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imonthinice · 3 years

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The Criminal Psychology Majors, Jason Todd x Fem!Reader Part 19/?

Word Count: 4.1k

Author’s Note:

Warnings: Mentions of the court system, fighting, swearing, no beta bitch we die like Jason Todd

Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5) (Part 6) (Part 7) (Part 8) (Part 9) (Part 10) (Part 11) (Part 12) (Part 13) (Part 14) (Part 15) (Part 16) (Part 17) (Part 18) (Part 19) (Part 20)

Time Skip lol, February, next year. Finals.

She and Jason had been together for 6 months around February. When finals started coming up. The distance and tension between the two was fucking palpable. They hadn't fought or anything, but the stress between them had caused a slight riff. They just had space to focus on their studies.

They would see each other at work. She was his secretary. Everyone, all their friends, even their families, swore they just needed to bone. Which, considering they both heard about this from Bruce first, didn't mean they wanted to do it.

If you had asked Y/N, she would have said she wasn't dressing for Jason. But that was a lie. She was tempted to go with the advice everyone was giving them, especially before they went into their first finals exam. She walked into his office.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Well, I'm your secretary. Seeing if you need anything."

"I don't."

She turned to walk out.

"That doesn't mean you can walk out."

She smiled to herself, "Alright." She sat on the chair in front of his desk, "I won't walk out."

"Mhm."

She frowned, he didn't even look up from his computer. "What do you want me here for, Jay?"

"Close the blinds on all my windows, baby."

"It'll become dark."

"Good."

"Your eyes will fry from the light of your computer."

"Trust me, they won't."

"Uh-huh," she doubted as she closed the blinds.

Jason walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his head in the crook of her shoulder. She smiled and leaned her head on his.

"Exams fucking suck," Jason said.

"Couldn't have guessed from the riff in our relationship, really? You don't say?" she sarcastically retorted.

"It's not like we had it easy this entire time, either."

"Fuck you don't say? At least my attacker was admitted to Arkham and my friends got out."

"Can't catch a break," he paused because his buzzer went, "Can't catch a fucking break!" he exclaimed, exasperated. He went and answered it, "Jason Todd, who's using Y/N (Last Name)'s buzzer," he said, sounding annoyed.

"Hey, it's Dick. You two aren't fucking right, B will be pissed."

"Shut up. We aren't. What do you want."

"Someone's pissed. I need paperwork."

"Come and get it."

She crossed her arms and laughed when Dick entered the room. She slightly waved. He slightly waved back.

"You know, you two should bone. But not here," Dick joked. He walked over to one of the many, many filing cabinets to search for the paperwork he needed.

"You're really just riding the wave into Jason running you down, aren't you?" Y/N said.

"Well, we're always up for sparring."

"It probably won't be sparring, Dick. You know your brother. He's staring daggers into the back of your head."

"For Valentine's, I'll be giving Barbara the stress of taking care of me after Jason beats me to a pulp."

"At least you'll get one last Gala?" she joked.

"Will you be coming?"

"She will," Jason said.

"Amazing. Don't fuck on the dance floor," Dick joked.

"Fuck you."

"Love you too, Jase," he turned to walk out, "Love you too, Y/N."

"I'll be sure to tell you I love you at your funeral, Dick," she joked as he walked out. She paused before turning to Jason, "Gala?"

"Come, please," he said before going to hug her. "I miss you."

"You see me every day, Love."

"But we haven't been," he paused, "Well, a couple. In weeks. I miss you. The fun one who got me to run down the streets of Gotham on a skateboard."

"Dress code?"

"White tie."

"Dammnit. Guess I'm shopping."

"I'll give you my debit card?"

"I don't need it, baby. However," she joked, "I sure will take it."

He laughed and forked it over to her, "Don't spend my Ph.D. funds."

"I will gladly spend your Ph.D. funds."

"No," he laughed, "Please, I need those."

"I mean if you insist I spend it all," she said, laughing.

"The Gala's later tonight, you can take the rest of the day off."

"Kind of you to do."

"I know, I'm a gentleman."

"Truly," she kissed him. "I'll see you tonight."

"Can I come to get you?"

"Feel free too."

"Alright. I love you."

"I love you," she said before she left the office.

Getting into her car, she fumbled with the mirror a bit. She looked like a mom. The bags under her eyes and the formal get-up for an office job did her in.

They had said "I love you" for the first time around Christmas. She wished she caught the moment where they were fucking around and she just said it.

The Christmas lights surrounded them, hung in the trees. They had gone to see the New York City tree in Times Square. He was setting up a photo to take of the two of them and she just said it.

She could have sworn his fucking eyes lit up with green. Like they glowed.

Reminiscing on those small moments with Jason was something that would make her smile without fail. That man somehow unlocked a new set of feelings, stronger feelings. She was in touch with herself.

She went to her house first, to see how A/N was doing. To see her on the steps. She pulled into the driveway.

"Hey, you good?"

"Huh? Oh! Yeah, of course. Why?"

"I have to go get a dress for a Wayne Gala trademark, do you want to come to help me?"

"Of course I do!"

---------------------

"I guess you could say we didn't narrow shit down about a dress," Y/N joked as she came out in the 16th dress she had tried on.

"Okay, well, that one is the best so far," A/N said, seeming like they finally made progress.

"Wow, this is news, we've narrowed it down."

"Honestly consider it a miracle. Thank God Jason let you go from work early. Are you getting a full day's pay?" A/N asked.

"Probably. I told Bruce I didn't want a full day's pay if I wasn't there, but Bruce said it was in my contract. I think he's just being generous," Y/N said with a sigh.

"Did you not read your contract?"

"I did! That's why I think he's being generous. I don't think I'd forget something like that."

"Watch you did forget those words. You should ask him to see your contract, if he's disobeying it then the board members are probably at his ass about it," A/N explained.

"God, please no. I would hate being a contention point for the board members."

"They probably want you fired. And they're probably mad that you won't be fired because you're with Jason."

"Well, I'm also just a great secretary"

"See, each time you say that I assume it's because you give him a little something-something under his desk every day."

"I'll have you know we've never had sex in that office."

"Did you have sex in another office?" A/N questioned.

"I'm pleading the 5th to any further questioning."

"Wait, oh my god."

"Nope! Going to go try on another dress and ignore you now!" Y/N exclaimed with a joking tone.

"This one's the best," A/N said.

"We're making progress! I'm thinking if I go with this one, I add gloves."

"God, are you trying to give Jason a hard-on?"A/N joked.

"I would like to plead the 5th to any further questioning on the matter," Y/N retorted.

"You're evil. If you're going to be evil, you might as well wear a suit."

"I wish. After all the shit I've been through, I want to stick it to the fucks who keep judging me. I'm already so jeopardized, though. Jason goes through a lot of shit dating me. I'll wear the dress."

"Old white people are old white people."

"Well, Bruce is nice at least. If he's judgemental, at least I don't hear about it on the news," Y/N said and twirled. "Yeah, this one. I like this one."

"I also like that one. There's something about silk. Always gets someone to look like 50 million dollars. Probably worth that too."

Y/N fumbled with the tag, "It's not pure silk, so it's less. Only 1000$."

"Only 1000$? God, that's like our rent."

"Rent is more."

"Well if we weren't in a house it would be the same. That's insane. That's like 3-4 months of groceries."

"I know it's a lot to us commonfolk, but Jason is rich. He wouldn't mind. We might, but he wouldn't."

"Yeah, but do you feel okay with spending that much of his money?"

"I have no idea. We'll see. I'll go try another dress on."

"This is cute," Y/N said.

"Well of course it is, it's probably worth your college scholarship, though."

"God, don't remind me of prices."

"It's hard to forget prices when we're given a lot of money to spend."

"We can't spend all of it!"

"What's he using it for?" A/N asked in a half-joke.

"He's getting a Ph.D. in Criminal Psychology when we graduate."

"Okay, okay. So he needs it."

"Yeah, he doesn't let Bruce pay his bills, remember. He's making his own money, minus the working-for-his-dad part."

"Yeah, the working for Bruce part seems a bit counterintuitive."

"If he's getting paid, it doesn't matter to him."

"What's it even like working with his family? Especially with the tension between you and Jason?"

"It sucks. Jason and I haven't fought, yet. We have to act like we aren't fighting. Which makes everyone think we are fighting. Which makes both of us mad. Because apparently," she paused, "The way to fix fighting is having sex, apparently."

"So have sex?"

"Shut up."

"Family on your nerves?" A/N asked.

"They're so involved, but I love them all. I just wish we had a moment alone, I know it's hard to do in a fucking office, but still."

"Go try on another dress. Show up looking like a million bucks."

"You are simply so right."

"I feel like this is the mature version of the black sparkly spaghetti straps one," A/N said.

"It's like you mashed a bunch of words together and suddenly I have to sell you my first-born son."

"Well, it's true!" She laughed, "It's a grown-up version, what someone, old white people, would expect of you."

"Old white people expect a lot."

"Jason's going to be one, one day," A/N joked.

"He's got not-white features," Y/N said, trying to picture his face. There was something about him. Something not-white. She had always picked up on it, but she could never tell what it was.

"Well, it's not like you can ask his mom her ethnicity."

"Jeez, that would be so rude of me to do. Let's just say it's... it's not my place."

"He's got secrets?" A/N questioned.

"Tall, handsome, mysterious. That's my Jason."

"A little bit of everything, all of the time," A/N said in a sing-song tune, specifically the "Welcome to the Internet" tune.

"Don't quote Bo Burnham to me, that album broke me," Y/N joked

"Who didn't it break? Oh, wait, probably Jason."

"He probably sobbed like a baby at it, I don't know where you got the "Emotionless" trope from, A/N."

"Can you blame me? He's a Wayne."

"Those are some of the most emotionally connected people I know? Like, genuinely, they're probably more in touch with themselves than you and I."

"Well, they don't exactly have the reputation for being able to discern their emotions, you know."

"You need to stop interacting with tabloids and their articles," Y/N said, seeming exasperated with the tabloids and the line of conversation. But that was nothing new. She hated the press, the articles, the paparazzi. She hated them all.

"Yeah, probably. You hate them for a reason."

"Do you not know about that time they made it so we couldn't get into our car?" Y/N asked.

"You did, you did."

"Fuckin' tabloids."

"Go try on another dress before you explode from rage."

"Valid," Y/N said, laughing.

"God, if only this wasn't a white tie event," Y/N said and sighed.

"I mean, you could just wear it."

"I will get my ass handed to me, however," she said, taking a picture, "Maybe Jason will just let me get it if I pay him back?"

"You don't have the money right now?" A/N asked.

"I need to get paid and I'll have enough," Y/N explained.

"Don't tell me this is worth more than our rent."

"I will just simply not tell you."

"Girl, you can't."

"Money is dumb and I hate it."

A/N laughed, "Which one do you want to go with?"

"Uh, probably the silk one."

"Temptress."

"I will literally buy and wear a corset to make Jason's life hard to get you off my back," Y/N laughed.

"I implore you to do so for the joke."

"Shut up," Y/N joked.

She still sent the picture of the last dress to Jason off-handedly. Asked him how he felt about it since she knew she loved it.

Why don't you just get it? He had sent back.

Can't afford it.

I can.

Please let me pay you back for this.

Just take me on a date.

I can do that.

You should.

I'll see you soon.

She laughed and grabbed both dresses.

"Jason's buying both?" A/N asked.

"Mhm! I have to take him on a fun date in return."

"You were probably going to do it both ways, honestly."

"You just know me so well."

-----------------------

They had gone and gotten the gloves before heading back to their house. Laughing and blasting rock songs the entire time. There was something about the bass running through the car and having the windows rolled down while screaming the songs. It was insane.

One of the songs they blasted was "I Think I'm OKAY" by Machine Gun Kelly and YUNGBLUD, switching out the vocals. It was fun to take breaks like that and, just enjoy each other's presence. Especially during finals season, where both of them were stressed because of their respective finals.

Everyone was stressed. Finals did that to everyone. Whether someone was in school or not, they felt the teenagers and college students lose their minds about it.

They got out of the car at their home and took the dresses inside. A/N went to go study in her room while Y/N went to go hang up her dresses. She entered her room and instantly remembered why she hated her laptop.

The laptop fan was deafening, it's why she barely had Jason over at her house anymore. She cleaned it constantly but, it kept going and going.

She brought it to the Wayne Manor over the Winter Break because she had work to do but wanted to see Jason, and everyone, everyone, commented on the thing.

They compared it to a screaming goat, an electronic mess, a horse-powered fan, anything they could put together with electronic, goat and fan, they called the laptop that.

Bruce even offered to buy her a new one, but she declined. She didn't think it was broken, so it didn't need to be replaced or fixed. If it was still in working condition, she was going to use it until it bluescreened on her.

Much to everyone's dismay.

She hated the fucking thing. So if she could drown it out with music, you bet your ass she did. She was grateful that her parents had sent it to her, but she assumed it was because they hated it too. She was right. No one liked that laptop.

She went to go shower. She figured if she fucked with her appearance and hair a bit, then the press would get off her back. She hadn't exactly tried to impress them thus far. But she wanted to just live her life.

She figured doing her hair, makeup, wearing the right clothes, she'd get harassed less. There was a lot of pressure dating a Wayne, she had realized.

She was constantly in the media, somehow she became an idol for little girls in the span of months. It was a lot for someone to take on. She embraced it normally. With open arms normally.

But A/N had told her that she started sleep-talking. Screaming about the eyes, the people watching her. She knew it was probably connected to the stress she was under dating Jason, but she really didn't want to deal with it.

If she ignored it, no one could tell her to deal with it. If she hid it, no one had to see it. She was looking into soundproofing her room so that A/N didn't have to see it.

Was it healthy to do that? Probably not. Probably far from the concept of healthy coping mechanisms.

She got out of the shower and started playing with her appearance. If she ended up with loud makeup and hair after this, she was going to just accept it.

She did end up with pretty loud eyeshadow. But her hair was fine, as acceptable as it could get for everyone judging her. Only nude lipstick that was just two, maybe three shades darker than her skin was what she needed. She kind of overdid the eyeshadow, so it had to be balanced.

Nerves by Icon for Hire was playing in her room. And in a way, that was how she felt. There was a lot of feeling in her, that she wasn't made for the life she was starting to lead. That being an idol was how she was going, but she couldn't do it.

She sighed and put on heels. White heels. It would be easier to put them on before the dress and gloves. The corset came on next. IT wasn't anything special, and she was capable of putting it on without help.

But then the dress.

"She loved that dress, but it wasn't the other one. The other one sparked a little bit of joy in her, while this one just conformed to everyone's opinions of her.

She wanted to wear the other one, so, so, fucking badly.

And finally the gloves. It was an outfit she thought was cute but would be torn to shreds in the media. She knew that.

The media liked to eat her alive.

Part of her wanted a break from it all. The other part wanted to do an interview with the press, to shit-talk all of them and make them weep. She wanted to be the one to destroy them.

Revenge was best served cold though, and the rage was far too hot in her head to even begin a proper essay on why they sucked.

She turned off the music in her room and was greeted with the lovely sounds of her computer fan. Comforting, but hatred.

Jason was going to be there any minute. Was she even ready for a Gala?

They had been through so much.

---------------------------------

She walked to his car. He brought one of the fancy ones.

"You couldn't just like, own a not expensive car?" she joked.

"Why would I do that?"

She laughed and handed him his debit card, "I don't know, to keep the press off your ass?"

"I think they'd find us no matter what," he said as he backed out of her driveway, "You look beautiful by the way."

"Thank you, Love. You're as handsome as always."

"Simp."

"Alas, I admit it," she joked as she turned on the radio. "I swear the media is going to have a field day today."

"When do they not?"

"That's fair."

"I'm sorry this school year's been fucking our relationship," he sighed, "We deserve better and a better chance than what we've been dealt."

"Unfortunately that's how school works."

"Fuck school sometimes. Not everyone gets as hit as badly as us."

"It's the psychology teachers. If any teachers are strict, they are."

"We still deserve a break."

"Well, there's always when finals are over."

"I swear we're doing something nice when finals end."

"That's not that hard to do."

The tension in that car was palpable. Truly, you could cut that with a knife. A diamond's edge.

They got to the Gala before anyone, except the Waynes.

"Hey lot," Y/N said.

"Y/N! Glad you could make it!" Stephanie said and pulled her into a hug, "The guys suck, so I like you the most today."

She laughed, "What did they do?"

"They won't play rooftop tag with me."

"Why do you even play that game?" Y/N asked.

"Agility! I'm a track star, duh. I drag them with me."

"Ah, how could I be so foolish," she laughed as Stephanie pulled her towards the other girls. Y/N waved at the boys while laughing. "You do know I have a boyfriend who wants to see me, right?"

"It's Jason."

"Good observation."

"Shut up. I claim you."

"You can't claim me!" she jokingly exclaimed, loud enough for the boys to hear.

"Steph, that's my girlfriend!" Jason yelled back.

"Not anymore!" She yelled as she pulled Y/N into the building.

"Explanation?" Y/N asked, "Do you have an issue or something?"

"I don't. Babs does."

"Go on?"

"Ask her."

Y/N sighed and walked up to Barbara and Cassandra, "I heard you have an issue or something?"

"Yes! You! Okay so," Barbara said, "We're all worried about you and Jason."

"Oh, Jeez," Y/N sighed.

"No no, listen. We can feel the tension. Have you been fighting?"

"I told you before, we aren't."

"Then what is it? 'Cause I'm known for being a detective, hello, I'm Jim Gordon's daughter. And even I can't figure it out."

"Probably exams. Exams suck."

"Oh! It's because you're not used to the fame," Cassandra said.

"Okay, Cassie. Listen, it's-"

"It is isn't it!" Stephanie exclaimed.

"Ugh. Yes. Are you happy now?"

"C'mon, it isn't that bad is it?" Barbara asked.

"It is. They've been at my throat with daggers ever since I met Jason."

"Who's been at your throat with daggers?" Jason asked.

"Don't worry about it," Y/N said before anyone could open their mouths and say to the contrary.

