Didn’t know if I would do that again.”

“I would love to see one of your paintings,” Grian says.

“I don’t really think they’re worth getting excited for,” Scar says, doing a bit of regrettably predictable artist’s humility. “But I’ll mail you one, if you want. Oh! Maybe you’ll even get a little surprise. Jellie likes to help me sign a few pieces, whether I want her to or not…”

The idea of a painting signed with a paw print is so utterly charming to Grian that he almost suggests that Scar should do it with all his paintings as some sort of signature flair. Then it occurs to him that it might be hard to wash a cat’s paws, and starts to ask Scar about what he does—in his cabin in the middle of nowhere with no running water—when a sparkle catches the corner of his eye.

Grian whips his head around just in time to see the sparks die. “Ugh,” he radios. “I just saw a firework. Super far away though.”

“Well, I was surprised neither of us had seen anything yet. Go ahead and mark the general direction of it even if it’s out of your district. Hopefully if there’s a fire someone else closer will catch it, but you could always check on it in the morning.”

Grian wanders over to the firefinder in the center of the room. Conveniently reminding him of which direction it was, several more fireworks go off in quick succession—golden, blue, red. It’s too dark to take a real reading, so he just points the sight in the general vicinity of the celebrations and takes its azimuth. He’ll spend extra time tomorrow examining this direction.

As he takes the measurements, a thought drifts into his mind. It’s something about the convergence of this specific job, a job nobody’s ever heard about in a Forest overlooked because of its more popular neighbors, and the wistful quality of Scar’s voice when he spoke about the subjects of his paintings. He found this job advertised in a newspaper. How did Scar find it? Who trained him to do this?

He sits back at the desk, and starts to sketch in the mountains around Scar’s lookout. This, he remembers well. He knows the familiar fold of the hills and peaks like the back of his hand, even after a little more than two months on the job.

The question circles his mind.

“Scar,” he says finally. “You know why I came here. To this job. To this National Forest. I’ve…made that really clear, whether I wanted to or not. But I don’t think you’ve ever said why you came.”

“Oh,” Scar says. His voice is quiet. “I guess I haven’t.”

Grian lays the radio down on the table, giving Scar space to speak. There’s something about the way Scar acknowledged him that sounds like he’s been exposed. One thing Grian has come to learn about him is that he’s a smoothtalker, and an excellent actor. Scar has dramatic flair in spades, and if he really wanted to, he’d spin a captivating tale for Grian about the totally-true events leading up to his place in this forest. It’d be as truthful as his name.

He doesn’t, though.

“People come out here for a lot of reasons, but not every person can stick with it. It’s lonely, for sure. And, of course,” he chuckles, “the bugs are pretty bad. I’ll tell you right now, I’ve seen more than a few volunteers and new lookouts suddenly get afraid of the dark when it’s just them and no one else for miles,” Scar says. “But the people who stay tend to fall into two categories.”

“What are they?”

“People who are running from something and people who are looking for something.”

There’s no need to question which category Grian is in. Not when he’s already laid his whole soul open for Scar to pick through and deeply intertwined himself in this mystery.

There’s only this: “Which one are you?”

“It’s hard to say,” Scar replies. “But I think I was running away.”

And Grian wants to say from what? but he doesn’t. And he wants to be sitting in Scar’s lookout right now, or anywhere but here, but he isn’t.

He sets the pencil down, temporarily abandoning the drawing he’s been scratching this whole time. He looks straight ahead through the window, but the glare from the lamp on the glass just reflects his own face right back at him. In the shadow where his head is, he can pick out the faint outlines of the hills beyond.

“You can’t run from yourself though,” Scar says. “‘Cause it just follows you. And being alone with yourself just makes you face it faster. I think my mom was right. She was worried about me. That’s why she made me take Jellie to keep me company.”

“I think I need to meet this Jellie,” Grian says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Scar doesn’t typically sound so serious, and it’s a little jarring. “She sounds pretty fantastic.”

“She is, she’s—hey, what about meeting me?”

“Nah, I think I prefer the cat,” he says. Cheeky.

“Well, I can’t say I don’t agree,” Scar says. He sighs. “I guess I should just talk about it, right? You can ask me whatever you want. ‘Cause the more I ramble, the less I talk about it, and the less I actually answer your question. Which is the fun of rambling! If you say enough words people forget about what you’re distracting them from. Oh, but I don’t know why I’m telling you that. A true salesman never gives up any secrets. I’m only a salesman in the winter, though. What am I selling now? I guess I’m selling myself. Wait—no, not like that, don’t you dare be laughing over there, G-man!”

