#and i got a bunch of art in the vault that i never posted | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

randomstarmuffin · 3 years

Photo

My @runefactorysecretsanta gift for ya_boi_nye is finally done!! Hope I did your favorite characters justice!! :)

Happy holidays!!!! I don’t want to take up too much room so I’m going to throw some rambling and extras under the cut lol

So I don’t think nye has a tumblr, but on their twitter i saw that they were into VTube and youtaite and i wanted to incorporate that in their gift somehow. Unfortunately.... the characters are kind of all already anime??? So drawing-wise, i figured it would be more fun to go with a more general YouTuber AU so I could put in some variety rather than just stills of singing or badly rendered 3D models (by which i am throwing shade on myself alone, VTube rigs are sick but i regrettably have no 3D skills lol)

I’ve actually,,, never played Frontier at all, so I apologize if anyone is wildly out of character!! The wiki is extremely sparse and I didn’t have time to watch too too much of the let’s play i found, so if they’re not right just chalk it up to the YouTuber ~performance~ aspect of this AU lmao.

Even though I’ve never played before and don’t know the characters Super well though, I still had a lot of fun thinking about this AU! If you want to know the specifics of everyone’s content:

Anette does parkour (fun facts, this particular move i drew is called a speed vault!) and a little bit of vlogging, and she’s friends with Erik (as in canon, if I did my research correctly lmao). She sometimes appears on his channel and vice versa, and he helps her film and edit and stuff sometimes. She lives and works with Mist and Rosetta and helps out with their online boutique. Mist is the idea woman who comes up with crazy stuff, Rosetta is the realist and bookkeeper who pulls those ideas together into something feasible and profitable, and Anette handles all the packaging and shipments and stuff! There’s always something weird going on in their apartment and everyone ends up there a lot, so some of Anette’s vlogs get really popular just because of how out there they are lmao. Oh, almost forgot, but her channel is “DeliveryIsFreestyle” bc... get it... free delivery... freestyle parkour / freerunning... Lol actually it was almost going to be “RunTheMail” because i couldn’t think of anything at first so i think this was the right move in the end :P

Erik has a gaming channel where he mostly plays farming and dating sims / otome, and we don’t read too far into whether or not RF exists in this universe for him to play even though I put the posters for frontier on his wall xD. The reason I picked Stardew for this thumbnail specifically is because A) I have it and could easily take screenshots and B) i read that he has a crush on Lara? And she’s like, kind of a nurse? And Maru is kind of a nurse? It’s a silly joke but I thought it would be funny to cockblock him from dating a nurse he has his eyes on even in video gaming with his friends lol. His channel is pretty self-explanatory (I was really hoping his farm would have a fun name when i was looking it up but it’s really just “Erik’s Farm” huh? ...but I probably shouldn’t judge, my dnd character’s wolf is named Wolf xD)

Lute paints!! I think he does a lot of speedpaints and mostly does traditional art, but I think he would have some digital skills hidden up his sleeve as well. And also I don’t know why at all bc I know the least about him out of all 4 of them, but I feel like he has done / does some of those like “how to draw anime” videos because I just think that’s funny. He has a bunch of really popular ones about overly complicated fantasy outfits. No this is not a callout for any series in particular why do you ask? Anyway, I’m not sure exactly how the line goes because I couldn’t find it, but the wiki mentions that he’ll say he’s not doing anything suspicious when he’s painting at the lake, so i thought it would be funny if there’s some kind of running gag with his subscribers where they point out suspicious things he does and he responds in the next video or whatever. The thumbnail I made definitely does just have a screenshot of rff that’s color-corrected and blurred, because I ran out of time but also wanted to differentiate the bg from the canvas ^^; His channel was originally just “lute” in all lowercase but then i got to the part of the let’s play where he was introduced and he calls himself a “fledgling painter” so i thought this was more fun.

And Eunice has a cooking channel!! She specializes in baking, but she also has a whole playlist along the lines of “Nutritious Food Can Still Taste Good!” where she talks about healthy eating habits but doesn’t buy into diet culture bc I personally HATE diet culture lmao. I think when that gets popular, she also maybe does a side thing about easily accessible workouts for all sorts of people who want to get into shape? But with a focus on getting stronger / being active and Not a focus on Losing Weight necessarily. Promoter of healthy and happy living! I know how her events / dialogue can go in the game, i just happen to have Opinions About Things, so, that’s how she is in my version. Also, unrelated, but she’s very cute. Even though her braids were a bitch to draw hahaha. And i did end up drawing her just in her actual outfit even though i gave everyone else different clothes bc idk it just felt like it fit the aesthetic of a cooking vlog well?? And it’s not a super complicated one unlike others i could mention. Her channel is “Charming Sweets” and her cooking series is “My Cooking” because those are the titles of the books she has on her bookshelf at the start of the game :)

But that’s just all of *my* headcanons for the AU! If anyone else who knows them all better has their own ideas, please be my guest and imagine it however you like!!