"Well, then. Everyone should be here soon," Bruce said. "Wish we had entertainment this time."

"Can't Y/N sing?" Tim asked.

"Uh, yeah?" Y/N said.

"So sing," Tim said.

"Tim. C'mon. Don't do me like this, man."

"Think about it," Bruce said and put a hand on her shoulder, "It could be fun."

She laughed and everyone scattered except her and Jason.

"So, the daggers comment?" he asked.

"Media reference."

He sighed, "You can always step out of the spotlight, my love. Step down, walk away from their eyes but still be in mine."

"I'll think about it."

He took her hands, "You should think quicker," he joked.

She laughed and he pulled her into the ballroom she knew all-too-well at this point. The first time she was there ran through her mind like no one was watching, the beauty in her memory for capturing it like that.

She knew once the pictures were released she'd probably attempt to paint it.

Galas were stuffy and full of people. She didn't like the people aspect. When strangers would come up to her and start talking, she'd get freaked out. They knew her, but she didn't know them.

She wasn't involved in getting to know people high-up in the world. She was a simple secretary who was dating one of the CEOs.

She'd get twirled around by people's sons. Stuck in dances and conversations. She almost always found herself with one of the Waynes after she ran from someone she didn't know.

She did figure if she sang she'd get away from everyone. So, in a fit of trying to get away, she found her way to Selina.

"Hey!" she said.

"Y/N! Are you running again?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Do you want to sing or something, Bruce said he asked you to."

"He did, and I figured, "Fuck it" so here I am."

Jason came up just as she said that, "Duet?" he asked.

"Now that's an idea and a half."

"You kids, always doing crazy stuff," Selina joked, "Le me see what I can do for 'ya."

"We're really doing this?" Jason asked as Selina slinked off.

"I guess so!" she exclaimed and he pulled her in for a kiss.

"Really saying "Fuck you" to the press today, huh?"

"Well, they're always saying "Fuck you" to me."

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shinesurge · 3 years

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I’ve been holding off on making this post because I wanted to try it out myself and get settled in and make sure everything went okay, but seeing as I’ve gone ahead and updated my site and everything I thought now might be a good time to start talking about this publicly!

If you’ve known me for more than five minutes you know I fucking hate Webtoon, like, a lot. Every aspect of it disgusts me to the core of my being, and while Webtoon is the ugliest version of them the aspects that I hate also extend to basically any comic aggregate site. I hate that they treat artists like content robots, I hate that they treat comic readers like morons who aren’t capable of engaging with complex stories, I hate that they actively try to strip away all the cool parts of indie comics by cultivating sterile and impersonal environments that discourage artistic experimentation and unique expression.

So! I hope you’ll be interested in what I have to say about this new platform that’s (hopefully) going to be out of alpha this summer. If you think you like reading comics on Webtoon, I really encourage you to check out Dillyhub once it launches. That’s the short version, but I have a LOT to say about this! So I’m putting the rest of this under a cut.

Full disclosure, I’m not getting paid or anything for this. The creative outreach at Dillyhub contacted me a few weeks ago asking if I’d be interested in having Kidd Commander be one of their launch titles when they go live this summer. I was hesitant at first, since I actively distrust anything claiming to be For Creators at this point, but they answered my pushy questions patiently and everything seemed on the up and up so I gave it a shot; I’ve been needing a mobile mirror for KC anyway. Eventually they invited me to the alpha creator discord, where they’ve been working directly with all of us artists to improve the platform, and now to be honest I’m REALLY excited for this thing to get off the ground. Nobody asked me to make this post, but since I’ve spent years whining and bitching about how other services do wrong by their creators, I thought I’d talk about this one that’s doing things right.

So, the biggest advantage this site has for creators over others in my opinion is that it. Treats us like individuals, regardless of follower count lmfao. If you’re a new person just starting out with your new webcomic, here’s what webtoon does for you:

Note: you don’t get a custom banner, you don’t even get to choose the solid color it is. That big circle icon is ALSO the image that shows up in searches, but everywhere else on the site it’s a 100x100px square, so you have to choose whether you want it to look good as a giant circle at the top of your comic’s page OR whether you want to look good in search results. Which, by the way, is the ONLY way for people to find you if you’re not partnered. And that’s it! You have no monetization options, you won’t show up on the genre pages, and when someone DOES stumble across your page it looks super unprofessional. Good Luck!

Now here’s my Dillyhub page(s):

You don’t get a static banner and one icon, you get a whole carousel banner with as many images as you want front and center as soon as you get to the project page. You get seven (custom!) genre tags, as opposed to Webtoon’s single tag you have to pick from their list, and plenty of room to talk about your work. The episodes are even laid out better, you get a MUCH bigger preview space to work with and they’re nice and big on the bottom half of the page:

you know, like they’re actually presenting ART lmfao.

That’s already an ENORMOUS improvement, but here’s my favorite thing.

o hm that’s a lot of super cushy settings I have for every individual episode, but what’s that, Episode Type?

LIKE.

listen, i know this is probably a bit specialized if you’re not a comic maker yourself, but this is a HUGE DEAL. You can post vertically OR page by page! You can even post pages two at a time for double page spreads, or so they read like a physical comic book! AND their specs are really open, as long as the file meets the size requirement you can make it whatever shape you want. You don’t have to reformat all your shit to post here!! I posted the entire first volume of KC STRAIGHT FROM THE PRINT FILES in like half an hour!!! The episodes can also be any amount of pages, you can post a single page or an entire chapter all in one go!

So that’s just the project page for the comic, let’s see what happens when I click on my username there.

Each author gets their own unique page (which you can tack a vanity url to!) to present themselves however they want! You always have the banner at the top, but beyond that you have a ton of options. Among other incredibly useful tools that really should just be bare fucking minimum at this point, like the ability to preview your page on different devices, you start customizing your blank page with this set of widgets,

and from THERE you can customize them MORE, you can promote your patreon or your kickstarter or whatever! Having this creator space ALSO means that if you run several comics, or if you want to promote your comic AND your illustrations, you can just separate them into individual projects! Each with their own page! This is also really nice as a reader because you can subscribe to a creator but you can also just subscribe to specific projects, if you don’t want to get ALL of their stuff in your inbox. It’s so good y’all hh.

Once again, all of this functionality is just THERE as soon as you make your account. You don’t need to be “partnered” or whatever the fuck, you don’t need to meet a certain follower threshold to unlock the ability to operate normally. You get your own creator space to present yourself how you prefer, you get pages for all your projects, you can even set up monetization options (and change them for individual pages IN a project) right from the start.

ok ok let’s compare this to my webtoon page

oh that’s right webtoon just puts your greyed out name at the bottom of each comic and that’s it because human beings don’t make this stuff, my bad lol anyway

Other fun shit that Dillyhub does that makes me feel like they’re people who have actually consumed or made comics on the internet at some point in their lives:

-When you log into the “studio” space, you’re in your creator account. When you log OUT of the studio space, it’s like you swap to a “reader” account, where you can access your pull list and comment on things with a different name and profile icon. Again, maybe only cool if you’re a creator, but if you ARE then you know exactly why this is incredibly useful lmao

-You can set up “hidden” projects, so if you only want certain things to be accessible by certain people or to not show up in searches that’s an option! You have SO much control here it’s great.

-The comment section has moderation options GODDD. You also have a real comment space, you know, so it actually encourages building a community (and a rapport with your community, if you like), and you also can just turn comments off entirely if you want! I haven’t used it much yet, obviously, but it’s been made very clear in the discord that artists want better control over their comment sections and the devs have it on their priority list.

-Absolutely every step of customization gives you a preview before it’s live, so you can easily see what these images you’re posting in different places are going to look like before you beam them to your followers’ inboxes. This includes individual episodes!

-This was sort of in one of the screenshots but it’s important so I’m saying it here too: the option to mark individual episodes as mature or with content warnings, rather than having to mark an entire comic as Mature Spooky Scary Content because of one or two pages getting a bit hairy.

This site is only in alpha right now, and it’s invite-only until they get to beta (for creators; anyone can make a reader account! but they haven’t set up a way to browse comics without direct links yet so) but honest to god it’s already blowing every other site I’ve used clean out of the water. And the staff has been really kind and responsive to us proposing fixes or changes! I will always defend individual websites as being the best option for an indie comic, but everybody’s gotta start somewhere and we NEED something that isn’t Tumblr or Webtoon to fill this role; this site feels a lot more like a symbiotic relationship than any of the other staples available for new creators right now. If you’re a comic reader and you want to see your favorite comics on Dillyhub I’d suggest keeping an eye on this site and once it’s live start poking them to look into it, and if you’re a creator follow their social media and hop in when they open up for anybody to join. I would LOVE to see this site take off as a viable option for hosting and reading comics.

Thanks for reading all this! I haven’t quite finished setting up yet, but if you want to poke around a project/creator page for yourself mine is here have at it. As things progress I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but since I’m usually so aggressively negative about places like this I just wanted to give some credit where it was due. fucking finally.

#long post #i want this site to obliterate webtoon so fucking bad lmfao

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hotchley · 3 years

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I'm so tired please give me soft Hotch and protective Morgan content ♥️

Aww it’s okay to be tired and take a break and if you ever want to talk, my asks are still on, and I feel like I’m getting to this really late because I was probably sleeping when this was sent?

Anyways, this is just a little image I’ve had floating around my head. I’ll cross-post it to my ao3.... later because at it’s 5:41am and I want to go to sleep.

I may have missed the mark with this?? I don’t know, we have protective Morgan showering Hotch with compliments and Hotch being himself about the whole thing so I feel like it counts.... also the ending will make sense at the end

This is set during Gabby, but that’s not that relevant because I barely remember what actually happened in that episode, just that Hotch got punched by Sue.

Warnings: canon-typical violence (Hotch gets punched but it’s not graphic, just an event, and something referenced)

fifty-two minutes

Hotch knew he was going too far as he insulted Sue's abilities to parent Gabby, but he also knew there were certain things that had to be done for cases. He needed to know. Everyone needed to know whether or not she was capable of doing the unspeakable. If she was the one responsible for Gabby's disappearance. And the only way he could do that was by pushing. By pushing until she snapped and reacted.

He had just assumed her breaking point would lead to some form of verbal retaliation. Something about the lack of wedding ring, even though there was still a tan line because on the days where he missed Haley so much it was all-consuming, he would put it on, just for a few moments to remember the version of her that had been everything to him. He assumed she would make her own biting comment about how he wasn't with his own son. There was only one reason behind the glitter on his shirt. Derek had found his horror at being informed about its existence hilarious, but that was besides the point.

He hadn't thought she would punch him, square in the jaw, with all the rage of a scorned woman. He hadn't expected it to hurt as much as it did, or that it would immobilise him as much as it did. As he stumbled back, he was vaguely aware of the guard entering, but it hurt like a bitch. It took everything in him to remember how to de-escalate the situation without causing anyone further harm, but he did it, and then him and Dave left the interrogation room, armed with new knowledge.

"So how do you know this?" Derek asked casually.

Hotch didn't quite meet his eyes, staring at his eyebrows instead. He loved the way Derek treated him like he was the most precious and valuable person on the planet, and he loved that with him, he could be Aaron- the soft man that enjoyed theatre and was willing to get glitter all over his work clothes for his son.

But there was a time and a place for that, and it wasn't here, no matter how much he wanted to feel Derek's arms around him, grounding him to the moment and convincing him everything was going to be fine.

"She... reacted to my comment about motherhood," Hotch said, acting very much like the Southern-born gentleman talking about something unsavoury that he was. As if on cue, his jaw seemed to ache once more, and he was reminded of the need to actually deal with injuries instead of hiding them.

"Reacting? Aar- Hotch, what did she do?"

Hotch loved the way Derek would say his first name, sometimes exasperated, sometimes through a fit of uncontrollable laughter, occasionally with annoyance, but always with love and affection sprinkled in. He also loved the way Derek called him Hotch. Like there was a secret joke between them, and in some ways there were.

Dave liked to think he was the only one on the team to consistently call him Aaron, but he wasn't. Not anymore.

"She may have responded with physical violence," Aaron said, voice quieter than usual. He started shuffling the files around. Alex tapped the table, and Spencer smiled at her, leaving to go and get a coffee refill. JJ was already out with the sheriff, so there was nobody left to distract from the situation.

"Physical violence?" Derek sounded worried.

"Sue punched Hotch in the jaw," Dave filled in.

Aaron spun around to face him, looking betrayed. "Dave!"

"He was always going to find out. And your jaw is starting to bruise," Dave said, smirk on his face.

"She punched- Aaron you can't just not- Dave can you cold the fort down for a few minutes?" Derek asked, already going round the table. Aaron looked down, knowing that if he saw Derek's eyes, he would start smiling like an idiot.

"Take as long as you need," Dave said, winking.

Aaron flushed, Derek rolled his eyes but smiled, and then grabbed his boyfriend's arm and dragged him to the bathroom.

"Der- Derek what are you doing?" Aaron stuttered. He hated that he stuttered whenever he got anxious, but he didn't want people spreading rumours. Or making assumptions, because yes they were together, but that didn't mean they were sneaking away to do that.

Luckily, Derek dragged him right past the bathroom and into an empty and unused conference room, which in some ways was almost worse. He pulled out a chair and forced Aaron to sit. Not that he needed to force him to do anything. For Derek, Aaron would do anything. Apart from admit that he enjoyed wearing his shirts because they smelt like home. That would be his pretend secret.

"I'm treating the injury you tried to hide from me!" Derek said.

Aaron scoffed. "I didn't hide it! I just didn't tell you the moment I saw you that the information we got came at the price of a punch! And it's not that bad, my jaw just aches. It's nothing new- get your mind out of the gutter you know my hearing messes with my jaw!" he said, voice rising in pitch when Derek smirked.

"But honey, I didn't say anything," Derek said, grining. "And is that really your best argument? Some prosecutor." It was teasing though, and Aaron smiled, because even as he'd said it, it had sounded stupid.

Derek left, closing the door behind him, and without case files to distract him, the pain in his jaw- which was worse than he had been willing to admit- became more prominent and he decided that Derek was the best thing to ever happen to him. And then he started wondering when he'd become such a sap.

"I got the first aid kit, and some ice. I reckon that's all we can do, but just before that, can I just check that it's not dislocated?" Derek said as he returned. And Hotch accepted that he'd always been a sap, it was just amplified by Derek's love.

"She didn't punch me that hard," Aaron whispered, still wincing when Derek pressed two fingers to the spot that was bruising.

"Mhm. Whatever makes you feel better. But seriously, does anything feel wrong?"

Aaron shook his head. He closed his eyes as Derek poked and prodded him more, the touch still comforting even though there was some necessary force behind it. He had never felt better than he did in the soft and silent moments like this, when they could just exist and not feel the need to fill the silence with unncessary words, because the silence said more than sentences ever could.

He let out a yelp as the ice packet was pressed to the skin that was definitely bruising. "Derek!"

"Yes honey?"

Aaron blushed at the pet name, looking down at his boyfriend. He hadn't even realised that Derek had been kneeling by his side, staring at him with such adoration and love in his eyes that it physically hurt Aaron's chest to see just how capable of good things people were.

"Warn me next time," he said, pouting slightly.

Derek smiled. "Of course sweetie." He didn't let go of the ice pack, even though Aaron was fully capable of holding it himself. It was nice though, if a bit of a strange image. One man in a chair, looking down as his partner knelt on the floor holding the ice pack with a suprising amount of genteless. He took Aaron's hand in his own, drawing circles over the knuckles the same way Aaron would.

Aaron looked down, mesmerised by how well Derek knew him. By the fact that he got to call such a good man his everything.

"Okay, it's been a decent amount of time, the pain and swelling should go down. It's still going to bruise, so I'll take Jack to soccer practice when we get back, otherwise all the other parents are going to be drooling instead of watching and we can't have that, can we?" Derek said after both sides of the ice had gone warm.

"Derek," Aaron warned.

"Aaron," Derek mimicked. "Seriously though, they're all going to be back now."

"I know," he sighed.

Derek stood up, letting out a slight wince. Aaron couldn't help but smile. Derek was always teasing him about his back pain and the fact that he was getting older with every passing day, but the same could also be said of him.

"I love you," he whispered as Derek took his hand to help him stand up, even though he could have done it himself. The words had never come easy to him, not with Haley, not with Jack, but he was getting better. And when Derek said them, he never expected a verbal response, knowing Aaron said them in every other possible way.

"I love you too," Derek said, pressing a kiss to Aaron's hair. Aaron let his eyes flutter closed as Derek pulled him closer for one final hug. He inhaled deeply, the smell of Derek's shower gel and deodorant the most comforting thing, alongside the laundry detergent he used because Haley had.

When they re-entered the conference room they had set up base in, Alex wordlessly asked if everything was okay. Aaron nodded at her, gratefully accepting the coffee she held out to him.

"Fifty-two minutes is not a few," Dave said, but there was no malice behind them.

"What can I say? I cannot resist beautiful men," Derek said.

Aaron hit his arm, cheeks warm with embarrassment but heart warm with love.

#mortch #hotgan #criminal minds #drabbles #derek morgan #aaron hotchner #criminal minds fanfic #sumayyah writes cm

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sinagrace · 5 years

Text

As Pride Month comes to a close, it’s time I spoke candidly about my experience at Marvel Comics.

To date, I’ve always been honest about the joy of writing Iceman’s journey as an out gay superhero, but I’ve skirted around the challenges that came along with it. This is partially because I prefer to give off an upbeat vibe, and there’s also a fear that my truth will affect my career. With more corporations patting themselves on the back for profit-led partnerships wherein celebrities take selfies in rainbow apparel, and with buzz that Marvel Studios is preparing to debut their first gay character in the upcoming Eternals movie, there is an urgency to discuss the realities of creating queer pop culture in a hostile or ambivalent environment. Hopefully, my takeaways will serve as a guide for people in positions of power to consider when advocating for more nuanced and rich representation. In an ideal world, embracing our stories and empowering us to tell them will yield far more profitable (and way less messy) results than what I encountered while writing Iceman.