Grian says nothing, and he isn’t laughing. He just lets Scar’s words fill the space. He doesn’t ask anything else. It feels hypocritical to do so. He’s dying to know everything, of course, but he also knows what it’s like—that looming weight on your neck from the pressure of well-meaning friends who just want to talk when all you want to do is be alone. If Scar has come all the way out here, then he must really have wanted to be alone.

Scar seems to rattle himself out of it on his own. “I’m stalling again,” he says, voice like lead. “I’ll just start. It’s okay. It’s been 10 years. I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Grian says. “I was just curious. You know all this about me but I didn’t know anything about you. But if it’s a…thing then you don’t have to.”

“No, no,” he says. “It’s fine. I already told you a lot of the story. I just left out some pieces.”

“It’s a slow night,” Grian says. “Only a few fireworks. Plenty of time to talk, if you want…or plenty of time to just watch.”

“I appreciate that,” Scar replies. He takes a deep breath. It’s a funny thing, that. Grian can’t see Scar’s face—he has no idea about anything, even what color hair he has—but he knows the sound of Scar’s breathing.

“I told you about my accident,” Scar begins. “I told you about how it nearly killed me, about the hospital, about taking up painting. And I told you about the way I’m still in pain, even years later. I don’t think it’s ever going to fully go away. But that wasn’t really the whole truth, or the worst part. The worst part was that I wasn’t the only one in the accident.

“I should have been, though. I was the one driving. I was just running an errand, but I was living with my parents at the time so I asked my dad to come with me to help me pick something out. I don’t even remember what it was. And I don’t remember the accident, either. I only know what they told me. I read the accident report. But there’s a wall of glass between me and what happened. Apparently, we hit some black ice in the road and it spun the car into the other lane. We got hit by a truck. It happened so fast. He didn’t know what was coming either.”

Scar pauses there. Grian tries to take in the story. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That sounds terrifying.”

Scar’s voice breaks on the next line. “The doctor told me my dad was dead when the paramedics arrived. They think he probably died instantly. I don’t remember that, though. I don’t remember anything. I just—I just woke up a week later in the ICU. That’s what I remember. Everything was just so fuzzy and hurt so bad. I could tell something was up but I was too tired. I slept. They waited three days and made my mom break the news.”

“Oh, Scar,” Grian says. “I’m so sorry.” But everyone is sorry. They’re always sorry. It doesn’t do anything. So instead he adds, “You must have been so scared. It must have been confusing.”

“It was ten years ago. I’m fine,” Scar repeats, and Grian doesn’t comment on the way it sounds like a lie. Maybe it isn’t a lie on most days of the week, but it certainly is tonight. Scar continues to talk. “I don’t know why that’s what messes me up the most. That I caused it and I don’t remember it. That it’s my fault but I didn’t know for so long.”

“It’s not your fault,” Grian says gently. “It was an accident. That’s what accidents are, they’re not on purpose. So it can’t be your fault.”

“And you’re right, G-man,” Scar says. His voice wavers. “I already know that. It isn’t my fault. I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. I didn’t know about the ice. I know it’s not my fault but…it’s really hard to believe that, isn’t it?”

Grian swallows against a lump in his throat, and flicks his eyes down to the table. It’s the hardest thing in the world, just below staying alive.

“I just think about everything I could have done differently. Why didn’t I just go alone? Why didn’t I wait until the next day? What if I was driving slower? Would the difference of one mile per hour, or five, or ten have been the difference between life and death? What if I had reacted faster, or better? What if I saved the car from spinning? If I had left just one minute earlier, or five seconds earlier, there might not have been traffic in the oncoming lane. If I had left three hours earlier, maybe the temperature would have still been high enough to keep the ice from refreezing.”

He stops to take a breath. “It doesn’t ever stop. And it doesn’t bring anyone back. The worst is thinking about the things you did and the things you didn’t. Like maybe I would have told him I loved him that morning if I’d known that was the last day I’d see him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have stolen $20 from him and then lied about it when I was 8 years old. Or maybe I would have asked him again to tell me about his funniest story from when he was a teenager. But that’s just how it is, I think. It all comes back to you.”

“How do you deal with it?” Grian whispers.

“Badly,” Scar says, and for once he doesn’t sound like he’s on the brink of tears. “You go forward. And then backward. And then forward again. You live through it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“You’re already doing it.”

“I’m not doing it very good.”

“That’s the only way you can do it.”

There hasn’t been any more fireworks since they started talking. The night outside is dark, with only the slightest sliver of a new moon. Millions of tiny stars glitter in the sky in nearly uninterrupted view. It’s a beautiful night out there, hot and still, but Grian stays in the four walls of his cabin. Enclosed.

Scar speaks. “One of my steps was coming back here. I think, in the end, it was a step forward. This place gives me comfort. I always liked this part of the state. My dad used to take me camping out here all the time, like once a summer. Sometimes we went to Yellowstone National Park. Sometimes we went to Grand Teton National Park. Sometimes we went to Bridger-Teton National Forest. And sometimes we went here. It’s the quietest here.”