Oh, also, fun facts, this is partially a screenshot of my actual web browser, lol, so if y’all want to know what all I have saved on my bookmarks bar and what my google profile pic is, now you know. However, i would like to not downplay how long i spent editing this in what was possibly the least efficient way to put it together how i wanted, rip, which is entirely the reason i am posting this so late LOL. Apologies for the delay, but technically it’s still the 27th here, so! Victory!

(speaking of the layout, did anyone catch the url? I’m disproportionately proud of the url. though i won’t lie part of me really wanted to put the rick roll url there just for my own amusement hahaha)

And, yeah! That’s the end of my spiel. Happy end-of-2020 to all, and an extra helping of that sentiment to nye!!!

#rfss2020 #rune factory #rff #rune factory frontier #rf anette #rf erik #rf lute #rf eunice #my art

47 notes · View notes

oceanselevenism · 3 years

Note

I've seen that most of the stories on ao3 about them are mostly canon-compliant (and I don't have anything against that tbh) but I was wondering if you have any aus that you think could fit them or that you'd like to see?

omg i have SO MANY aus!! (it got Very Long so its under a cut)

- college au! danny gets kicked out (hes on full scholarship and does Thiefly Things to cover his expenses so hes not endangered just fairly fucked up abt it) (does it count as kicked out if u only live w ur dad three months a year) in freshman year, he befriends rusty (1 year below him) in sophomore year, debbie also befriends rusty (she and danny dont talk much but shes 2 yrs below him at the same college), and when reuben comes calling for a job he thinks debbie has a boyfriend (thanks to debbie telling her dad that she does) so she fake dates rusty. who ends up joining the job. and danny is Very Jealous

- snl ripoff au! danny and rusty are the weekend-update-adjacent anchors and they get gay. i Would have this take place in la (reuben is taking A Risk producing a late night sketch comedy show on the west coast but the 11/12/however fuckin many are fantastic cast members so even though they lose revenue from the other timezones not watching as much as they watch snl or whatever, they still make BANK... but danny and rusty getting gay throws the equilibrium out of whack) BUT la sucks DICK so its happening in new york. also this way u get Ocean Sibling Banter (debbie and lou are the anchors for The Actual Weekend Update and when debbie/lou get together and also when danny/rusty get together there are so many ‘just switch out the blondes/brunettes nobody will be able to tell and we won’t have hr down our necks’ jokes)

- au where the caldwells, abt to go deep undercover on a Huge Fucking Case, have to give up custody of 6 year old linus to tess and danny. the case stretches on for twelve years and linus grows up w tess and danny (who get divorced like right after they adopt him bc tess finds out abt dannys Thiefly Activities-- he confesses to her bc he doesnt rly want to predispose the kid to said thiefly activities) and also isabel (she and rusty break up like Right Before tess and dannys wedding and its very funny; she then goes on to marry tess) parenting him (rusty isnt as much in the picture bc he doesnt feel bad at all abt stealing and tess doesnt want linus to pick up that mentality also rusty Feels Things abt danny)! then when linus is like 18 or 19 danny disappears (tess and isabel think its Thiefly Activities again and arent concerned, just disappointed, but linus is very concerned for his dad-slash-stepdad-slash-sort-of-uncle) and he tracks down rusty so they can find danny. they roadtrip across america and eventually catch up to danny, who is helping the caldwells, and the five of them take down whatever gang the caldwells were chasing. linus now has 6 parents

- au based on this post where some archaeologist finds a bunch of dannys [french person voice] Love Lettairs 2 rusty and so obviously the logical course of action is to rob the museum (which happens to be the museum that tess is curating. funny how things work out) without telling his team What Theyre Stealing. they successfully pull off the heist but turns out the letters were not among the items they stole!! danny is getting desperate. as a last-ditch attempt he calls tess and asks her to let them rob the museum. shes like Why The Fuck Would I Do That. he explains and she begrudgingly agrees. danny and livingston go break into the museum Again but rusty tails them bc dannys been acting Weird and he finds out abt the letters bc livingston sweats more whenever he tells a lie. they live happily ever after (literally, theyre immortal) the end. also even though dannys a werewolf the 11 all call him the new jersey devil (its not his fault that legend came to be ok!! he was very drunk!!)