Stand by your people

It’s no surprise that I got the attention of trolls and irate fans for taking on this job. There was already backlash around the manner in which Bobby Drake aka Iceman came out, and Marvel needed to smooth that landing and put a “so what” to the decision. After a point, I could almost laugh off people making light of my death, saying they have "cancerous AIDS" from my book, or insinuating I’m capable of sexual assault… almost. Between Iceman’s cancellation and its subsequent revival, Marvel reached out and said they noticed threatening behavior on my Twitter account (only after asking me to send proof of all the nasty shit popping up online). An editor called, these conversations always happen over the phone, offering to provide “tips and tricks” to deal with the cyber bullying. I cut him off. All he was going to do was tell me how to fend for myself. I needed Marvel to stand by me with more work opportunities to show the trolls that I was more than a diversity hire. “We’ll keep you in mind.” I got so tired of that sentence.

Even after a year of the new editor-in-chief saying I was talented and needed to be on a book that wasn’t “the gay character,” the only assignment I got outside of Iceman was six pages along, about a version of Wolverine where he had diamond claws. Fabulous, yes. Heterosexual, yes. Still kind of the gay character, though.

We as creators are strongly encouraged to build a platform on social media and use it to promote work-for-hire projects owned by massive corporations… but when the going gets tough, these dudes get going real quick.

Believe in the work

You may be asking if my Iceman book was any good, or if I’m just being sour grapes over a bad work experience. Believe me, I asked that, too. From the get-go, my first editor asserted that Iceman would be DOA if it were “too gay,” while also telling me to prepare for a cancellation anyway, given that most solo X-Men titles don’t last beyond a year. Never mind that my work on Iceman had gotten positive press in the New York Times (in-print), or that in spite of (since-deleted) critical sandbagging, the series nets glowing reviews on Amazon… Marvel still treated me as someone to be contained, and the book as something to be nervous about. Do you know how hard it is to not argue with a publicist when he’s explaining the value of announcing Iceman’s revival via the Marvel homepage? Sis, that’s a burial. Instead of clapping back, I just went and got myself more press from the New York Times. From there, they tightened my leash. I had to get all opportunities pre-approved, and all interviews pre-reviewed. This would be fine if it was the standard, but I assure you: none of my straight male colleagues seek permission to go on podcasts promoting their books.

What Marvel should have done is assign me a special projects editor. They should have worked with a specialty PR firm, rather than repeat a tiresome cycle of treating the book like a square peg, and getting confused when it’s a hit.

Give us a real seat at the table

There was a moment before Iceman was cancelled where I wrote then-editor-in-chief Axel Alonso an email, pleading for a Hail Mary arc. I explained that Iceman was landing with a newer generation of readers who focused more on binge-reading than month-to-month periodicals. The series needed time in the book market before its true strength could be assessed. To Axel’s credit, he was warm to the idea and even gave me an extra month, but when he left Marvel that idea got brushed away. Of course I was right. The first two volumes sold like gangbusters thanks to word-of-mouth, librarian love, and support from retailers big and small.

When the series returned, no one at Marvel asked me: “What do you think landed with readers?” Nor did they ask the question that Axel did: “What matters to your community?” So when I wrote what I thought the fans would be into, a story about a man learning to be a better ally in the war against hate, editorial totally missed its value.

Seat at the table pt II: The Shade of it all

All of the weird drama I put up with crystallized when I created a drag queen mutant, first called Shade, now called Darkveil. I told my editor that Shade would be a big deal for X-Fans, and asked how we should promote her. He said: “leave it up to the reader’s interpretation.” Everyone at Marvel shrugged off two years of goodwill and acted like I’d coordinated behind their backs on an announcement that made headlines. Beyond mentioning on Instagram the queens who inspired the character, I didn’t coordinate shit. Of course, their head publicist can’t admit that my quotes were pre-approved from an unreleased interview. At this point, I stopped believing that there’d be any more work for me. There were so many shady moves on their end that I’m still having trouble putting into language, but it all aligned with an experience I had in retail where a corrupt manager kept lying and moving the goal posts in order to keep me selling in a department I didn’t want to work in. I offered to give Darkveil a proper character bio, and I walked away.

I recognize that some of my complaints can be filed under “this is freelance life.” I am aware that it was not a queer person of color who joked to me that “it’s not a matter of if Marvel fucks you over, it’s a matter of when.” That came from a cis white male. The same-day turn-arounds without warning, the work emails on Christmas week… that’s the freelance bullshit. Truly, I don’t even think of this as discrimination, I call it general ineptness. It is my belief that if we are telling stories about heroes doing the right thing in the face of adversity, wouldn’t the hope be to embody those ideals as individuals? Instead of feeling like I worked with some of the most inspiring and brave people in comics, I was surrounded by cowards.

Truly, I hate writing this. In keeping with Pride Month, I am proud of the work I did on Iceman... I love the book! It sucks that I may be tarnishing its legacy going public about how the cookies were made. That said, the time for self-congratulating is over, and folks should be earnestly listening when they ask: what could we have done better?

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arundolyn · 3 years

Note

I was the anon who requested the elphelt times up animation- thank you so much, it's perfect!!! Out of curiosity, did you follow or make any tutorial on how you make these gifs? I don't want to bother you with any further requests, but was hoping I could make some for my own purposes as I also like playing around with the gg camera mod! If this is too much of a bother, no worries at all, and thank you so much for doing my request again!!!!

OKAY this might get long so ill put it under a cut

download latest version of cheat engine

camera mods here

your choice of screen recording software, i use obs with these settings

which makes the recording as faithful to the original footage as possible so even if it makes the models look a little uh. blocky? idk. im used to pixel art so i find it charming and its the least time consuming to do that way. be aware that, like the setting says, the files are huge so record only for short bits at a time unless you have a ton of space like i do (unrelated but i accidentally recorded like 10 hours cause i didnt realize i left it on and it was only like? i think 2 TB so it could be worse really) (and i hate to point it out but if you look between some of my gg gifs youll see where i was recording wrong for a while and was too lazy to go back and rerecord and post the right ones so they look softer/have different colors)

in cheat engine when you open the game (i dont have it open or all the question marks would be numbers, im lazy (also to do that click the green square in the top left and select gg from the menu that comes up)) if you change stage select to 19 it makes the screen black and you can just use the photoshop magic eraser tool at like 15 to erase all the black. iirc to make the hud go away the top one is like -500 and the bottom is 500 or the other way around. something like that

in the advanced options menu you can disable pieces of code by right clicking, but be aware that you have to do them one at a time or it straight up wont work unless you restart the game. you can re enable them and re disable them at the same time subsequently but when you open the game you have to disable them every time. names are p self explanatory. if anyone wants to do front facing gifs

these are the settings i use i think

so when i make gifs i basically only disable the normal camera and the character positions cause im not gonna be doing the other stuff really unless im doing all of someones moves. then turn on obs/whatever and record whatever animation i want (if you want someones lose for instance set rounds to 2 and time to 30 and just try to run away after getting hit like once) and then take the .avi to photoshop and copy the frames out of the video with the select tool and erase the background. its literally a lot less complicated than it sounds i promise. its kinda fun tbh

if yall still want to ask me to do stuff i totally dont mind cause i probably intend to do it anyway and have just been being lazy about it. i understand that its kinda time consuming and my adhd brain is the only thing that lets me do this most of the time fjkshkjgfg

#crow.txt #guilty gear #gg rev gif tutorial #let me know if you have any other questions cause im sure i left something out tbh #at age 6 i was born without a face #cawing

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jimlingss · 4 years

Text

The Colour of Our Voices [16]

Chapter 15 - Chapter 16 - Chapter 17

➜ Words: 3.5k

➜ Genres: 98% Fluff, 2% Angst, Slice of Life, Broadway!AU

➜ Summary: He wasn’t supposed to hear. He wasn't supposed to know. But the instant Jimin came into your life and pulled the curtains back, you couldn't hide backstage anymore. You were no longer merely a phantom of the opera.

cr.

He’s never there. Like a ghost, Jimin vanishes from thin air. As if he never even moved in. Like you didn’t wake up one morning to a moving truck and cardboard boxes everywhere in the hall that made you trip. Like you never spent countless nights teaching him how to sing and the ins and outs of Broadway. Like you never came home after a long day to a brunette boy in pajamas cooking and singing to himself at the stove. It feels like a dream. The only evidence that he existed in your life is lingering traces of him left in your apartment, toothbrush, hair products, soft sweaters that you still wear and bring up to your nose and cry into. Even after three weeks, you’re still sobbing even when you try not to. As long as there’s silence, your mind wanders back to him and tears start shedding down your cheeks. You feel the mattress dip. “Y/N.” Yeonjeon pulls back the covers and sighs at the mess you’ve become. She hands you a cold water bottle. “For God's sake, stop crying. Aren’t you tired? Drink some water before you become dehydrated and die.” “I….I-I’m sorry,” you hiccup, wiping your face with the back of your head. You lift yourself to drink the bottle while you’re still hiccuping. The actress sighs. “What’s the point of drinking if you’re going to cry it out. Finish the bottle!” she shouts when you begin to put it down only half-finished. You listen to her and finish it off. “I’m sorry.” You pull the covers to your chin, tempted to drag it over your head again, but you know she’ll rip it off of you. You’ve been here long enough to know that Yeonjeon hates talking to lumps — she prefers to see facial expressions and to sickly revel in how upset someone can look from her jabs. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry too, alright?” she grumbles and sighs. Yeonjeon would offer to take you out and find a rebound, but it doesn’t seem like you're even close to being at the stage of wanting to go outside. “Don’t you have your performance in two weeks?” You don’t make a sound, merely sniffling. You stare at the huge mountain of tissues on the nightstand from wiping your snot and tears. “You gotta get better before then, come on, Y/N. You’re not even trying right now. At least two weeks ago you took a shower. Have you even washed your hair since then?” You stay quiet for a second before your lips part— “I...I love him.” “Uh-huh. He probably loves you too, but y’all are dumbasses.” The thought that Jimin might still love you has you sobbing even louder. You wail, shifting in her covers to face away from her. Yeonjeon slaps her hand against her face, wishing it would knock her right out so she wouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit. “Oh my god. Listen, I love when you come over, but this is pretty pathetic even for you, Y/N. It’s been three weeks. When are you planning to go home?” “I,” you hiccup, “don’t know.” “Are you scared of running into him or what?” That’s not it. You spent a week in your apartment before taking refuge in Yeonjeon’s home. But that short time frame was enough to realize the chances of you running into him are slim. Jimin is seldom there. He hasn’t moved out, technically still your neighbor, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he’s living somewhere else now. Or crashing at some pretty girl’s house and sleeping in her bed instead. “No.” “Then what are you scared of?” That you’ll come home to your empty apartment and realize he’ll never come back. That you’ll realize it was your fault that you kicked him out of your apartment and he’s disappeared off the face of the planet because of it. That all his lingering belongings are still there, belongings that you could never throw out. You can’t even bring yourself to call or text him. He probably wouldn’t pick up. And knowing that the silence is inevitable no matter what you do is the worst. “I love him…” “Yeah, and I fucking would love it if you got off your ass.” Yeonjeon isn’t very good at comforting people. She made that known when you came to her. But she serves the truth on a silver platter, and says what you need to hear. “You’ve said you’ve loved him probably a million times by now. I’m sick of it. I get it. You two are dumb and pathetic for each other. But unless you want your career to go down the drain like your relationship, you should clean yourself up, Y/N.” You cry louder and she rolls her eyes. But as you cry, vision fogged up by saltwater, you peel the covers off of you. Slowly, you get to your feet. “There you go.” Yeonjeon nods in approval, watching you stumble to the bathroom after grabbing your script from the other nightstand and pressing it to your chest like it’s a lifeline. You try singing in the shower in between your sobs and reciting your lines in the middle of your hiccups.

The door to your apartment opens. You’ve returned home for a full day now after much convincing and Yeonjeon threatening to throw you out the street if you don’t get your shit together. You’ve decided that you’re going to take it one day at a time. But you can’t help the way you stop in front of his door instead of leaving for rehearsals. You linger. Eyes stinging. Until you tear them away and lurch down the hall, rounding the corner to the stairwell. It’s bad timing. At the same moment as you turn, the door to Jimin’s apartment opens. The pair of you miss each other by sheer seconds. And if you saw him, you’d find that Jimin’s become a ghost. His skin is a sickly shade, hair in disarray, nose red, the underneath of his eyes also a shade of scarlet from incessantly rubbing and crying. Even now his eyes are still glossy. He braces himself against the wall, facing your apartment door. “Y/N?” Jimin’s voice cracks. It’s the most horrible sound that’s left his throat. He knocks on your door again, knuckles weakly rapping against the surface. “Y/N? I...need to talk.” No one answers. He tries the bell, but to no avail. Of course. You wouldn’t want to talk to someone like him — not face to face, not through text, not through phone. You probably hate him now and he wouldn’t blame you. He’s a selfish prick that’s time and time again taken you for granted. “I...I love you, please...p-please, open the door,” Jimin sobs and silence answers. He tightens his hold on the note in his hand. He was scared this would happen — that you wouldn’t want to talk to him, that you wouldn’t want to see him. So he tried to write something instead to hand to you. He wasn’t sure what he could say to make it better in a few words, and he wrote a million versions, a thousand different things. But the note that was in his hands was the one he chose in the end, the final one he decided on. It’s written carefully, as best as he could with a shaking hand. But as he looks down to the white square of paper in his hand, he doesn’t know if he can slip it underneath your door. After another beat, he crumples the note in his fist. Jimin turns back to his apartment, shuts the door and throws it into the garbage. Your eyes never see it. It never read his words— I’m sorry. I love you.

After months of filming and editing, the amount of grueling work you knew it took, it’s finally finished. You tug on your black dress, lost in the sea of glamour and high-maintenance movie critics. But you still search for Jimin. Yeonjeon called you a dumb bitch when you expressed that you wanted a ticket to the early premier of Jimin’s movie. But she gave it to you anyway through her connections. The Broadway actress even helped you slap on a thick layer of makeup to hide the mess you were in for crying all day and night. She didn’t come herself — citing that she wanted to be spared from your stupidity. You wish you could spare yourself too, but you missed him too much to worry about your pride and how idiotic you were for doing this. Though it seems like your effort is futile, that you’re being played again by the world, that you’ve been dealt a bad hand. You can’t find Jimin in the crowd no matter how hard you search with your eyes or where you turn. Eventually, you’re pushed into the theater, forced to take your place at the very back in the corner. Even then you don’t see Jimin. The director and main actors briefly introduce the movie, giving a speech of how wonderful everything was. And Jimin’s missing the entire time. It’s not until the lights dim and five minutes into the movie, you see a black shadow enter and quickly sneaking to one of the front row seats. In the darkness of the theater, all you’re allowed to see is the back of Jimin’s head. But at least you get to see his face on the big screen. You get to hear his voice. You get to feel the way your heart blooms with pride. And you cry quietly in the theater, wiping your tears away with hopes that no one notices. // People file out gradually, spilling out of the theater. Jimin’s able to talk to a few people who compliment the movie’s storyline and his skills. He musters a smile, but it’s hard to network when his mind isn’t in the right state. He knows he’s losing out on chances when he’s not staying focused, but he can’t come to feign happiness. It’s in the middle of a conversation with some wife of a critic that the corner of his eye catches something. Or rather, someone familiar. His head whips over. “Excuse me….” Jimin walks away as if entranced. Then his footsteps speed up. He swears he saw it — the strands of your hair, the profile of your face, your eyes, lashes, the slope of your nose, the dip of your cupid’s bow. He saw a familiar black dress, the one you never got to wear outside, the one he saw on the night he forgot about his promise. “Y/N?” Jimin shouts above the crowd of people like a crazed man. He moves past them, ignoring people’s grumble, gasps, and dirty looks. “Y/N?!” He fights through the group of people, lifting himself to look over people’s heads. He feels like he’s swimming against the current of the sea, a horde of people in between you and him. After a moment, Jimin manages to stumble out from the mass of people, and he turns his body to every direction possible. But you’re gone. Vanished. Like it was a mere figment of his desperate imagination. That’s right. It’s impossible. How could you come here? Why would you? “Are you alright, man?” Jungkook finds him, doe eyes wide and full of concern. Jimin’s still looking everywhere he can, brows furrowed deep enough to hurt, the knot ruining his features. “I...I thought I saw her.” Jungkook finally understands and sighs, patting his friend on the back. “I’m sorry, dude.” And the actor is genuinely sympathetic. He knew how much Jimin loved you.