“It sounds like you were close with your dad,” Grian says. “It sounds like fun.”

“It was,” Scar says. “My dad was cremated. It was a while before I was out of the hospital, and it was a while before traveling somewhere wasn’t an ordeal. We saved some of his ashes for closer to home, but we made a special trip out here and scattered a little in each spot.”

“That sounds nice…” Grian trails off. “Like he’s still here, somewhere. In a place he loved. In a place with you.”

“I think I fell a little in love with this place then, in a way I didn’t when I was just a child. Or maybe I was just antsy. I wasn’t doing very good, I guess I can tell you that. There was too much guilt and familiarity at home. I wanted out. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. It took me two years after the accident to make it but I came here.”

“So,” Grian says. “Running from something. I see it.”

“Yeah,” Scar says with a huff of air. “Not that great at running these days though! I mean, I’m barely a hiker anymore without being wiped out for a few days! My mom thought this job was a terrible idea. She thought the last thing I needed was to be alone. I guess you know what that’s like.”

“I didn’t even tell my friends or my mum I was taking this job,” Grian admits. “They’d freak out. The reaction from people I knew back in Colorado was bad enough. So I just sent ‘em a letter the first week I was here. A ranger told me I had mail at the main office but I don’t want to check it.”

“They’ll give it to you at the end of the season if you don’t come pick it up,” Scar says. “You can read it then, after you’ve already done it.”

“Was it what you needed?” Grian asks abruptly. “Being alone.”

“I needed it. I think—sometimes everything in your head makes you want to avoid people. You feel like you need the silence of an empty room to just let it all fall out and fix itself. It helps. But only for a little while, because it never really fixes itself. After a while it just eats you up.”

And Grian wants to say, I think it’s eating me. And he wants to say, I think I am not alone enough, I still need more space, I still need more time. And he wants to say, Everything will be fine, I just need to find him. And he wants to say, I don’t think I would have lasted this summer without you.

“I didn’t have anyone to talk to my first summer as a lookout,” Scar admits. “But you have me. And I think—Grian, I know you think you’re alone, but you aren’t. And I know you think nobody understands, but I do. I’m trying to.”

“Oh,” he says. Oh.

There’s tears suddenly welling up in his eyes, and Grian rapidly tries to blink them away. He sees it in the incessant chatter that had annoyed him on the first week. He sees it in their radio channel, the one just for them to talk on, the secondary channel that ensures the main frequency is always open for real emergencies. Scar’s been cultivating the perfect landing spot for Grian to fall into, before he even knew Grian needed it.

“It’s not actually two different things, is it?” Grian finally responds. “Running away from something, and looking for something.”

And Scar says, “I don’t think it is, in the end.”

<< Chapter Seven | Masterpost | Chapter Nine >>

#hermitcraft #grian #goodtimeswithscar #hermitcraft fanfic #hermitcraft fanfiction #hermitcraft au #hc_firewatch_au #quara fanfic

30 notes · View notes

lycomorpha · 10 months

Text

The Flora of AC Valhalla: Food plants in Avaldsnes and Stavanger

I want to talk about the edible plants we see early on in ACV in Norway, because they're such an integral part of human existence! However...

Crops/economic botany is not my area of expertise

Neither is Norwegian food history

As a very part-time interloper and not an Actual Norwegian, I do not want to end up in an argument about grøt

The secret to a long and happy life is... Don't argue with; your Yorkshire relations about parkin, French friends & fam about butter, or Norwegian folks about grøt (which is porridge, but more so.) Trust me on this. But since we often forget to notice the plant materials that feed/clothe/shelter us every day, I'm gonna wade in anyway and link to more expert folks on porridge (bc I know my limits, lol.)

One other fun thing to note is that there's a reconstructed viking-era farm at present-day Avaldsnes, on the island of Bukkøy (which is also represented in-game as a small wooded island full of deer, just off Avaldsnes.) So if by chance you ever found yourself in the area in summer when it's open, you could find out a lot more on what the settlement and its crops might have looked like IRL.

Cultivated plants in Avaldsnes

We see crop plants as soon as we sneak into Avaldsnes. The first thing I noticed is a field of oats, and nearby is a cart with bundles of oats and another grain - probably barley or rye rather than wheat in this time period. This is where discussion of grøt & other skjemat (literally "spoon-food") would come in if I was feeling brave or foolish... Instead let me point to this lovely piece on the history of porridge as a staple in Norway, which includes links to recipes. Also here's an explainer of skjemat. One way or another I'm betting Eivor ate a lot of porridge, savory and sweet, because it's good stuff.

I also saw some fields out in the distance, past the oats and outside the restricted area...