- childhood friends au!! danny and rusty were best buds as very young kids and then the oceans had to move. flash forward 2 present day where danny and debbie r robbing a museum (theyre building a flower shop over the vault and tunneling in, the dudes in brazil who came up w it are very very clever) and guess which two people are the assistant curators (is that even a title?). guess. ill tell u its tess and rusty! danny recognizes rusty, rusty ‘does not recognize’ danny (which is valid. look at photos of child george clooney and tell me you would recognize him). the 11 demand that they use this to their advantage and so danny and rusty Sort Of Date while the rest set up for the robbery, and danny feels really bad abt it so on the day of (after everyone has gotten away, ofc, he might be a lovesick bitch but hes not a snitch) he confesses and rustys like lmao i was onto u from the start. what kind of a name is [insert alias here] anyway. then they go live a life of crime and its great

- @sanduschism came up w a fantastic au where danny pickpockets rusty and feels bad so he sends the wallet back and they strike up a Correspondence

- HOSPITAL AU!!! danny and rusty r er techs while theyre doing med school and nobody knows how they juggle their shifts w school but also rusty can do a tracheotomy in like 5 seconds and danny can tell when a person needs an mri before they even list their symptoms so nobody questions it and nobody splits them up Ever. when they eventually become surgeons, danny does cardio and rusty does neuro, and whenever they have to work together not only do they never have to say what theyre doing, they don't even have What Do U Want To Cook For Dinner convos fully out loud. tess is head nurse... she makes so many excel spreadsheets... they are ALL color coded. isabel is head er doc and nobody dares to halfass things on her watch. reuben is head hospital admin, saul is chief surgeon, basher is head of the burn unit, the malloys r the HUNKIEST nurses in town, frank does plastic surgery/ent (every patient loves him bc he is just So Calm), livingston is The IT Guy, yen does like orthopedics or physical therapy, and linus is their fav resident who they all lovingly tease 24/7. the ocean sibs r both Cardio Gods and each dominate their respective coasts. debbie is an nyc doctor and if she sees a mass gen doctor its on SIGHT. the few surgeries that she and danny collab on go so fast that the med students in the gallery Cannot tell whats happening. lou is also a plastic surgeon and she and frank r best buds. linus requests time off like 6 months in advance Every Time and everyone hates it bc then They have to be on call but he doesnt realize his Extreme Overachieverness is causing so much strife. whenever tess and danny get in an argument she colorcodes his rounds spreadsheet to be the most neon shit youve ever seen. can you tell i never fully progressed past my greys anatomy phase this one is like 93489302 lines long

- superpower au where rusty has midas touch and danny has corrosive touch and when theyre too young to have control over their powers (abilities develop throughout adolescence and the user gains control at the end of adolescence) they accidentally brush hands and are terrified they just killed each other but turns out their powers like. cancel out. so until they reach like 21 or 22 and can touch things without fucking them UP they just. hold hands all the time. bc otherwise they have to wear gloves to prevent Accidents and both of them “hate gloves” (and also love holding hands. gayasses)

- uhhh hallmark au where danny is a crime fiction writer out on some beach north of ocean city nj and rusty is his fancy nyc editor. everyone else is a thief including debbie who is just Very weirded out that her brother, who robbed boston’s institute of contemporary art at age 22 and got away with it, has decided to spend the rest of his life churning out books. he is very critically acclaimed and about half of the 11 are buds with him and use his published books as heist inspo. the other ~half of the 11 are buds with rusty, and they tell him if danny’s heists are feasible or not (they always are. scarily so.) anyway rusty and isabel break up 12 days before xmas and danny and tess break up 8 days before hanukkah so dannys heading to debbie’s place in upstate new york to mope for the holidays when A BLIZZARD HITS and he gets stranded in midtown. and he and rusty are buds but like. Email Buds. they dont hang out irl and therefore they dont let their Totally Bud-Like Feelings mess up their professional relationship. but danny is stranded and its hanukkah and he ends up crashing at rustys place for the duration of the blizzard. and then rusty ends up coming to debbies place for the rest of the holidays. and then they kiss on new years eve and debbie kicks them out bc theyre being gross