For a long time, neither of you could find equilibrium between your relationship and your ambitions. It seemed to be one or the other. It seemed like you had to make a choice, a choice neither you nor Jimin wanted to make when they were both equally valued. But now you've lost half of what you wanted, a huge component lost — and suddenly, there’s so much time left. Suddenly, it feels so empty. The production you were working on was going exceptionally well. Now that you’re performing in the evenings, mornings and early afternoons have become open time slots. Time used to feel so short and fleeting, like you were constantly trying to grasp for it. But now it mocks you by showing up in abundance. You wonder if Jimin feels the same way now that his movie's complete. You’re singing alone in an empty studio. It’s a good excuse for you to not go back to your apartment and have to be faced with the fact that he's never there anymore. But you’re interrupted halfway through a duet you used to sing with Jimin by a knock on the door. “Hey there! Thought I'd find you here. I hope I’m not interrupting.” A small smile lifts on your features — it’s not as stiff as it's usually been. “It’s okay. It's been a while, Taehyung.” Taehyung grins, entering with his arms behind his back, head quirked to one side. “I know. I'm sorry. I've been so swamped with work lately — which is actually something I wanted to talk to you about — but I can't wait to catch up with you and Jimin soon.” You feel yourself tense, blood running cold, but you try not to show it and it’s getting easier. “What did you want to talk about?” The blonde man’s eyes sparkle in excitement. “Sit down, sit down. This is pretty important.” You laugh, taking a seat and he claims a spot right across from you. “Okay. What is it?” “Alright. So I've been fairly busy for the past few months finishing my own screenplay that I've been working on for years.” “That's so exciting, Taehyung!” You mean it too. In many ways, he’s like you, on his own path trying to reach success. You’ve known for a long time he's been an aspiring screenplay and producer. “I know.” Taehyung grins, mouth drawn into a rectangle, irises twinkling with lights from above. “And I got it approved by Director Lee and I pitched it to a whole bunch of people, and it worked! And I'm going to be running my own original production here on Broadway.” Your eyes are wide and you smile, reaching over to hug him. Taehyung laughs, squeezing you once before you let go of one another. “That is so incredible, Taehyung. I'm...speechless.” “That makes the two of us,” he laughs again. “But I wanted to talk to you specifically because I want you to be my main female lead.” “What?” “Will you do me the honours?” Taehyung asks with a blazing smile. “Are you serious?” “More than I could ever be.” “I....” Your mouth is a gaping hole and you gasp for breath. “I don't know what to say.” “Say yes please.” Taehyung snickers. “I promise, it's a really fun character and I think you'll suit it. To be frank, you're the only one I can imagine for the role. I've envisioned you for a long time now.” You’re emotional. Touched. “Yes!” “Yes?” “Yes, I'll do it!” There’s no one more than you trust as a director and producer than Taehyung in this sort of thing. You know whatever he's created, it'll be spectacular, and you feel overwhelmingly grateful that he’s chosen you to take on such a big role. “Thank you.” “No, thank you!” He fist pumps the air, eagerness infectious and it makes giggles bubble out of your chest. “There’s so much I want to tell you, but first thing first, it's going to be called 'The Colour of Our Voices'.” “‘The Colour of Our Voices’?” “Yeah, what do you think? It's about a senior actress who's been on Broadway for a decade now and she's lost her passion for acting and singing, but she meets this newcomer actor who's really lively and optimistic. It's going to be a love story with some drama in it.” “I think that sounds lovely, Taehyung.” He smiles. “Thank you. Now all I have to talk to is Jimin. Don't tell him I told you though — I want to keep it a surprise.” “Jimin?” “I want him to play the main male lead. You think he'll say yes? I know he's been busy on his own projects…” “Taehyung.” Your lips draw into a straight light, eyes dimming. “Jimin and I, we’ve broken up.” The man blinks, ears not picking up on what you just said. “You guys have spoken up?” “No, we’ve broken up.” “Oh.” “Yeah…” As you say it, your bottom lip starts trembling again. Taehyung must see the way your expression crumples — the tears making your eyes glossy, the furrow of your brows, the twitch of your cheek muscles and scrunch of your nose, because he becomes alert. “Are you okay?” His hands lift, not sure if he should touch you or how he should even comfort you. Taehyung can barely get over his own shock. He’s baffled beyond speech. “W-What happened? I thought you two…..I thought….you guys were….” You end up with a tissue in your hand, dabbing underneath your eyes as the conversation takes an unexpected turn. “—came out of nowhere. I just….I don’t know what to do anymore.” Taehyung nods, having listened quietly for the past ten minutes. “I could’ve never guessed. Since when did his head get so far up his own ass?” He playfully bumps into your shoulder, trying to stop you from crying. You muster a smile. “It was my fault too. I knew he felt really guilty, but I didn’t do anything to help him. I just didn’t know he felt that bad about...us.” “Hey, it’s okay. He doesn’t know what he’s missing out on,” Taehyung quips, easing you. “Do you still want me to—” “Yeah. I don’t want you to take an opportunity away from him. I don’t want to ruin your vision if you’ve always imagined Jimin.” You nod. “I...I can be professional.” “Okay. If you change your mind, tell me, alright? I don’t want any of you guys to be uncomfortable and if you think you can’t work together, I’ll find some way to accommodate or change my plan.” “Yeah, but I think I’ll be okay. I just need some time.” He understands and hums warmly. “If you want, I can go beat him up first.” You smile in the middle of a sniffle. “Yeonjeon already offered that.” “I bet she did. But it’s always better to jump someone when you have a whole team of them,” he says, and you burst out laughing. “How about this?” Taehyung leans in, voice dropping into a husky whisper. “We break into Jimin’s home in the middle of the night and beat the shit out of him. You get a cane. Yeonjeon gets a golf club. I get a baseball bat.” You laugh again — Taehyung always knows how to make you feel better.

In the meanwhile, Jimin steps off the elevator. He ignores the stares he gets from people passing by. He knows he looks like a mess, that he hasn’t showered in days, that his hair is a wreck. He can only imagine what his face looks like. Nonetheless, the brunette wobbles down the hall. He wonders if you’re in the studio — you’ve always said the last room on the second floor was perfect, that the acoustics were just right somehow in comparison to the others. He remembers clearly. It seems like these days Jimin’s recalling all the details about you. Memories. Things that you’ve said. He plays them over like broken records in his head. Jimin braces himself on the wall as he gets close enough to the end of the corridor. And then his ears perk at the light sound of your sudden laughter. Goosebumps raise all over his arms. But as he peeks into the room, he finds you with Taehyung. The two of you are laughing and smiling together. Your expression is lit up, happier than you were with him in the past few months. Jimin stares for a second. He was wrong. Looking at you from afar isn’t enough to satisfy him. To know that you were still well, to see you when he missed you so much — it’s not enough for him to feel better. Jimin doesn’t step forward into the light. He doesn’t allow himself to be known. He doesn’t confront you, and ask if you were there on the day of the early premier. If you were there for him. He doesn’t want to ruin this moment for you. He doesn’t want to make you upset anymore. So he walks away.

#bts fanfic #bts scenario #bts fluff #bts angst #jimin fanfic #jimin angst #jimin fluff #jimin scenario #IT'S ALMOST THE END Y'ALL #TWO MORE CHAPTERS LEFT!

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shannygoatgruff · 4 years

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My Brother’s Keeper - Chapter XX

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Modern Ivar X Modern Hvitserk

Rating: MA+18

Overall Warning: Dark story told from an emotionally distributed person’s POV with graphic and sadistic material including rape, terror, torture, kidnapping, drug use, slash, implied incest, necrophilia, and insecurity. Heavy trigger warnings.

Chapter Warning: Talks of psychological torture.

A/N: You did it! You made it to the home stretch! Congrats! I hope you like the last chapter. It’s a little long, but hopefully, well worth it.

This story is dedicated to @youbloodymadgeniuss and @ivarthebloodyking. You guys have stuck with me through the beginning with this thing.

Chapter XX

The unsettling guitar riffs of The Widow by The Mars Volta pour out of my earbuds – it’s like I can hear it, but it’s hard to pay much attention. Maybe if I could get out of my head long enough to concentrate on something else, I might actually enjoy listening to this song again. It’s one of my favorites.

Right now, though, it’s like I’m on sensory overload. There’s so much I want to see, do, and hear all at the same time but, I’m having a hard time focusing on just one thing. Being back here isn’t helping any; that’s for sure. Especially, not this many memories. It’s been years, but everything’s just the way I remember. Seeing as how some of the shit we tucked away here and there is still in tacked, no one’s ever found this place.

Taking in a deep breath, I cough immediately from the smell of mold and dust. The hole in the roof did nothing to arrogate the building throughout the years. Making my way to the window to force clean air in here, I stop at the memory. The window. Ivar kicked it in for me the day he first brought me here. The broken glass still decorates the windowsill and the outline of his boot is still here. It's like he never left.

God, I miss him.

I swear that it feels like if I were to close my eyes right now and open them again he'd be standing here smiling at me. But I know the truth. The truth is, if I close my eyes and open them, I'll be standing in the middle of a broken-down cabin… alone.

I knew the memories would come flooding back if I came here, but I couldn't help it. It's just that I miss him so much lately. I guess I just needed to feel close to him again. For so long Ivar was my everything. He was so much more than my baby brother; he was my best friend, my companion…my soul mate.

Now, I just want to know why he left me. He didn't even say goodbye. I waited. God, I waited for so long, hoping, praying…needing him to save me. But, he didn't. It’s a crock of shit that time heals all wounds, because for five years I’ve been broken inside and all I can do is ask the same damn question: Why didn't he ever come back for me? He promised me that it would always be me and him against the world, but he lied. He told me he would never leave me, but he did just that. I don't understand.

I still don't even remember how I ended up there. I know there was a trial - they put me in a tight blue suit and an ugly paisley tie. I sat next to this crackpot public defender wondering when it was going to be over. I think his name was Harrow, or Harald, or something like that. He had big ass, square, donkey-looking teeth, and was always smiling. He never talked to me. I think we sat next to each other a dozen times on those hard-ass chairs and he never once said a word to me.

Hell, even that detective that Judith bitch had interviewed on the news, Torstein, I think his name was, talked to me. He told me they were going get me help. I didn't know what in the hell he was talking about, but at least he said something to me. All I knew was I didn’t need their help, I needed my brother.

Even Dr. Lagertha talked to me and I hate her. Every time they would show pictures, there would be gasps and screams, she would come over to me, rub my shoulders and tell me that everything was going to be fine. She got them to let me stay in a break room when the screaming got to be too loud. I don't like screaming and there was plenty in that place. And as much as I hate Lagertha, she kept them away from me. She was there for me. Well, at least I thought she was. But it was fake. All of it.

She didn't care about me. She lied, too. She told me she would never hurt me, but she sat in front of everyone and she lied. She said that I did all of these horrible things to people. All the shit that Ivar did, she blamed on me. She told everyone in that court that I was a monster and they all believed her. I knew that bitch wasn't to be trusted and she proved me right.

Now, I'm not denying that my hunger was bad, and maybe I did some things that weren't so nice, but I wasn't as monstrous as she made me out to be. She told them I had all these problems and that I couldn't deal with real life. She made it sound like I was crazy. But what sounded craziest to me was that nobody ever asked to hear my side of the story. Nobody said shit one about Ivar and his part in everything. It’s not like I would have given him up or anything, but still….they just took her word as law, and that was that.

I don't remember a lot after that. I know that Harrow, or Harald, or whatever the hell his name was, sat further away from me. Even that detective started to look at me with pity. All those fucking people started watching me like I was a freak show. It was too much to handle. I just wanted to die.

I prayed that they would kill me. I wanted them to strap me down to a table and shoot me up full of all the drugs they could get their hands on. Or put me in the gas chamber and let me choke off of my own vomit. Anything was better than the laughing and the whispering.

Ubbe once told me to be careful what I pray for because I just might get it. Well, he was right. If I died, I would have gone straight to hell. Well, they didn't kill me, but I went there anyway.

After I stopped going to court, I started going to Lagertha's little Drug Store Hell every day for years. Drugs and talking. Headaches and blackouts. Bruises and scars. And of course, her file full of lies and the fucking memories. They should have killed me. But it wasn't all bad. I learned a lot and I used it to buy my ticket back to real life.

See, I learned that people only see what they want to see and they don't care about anything but their version of the truth. They feel accomplished when they scratch the surface. As long as they get enough to prove themselves right, they let up and don't want to dig any deeper. For them, it's all about perception.

For me, it's all about adaptation. Being in hell, I learned how to adapt to my surroundings. For example, I learned that I had extensive knowledge of how drugs alter my behavior. I guess years of recreational drug use paid off for something. I know what it felt like when I was high, so when I finally got the willpower to stop taking that shit, I was still able to keep up appearances. As long as I acted like a zombie nobody fucking cared that I was stuffing that shit in a slit that I made in the mattress by using a loose bedspring. Of course with as many pills as I had stockpiled, I had my run of the fucking place – between trading that shit as currency with the other demons, and making cocktails to get myself in and out of every inch of that place, every day was a new fucking adventure.

You know, you can drug a guard, get keys to locked doors, and take a few patients that are drugged out of their fucking minds into off-limits rooms, come and go as you please… When you have the right combo of drugs conveniently crushed in coffee or sprinkled in the pudding of the powers that be, the possibilities are endless.

I also learned that if you alter your behavior to reflect that you think you are as bad as your file says you are, it makes you look more favorable to your doctor. They think you’re having a fucking breakthrough or something. They think all that self-loathing is some sort of remorse for all the wrongs you’ve done when you’re just sick of them telling you that you’re a fuck up and you need to do better. Truth is, you’re really just frustrated because you can’t fucking kill them.

It’s all just bullshit. Just like when you smile, you're not thought to be sad. If you do everything they say, suddenly you're cured. And most importantly, if you stop talking about Ivar, they stop thinking you're crazy and let you join groups and have privileges. They almost treat you like you’re normal as long as you never mention the “I” word.

Ivar.

Five years…five years without that smile or felt those magnetic blue eyes looking at me. For five years, I've been alone in a room, with their drugs, talking, and pain like nobody's business. I’ve let them break me down only to build me up to what they want me to be, but I managed it because I just knew that he was coming back for me. In the beginning he would come to see me, but, then suddenly, he stopped. The day he stopped coming, is the day that the real torture began. But I did it. I survived.

I did it alone.

I'm not gonna lie, being on my own is so hard. It’s gotten a little easier lately, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I finally got into a routine and I make it a point to deal with each moment as it comes. I don’t spend all my time in my head trying to block out the past and run from my future. I’ve even met a nice girl named, Amma. She’s a student up at the college. If things keep progressing with her the way I hope they do, I’m going to ask her to marry me.

I'm slowly building my life back, one brick at a time. I’m finally getting to a place where I’m hardly having nightmares about being in that place. It seems like I’m on the road to getting that normal life that I’ve always dreamed about. But, lord knows, normal is boring as a motherfucker. Especially without him.

Don't get me wrong, I never stop longing for him. I can't. The same blood that courses through my veins also runs through his. We’re connected for life. But, it’s more than that, for me. It's like denying that the love of your life ever existed. He's never far from my mind, but my thoughts of him don't consume me anymore.

Well, normally they don't. Today is just a really shitty day.

Sitting my iPhone on the window ledge, I absently wipe the tears from my eyes and I look out at the brook behind the cabin. Things were so much simpler the last time I got lost in watching the water flow downstream. I remember standing there with Ivar feeling like I could conquer the world. The world. Yeah right. I haven't been able to do that yet. But at least I've been able to conquer the hunger. It doesn't sound like much, but it feels like the world to me.

It's gone almost completely gone, I think. I hardly feel it at all now. Gert says that it'll never go away completely, but I can learn to manage it with meds and therapy. Well, fuck her because I’m doing it without either. I don’t need her psychobabble bullshit or her fucking pills. I just need the fresh air and the knowledge that the alternative to me fucking up again is going back to that hell on earth. That’s enough to make me keep my shit in order.

I’m just thankful that the hunger isn’t all-consuming anymore – just a little twinge now and again. I can deal with that. I've learned to ignore it. I mean, I still hear it and see it, but I don't taste it anymore. That's got to count for something, right?

Turning away from the window, I count the steps past the weakened floorboard and walk toward the door. This place feels like it's getting smaller by the minute and apparently, something died in here because it stinks. The smell of death never bothered me before, but right now it's getting to me. I guess without the hunger, I smell it for what it is now. It's comforting, just not that damn appetizing.

Leaning against the door frame, I take a deep breath of the heavily wooded air. That feels good. I almost forgot how good fresh air smells. Lord knows I didn't smell it for years and now I can't seem to get enough of it.

I guess that's why I rented this little house in the country. Ivar left me some money. A lot of it. I don't know where he got it and I don't give a shit. All I know is I’m able to afford a nice place out in the middle of nowhere that I fucking love. There's not another house for miles and I don't have the temptation of a bunch of people around me. It's secluded, like I'm trying to keep society out. Or maybe I'm trying to keep me away from society. Either way, I'm happy there.

I'm surrounded by woods and I’ll be able to smell the grass in the summer and the dying leaves in the fall. Ivar would shit a brick if he found out I became a nature lover. He'd shit golden egg rolls if he knew half of the shit I discovered about myself. I'm not the same Hvitserk as I was before.

It's still hard for me, harder than it is for most people, but I don't seem to cower from the world now. I know they're still watching me. The truth is I don't get scared like I used to, or worry about everything every single second. Yeah, I feel alone sometimes, but I'm not afraid of it now. I guess being in hell taught me how to deal with it. It's not like I had a choice in that place. In there, the loneliness would have eaten me alive if I had let it. But I didn't. I had to prove to myself, and I guess to Ivar, that I could make it. And I did. I made it without him.

There's a breeze whipping the fallen leaves around in the air. It'll be dark soon and it looks like it's going to rain. I don't mind though. Even with a huge hole in the roof, I'd rather stay here and get soaked than to go home and be alone. Amma’s staying on campus tonight because she's got a test in the morning. Not that I mind. It's just that it's fucking lonely in that house all by myself. Besides, it's been so long since I could just be alone with my memories and just feel what it is that I'm feeling that I'm enjoying it here. I'm not ready to give that up yet. After five years of having everything about me questioned, dissected, and analyzed, it's nice to have a minute just to remember without someone reading more into it.

Even now it's like that. I'm sure Amma doesn't mean it, but she likes to talk and every time I get quiet she thinks something's wrong. It's cute actually, how she tries so hard to keep me happy. She's one of those girls that does any and everything to make sure things between us stay good. Even after everything I've been through and all the lies the media told about me, she still loves me. Granted, she was just a kid when all of that shit went down, but she knows. At least she knows what she chooses to believe. If you ask her, I got sent away on some bullshit because I took the rap for Ivar. It's the truth, I did, and she refuses to believe anything other than that.

But still, she knows they're watching me and she sees how much it gets to me. She tries to keep my mind off of it and when that doesn't work, she wants me to open up about it. It doesn't bother me, though. Not like when Gert did it. That shit got on my nerves. I know Amma’s just trying to make me happy. But still, I'd be lying if I said the solitude of this place wasn't nice.

Closing my eyes to fully take in my surroundings, I hear the sound of leaves moving in the distance. With a sigh, I place the filter of the cigarette to my lips and feel my entire body relax as soon as the tip is lit. There's something about a quiet smoke that always seems to put things in perspective for me. With my head against the frame of the door, I watch the world.

The woods are beautiful with their bare trees and the multicolored leaves decorating the ground like a blanket and the brook bubbling happily in the distance. It's alive; everything about these woods is bursting with life even though winter is coming. It's like nature is preparing for it, but this place is resisting. It's ironic actually because that's exactly how I feel.