And when I got there one was full of conifer saplings, and the other with dried flower or seed heads I can't identify. Most histories (in English at least) associate Norse settlers with deforestation. But there's evidence of them coppicing in England and growing orchards in France. So arboriculture in ACV's world doesn't seem too wild an idea.

I've no idea what the dried seeds/flowers are, and AFAIK there are few if any written herbals from the era. There are many plants listed in the present day region which have seed heads you could dry, but I recall some Danish research looking at archeological evidence of medicinal herbs used in medieval settlements? I might pick that up with the herbarium folks and see if they know anything - there is at least one person there that has studied old herbal texts and how they were compiled. I'm curious to know what plants Eivor would have known about/used!

Food plants and herbs in dwellings

In both Avaldsnes and Stavanger, we see food in and outside of the homes. Vegetables include cabbage, onion, and carrots - I like that the carrots are white, which they apparently were at this point in history. Cabbage and related vegetables can grow in quite cold winters (I wonder if the Raven clan would've had the same fkn whitefly problems we get on them, lol!) There's also bread... Some cheese on the shelf to go with I think? Nice.

I'm not sure what the herbs hanging up are, some look dry and others fresh. No doubt Norse travellers would have brought tasty culinary herbs from their travels, and maybe cultivated them as well as native medicinal/edible species. Seeing fruit & veg food outside in the snow reminds me of hanging milk and fresh food in a bag outside my room on a window ledge when the temperature allowed - so that it didn't get pinched from a shared fridge!

From a sync point in Stavanger you look can out over the town and see fields of oats here too. Having been to Stavanger, it was cool to imagine the port, new and old town in the distant past. The weirdest thing for me was seeing the coastline very simplified. It's a bit like how some of the counties in England where I've lived (and live now) look oddly glued together in game. Not complaining tho. Obviously there's only so much detail you need/is practical to include in a game! It just bends my brain a little.

But I did enjoy one joke that is included in the map; a small island for you to practice raiding called 'Ikke en Oy'. The words "ikke en øy" literally mean "not an island" in Norwegian, so I'm guessing that was an amusing way of saying "yeah, we made this lil bit of land up!"

#Flora of ACV #Flora of AC Valhalla #ac valhalla #assassins creed valhalla #assassin's creed valhalla #video game botany #videogamebotany #eivor varinsdottir

27 notes · View notes

insecateur · 10 months

Note

Hey Mr. Sam! I'm not super acquainted with the fanfic community, so I'd like to ask a question in order to put some thoughts in order. I've seen this recent phenomenon where some readers will try feeding abandoned/hiatus'd fics into some sort of chaptgptesque thingum in order to finish them, and writers are, naturally, upset. My question then is: are they/you *largely* upset because a) said readers are basically saying the writing is boilerplate and predictable enough that it can be ML'd into a coherent continuation; b) there is a legitimate fear of how the data is used or the program is trained on it; c) there is fear that their unique style will be successfully "replicated" by AI; or d) some other reason? Thanks for the info!

heyyy sorry for not answering right away,

i want to give a caveat before i say anything else - i'm markedly more jaded than most fic writers i've seen on this topic, as a primarily visual artist who's used to my work being reposted, reused, sometimes even edited etc without permission. i haven't even bothered to edit my fics on AO3 to make them available to registered users only bc i'm just like, it is how it is. if machine learning algorithms want to put my ott kinky smut in their research data you know what, good for them i guess. maybe it'll make the results less biased toward vanilla straight people lol

but anyway, i think in general it's a mix of not wanting your data to be put into machine learning without your permission or knowledge, and just an overall frustration at how people who read fanfic, look at fanart etc online treat people who make that stuff like they're basically non-existant or just there to provide "content" to be "consumed." which i guess is part of why i'm already way past jaded about it; people have already been doing this to fanartists for years and years and years at this point LOL. i'm actually myself kind of frustrated seeing some writers talk about it as if it's a new phenomenon and proof that writers are treated less well than visual artists in fandom ? when ummm. i guess you just didn't notice until now bc it wasn't threatening you? which is fine but it gets kinda old after a while.

i personally just don't like people doing stuff with what i make without permission, as much as it is a losing battle at this point. so seeing people joyfully basically say like, "i don't care about the people making the things i like, i can just get this ''AI' to do it faster anyway!" is pretty disheartening, especially when it involves feeding works you might have spent months or years on into it. it's kind of an accumulation of negative feelings.

in the grand scheme of things i'm mostly over it tho. to me it's pointless to worry about it just like it's pointless to worry about the people disregarding my wishes regarding my art. all it does is cause me undue anxiety. which isn't to say measures shouldn't be taken against it, and i'm glad there have been moves recently to try and draft laws etc on the subject, but at my level there's not much i can do except say "please don't do that" so really it's whatever.

#la réponse d #idk if this is an interesting answer but there u go. if other people want to weight in feel free

22 notes · View notes

z-grist · 5 months

Text

youtube

I forgot to share it here, but here's a storyboard piece I worked on a couple months back. Made it so I could finally add some more recent work to my portfolio. I actually started this 2 years ago back in 2021, but then got busy and never finished - I finally had some time to finish it so here it is!

Story & Characters are by me, all the backgrounds were done in Blender 3D (which was such a challenge to learn btw LOL)

Here are some other scraps underneath:

When I started this board, I already knew what characters I wanted to use - these are some ocs I've had for a while now - a bounty hunter and an outlaw (very much meant to be taking place in a sci-fi setting).

In retrospect, I don't think I needed to go and draw these very intricate character sheets lol. I did them mainly to apply to some character design positions a year back (that never happened).

Also, if you notice, I changed the bounty hunter's black glove to be on their right hand instead of their left in the actual board - when I was drawing the boards I realized that it would create some better compositions if the glove was on the other side lol. My foresight is still underdeveloped at times.

When it came to actual storyboarding - I usually started by writing down the script and listing the shots through text

Here's an example:

So you can see every shot is described by the type (a closeup, a medium shot, wide shot, etc) as well as a short description of what's happening, whether it's dialogue, an action or both.

This helps me visualize the scene without having to actually draw anything. This was a trick a professor taught me so that I didn't waste my arm (and time).

If you want to see more of the document here it is : X I had also included some references in there.

Also some sketches/thumbnails, I was trying to figure out the look of the environment.

"do more research on this part," the 2nd image says, whatever Past Me. These were just thoughts, in the end, I did go and gather a lot of industrial plant references online to properly figure out the environment. As I mentioned, I went and modeled some mockups on Blender 3D. On a side note, I don't think the mockups look that good, but they are just meant to be a stand-in for the environment - what's important is that they are clear and you can understand what's going on (Was I successful in that sense?)

Anyways, thanks for reading. I'm currently thinking of the next storyboard portfolio for me to do.

Here's a little bonus sketch that I drew 2 years ago that still makes me laugh:

#storyboarding #sci fi storyboard #mine #my art #artists on tumblr #zgrist #2023 #long post #Youtube

8 notes · View notes

your-local-uwu-artist · 6 months

Note

how's the smurfing going?

it's going good! my google doc is at over 5 pages, I got some nice sketches and the responses have been very helpful and fun >:D (shout out to isopod guy) the only problem is trying to not make my bias of who's my favorite smurf to be tooo obvious fndkjsa

plus the constant struggle between needing to do research and rewatch episodes and read wikipedia articles and the fact that i get what i call 'withdraw-l'... bassically I can only go so long before I just gotta doodle fdnjak

anyway: I SUPPOSE i might as well explain what the fuck I've been doing (if anyones noticed a lack of posts in the past handufl od days: the reason for my absence is that I was busy iwth my smurfing fdja )

bassically I've always had a LOT of questions regarding the smurfs, (many of which I've had sense childhood) and it's been plaguing me because nobody else seems to care to answer these questions, I'll be like 'what chemichal do you think makes them blue?' and 'what form of asexual reproduction do you assume they use' and 'i don't think it makes sense that they'd crush on smurfette, i'd imagine their mono-sex mono-gender society wouldn't really have those concepts or well, be heterosexual for that matter' and everyone responds with 'what aere you on' (the autism spectrum) 'why are you asking me this?' (i want to here your answer) and 'it's just a cartoon' (AND SOMETIEMS YOU GOTTA ASK SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS ABOUT CARTOONS) so I decided if I must do everything myself so be-it.

essentially I'm planning to make a very silly half video essay half my nonsense 'if i was in charge of a smurfs reboot' video. heres some of the doodles so far!

vanity's always been my favorite so i'm having a hard time convincing myself to draw some smurf other than him fndasjkfnask (Azrael has always been my second favorite lol) I'm really excited to draw more fo smurf village! mushrooms houses my beloved <3 tbh the village is def a plus for the live action films, while giving the smurfs eyelids and lashes and pecs did not work I do enjoy seeing cute fantasy mushroom village in a photorealistic style <3

anyway one very fun thing i learned about while researching is about these really pretty very epic and pog mushrooms that are native to new zealend and just the most brilliant shade of blue

these things are blue-tiful! And there are actually pigmented! (a lot of things in nature aren't actually blue and rather the structure of it refelcts light and shit to give it a blue appearance) the thing that gives em the blue pigment is a kind of 'azulene' but somehow just a brighter varient: they're so whimsical looking!

a funny thing I've found just through research is that a LOT of people aren't aware of smurfettes origin story, or thought that the origin story was from the live action films, this is so strange to me cause like ????? it's been there sense the begining comics, and theres plenty of episodes where it's mentioned