This is the shit that I missed out on when I was in hell. This is the shit that I missed when I was still taking Lagertha’s pills. Yeah, I loved being high all the time, but they kept me in a state of numbness, preventing me from seeing and enjoying the world around me. They were necessary when I needed to be what they wanted me to be. But, now I have to be who I am, and I don’t need them anymore. I don't want my senses dulled. I don't want to have a medicine haze surrounding me at all times. I want to taste the rain on my lips and feel the cool air on my face. I want to smell fall. I want to live and those damn pills were killing me slowly. Well, fuck that.

Staring at the large bare oak tree in front of me I feel an overwhelming sense of peace. Tears fill my eyes, but they're not sad tears. They are tears of contentment.

I knew this would happen. I knew I needed to come here. I knew I needed closure.

"Hey, baby." Without words, I watch as he walks with his hands in his pockets. Dressed in blue jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather jacket he looks like just stepped out of a magazine.

Stopping next to the tree, he leans against it and looks at me. He’s cut his hair. His short dark hair has just outgrown a buzz cut, but it still looks stylish on him. It makes his face look darker and his eyes bluer, as if that were possible.

"Ivar." I thought after all this time I would be happy to see him. But I don't feel anything. For years I practiced the thousands of things I wanted to say to him. But right now, I can't think of one. All I can do is stare at him.

A slow smile slides across his face and he lowers his head as if he is going to laugh. But instead, he raises his eyes to mine and nods. "You look good."

"You, too," and he does. He’s beautiful. He's always been so beautiful.

"Had a feeling I'd find you here. You always did love this place."

Fuck the small talk. We don't have to have some long drawn conversation. "Why?" That's it. That's all I want to know. "You left me. Why?"

Taking a deep breath he pushes off from the tree and starts to walk toward me. There was once a time where I was afraid of the power that Ivar exuded. I was never afraid of him, but of his strength, because it only amplified my weakness. But that time is long gone. I've been through so much shit - felt pain like never before. I don't fear it now. "I didn't leave you, Hvitserk."

"Bullshit. You knew what that bitch was doing to me. You said you would come back for me, but you never did. You just left me there.” I can still see his face outside of that little glass square at the top of my door. He was looking at me, smiling, leading me to believe that he was going to help me. But, he walked away. He blew me a kiss and walked away. "Do you have any idea what it was like for me? Do you? I've had everything short of a fucking lobotomy, Ivar. Electroshock therapy, graphic desensitization…if you can think of it, they did it. And believe me, that bitch Lagertha can give you a run for your money in the torture department. Do know why they did all that shit to me? Because you fucking disappeared. You left and all fingers pointed to me. They ripped my fucking soul apart because of your shit and you have the balls to show up here today as nothing fucking happened."

With a calm only Ivar can possess, he walks up the stairs to the porch and takes a seat on the old splintered rocking chair. Running his fingers over his face, he tilts his head and considers me. He's impressed, I know that look in his eye. He's never seen me stand up for myself without blacking out in the process. Well, guess what? I don't fucking blackout anymore. "Would I do that? I didn't leave you, Hvitserk. I was there. I was there so many fucking times. You wouldn't leave with me."

I'm so sick of people twisting the truth into their form of reality. I waited for him for years and he never came back. But still, there's a calmness in his voice that makes me want to listen to his reasoning. "I wouldn't leave with you? Contrary to popular belief, I'm not fucking crazy Ivar and it's pretty fucking hard to leave with a memory. Every fucking day I waited. But you never showed up. You let me rot there."

"Bullshit, I did. At first, you were so fucking out of it, that you just cried all the damn time and talked about how much you wanted to die." Folding his hands in his lap his eyes narrow slightly in my direction. For a second, I recognized that look. Irritation. But I'm not backing down. Not this time. Not until he tells me the truth. "Then, you flat out refused to come with me.”

"Oh cut the shit, Ivar! I’m not one of these stupid marks we find to party with – it’s me, Brother. You know, all of these years I looked up to you, idolized you…put you on a fucking pedal stool. Turns out, I believed you when you said that we were going to be together forever. Turns out I was my brother’s keeper. I kept you, Ivar! In here…” I pound my fist against my chest.

He looks so cool at my outburst, yet proud that I’m not crying. Calmly, he licks his lips and slowly blinks at me, “When I finally got in to see that fucking quack ass doctor of yours, she gave me this bullshit letter you wrote that told me to fuck off because you needed to do this all on your own. What the fuck, Serk? What the fuck else did you want me to do? You had it all. Your drugs, your little blonde doctor bitch hanging on your every word. You were in your element. Everybody was so worried about my poor baby. Why would you leave with me? You had everything you ever wanted and you didn’t need me anymore."

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean, I was in my element? I never wanted you to baby me, Ivar. You did that because it made you feel better. I just didn't want to be alone." Why is he trying to guilt me because I finally became my own man? If the roles were reversed, I would have done everything in my power to help him, or at least be proud of the progress he’s made. “I always need you, brother. I would never turn my back on you."

With a shake of his head, his smile drops and the look on his face is replaced with one of pure hurt. "If you didn't want to be alone, why did you keep turning me away? You should ask that bitch Dr. Gert how many times I called or came there to see you. Then ask her how many times she turned me away at your request. You left me, Hvitserk." He came to visit and she turned him away? No. That's not right. That couldn't have been how it happened. She never told me that he came to see me.

"You want to blame somebody for this? Blame her. She became more important to you than me. All the fucking lies she told you about me, you believed. All those sessions on her little couch, ending up with you crying. She was the one that started taking care of you, holding you, wiping away your tears. She replaced me. You should have seen the satisfied look on her face when she told me that you didn't need me anymore." He raises his brows at my shocked expression. He saw that? I remember that day – it was a particularly grueling therapy session. I would have said anything to make the pain stop.

"Didn’t know I knew that much, did you? Yeah, I saw it all. I saw how you stopped crying after a while. And you didn't black out anymore, either. I notice how after a while you were sitting there all tall and proud, talking and laughing with her. You were happy, Hvitserk. And I finally saw you. I didn't just look at you. I saw you. And that's when I knew it was true. You were strong on your own. You didn't need me in your life anymore, so I stopped coming. You were strong enough without me. And just look at you now…"

"You think you did me a fucking favor?" Stepping back inside the doorway I grab my bag from the floor. It takes a second to locate what I'm looking for but with damning evidence like this, there is no way he can deny it. "Look at this shit. Look at it! You thought I had a good time there? You saw all of the shit she did to me and you thought I fucking enjoyed it? I forgot torture is your thing. It must've looked like a fucking field day to you. Tearing me down…that's your idea of teaching me how to be strong?"

His eyes dance over the red printed letters on the front of the file and instantly I feel a chill at the sight of them. St. Dymphna Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Reluctantly, he opens to the first page and glances over everything. Without interest, he starts to read aloud, "Sociopath…Psychopath...Paranoid Schizophrenia… Histrionic Borderline Personality Disorder…Dissociative Personality Disorder… What the fuck is this?"

"That's your little lesson, Ivar. That's what the fuck I learned on Dr. Lagertha Svensdottir’s fucking couch." In all of the things I've felt for Ivar over the last five years, never once have I felt anger. But right now, I'm so pissed with him it's taking everything I have not to punch him in the face. "I learned that I'm fucking crazy. I was taught that I killed Guthrum, and Ubbe. I probably killed Bjorn and Father…hell, maybe even Rollo, too. But not Sigurd, Ivar. No - you did that one. I’m not taking the blame for him.

“Oh, and get this – did you know that I got sent to a funny farm, instead of leaving Father’s house to try to make it on my own, before that night I ended up sleeping on your floor. You know, right before I told you about my secret?” I can tell by the look on his face he doesn’t believe this shit either. “Yeah. They magically found some trumped-up records of me being committed somewhere. So instead of having an entire fucking life, I was institutionalized. Somehow I got better and they let me go, though. But I didn’t take my medication and got sick again, and that’s why I supposedly fucked up this time.” I angrily pluck my cigarette butt through the wooded area, “Shit, apparently, I fucking made you up. Did you know you were supposed to have died in the accident with Mother?”

"Those motherfuckers." His eyes grow cold for a moment, and then they soften when he looks at me. Ivar doesn't show remorse, but I can tell from that look that he genuinely had no idea it was that bad. "You don't believe this shit, do you? You never went away. You had your own place. I stayed with you a few times when shit got too bad with Father and Rollo. And that shit about me?” He stands from the chair and walks over to where I’m standing. Craning his neck until his face is inches from mine, I have no choice but to look into his eyes, “If you believe that shit, then you are crazy.”

"You know it's funny what pain will make you believe. You'll believe anything if it means that they'll stop hurting you. You of all people should know that."

"You don't believe me? Touch me. I've held you, rocked you in my arms, wiped your tears. I've been there for you more than anybody else has ever been. You know me. Fucking touch me and you'll know that I'm real." That seems to be all he cares about. Not the fact that the guards would beat me when I was strapped to my bed at night. Not the fact that Gert made me lie out loud and say that I killed damn near my entire family.

"I had to admit to everything you did in front of a room full of people and apologize for it. I had to tell them that I was sick and I didn't know what I was doing. They made me jump through fucking hoops and made me feel like a freak just to have the most basic of my needs met – to brush my own fucking teeth, Ivar. Now, I have people looking at me 24 hours a day, wondering if I’m stable; just waiting for the other shoe to drop." Lighting another cigarette, I suck back on the toke hoping it will calm me down.

"I have to follow all these stupid fucking rules. I don't have any privacy. I'm lying to my girl about what the fuck is going on. Oh, yeah, but I’m stronger than a motherfucker now." The sarcasm drips from my words before I can stop it.

"'Cause that's all that matters, right? You left me there to die, and just hoped that I was strong enough to survive. But what if I wasn't, Ivar? What if I didn't make it? What then?" As soon as I see the look on his face, I know that he didn't mean to hurt me. More importantly, I know that I can't end it like this. We’re all we have.

Nodding his head in understanding he straightens himself upright and glares out at the woods around us. "It was that fucking headshrinker wasn't it? She pumped you full of drugs and lies. You know she lied to you about all of that other shit. But you think she was telling the truth about me? Well here's the truth Hvitserk. If I thought for one second that you weren't strong enough to make it, I would have killed every last motherfucker in there to take you out of there. You can believe all of that other bullshit if you want, but you know that for a fact."

Staying angry with him is harder than I thought. But it feels so good to lash out after keeping all of this shit in for years. Always pretending to be what they want me to be so they'd let me out, keeping my real feelings bottled away…it's fucking hard. Finally, I get to be myself and it figures it's with the one person who I've always been able to be myself around. I know I should hate him. But I don't. I never did. I feel myself calming down and all I can do is look at him with serious eyes. "You were right about one thing. I don't need you anymore. I'm doing just fine on my own now."

A sly smile pulls at the corners of his lips and instinctively his hand runs over his almost bald head. "You're right. You don't need me…but it wouldn't be fun to have me around again?" His smile grows when I try to keep my face stern but it softens almost as soon as he says it. It's the truth. I miss him. Without him I feel like a part of me is missing. "We had some good times, brother."

Resting my head against the door frame again, I instantly feel the anger and frustration leave me looking into the cerulean pools of his eyes. "Yeah, we did." I look out at the forest and notice that the wind is picking up. The bare trees swing their branches like skeleton fingers waving goodbye to me. Or is it hello? I can't tell anymore.

"You came out on top, baby. You're bigger and better than you were before." Throwing the file on the chair behind him, he turns to me with a warm smile. He touches his hand to my cheek before kissing it gently and I can feel the electricity from it all over my body. God, I miss him. "I just wanted to see you again and to tell you that I'm proud of you." As soon as he steps down from the porch he turns to me and nods. "If you ever get bored, you know how to find me. I miss you." No sooner does he say that, does he turn around and walk down the stairs and away from the cabin. “Burn that fucking file. It’s nothing but a bunch of lies. You’re better than that, Serk. You always have been.”

Watching him leave a second time hurts more than I thought it would. "Ivar?" I steady my voice and force a smile on my face. "I miss you, too." I won't ask him to come back into my life, but I damn sure won't deny him if he does. In the few minutes that we spent together, I didn't feel lonely at all. I felt normal. That's all I've ever wanted.

His smile is illuminating. It lights up everything in this darkened wood like the sun was shining directly on him. It's magical. "I don't know how to apologize, Hvitserk. That's really not my thing. But I don't lie, so believe this. If you let me back in, I promise I will never leave you again."

There's so much to think about. I've been lied to so much by so many people I don't know what the truth is anymore. All I do know is I haven't felt this alive in years. With a shrug of my shoulders, I turn toward the door. "We'll see. I need to talk to my shrink first." With one last glance at him, over my shoulder, I walk into the cabin and leave the front door open behind me.

Pulling the pack of Marlboros out of my pocket, I dust off the chair and take a seat. Lighting the end, I close my eyes and concentrate on the thick smoke filling my lungs. I love the taste of menthol. With everything there is to consider, it's nice not to have to concentrate on anything but my cigarette while my thoughts fall into place. This is more than I can handle right now. I need some direction.

Resting my arms on my thighs, I lean forward and consider the mattress and the blonde woman bound and chained to the fireplace lying upon it.

"So, Dr. Lagertha, do you think I should give Ivar another chance?"

Fin.

A/N: Well, guys. That’s it! Thanks for sticking with me, and going on this crazy ride with my boys. This has been a fun rewrite. I hope to finishing some of my other stuff soon and posting some things I have just had sitting on the shelf.

As always,

Be easy!

shannygoat

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#My Brother's Keeper #modern ivar #modern hvit #modern hvitserk #ivar ragnarsson #Hvitserk Ragnarsson #ivar lothbrok #hvitserk lothbrok #ivar the boneless #Hvitserk Whiteshirt #shannyland

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turqrambles · 4 years

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The Five Worst Things About Digimon World

I did it.

It took 20 years but I did it.

I finally beat Digimon World for the Playstation 1, a game that has haunted me for most of my lifetime, and I did it with a Phoenixmon, the reason why I use “Turquoisephoenix” as a handle!

This is who I used to beat the game, named after an obscure Ratchet and Clank character because that’s just how I roll. The final boss battle involved a lot of Prominence Beam spamming and med recovery floppy spamming but I did it fair and square.

Before I get into what I thought about this game as a whole - and I do have a lot of good things to say about this game since I obviously enjoyed it enough to get to the end - I gotta talk about my least favorite things about this game. In a concise, Buzzfeed-esque list because I like writing things in easy to digest chunks.

Because, like most charming yet difficult games of the late 90′s, this game is very flawed and the flaws are pretty annoying!

1. Care Mistakes

The three emojis - Smile, Cool, and Poop.

Okay. This one - my least favorite part in the game - is going to take a bit of explanation.

First off, I don’t actually hate care mistakes existing as a mechanic. I think it’s a cute, virtual pet-y way to add a different wrinkle to evolution requirements, even if I think it’s a bit counter-intuitive to have to suddenly abuse my little companion once they reach Champion just because I want them to evolve into a floating metallic ball with a chainsaw.

My problem with care mistakes is that there’s literally no way of telling many care mistakes you have on your given Digimon.

Literally everything else in this game is concisely recorded and easily displayed on your Digimon’s stats screen. You can see how much your Digimon weighs. You can see their Happiness, their Discipline. How much Life they have left. Their Age. Even how many poops they need to make before they digivolve into a sentient pile of feces.

But Care Mistakes? Naaaaw, you just gotta remember every single thing that you did to your Digimon from the moment it evolves in your fallible human brain. What’s that? A good portion of this game involves grinding in the Green Gym and it’s really easy to make a Care Mistake there without knowing you did so because you mashed A too fast like the stat-grinding numskull that you are? Well, that’s just too fucking bad for you, then! Enjoy not getting some of the best evolutions, you piece of shit. You stooge. You moron!

This game, multiple times: You know who I hate? The player.

Care Mistakes are such an invisible mechanic that, to this day, there are many guides with misleading info about what counts as a Care Mistake and what doesn’t, which...really stinks for a game such as this where you will be using a guide pretty extensively to get the Digimon you deserve. And you know why that is? Because we don’t get any indication as to whether or not some random event counts against you when raising your Digimon.

And honestly, having one of your main mechanics of the game being entirely invisible to the player is a terrible idea. Just put a little number in my profile that says “Care Mistakes: 0″ in there. Let me know this information without guessing.

2. The Glitches

Pictured: Something that will CRASH YOUR GAME if you try it on a physical copy.

Let me start with a disclaimer that most of the glitches I’m going to complain about were added into the game when Digimon World was localized and therefore aren’t the original intent of the developers. There are certain versions of Digimon World that are more stable than others (The English PAL version is the best version to play because of this) and, if you play this game via “certain methods”, there are patches to circumvent some of the bigger problems.

That being said! Boy! Isn’t it ironic that a game where I’m exploring the digital world is plagued with so many annoying, game-ruining glitches? Especially if I’m playing this game on a physical 20-year old copy like a dunce?

“Ohhhh...so Agumon thinks that they can block the Digimon game with their big fat Digimon-blocking head, do they?!”

The NTSC version of this game has a jukebox that will crash the game if you try to use it, keeping you from ever using a bonus feature meant to be a fun little reward for completing a certain dungeon, but that’s not as heinous as the Spanish, French, German, and Italian PAL versions of this game locking a good portion of the game to players because they forgot to make the Agumon in front of Ogremon’s Fortress an object you can interact with.

So that means, if you happened to get this game in one of four lucky countries, you can’t complete the Ogremon mission, you can’t recruit Whamon, you can’t recruit Shellmon, you can’t recruit anything tied to Shellmon’s bulletin board (which means no Vademon or Skullgreymon), and you can’t go to Factorial Town and recruit Giromon, Andromon, or Numemon. Ogremon is a key part of the Digimon World storyline and causes so many different things in the game to change, meaning that it should’ve been imperative to make sure this part of the game works!