I'm also suprised by how many people seem to be fond of the new female smurfs: so I guess I'm on the unpopular side here, I've always imagined them as sorta sexless and generless, and that female smurfs (excluding artificially made ones like smurfette) just discovered and decided they preferred feminine gender expression/presentation. (i do wish i included a question asking if people as kids assumed them sexless, cause i always have)

idk I'm still working through the new cgi series and my cartoon pirating site doesn't have the second season, so maybe I'll change my mind on them

ufdnsjafnsdk sorry for rambling the hyperfixation has taken hold lmao

#kyuchat #yuwutube

7 notes · View notes

kingdoms-and-empires · 1 year

Note

Hii❤️ Take a seat, prepare something to drink, because this is going to be a long long praise ❤️😂 I've played your game in the past at least three times, and I always enjoyed it so much! But yesterday I played it again and I noticed some scenes that I think weren't there before! I think you did a great work! The previous demo was really smooth and enjoyable, but I feel that the new one makes the story a bit more linear, if that makes sense. All the new scenes allowed us to feel more immersed in the narration, and connected some situations that were previously a little sudden (for example, the first few times I read, I don't remember being the scene where we read our grandfather's letter) (I also really liked that you added the possibility to read about all the teaching we received during the years!)(did I stay awake all night to read? absolutely yes!😍)

I also wanted to tell you that the way you write about our relationship with our family makes my heart melt every time😭 I could feel the love of our parents, the way they care for us and actually make an effort to spend time with us because they love us! You really have a way with words!

And also, I warn you: I'm going to kidnap Aurelius one of these days. HE IS TOO PRECIOUS FOR THIS WORLD! The way he opens and closes his little hands when he is a toddler makes me go "🥹🥹😭😭😭😭" And also Mary is sooo sweet! So dedicated, so brave, so pretty, I want to hug her so much!❤️

Last but not least (I actually don't remember if I had to add something else... I'll just write another ask if that's the case😂) when I played the game the first three times, I always read the torture scene, because I wanted the whole experience of what was happening. But it's written so well, that this time I really couldn't do it. It's an extremely strong scene, really difficult to write too, I think (just like the whole flashback later in the story), but you wrote it really well. I usually don't have problems whit this type of scenes, but yours was on another level😂

Now this has gotten really long, but I have a couple of questions... So I'll make another ask later so you can answer separately 😂

Thank you for your hard work❤️❤️

Thank you really much for your kind words!

I actually did add a few scenes in the beginning again to help the story flow better, and cleaned some stuff up.

For the final product or later in the future ill be making the festival arc cleaner with Leah's suggestion of making a mini arc with it so that you can travel around the city via a choices checklist so it feels much more immersive in the future, sorta like how Shepard's of Haven lets you do things throughout the day, which reminds me, if you havent played, please do!!!

@shepherds-of-haven is a quality game that deserves all the attention it gets!

Back on track again, uhhh oh yeah, about Aurelian, our lil bro picks up mannerisms throughout the years. When he was young, he open and closed his fist when excited, nowadays he snaps his fingers whenever he gets excited lol

Also the torture scene and night of tears were really heavy to write as well. Needing to research on the topics like the munster rebellion and the execution afterwards, or the Romanov family killings really put a damper on me as i wrote, and i had to make sure i wasnt glorifying nor making the violence edgy for edginess sake. I needed to make it raw, but also not annoyingly grimdark.

But again, thank you for the kind words!

#kingdomsandempires #if wip #interactive fiction #interact if #dashingdon #hosted games

41 notes · View notes

whmp · 4 months

Text

in case you're just here for the good stuff, i'll be tagging my personal ramblings as #whmpersonal so you can avoid em BUT this is tangentially related to the game project i'm working on, so stick around i guess? tl;dr: i'll probably make a more coherent post where I ask ppl for help (especially artists). also, i'll be more attentive and answer your asks faster, hopefully. : )

anyway, after a bit of a "review" of my creative process (and i guess my uhh way of living in general?) i've noticed that it's a huge clusterfuck. and that it has been since i was a kid. without some external pressure or an imposed structure (like deadlines, parents or strongly worded emails) i just sort of relied on random surges of productivity to carry me through life. on one hand, it's kinda fun: most of the time i'm not doing anything valuable and then all of a sudden i condense weeks worth of work into several sleepless days during which i feel like An Immortal Unstoppable God. lighting bolts shoot from my fingertips, my eyes glow in the dark, and my caffeine-to-blood volume ratio is hovering around 1.

unfortunately, it's not really sustainable. the "not doing anything valuable" stage that takes up most of my time is not me just chilling. it's me freaking the fuck out about not doing anything despite wanting to and finding myself just. not able to. not to mention that some things just need minor, but constant maintenance - at best i'd just forget about them and face the consequences later on. at worst i'd be acutely aware of them while procrastinating, clueless as to what's wrong with me.

couple that with a couple other unhealthy habits, a microscopic attention span and wow, i fit like all the criteria for adhd. i gotta admit i was super sceptical at first when doing any research, since, well. how the fuck am i even supposed to gain any unbiased insight into this. anyway, i spent a stupid amount of money on an official diagnosis (seriously why is this not covered by insurance gsygx), it took a million meetings and tests and i get a piece of paper that says i have add and deserve some medication.

this has also made me realize that i'm spread out super thin when it comes to projects. i love every single one of them, but im going to have to be a bit more realistic in terms of what can remain in "when it's done" limbo and what needs a bit of a push. the whump game is unique in that it's not just me who wants this to eventually get released. so! what this means is that it needs a proper, project structure. not a .txt on my desktop where i keep a backlog of missing features. but must important of all, it needs ~*people*~. this is the first time i took a step back and estimated how much time everything would take me and yeahhhh i was being very optimistic when i said "playable build in 2023" lol. i've been hesitant to ask for help bc 1. i'm stubborn : ) 2. im bad at coordinating stuff 3. i can't pay ppl - like seriously, there is one person making a model for me (if you're reading this sorry i didn't ask if you want a tag but this is just a personal post where i keep yapping) and it's looking so clean and professional,,, you gotta sell this as an asset.

HOWEVER im getting past the mentality of "i gotta do as much as i can by myself". and also taking meds so that im able to focus on tasks (both gamedev-related and others) and actually pay attention to what im doing. which is great news for development! and answering asks! ill be making a dev post where i tag all the ppl and will also ask for help.

that's it. im on a train rn and bored out of my mind so this is why this post exists, sorry. anyway check out this screenshot of a moment in clone high that i relate to deeply.

#whmpersonal #<- this is the tag #isn't it creative like wow i had to think about it for a couple of minutes #not tagging it as whump dev since it's just me rambling #I'm so bored you don't even know #this train is already late by like an hour??? god #shout out to łódź fabryczna gotta be one of the ugliest train stations known to man

5 notes · View notes

suzieb-fit · 5 months

Text

Ok, another episode of my often meandering thoughts....

I've done vast amounts of research on fasting over maybe 18 months or so. Since I incorporated it into regular life.

And I have only noticed the information on the reported benefits. Of which there are an abundance, of course.

But how about people that it actually causes problems for?

I know the obvious ones like pregnant/breastfeeding women. Those with eating disorders, people that are malnourished, etc.

I just mean otherwise relatively "average" people (let's have me as the specific example).

I was fit, healthy, in great shape, peri-menopausal but without any serious symptoms. Type one diabetic. Erratic sugar levels here and there but usually with a reason.

Then I started fasting.

Felt fabulous at first. Full of energy. But it was pretty short lived. But by then fasting was just part of normal life.

I've since been plagued with an array of issues. Insomnia beyond anything I suffered with before, countless dietary sensitivities, and most notably the now infamous (lol) mucus thing.

I've just been sat here wondering. Is fasting actually messing me up??

Is that even possible?

Am I finally losing all cognitive thinking skills lol?

Anyway, with that new theory at the forefront of my mind, I'm going to go with it.

No more fasting beyond 14 hours.

For now at least.

No particular reason for that number, it's just a time frame that fits my daily life.

So that starts now.

Up as usual this morning, and into one of my favourite full body workouts.

I used both kettlebells and my trusty little dumbbells.

A good way to get moving.

And as I've done for the past few days, I'm breaking my shorter fast with delightful frothy coffee and peanuts. Threw a few walnuts in there too.

Forever determined to figure out what my rather nonsensical body needs......

#fitspo #fitspiration #fitblr #fitness #healthy living #health and fitness #fit #workout #fiton #suzieb-fit #fasting lifestyle #intermittent fasting

2 notes · View notes

rickie-the-storyteller · 5 months

Text

The Looking Glass...

Hey guys! Great news...

I want to finally share who the mystery blogger is.

Just kidding lol. But I wanted to talk about it a bit more on here, since people have started to speculate about it (which is great btw!) and I wanted to go over its background and overall role in the story a little bit more.

I've gotten a lot of interesting guesses. Some of which make sense. Others that... well, don't. To put it as simply as possible. But that makes sense, seeing as I haven't shared much about it. Until now!

The Looking Glass wasn't always this controversial blog - it started out as an innocent space where the writer would share their opinions on life and words of wisdom, as well as their own creations and interests (whether that was poems/stories they liked to write, artwork they did, songs and playlists they'd listen to, videos, books/tv shows/movies they enjoyed or whatever else). In fact, it never used to be called "The Looking Glass." It was called "Geek Heaven." And it was written by a self-proclaimed geek (Obviously lol).