But no. Instead this one little bastard Agumon keeps most players from finishing the game, because it starves players of those PAL regions of a bunch of Prosperity points, the main source of progression in this game. That means that Mt. Infinity and the final boss is just that much harder to unlock. It’s doable, but it’s more grueling process.

This really is a problem with the translators and really highlights a lack of general care with testing this game. Why this game was allowed to be shipped with such glaring bugs is anyone’s guess, especially in an era where you couldn’t release any patches over the Internet to fix retail versions.

3. The Monochromon’s Shop Minigame

Ohhhh....this one was so close to getting the top spot. When I first wrote this draft, this was the top spot.

Monochromon was only spared of my true ire on account of the fact that it really only exists for one part of the game (rather than being a constant problem like the Care Mistakes and the Glitches are) and you can easily cheese it by sleeping in front of the store so that you can save scum your way to victory. Like a true Digital Champion!

At one point in the game, you gotta help a entrepreneur dinosaur rhino man make a profit, because he was stupid and put his convenience store in the middle of a giant canyon next to a gaping chasm. So you play a little game of haggling, where you try to ruthlessly oversell a bunch of random items to customers until you make enough of a profit that this talking dinosaur tells you that you passed his secret test of character, abandons his store, and moves into File City.

There’s just one problem with this minigame - everything is decided by RNG.

“Get the hell out of my shop”

This minigame hates you. It wants nothing but to see you fail and to waste your time. The difference in profit margins of the three items (Meat sells for 50g, Portable Potties sell for 300g, and Medicine sells for 1000g) are so stark that, if you get too many customers asking for Meat, you might as well just reset the game and start over because it will be literally impossible to meet the requirement even if you busted the customer’s proverbial balls and squeezed every last bit out of their cutesy penguin faces.

Oh! It’s also RNG as to whether or not your customers will take your asking price or storm out of the store without buying anything!

It’s all the fun of working at retail! In a video game!

4. Three on One Battles

What you see before you is a battle system that is really fun when it’s one vs. one, manageable at two vs. one, and downright unbearable at three vs. one.

The battle system works for the most part. You don’t have full control of your Digimon (and yes, you only have one Digimon with you at one time, so you can never stack the numbers in your favor) so you shout commands at it, commands that the Digimon’s AI are pretty good at following, and hope for the best as you chuck healing items at it.

It’s not the best battle system, but it’s fun. And it definitely reinforces the whole “this is a pet you’re taking care of with its own thoughts and feelings” atmosphere that this game is going for.

However, nothing can protect your Digimon from enemy fire concentrated on them, especially if you did the thing that most players do and equipped your Digimon with the most powerful attacks that also happen to have slower cast times than the faster, weaker attacks.

What then happens is your Digimon’s Health is slowly whittled away as you are powerless to stop it, watching as your digital friend is straight up bullied by enemy Digimon as they keep falling to the ground over and over and over and over again.

The one saving grace is that Friendly Fire exists in this game so that oftentimes the enemy Digimon will damage each other in their mad dash to ruin your day, but that seems more like a band-aid than an actual fix to this system.

5. Fishing Seadramon

“Hi, kid. Let me guess - you also thought you had to talk to the Tankmon in Factorial Town in order to unlock me, huh.”

This one is a lot less of a pain than the other four and it’s only a little annoying but boy...getting Seadramon kinda sucks in this game.

It took me almost a goddamn hour to catch Seadramon. One hour of gameplay devoted to catching one fish. Just like real fishing!

I will say, besides Seadramon, the fishing minigame in this game is pretty competent. It’s just that Seadramon is very elusive, showing up at only two hours in a 24 hour day, and is a very finicky fish that won’t take your bait even if you literally placed it in front of his dumb fish face.

Don’t be fooled by this screenshot. The heart just means you have the right bait. The heart means that you didn’t actually get within range of hooking him.

IT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!!!

Seadramon is also subject to almost as many gaming myths as the Care Mistakes are, due to how elusive he is, but that’s less to do with poor communication (the game does at least explain multiple times in multiple places how to find him) and more to do with the fact that catching him is just such a goddamn chore to do that players of this game always assume they’re doing something wrong.

When in reality, Seadramon is just a picky little bitch.

Next time I discuss Digimon World, I’ll talk about things I liked, don’t worry. I just had to get all of this negativity out before discussing the full game proper.

#Digimon World #Turq Reviews #Turq Plays a Game

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twobitmulder · 4 years

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MCU Spider-Man 3 Pitch

I have not been the biggest fan of the MCU’s take on Spider-Man, but I do think there’s a way that they could close out his trilogy and make up for a lot of what didn’t work while also staying true to what’s been done in the first few movies.

So picture this, it’s been a few months, maybe even a year, since Spider-Man was framed for Mysterio’s death. Stark Industries lawyers have been able to convince a judge that the footage was doctored to put Peter’s face in in it, but that’s only improved the situation a little bit. Half of New York still thinks Peter is Spider-Man and the other half at least think Spider-Man murdered Mysterio and framed this kid. Happy and Stark Industries have had to distance themselves from Spider-Man publicly because even though Peter Parker is technically legally innocent, Spider-Man is still wanted for murder.

Ned and MJ stand by him, but the fact of the matter is that the world is just against Peter Parker on all fronts....

That’s when Norman Osborne shows up. Norman is a tech genius and his company Oscorp has always been a sort of quiet competitor to Stark Industries. Since the Snap (or the Blip if you prefer) they’ve raised their public profile and are doing a lot of work cleaning up the world. Norman approaches Peter much like Tony did. He knows Peter is Spider-Man and he’s offering him a job with Oscorp, a way to save his reputation and earn some money (Stark Industries covered the legal fees, but the constant attention has put a strain on the already sparse Parker family budget). Norman is putting together a new team, to fill the void left by the fracturing of the Avengers...the Thunderbolts.

Now Peter isn’t an idiot. This all feels sort of suspect. After all, Mysterio came to him as a fellow hero too. So he does his due diligence. He checks with Dr. Strange and looks as far back as he can into Osborne’s past, but he can’t find a blemish, what he does find is that Osborne knew his father, worked with him when they were in Grad school, and it leads to a very tender father/son moment between them.

So he agrees to become a Thunderbolt on a trial basis. May doesn’t like it, but Peter is 18 and she can’t stop him. MJ thinks he’s nuts. “You got lucky trusting one billionaire, you’re crazy to trust a second one.” Even Ned, trying to be supportive, can’t help but feel that something is off.

Peter meets the other Thunderbolts. Max Dillion, who can control electricity, Sergei Kravinoff, who has enhanced strength and agility, and Dimitri Smerdyakov, their own personal Black Widow and master intelligence operative. They have an early run in with Mac Gargan, now in possession of a suit of power armor and calling himself The Scorpion, but the real clincher for Peter comes when, responding to an attack by some kind of sand monster, they capture a very alive and well Mysterio.

With the path to fully clearing his name now open, Peter comes to fully trust Osborne who tells him how he wants to do what the Avengers couldn’t. He wants to build a suit of armor around the world.

Meanwhile, MJ and Ned are still suspicious and they break into Oscorp where they find Osborne’s scientists running tests on Dillon, Kravinoff, and Smerdyakov. But worse than that, they find Beck and Gargan free, and getting equipment upgrades from Oscorp scientists. They’re captured and interrogated by Osborne. MJ tells him that she’s got him all figured out, that he’s just running the same scam that Beck was, creating fake disasters to swoop and stop. But Osborne tells her that it’s much more than that. Peter represents the possibility of a new generation of heroes, young and impressionable that he can mold and shape, effectively putting the next generation of super people entirely under his thumb. Luckily for Osborne, Beck’s stunt with the doctored footage helped alienate Peter enough for Osborne to get his hooks in.

Later, Peter is worried that he can’t get in touch with MJ and Ned, but Osborne tells him not to worry, tells him that his destiny as a hero is beyond all that and that he’ll make new friends, friends on his level. Osborne shows Peter files he’s been keeping on other young people with powers (and here we can take an opportunity to show off some upcoming characters, I think Angelica Jones, Bobby Drake, and Sam Alexander would be fun Easter Eggs) that he wants Peter to start training to be the next generation of Thunderbolts.

This starts to rub Peter the wrong way and he wonders if maybe MJ and Ned were right. He hacks Osborne’s computers and steals some files on the Thunderbolt Project and takes them home to sort through them. On his way home he gets a call from MJ telling him to meet her in Central Park.

By the time he gets there it’s dark and he sees not MJ, but Aunt May meeting with someone who looks just like Peter. Before he can call out to her he’s blindsided by a masked man (Kraven, but Peter can’t tell) who pins him down and makes him watch as the False Peter (Smerdyakov) locks eyes with Peter and makes it clear that if he makes a sound he’ll kill May. Kraven asks for the data Peter stole from Oscorpe back. Just as Peter is about to hand it over he sees May wallop Smerdyakov.

We cut to May kicking Smerdyakov’s fallen gun away from him and asking him where Peter is. Smerdyakov’s shapeshifting falters and we see a new form, a blank, smooth white face.

“How?” He asks.

May sneers at him. “You think I don’t know my own son?”

A webline hits Smerdyakov square in the chest and Peter rockets into frame, knocking him onto his ass. Kraven rushes him and Peter yells for May to get clear.

Suddenly an explosion rips through the park. Osborne, in something almost like a cross between an Iron Man suit and and Vulture’s wing harness, swoops down, picks Peter up, and plucks the data stick from the pocket of his suit, then throws him into a nearby building where Peter blacks out.

Peter wakes up in a hazy and brightly lit version of his bedroom. He sits up on his bed and makes eye contact with someone across from him.

“I let you down didn’t I? I tried to...I tried to be better. I tried to...”

“Pete,” an unfamiliar voice says, as we pan to the other end of the room and see, for the first time in the MCU, Benjamin Franklin Parker (I’m imagining Nick Offerman, but Toby Maguire would be fun too). “You could never let me down.”

Peter tells his uncle that he thinks he made a mistake, that he doesn’t know who to trust anymore, and that this whole Spider-Man thing was supposed to be to make Ben proud, to make up for...well, Ben knows...but it never seems to turn out right. It just feels like he keeps getting drawn into other people’s messes and making a mess of his own life and he’s tried to be his own person but it feels like the more he’s Spider-Man the less he knows who he’s supposed to be. Is he Tony? Is he Osborne? Is he an Avenger or a Thunderbolt? Ever since he got drawn into this people have been talking about his potential and he’s afraid that he’s not going to measure up to what people expect of him. And Ben very gently tells him that it’s not about measuring up. It’s not about being the next Tony Stark but better or becoming an Avenger. It’s not about measuring up to anyone’s ideal. It’s about knowing that he’s making a difference because he feels it’s the right thing to do no matter whether the rest of the world sees him as an Iron Man or a menace or an Avenger. And he tells him that he knows he knows he’ll do the right thing, because he can’t not, it’s who he is, it’s in his actions every day.

Peter wakes up to May frantically doing chest compressions on him in the middle of a collapsed public restroom in the park. He almost tells her what he hallucinated while he was out, but he can’t bring himself to. Instead he says they need to get to a computer.

Peter reveals that he made a backup of the data and stored it in the suit’s computer. He opens up the files and they find out that Osborne is planning to release the personal information of his teenage Thunderbolts candidates to every budding super-criminal and news outlet in the world. He’s gonna back them all into a corner the way Peter was, destroy their lives so he can pick up the pieces and turn them into his loyal army.

Following an SOS from MJ Peter find Osborne and confronts him in the Oscorp Tower while Aunt May sneaks in and rescues MJ and Ned. What follows is a climactic fight where Peter takes on Osborne’s Sinister Six while May, Ned, and MJ make their way past Oscorp’s security to stop the data leak.

The fight spills out into the city and Peter shows off his experience as Spider-Man, staying one step ahead of his multiple foes and pulling civilians out of harm’s way.

May, MJ, and Ned manage to stop the data leak from Oscorp Tower but Osborne reveals he can just as easily release it all from his suit. He points out to Peter that as far as the world is concerned, he and the Thunderbolts are new superheroes while Spider-Man’s reputation is still in doubt.

“Keep fighting me and they’ll hate you forever” Osborne says.

“It doesn’t matter if they hate me” Peter says, tearing the computer systems out of Osborne’s suit. “It matters that they’re safe.”

The day saved and the villains defeated and incapacitated, Peter limps to the top of Oscorp tower where he meets May, MJ, and Ned, as they watch as the sun rises over the city.

Cut to a few weeks later and the media is still divided whether Spider-Man is a hero or a menace. Norman Osborne has been taken to The Raft after a data leak from Oscorp Tower revealed business dealings with remnants of Hydra, AIM, and the Fisk Crime syndicate. MJ, filling out applications for a journalism major at ESU, looks knowingly proud and justifiably smug as this is reported.

The film ends as Peter, in his Spider-Man suit, approaches a young girl sitting on the edge of a rooftop, flames dancing on her fingertips. Ned and MJ monitor him from a jury-rigged computer display and talk to him through his suit.

“Hi,” Peter says to the girl, “Angelica Jones?...Can I talk to you for second? I think I can help you.”

Post Credits Scene 1: Peter is visiting Dr. Strange again who tells him that he honestly can’t say if the vision Peter had was anything more than a near death hallucination, but that he should take comfort in knowing that the people we’ve lost can still help us once they’re gone, even if it’s just their memories. Peter presses the issue and Dr. Strange shrugs and says anything is possible. There are infinite worlds after all, different planes of existence, different dimensions.

Peter Scoffs, “That’s just something Mysterio made up to con us”

“Well even a broken clock is right twice a day” Strange replies.

Post Credits Scene 2: Osborne is locked up in The Raft. Footsteps approach. General Ross comes up to his cell and shakes his head.

“Beat down by a kid Osborne. Well, even so, you still put together a damn impressive team. I had some ideas about continuing your little project. I do really like the name.”

#That ended up longer than I expected #I sort of wrote this in a frenzy over two days before the news about Garfield and Maguire broke #I'm not crazy about the idea personally since it's already been done and been done better than the MCU could hope to #spider-man #MCU #peter parker #movie pitch #I had a devil of a time figuring out the Uncle Ben scene but it's too weird to have a whole Spider-Man series without mentioning him #I know it sort or hits some of the same beats as Far From Home but I did not realize that as I was writing it #this ended up as more of a fanfic than a pitch #I realize on the one hand that it might be more fitting for Miles to be the one Peter comes to at the end #But I think Miles deserves a fuller intro than a tag scene #really the best way to introduce Miles would have been while Peter was dead in the five years between Infinity War and Endgame #C’est la vie maybe we get an interquel later

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oldmacnewlife · 3 years

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DIY

Create Your Own CD Sleeves Using Microsoft Word 2004

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it over and over again: I love old computers. I love tinkering with them. I love seeing what, if any, more or less useful work they can still do in the modern world, years after everyone else has moved onto the Next Shiny Thing.

Since I collect old computers, that means I also collect old software - mainly old drivers to power the old computers. I find them on the internet, download them, then burn them to disk to archive them. To keep these disks safe, I store them in CD jewel cases. I like these to look at least a little bit nice. I make my own CD sleeves for them.

Dimensions

In order to create your own cd sleeve, you need to know what size to make them. An internet search states that CD sleeves are typically 4.7 inches by 4.7 inches. The internet deals only in truth. Trust the internet.

Word 2004

Word 2004 is an old version of Microsoft’s word processing software for Mac OS X (10.4 “Tiger”, in this case). As a word processing program, page layout isn’t exactly its focus, but it still has the chops to get this simple task done. Word 2004 is roughly equivalent to the 2003 version for Windows, so the same features should be present in both versions, though they may be accessed a bit differently in each.

Go ahead and fire up Word and open a new document from the file menu. Since what we’re doing here is more of a page layout task than word processing, go ahead and set the view to Page Layout, which can be done from the View menu. While your mucking about in the View menu, you may as well turn on Rulers, (if they’re not already on), and the Drawing toolbar, which can be activated from the toolbars submenu of the View menu. A quick note on the Rulers: we’ll be working in inches here, so if your Rulers are set to some other unit of measurement, you’ll either have to work out the conversion OR change your Ruler’s settings to inches.I hate math, so I changed the measurement units to inches. This can be done in the General section of the Preferences dialog.

With a new document open and Preferences and View set, we can now set the margins. Select Format->Document from the menu to bring up the Document dialog. This dialog contains a Margins tab. This tab contains options for setting the margins. Go figure. For this project I set all margins to zero. Word will gripe a bit about this when you print later on, but I have my reasons.

With the margins set, we’re ready to start designing our CD sleeve. Since I’m using plain 8.5 x 11 inch printer paper, I’m going to have to cut my CD sleeve from this. So, the first thing I’m going to do is create a couple of guidelines to show me where to cut. I set the page margins to zero so that these lines would be drawn right up to the edges of the paper. From the Drawing toolbar, select the Line tool. (It’s the button with the picture of the line on it. Pretty clever, those Microsoft folks.) Holding the shift key, click and drag the mouse downward in the document to draw a vertical line. Holding down the shift key tells Word you want a straight line, not a crooked one. Don’t worry too much about getting the size and placement of the line precisely right here. There’s a dialog that will let you adjust these with much more precision. Speaking of which...

Once you’ve drawn your vertical line, right click it. From the resulting context menu, select “Format AutoShape” to bring up the Format AutoShape dialog. From the dialog’s Size tab, set Height to 4.7 inches. Leave the Width setting at its default. Under the Layout tab, click the Advanced button. Under the Picture Position tab, you can set the horizontal and vertical positions of the line. Set the Absolute Position for horizontal to 4.7 inches. Set vertical to 0. Click OK to dismiss the dialog.

The steps to draw the horizontal line are pretty much the same, except of course you want th draw the line horizontally across the document window instead of down it. Bring up the Format AutoShape dialog as before and set the width th 4.7 inches. (Leave the height set to 0). Set the horizontal position to 0 and the vertical position to 4.7 inches.

You don’t have much of a CD sleeve yet (unless you prefer absolute minimalism), but you do have a simple template for making one. You can save your document now.

You’re now ready to make a CD sleeve specifically for the disk you’re storing. How you proceed depends on what content you want for your sleeve. I usually like a picture with a bit of text describing the content of the CD.