It wasn't until around November 2010 that the name changed to what it is currently (after several years of no posts at all, after one of their most popular posts got a ton of backlash and traction), and the whole site got a complete makeover. It got revamped into the blog it is by the events of book 2 - deep dives, commentary and analysis of news, trending world events and stories. While that was a small amount of what the blog used to do, it was now entirely what it was. And evidently, this was a good move. The Looking Glass picked up a LOT of popularity in a short span of time, and by the events of UVC, it had nearly a million followers (mainly from the UK, but in other places as well), got nominated for a bunch of awards (including the "Best New Creator Award," which was usually given to YouTubers) and was seen as a reliable source of news and info by a lot of people due to how well written and well researched it was, despite being run by an amateur.

What I will say about the identity of the blogger is that it's rather convoluted... I'm honestly still trying to make that aspect of the story a little more simple/neater, especially in the third instalment (which is where Stephanie finally finds out who it is. I will be sharing what I've got for book 3 so far at some point, don't worry). It isn't just a clear-cut answer of one singular person (I mean, it is. But other people are responsible for it, if that makes sense. This is why there are a ton of red herrings within this mystery - many people are related, but not every single one of those people is the blogger lol).

Another small clue I'll give is that it isn't Stephanie's stalker. You know that plot point of her being wary of someone seemingly stalking her once she starts the investigation? Yeah, that creepy person following her around and trying to freak her out isn't the same person who's been writing about her online. A few people think it is the same person, but it isn't. I won't tell you who the stalker is here, since that's not what this post is about, but to give you a little hint, it is another person we know. Not incredibly well, but still.

Here are the most popular guesses (as far as I know):

Alice - I think I've straight up said it wasn't her in the past... but one or two people think I've been lying about that lol (and by that, I mean my friends from school). I'm not. Making that clear right now. Alice is actually one of the main people trying to figure out the identity of the blogger. And fun fact - she actually finds out before Steph does. I guess she is a bit of a detective lol.

Ben - A guess I got when discussing this plot element with some friends... I noticed that most guesses where from the female characters, so I pointed out that I never mentioned gender in the blog's title or description. So then people started pointing at Ben (and other guys, but Ben mostly) since it would be a major twist if it were him. And I agree with that... but Ben technically already has a major twist in the story lol. Doesn't mean he can't have another one, tho. You know how I'm like.

Holly - Putting this one here for my sister, tbh. She loved the whole Holly storyline from book 1, and she wanted me to bring her character back somehow. And she does appear in book 3 briefly (that news will make her happy lol). It's interesting to think about, though, since Holly's whole thing was that she got expelled for cyberbullying and had to leave... only to be 'replaced' by Steph the following year. Like, she took Holly's place in the friend group. So there's a bit of a connection there, even if the two girls haven't officially met yet.

Bret - Another huge twist if it were true. And it sort of works on some level... He and Steph get really close in the sequel, and she does confide in him a lot. Alice also guesses him at one point due to not being able to trust him anymore. Understandable, I guess, considering what he does in the sequel.

Aisha - Haven't talked much about her or her sister on here, but I have with my school friends. They thought she's a good pick for the blogger because she's a writing student with the same level of sassiness that Alice has. It fits nicely, you must admit. Plus the other characters don't know her particularly well, but she is very observant and is good at getting to know other people.

Charlie - Red herring. But it fits well in terms of his general attitude. Another quick little fun fact - out of all the people to not know from the beginning, this guy is the first to find out. Not that that changes the overall narrative much... I mean, it's not like he does anything big with that info, but it's still rather cool.

Elise - Last person I'll mention here. This is a more recent guess I've got, so I thought I'd mention it. It's another one that would be a huuuuuge twist in the story if it were true, especially knowing what Elise is like as a character... and considering her arc throughout the story (especially her role as a rival to Steph in book 3. I felt like that was a logical step for her in book 3, since book 2 was her realising the reality of having Steph as a friend, and deciding that that wasn't what she wanted). She's very principled and very much about finding justice and truth, and she is also deeply hurt by a lot of Stephanie's actions, so there's some motivation to her potentially being the blogger as well... I'd say this fits, too.

I got other guesses, too (my fave being Dylan lol. Imagine freaking Dylan being the blogger lol. Connor was another one that got me🤣), but these ones are the most popular and intriguing to me.

Who do you think it could be? Let me know your thoughts!

More Steph's Crew-related stuff coming soon (as well as my plans for the blog as we wrap up 2023 and move on into the new year).

#rickie-the-storyteller #writerblr #steph's crew #the looking glass #secret blogger #suspects

5 notes · View notes