Select Insert->Picture->From File from the menu. Navigate to, select and open the image file you want to use for your sleeve. Word will insert the picture into your document at its full size and, by default, in the upper left corner. If you’re happy with the results, you can move on to the next step. Keep in mind that with the margins set to 0, anything near the edge of the page may get cut off when printing. Odds are, you’ll have to make some adjustements.

There’s a couple of ways to adjust the size of the image. Click on the image in the document window to select it. Word places a border around the image to indicate it’s currently selected. At various points along this border, you’ll see little “boxes.” These are points you can click and drag to adjust the size of the picture. If you work on one of the corner points and drag towards the center (or away from the center, if you’re enlarging the image), Word will resize the image while doing a reasonable job of maintaining the correct aspect ratio. Dragging straight up or down will tend to leave the picture looking stretched or squashed. Another thing to keep in mind: images downloaded off the web are generally low resolution, which means they’re just not going to look very good printed. Enlarging them is just going to make them look worse.

If you want more precise control over the size of the picture, you can right or Control-click the image and select Format Picture from the context menu to open the Format Picture diaog. Under this dialog’s size tab, you can either set the precise height and width of the image, or scale it to a percentage of its original size. You’ll probably also want to make sure “Lock Aspect Ratio” is checked to avoid that stretched out or squished look.

As with size, your picture’s position can be adjusted by either clicking and dragging it or with the Format Picture diaog. (Bet you can guess how to open that...) If the picture won’t move through clicking and dragging, you need to change its text wrapping setting from the Layout tab of the Format Picture dialog. You’ll see a few options under Wrapping Style. Select “Square.”

You can also adjust the picture’s position with more precision from this dialog. This works pretty much the same as adjusting the position of our guidelines did. Under the Layout tab, click the “Advanced” button. From here, you can set the picture’s horizontal and vertical position, just as you did with the guidelines earlier. When you’re happy with your settings, click OK to dismiss the dialog.

In addition to a picture to illustrate the CD sleeve, it’s nice to include some text to describe the contents of the disk. Click the Text Box button on the Drawing toolbar (it’s labeled with the 2D letter A with the cursor bar next to it) and click and drag in the document window to draw your text box. Click inside the text box and enter some text. To adjust the alignment of the text (left, right or center) right or Control-click inside the text box and select Paragraph from the context menu. You can also bring up this dialog by pressing Command-Option-M with the cursor inside the text box. You can set also the text alignment from the Indents and Spacing tab of this dialog. To adjust the font, bring up the Font dialog by pressing Command-D or selecting Font from the context menu (right or Control-click to display).

The size and positioning of the text box can be adjusted very much as before with the picture and guidelines. Right or Control-click on the border of the text box to bring up the context menu and select Format Text Box. Go ahead and make your adjustments. One more thing: by default, Word draws a border around your text box. This is an actual border that will show up when the document is printed and not just a display border to indicate the text box is selected. To get rid of it, open the Format Text Box dialog's Lines and Colors tab. Under Lines, click “Color” and select “No Line.” Once you’re satisfied, click “OK” to dismiss the dialog.

You’re now ready to print and save your CD sleeve. Click “Save As” from the File menu to assign a new file name so you don’t overwrite the original blank CD sleeve document. We’re saving that to reuse as a template. If you're ready to commit your work to paper, go ahead and select Print from the File menu and... print. Cut out your homebrew CD sleeve along the guidelines, insert into the CD jewel case, and you’ve got yourself one professional looking CD. Well, no, you don’t. At least I didn’t end up with one. But it’s still nicer than just some handwriting scribbled along the front of the disk. Happy computing!

#computers #page layout #desktop publishing #mac #maintosh #word 2004 #apple #microsoft

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mobius-prime · 4 years

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175. Sonic the Hedgehog #107

Crouching Hedgehog, Hidden Dragon (臣人豪猪臧龍) (Part Two)

Writer: Karl Bollers Pencils: Ron Lim Colors: Frank Gagliardo

Yes, those are the same Chinese characters as last time. I was kind of hoping they would have used different ones so we could have a second nonsense phrase to laugh over, but alas. The morning after the dragon's attack, Sonic and Tails are playing video games when they're called to a morning meeting with Station Square's president. Once in the meeting, the president begins to explain his strategy for taking on the dragon, but Sonic is less than interested.

Sonic suddenly realizes he recognizes the team as the one that captured him at the beginning of Sonic Adventure 2, and promptly bursts into hysterical laughter, remembering how easily he disarmed them last time. Sally is quick to salvage the situation by claiming that it's Mobian tradition to laugh at their allies as a show of respect, and a confused president and annoyed Paladin Team look on as every Mobian at the table howls with laughter to keep up the ruse. Sonic, however, is not pleased with the tough-guy, humorless attitude that every member of the team exudes, and Sally, Rotor, and Antoine stay behind in the city as Sonic, Tails, and Bunnie airdrop in with the team to Pyro Island, where the dragon is believed to be hiding out. The Mobians are cheery, singing and chatting with one another, but the leader of Paladin Team admonishes them for not taking things seriously. While everyone is distracted, two of the Paladin Team members lag behind everyone else, not realizing that there's a shadowy, snakelike figure stalking them from behind. As the Mobians and humans begin to argue, they suddenly notice the disappearance of two of their team members.

While the humans angrily head out to find their missing team members, Sonic, Tails and Bunnie press on into the trees, trying to figure out where a dragon might hide. Tails spots a cave behind a waterfall, and they duck inside, to be immediately greeted by… Dulcy! It's been a while since we've seen her! Her arm is in a sling, but otherwise she seems fine and happy to see them. Suddenly, the red dragon emerges from behind her, but Dulcy quickly explains that this is Zan, and she's in a relationship with him. However, he begins to act aggressive, insisting that the others are their enemies and shouldn't be here, to her dismay.

Well, that changes things a bit. Everyone tries to convince Zan to settle down so they can talk things out peacefully, but Zan becomes even angrier when Dulcy agrees. He's interrupted from scolding her for relying on them when a net entangles his mouth, shutting him up, and the humans all rush in with guns drawn, ready to kill both dragons. Sonic utilizes his super speed to take apart all their guns before they can fire, but then Zan breaks free of his muzzle, gloating that now that they're unarmed he can kill them easily. Sonic steps in the middle to prevent that from happening either, and then Dulcy, from the back, quietly speaks up.

So this isn't the only "surprise domestic abuse" plot in a Sonic canon. Anyone who's played Sonic and the Secret Rings knows that an abusive romantic relationship plays a big part in that game's plot as well. But it still does come as a big shock here. Sonic freaks out, infuriated that Zan would hurt his friend, and begins wailing on him, while Tails and Bunnie rush outside to check on Dulcy. She repeats certain stock phrases that are common of abuse victims, such as "he loves me" and "maybe it's my fault," while Bunnie reassures her that she's not at fault at all and deserves better than to be treated this way. It's honestly a decent portrayal of the guilt that abuse victims become stuck with, just very condensed, because this comic doesn't have time to throw in a whole long subplot about Dulcy's emotional recovery. Instead, it takes a fast-track approach, as while Sonic and Zan fight, Paladin Team sets up explosives and blows up the entire cave, with Sonic and Zan still in it! That'll solve it!

Everyone outside is horrified and rushes forward to try to dig them both out, but Sonic emerges safely, tunneling his way out from under the rock. However, Zan isn't so lucky. The team contacts the president, informing him that the dragon that menaced them is dead and the city is safe again, and he agrees formally to take in the Overlander refugees, while Sonic, Tails, and Bunnie stay with Dulcy at the ruins of the cave till nightfall, letting her mourn despite the abuse.

Fittingly, our character file for this issue is for Dulcy! She's an outlier in almost every way compared to the other characters so far. Since she's a dragon, you'd expect her to be bigger than the others, but I wasn't expecting her to be so massive. She's a whopping 240 cm or 7'10" tall, and weighs 111.8 kg or 245.9 lbs! That's easily taller than Big the Cat and E-102 Gamma, the tallest characters in the games (not counting bosses such as Iblis or Dark Gaia), though not nearly as heavy as either of them. Her wingspan also comes out to 169 cm or exactly five feet, which correspond well enough to how they're usually drawn as proportionately small. However, that's not the most interesting thing about her file. Based on her behavior and this recent relationship of hers, how old would you say Dulcy is? Seventeen? Eighteen?

She's thirteen.

I was honestly shocked when I found this out. This means that most of the previous times we've seen her, she was literally only twelve, not even a teenager yet. This actually puts a lot of her behavior into perspective - her somewhat crybaby attitude and nervousness in the face of danger, all that is due to literal immaturity. This means she was only about two years old when the war against Robotnik started, with her birthday being August 23. The file explains that when Robotnik began his coup, he heavily targeted dragons before any other creatures due to their sheer power. One such dragon, Sabina, sought protection for her daughter Dulcinea (Dulcy's real name) among the Kingdom of Acorn before she too was captured. Dulcy grew up over the years and helped the Freedom Fighters, though she mainly lived outside on her own due to her massive size. Interestingly enough, the file also attempts to provide a bit of a retcon for the whole "dragons can sense truth" plot hole that I pointed out all the way back during Endgame, instead suggesting that Dulcy in particular is just a very trustworthy individual who doesn't like telling lies and has an instinct for knowing when someone is being truthful, which I can accept. It's a lot better than the handwave from before, anyway.

Reunification (Part II)

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Dawn Best Colors: Robbie O'Quinn

Lien-Da is pissed. Apparently, she actually didn't expect Knuckles to be able to reverse the effects of the Quantum Beam, despite Dimitri not only promising Knuckles he'd do so himself, but even encouraging Knuckles to do so on his own. Dimitri is also shocked, though more at the sheer extent of Knuckles' power, which exceeds even his own when he was Enerjak.

What, Lien-Da? You think you're gonna recruit Remington or something? Remington's an upstanding guy, man, I think your chances are… uh… well, I suppose we mustn't forget about the time traveler girl who apparently thinks he's gonna murder Knuckles. Remington asks her for her name and she gives the name "Jani-Ca," though internally she notes that she's trying to hide her own identity, meaning this isn't her real name. Wynmacher and Lara-Le rush up, concernedly asking after Knuckles, and while Remington states he hasn't seen him, Jani-Ca hides her surprise at seeing a younger version of her grandmother. Wait - grandmother?! Then that means she's…

The Chaotix are back as well, having landed right back in the ruins of the Grand Conservatory, with their dialogue again suggesting that they haven't been away for long due to the slower time scale within the Twilight Zone. In Haven, the various members of the Brotherhood are dismayed to find the place trashed from Knuckles' earlier bursts of uncontrolled power, though they instead suspect the Legion's hand. They notice that Matthias and Hawking are no longer there, realizing that they've both died and headed on to the "next evolution," AKA echidna heaven. They sense one more soul with them, whom we know is Tobor, but they can't figure it out. Locke briefly worries that it might be Knuckles before hearing Knuckles' ghostly voice reassuring him that he's fine and currently in the city. Far from reassuring Locke, this only makes him worry that instead of his great plans for Knuckles to be a savior, instead his worst fears have come to pass. What, Locke, you starting to think that maybe genetically engineering and irradiating your unborn baby wasn't a good idea after all?

*sigh* So, yes, everyone, this is Knuckles' future daughter Lara-Su. Anyone who knows Penders and his whole lawsuit debacle will know exactly who this is. Now, she's kind of an unpopular character because of this (and because many people essentially dismiss her as Penders' Mary Sue OC), and there are definitely valid criticisms to be made about her inclusion into the comics, but I'm not going to immediately jump into hating her just because of the circumstances of her creation. After all, we still know basically nothing about her, not even how she came to be, and anyway you all know that I prefer to judge a character or story on its own merits and not on how likeable its creator is.

Everyone's conversations are interrupted by a flash of light, and Dimitri materializes in the middle of the group. Remington, of course, steps forward intending to arrest him, but Knuckles stops him much to his shock. Dimitri grins in a super-duper-not-an-evil-villain way and says that Knuckles has finally seen that he and his Legion only wish to rejoin the rest of echidna society, and that they're prepared to do whatever it takes to reintegrate…

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 107 #writer: karl bollers #writer: ken penders #pencils: ron lim #pencils: dawn best #colors: frank gagliardo #colors: robbie o'quinn

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al-winchester · 4 years

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Commission Guide

Commission Rules and Guidelines + How to Request

-Fandoms-

My list of fandoms I write for is constantly growing as I read and watch and play more things. I also may have forgotten to list a few, so don't be afraid to ask about a fandom! An up to date list of fandoms I write for can be found at the end of this post for easy reference, or via the link in my description.

-Genres, Prompts, and Content Rating-

I can write for any genre you would like. Specify which you are interested in, or let me surprise you.

I can write from prompts you see on my page, prompts you find other places, or a plot you came up with. Just be sure to word it carefully so the right idea is portrayed! A fun idea is using a song as a prompt. It allows for lots of ways to interpret it!

Content I write is most often PG-13, but I can do R-Rated. This being said, please notify me of anything that may offend you so I can create something you will enjoy reading. Alternatively, let me know what is okay to incorporate into the story.

-Default Writing Style-

There are things I do in my writing if there is no specifications made in that area:

- If it is a x Reader story, I write in first person (Example: I adjusted my bag.)

- I usually follow the plot of the canon universe, save for a few changes necessary to make the story work

- I use some swearing, if it is in character (This can be censored or omitted)

-Things I Will NOT Write-

- Incest, pedophilia, beastiality

- Anything that glorifies suicide or self-harm (different from depicting it)

- Anything that glorifies abusive behavior (different from depicting it)

- Anything that promotes racism, homophobia, or sexism (that includes the kind of fake feminism that states that women are better than men)

- Fanfiction of real people is not my thing. I don't want to write it.

- Anything that gives out personal information about you or others

- Any sort of hate promotion

- Real life politics (Not my area of expertise at all)

If you have questions about if your request breaks my rules, please ask! The worst I can do is tell you I won't accept your request. I am happy to clarify anything you may have questions on.

-Examples of information to give for a commission-

The more of the following you include in your request, the easier it will be for me to have a handle on what to create for you. Here are the things I recommend listing in your request:

- the main character(s), and how to refer to reader character (If doing a reader based story)

- a prompt or plotline (a song can work as a prompt too)

- Point of view

- Any alterations to the fictional universe being used as a base (Alternate Universes and Universe Alterations)

- Word count limit (This determines how much you pay. If more is written, it is not charged for.)

- When you would like to have it done by

All this being said, there are lots of ways to go about this. If you only have a general idea of what you want, that is fine too! I am happy to work with you to get what you want out of the story. Alternatively, the more details you give, the more of them I can integrate into the story. Last, you could go as simple as asking for a character and giving a word limit and let me work my magic! It is completely in your hands on how to make a request.

-Pricing-

Price is a penny per word up to 2000 words.

After for pieces longer than a limit of 2000 words, the price is 1 and 1/2 pennies per word.

For easy reference, a 500 word commission would cost $5. A 2500 word piece would cost $37.50. A table of word counts and prices is at the end of this post for easy budgeting.

You set the word limit. If I go over the limit, you only pay up to the limit. Consider the rest a bonus for getting me inspired. Standard limits are between 200 words and 2000 words. Anything longer will require more planning.

-Logistics-

Keep in touch - We can communicate via email or messaging. It’s your choice.

Payment - When the commission request is accepted, I will send you an invoice via PayPal or Square based on your preference. The invoice can be done one of 2 ways, either pay in full up front, or pay half before and half after completion.

Publishing - I will not publish the commission unless I have your express permission to do so. If it is published, you can choose to be tagged in it or not.

Receiving the document - I will send you a PDF file with your completed commission.

Altering a finished commission - If there is something you want changed about the commission for any reason, I will do so and send you the new version. If the alterations require 100 or more words to be added, the base rate of a penny per word will be charged. If the alterations remove 100 or more words, the amount removed will be refunded.

When you send in your request, please use the phrase 'Cybernetix is the future' as a pass code so I know you have read through this and understand my process.

-Pricing Table-

Word Count - Price

200 - $2

300 - $3

400 - $4

500 - $5

600 - $6

700 - $7

800 - $8

900 - $9

1000 - $10

1100 - $11

1200 - $12

1300 - $13

1400 - $14

1500 - $15

1600 - $16

1700 - $17

1800 - $18

1900 - $19

2000 - $20

2100 - $31.50

2200 - $33

2300 - $34.50

2400 - $36

2500 - $37.50

2600 - $39

2700 - $40.50

2800 - $42

2900 - $43.50

3000 - $45

-Fandom List-

Remember, if you don't see your fandom on here, it might not have been added yet, so ask me about it.

Arrow

Better Than Us

Bioshock

Brooklyn 99

Carnivale

Detroit: Become Human

Disney

Doctor Who

Ex Machina

Fallout 4

Flash

Grease

Halo

Harry Potter

Haunting of Hill House

Hereditary

Indiana Jones

James Bond

Jumanji

Jurassic Park

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Legend of Zelda

Lord of the Rings

Love Death + Robots

Marvel

Miraculous Ladybug

Mistborn

Moulin Rouge!

Night at the Museum

Outer Worlds

Overwatch

Phantom of the Opera

Pokemon

Ready Player One

Sherlock

Skyrim

Star Trek

Star Wars

Stranger Things

Supergirl

Supernatural

The Adventures of Tintin

The Arcana

The Expanse

The Princess Bride

Tron

True Blood

Welcome to Night Vale

iZombie

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noccalula-writes · 4 years

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What are your favorite games and franchises? Top 5?

OH BOY have I got feelings on this subject.

Please keep in mind - I’m a storyteller and a writer. I fucking /love/ a good story. I DM a DnD game and my biggest weakness is that I don’t often include enough combat because I am so much more interested in telling a story. So for me, there’s got to be an emotional investment for a game to really land. I also hyperfixate like a motherfucker so I often refuse to pick up new things purely because there’s not enough space in my head for them at the time, so I’m slow getting to things as they come out.

So, I’m first and foremost a survival horror bitch. I cut my teeth on Parasite Eve before I played any others - my mother scrimped and saved and fought her way through Wal-mart back in like 1998 to get me the original Playstation gaming console and Tekken 2 (which was my first PS game, I played it in an arcade near her barber shop as a child - Tomb Raider 2 was my second). The old Playstation discs at that time came with demos for different games, including Metal Gear Solid, which I replayed until I could have done it in my sleep because poverty meant I wasn’t likely to get another game anytime soon. I mention this because the Parasite Eve trailer used to give me nightmares but I was super, super hooked.

I am a huge Silent Hill fan. Huge. That is a tragedy I could write a whole ‘nother post about, because as excited as I am to finally get my hands on Death Stranding (again, poverty, so it’ll be another minute before we can get a PS4), we’ll never get another SH game again unless some major reconciliation happens with Kojima and Konami, which is unlikely (and also hard to hope for - I’m happy Kojima now has the creative freedom to go as balls to the wall as he wants).

I am an equally huge Resident Evil fan. I’ve always maintained that my first fandom was The X Files, but my wife pointed out a few nights ago that my RE love started around the same time in the late 90′s, so now it’s a chicken and egg kind of thing. Point being, it’s either The or One Of my longest lasting fandoms/interests. RE and Silent Hill get compared to one another a lot - RE7 did nothing to help that - but they really are apples and oranges to me. Fruit, sure, but two totally different tones and experiences.

I’ve been a huge Tomb Raider fan for forever - my first high school boyfriend was loaded and bought me Angel of Darkness to come play at his house and while it was def critically panned, I do recall enjoying it - so that’s been fun to get those games remade with updated graphics. I’ve only played the one but the others are def on The List.

So now that I’ve talked for an hour, my Top 5 fave games ever -

#1 - Resident Evil 3 I am beyond jazzed for this remake, and a lot of people in the 90′s complained about RE3′s lack of clear cut boss battles, but I don’t know what they’re talking about. The entire fucking game is a boss battle - Jill vs. Raccoon City, and of course, Nemesis, who used to give my mother nightmares and caused me to sleep with a leaf-stabber by my bed for years. Jill is far and away my favorite protagonist in RE; she’s got a resilience of the spirit that somehow isn’t conflated with naivety, which is uncommon in ‘nice’ female protags. She’s savvy but she’s still kind, and she’s committed as fuck to survival - not to mention, as zealotous a Chris and Jill shipper as I am, she and Carlos had hella chemistry and I’m excited to see where that goes (JD Pardo would have made a fuck of a Carlos Oliviera, btw). It was An Experience and it’s forever at my #1.

#2 - The Last of Us

There is no comparison for emotional weight in video games, as far as I’m concerned. SPOILERS if you don’t already know the ending (this game came out in what, 2014?) but to me one of the biggest thing in the game’s favor is that the protagonist made the wrong choice. He had an option to potentially eradicate the cordyceps fungus and maybe save the world, turn the tides back for humanity, and with the weight of the world in the balance, he chose to save Ellie instead. It was, on a global scale, the wrong choice - but it was the human choice. It was the thing that a dad who never properly grieved his dead daughter would do for the surrogate daughter he inherited by accident. As for Ellie, there is no other character quite like her in games, and she’s fucking quality LGBT representation, especially considering how little we see queer children in media. I still cry every time, we play this game twice a year like clockwork and every single time, I still cry.

#3 - Silent Hill 3

All of SH’s games will have a special place in my heart - and if you wanna talk shit about Downpour, I’ll meet you in the Denny’s parking lot at 11, you better square the fuck up because I will defend Murphy with fists - but 3 is the best, hands down. I felt like it did the best job of streamlining the series’ ... uhm... somewhat complicated lore into something more understandable. SPOILERS: The villains are horrific - the Missionaries strike fear into my heart every time I play, and Claudia eating a miscarried god fetus to become god herself? Fucked up on a level you rarely see. I suppose if you didn’t catch it in the last sentence - your protag Heather vomits up a fetal god late in the game. Yes, you read that right. The best thing about this game though? Heather. I could climb up my feminist soapbox and talk about Heather as a subversion to video game tropes all fucking day - she’s a nonsexualized teenage girl whose father is killed for her character development. She’s self-sufficient, tough but still vulnerable, and hard as nails in a fight. As I might have mentioned a time or six, she also voluntarily aborts a god because Fuck Your Plans, She’s Got Her Own.

#4 - Final Fantasy X

Listen. I don’t know how much of this is because of actually enjoying playing the game and how much of it is emotional attachment. As most of you who follow me know, my mother died when I was sixteen. When I was about fourteen, I dated a rich kid who used to bring his PS2 to our very not-rich house and play games for us to watch - the sort of neophyte version of Watching Guys Play Videogames, if you will, which is another rant for another time. He got a Gamecube specifically so I could play RE Zero and Hunter The Reckoning. He was a neckbeard but he was also desperate to keep me from ditching so he did the smart thing and plied my very poor ass with money and food. The #1 game in the watching roster, though, was FFX - and if you know anything about the game, you know how heavily spirituality features into the story. My mother, very caught up in a very Eastern Philosphy Meets Quantum Physics internal seeking about the nature of things, was hooked from the word Go. She used to sit and watch Trey play for hours - we all did, but having her join us and love it that much? Wonderful. Half my memories of this game are both of us crying - crying when Yuna dances to send the souls, crying when Yuna reveals she’s on a suicide mission, crying when she and Tidus fall in love anyway, crying when she sends her Aeons to die in the final fight, crying over ‘the fayts are waking up’, crying when the big reveal about Auron comes up, crying crying crying. My wife bought it in 2011 and I watched her play through it again and while it suffers from the same issue as all FF games - too much filler and weird battle scenarios - it was cathartic. I miss my mom.

#5 - Resident Evil 6

Eat my entire ass. You already knew this was coming. I will defend this game to my grave for the fact that we have complex, interesting narratives surrounding female characters who have actual personalities. Was it perfect? No. Did it take RE out of horror territory and move it more into action? Woefully, yes. Is this series deeply problematic for where it chooses to set down your mostly-white protags and have them kill their way through? Big time. Don’t gloss those facts. But it’s got emotional punch in spades and a few weird character breaks that ended up being kind of brilliant - Chris has been so resiliently relentless in his fight against bioterrorism that a major PTSD break was inevitable. Leon would of course risk life and limb to help Helena, even though she implicated herself in something terrible. The icing on the cake to me was a grown up Sherry Birkin, wide eyed and believing like hell in the fight she thought she was on the right side of and getting knocked down only to get back up. Ada’s entire side campaign was brilliant. I hate some of the control choices they made in this game - the running from the Haos scenes near the end of Chris and Piers’ campaign makes me want to eat my own fist - but so it goes with most RE games (until RE4, moving your protag was like driving a tank). Jake and Sherry are My Unsinkable Ship. There are at least six scenes across this game that never get easier to watch - when the bomb hits the city and the cut scene of the mass infections begin, I still get sick to my stomach - and that, to me, is the mark that this game struck a hell of a chord in terms of storytelling.

This was long.

#noccalula answers #this was fucking long #ask and ye shall receive #vidja games

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namjoonchronicles · 5 years

Note

1, 22 & 14 !! namjoon :)

1. “Come over here and make me.” + 22. “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice.” + 14. “Hey, I’m with you, okay? Always.” I’m so sorry it took so long, I wasn’t feeling very well, and I know it’s not an excuse, so I hope you’ll like this *crosses finger*It’s slightly long~ so I might repost it as an actual fic with a title later.

“You’re fired, get out,” he massages his temples with his fore finger and thumb resting just underneath his cheekbone. The aura in the room shifts immediately. Swallowing a thick gulp, you begin to blink rapidly as you try to process the words that came out of his mouth so tactlessly, so dry and so immaculate. It sounded so foreign despite it came to you before so frequently as a nightmare that jolts you awake before your alarm manages to ring. It felt surreal.

Blood drained out of your face, warmth stripped away from your fingertips, as you began to realize the weight of being unemployed in this economy is simply a step away from being homeless. But still, you couldn’t let your pride dissipate into thin air and you bring your chin up, holding your breathe and peer at him from your nostril, to let out a shaky but stern, “Thank you.” Passive aggressiveness at best, you shrug your shoulders from the weight it has been carrying and the pressure that you’ve been keeping inside you, released.

You twisted the knob of his studio open and leave, understanding that you’ve done your ultimate best and still he, sees you as an incompetent, inexperienced and emotionally impulsive worker. He’s courteous enough to let you on this long, and you’ll never forget all the things he had taught you. It was a simple mistake. All you had to do was play the correct version of the song during the concert and you were sure that the track was there and labelled, twice! The fact that the shorter and non-extended version was played, was beyond you. Either someone was out to sabotage your work, or you’ve been spacing out again. Must be the latter, because why else are you getting fired, right? You always blame yourself, and obviously, you’re going to beat yourself for it.

Two days had passed, you nailed a part-time job at a nearby coffee shop. The irony. You used to be their customer and memorized Namjoon’s preferred coffee by heart and now you’re working there. It was a slash to your pride and ego, and as a staff at Namjoon’s record production office. It was also a slap in the face, for the reality of life aren’t always great. Namjoon probably got himself a new assistant while you were brewing coffee.

—–

Namjoon sat in his office long after the office hours ended. Surely, the way he saved the performance was effortless, but the set list is ruined. There’s nothing more he hates than to have a well-sought after plan, damaged in a way that it is irreparable.

And he had to fire one of his close staff because of the incompetence. Finding the constricting air in his office, no longer bearable, he leaves it and seek refuge underneath the stars on the rooftop with a bitter cup of bitter coffee, that leaves a peculiar aftertaste, particularly tonight. He hung his head low, holding himself against the handrail, letting out a long sigh. “Must you go to that extent…” he questioned his own integrity. Or was he blinded by the affection he has on you. Was he afraid that he would no longer able to keep his work ethics because of the feelings he hid from you? Was he afraid of the things you’d see? Did you get too close for him to banish you at any chance he gets?

Whatever it was, Namjoon rationalize himself, you may be just an assistant to him, but this was your full-time job. And he could have let you off with a warning instead of firing you out of fear that you might find out that he had a crush on you.

“Mr. Kim?” A small voice called for him by the door and Namjoon turns around to see a younger trainee in his office whom he met maybe two months ago, at a recruitment event.

“Who…?” Namjoon drawled, arching an eyebrow.

“I-I’m a trainee under internship under your assistant’s supervision,” he stammered, “I heard you fired her because of a wrong track played on the concert, sir, I just want to tell you that it wasn’t her fault, it was mine…”

Namjoon fully face this boy now, pretty tall for his age, squaring shoulders.

“I misheard the instructions and switched the track, I meant no harm to anyone sir, and–”

“–Stop,” Namjoon held his palm outward and returned to watch the sky, “Just go.”

The trainee heard that well and followed the instruction. Namjoon however, still had some issues hanging over his head. Was he really pissed off because of merely a wrong track played? Or was it because of the boldness you’ve showed him days before? And the week before that? Or the past months? You questioned his collaborating choices, and talked to one of the clients you had helped reached but Namjoon had cancelled at the last minute?

Last week,

“You are inconsiderate, tactless and selfish,” you stormed at him, leaving the others that surrounded him to squander away in fear as Namjoon stood on, dug his tongue against his cheek, grabbed the door to his studio open and waited for you to come in.

“As you were saying?” he crossed his arms leaning behind the closed door.

“You cancelled the collaboration with IRON because you’ve gotten better collab with the western artist. You leave him in a ditch because he’s a direct string to the past you’re trying to escape. You are a coward, indecisive and profit-driven prick.”

He hollowed his cheek, nodding a little bit at the insults you threw at him, and he cocked an eyebrow at you, “I am the producer here, not you. Every music I make is under my jurisdiction and it has nothing to do with you. Like it or not, I’m not doing it with him. He has a baggage to carry, and I know him longer than you do. So if you’re done with your insults, you’re free to go. I have work to do.” Namjoon moves toward his work desk and begin clicking things on the desktop noisily, crouching over his leather chair.

“You made me look for him, and I gave him promises that the collaboration is going to happen soon, now you want me to tell him that it’s cancelled after he sends 25 samples? Do you know that he’s living under a bridge right now? Literally?” You stare at his back, bent forward spine. Face out of view.

“That’s the problem with you. You’re overwhelmed with sympathy and emotional investments, you think with your heart and implore those in your occupation, that’s why you’re what you are. An assistant.” His eyes wildly search for files in folders, mouse underneath his palm glides.

He should know how his words stings. But he relentlessly continue, “You think I would have gotten this far if I think like you? So make him stop calling my cell because I have a flight to catch.” He hung his jaw.

The way you leave his room was slightly different that day, because before you walked out, he felt you pausing by the door but decided to be the bigger person and left him alone.

—–

When you greeted this last customer of the night, you were embarrassingly unprepared. Not only has he come with a long look on his face, you know the expression he has after hours of thinking and contemplating over a track and lyrics he is going over with; he came with something else you didn’t think he has: guilt.

“Welcome, to CocoMoco, may I take your order, sir?” you beamed and did your best even though there’s no other customer around to belittle you if you were to treat him differently.

Namjoon presses his lips and dart his gaze to the sides, ceiling, floor, every where so he doesn’t have to look at you in the eye and risk spilling everything he is feeling. His index fingers tapping and drawing random circles on the tip of his cloth as he wandered his eyes to every furnishing the cafe had, asking in a small voice, “Do you have time to talk?”

“We don’t have that on the menu,” you blinked at the cash register, doing the necessary check on each money received today.

“Is it fun working here?” He pulled out a chair but chose to stand behind them instead of sitting. Fear? You gave him your back as you rolled your eyes, wiping mugs. You set them down and gave him a soul-snatching glare. So his eyes fidgets, side-to-side, uneasily as he slowly started to reveal why he was here, ten minutes before you close.

“Come to think of it, I was a little dramatic…” he blinks, staggering in his stance as he admits his fault, “Even though you were empathetic, I didn’t think you would be stupid enough to admit a mistake that wasn’t even yours,” he gather up whatever strength he has, and looked at you in the eye as he declares, “I fired you without properly looking into the matter, I apologize.”

You could almost feel pity for him having to come here, but there’s just something about the way Namjoon treated you as a staff that makes you grow colder and colder as the years passed. And today was no different. He has make you bitter to the core and you resented him to no end. “It seems almost to me that you’re trying to find excuses to fire me at any chance you get,” you crossed your arm, chin up, getting bold because you no longer beneath him, you’re equals. As a human.

“Do you hate me that much?” you knitted your eyebrow, “Have I done something to you that make you feel like it’s okay to nitpick on everything I do for you, to you, and with you? Our ways are different but you continue to be rather harsh with me… so why are you here?”

“I want you back…Need,” he corrected himself with a shake of his head, “Need you back.”

“Is a 5 feet 4 and above girls, unavailable?” you smiled as you circled your way around to collect used mugs from tables, “I read the comment you wrote on my resume. You couldn’t find something you hate about my educations so you attacked my physiques…”

Namjoon blinked in confusion because he didn’t remember doing those until he realized, he didn’t remember because it was almost 6 years ago.

The mugs are placed in the tray while Namjoon followed you around like a lost puppy, “I was stupid back then, I didn’t know any better.”

Your head whipped to the side and he stops in his track, “So you say sorry and everything goes back to how it was?”

“N-no…” he sounds so small.

“I’ll gather my resources and get you a 5 feet four or taller girl that resembles your high school lover so could get your morning coffee and she could do all the dirty job for you like I did… Give me like a week.”

“But I don’t want them… Can you, can you listen to me?”

“I’ve been listening to you for 6 years.”

“I just… I fired you because I was scared that I’m falling for you and couldn’t stay professional.”

“Lame excuse. I know you long enough to know that you would manipulate feelings so the situation is in your favor.”

“Will you not talk about work, for once? I’m talking to you as a person who has feelings.”

“Come over here and make me,” you set the trays down and challenged him because you were certain that he was lying. But he charges forward, cupped your face and pressed his lips on yours. So, so heavenly soft. Feels like floating. Flying, slicing through the clouds. Wait. He’s Namjoon. You freed yourself and stumbled back. Your lips was tingling for more and your eyes widens while he stiffens, unsure what to do. This doesn’t happen in romantic movies, often.

“Did you… Did I. You don’t like that?” He scratched the back of his neck and took several steps back.

“I thought I was seeing things,” you gulped, hand on your hip, another covering upper half of your face, “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice, but I didn’t think too much of it… I didn’t know, oh fuck…” your hands fall to each side.

“Please don’t kill me,” Namjoon squeaked, “I didn’t know what to do. Don’t sue me. Or sue me, and I’ll gladly compensate you with monthly salary so you don’t have to work here anymore…if you don’t want to see me again, I just need you back at the office, I tried scheduling myself today and nearly booked myself two tickets to Seoul whilst staying in Seoul, I just–I can’t function without you and I think I may have acted out of jealousy, because you seemed so close with the new producers, and I’m not thinking straight.”

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to kill you for real,” you groaned.

“Okay.” Namjoon lowered his head.

“You are shit at giving confessions,” you added.

“I deserve that. I was hoping you could teach me how to be more, compassionate.”

“I will teach you nothing, but hear this. If I take this job back, I want a double pay, I will not be handling the shit you cowardly avoided, you do that yourself,” you paused, “and I want date nights. Lots of them. As frequently as we both can. While keeping it a secret.”

Namjoon lifts his head. Eyes twinkling.

“And should you go through any hardship, I must be included,” you stated, “And you have a lot of nursing to do with my damaged soul. I practically can’t feel emotions after six years underneath your tyrant leadership.” Namjoon trudges forward and opened his arms for you. When you awkwardly rest your head on his chest, he pats your hair lightly, “Hey, I’m with you, okay? Always.”

You couldn’t shake the uneasiness in your heart as he said those words. You have trust issues because of his passive aggressive ways of handling things, but you’re excited on how thing will unfold after tonight. To witness and enjoy Namjoon’s other more vulnerable and adorable side. Apart from being a boss.

#drabble_games

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