- And More! thanks for the ask, anon! sorry it got so long lol i just have Many Thoughts

#oceans 11 #oceans eleven #danny ocean #rusty ryan #danny x rusty #oceans 8 #oceans eight

44 notes · View notes

bnha-almost-a-hero · 4 years

Text

ૢ✧∘*━━𝐀𝐃𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍,

a;n: ʰⁱ, ʰᵉˡˡᵒ. ᵉⁿʲᵒʸ ᵗʰⁱˢ ᵖⁱᵉᶜᵉ ˡᵒᵒˢᵉˡʸ ⁱⁿˢᵖⁱʳᵉᵈ ᵇʸ 'ᴸᵃ ᶜᵃˢᵃ ᴰᵉ ᴾᵃᵖᵉˡ'. ⁿᵒ ˢᵖᵒⁱˡᵉʳˢ ᶠᵒʳ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ˢʰᵒʷ ᵒʳ ᵐʸ ʰᵉʳᵒ ᵃᶜᵃᵈᵉᵐⁱᵃ ⁱⁿᶜˡᵘᵈᵉᵈ. ᵃˡˢᵒ ⁿᵉʷ ᵇᵃʳᵒqᵘᵉ ˡᵃʸᵒᵘᵗ ᵒⁿ ᵃᶜᶜᵒᵘⁿᵗ ᵒᶠ ᵐʸ ᶠʳⁱᵉⁿᵈ'ˢ ʳᵉᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉⁿᵈᵃᵗⁱᵒⁿ.

𝐀𝐃𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍,

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬; yandere! shigaraki tomura, a blabbermouth! reader, dabi, toga himiko

𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲; le casa de papel ⁽ᵗʰᵉ ᵒⁿˡʸ ᵗʰⁱⁿᵍ ᵏᵉᵉᵖⁱⁿᵍ ᵐᵉ ˢᵃⁿᵉ, ˡᵐᵃᵒ⁻⁾

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬; bank robbery, hostages, guns ⁽ᶜᵃⁿ ʸᵒᵘ ᶦᵐᵃᵍᶦⁿᵉ ˢʰᶦᵍᵍʸ ʷᶦᵗʰ ᵃ ᵍᵘⁿˀ⁾, stockholm syndrome, post apocalypse, a brief, shitty rant on evolution and socio-economics because...? i should have made a graphic, fuck—

The first thing a person does when the world ends is adapt.

It’s an animal’s first instinct to every major event in life. How can I survive this? How can I live to preserve my future? It takes a while, sure, but you learn to find a niche in the system—something left behind by the species before you. And you take that niche and you exploit it.

When the League of Villains had raided the bank you were in, you couldn’t help but wonder why no-one had done so sooner as your skin prickled and your body trembled. Banks were amongst the first buildings ransacked when the government body collapsed and a power vacuum emerged.

After all, society had practically hammered in the idea that money was something one should strive to obtain since one entered schooling and learnt of jobs. And, Blu-Tacked to the walls of many a primary school, was a clip-art of a bank—representing both the letter ‘B’ and the far-off concept of money.

A civilisation's head was often the person with the most influence or possessions: both of which could be bought with money which was most concentrated in a bank. That’s why you had come here, you told the head of the operation, Shigaraki Tomura as he rounded up the hostages with the nozzle of a rifle.

“Shut up,” He muttered from behind the hand clinging to his face. You stared up at it for a moment as you knelt down and pressed your hands behind your head in surrender. Your eyes traced the knuckles, the notches, the imprints surrounding the fingernails. So lifelike, you think as you watch him turn and walk away, I wonder who sculpted it.

The other hostages whimper beside you, heads meek in their disparity, but you can only smile.

The world had truly and honestly went to shit.

“Don’t you find it odd?” You asked the man, Shigaraki, when he came to transfer you to the western atrium of the bank. Four of his fingers curled around your arm, cold to the frigid bone and with a grip that could crush ice. Still, you did nothing to stop him as he dragged you along, even taking a few steps of your own accord. You spoke once more, “Don’t you find it odd how banks make money out of thin air? How all they do is print paper and say, ‘Hey, this is worth something,’ and we all just go along with it?”

Silence.

“I guess that kinda constitutes cult behaviour, right? I mean, what’s stopping someone from refusing to acknowledge the value of money?” You make a ponderous ‘hmm’ with your lips as Shigaraki stops. “On that thought, why is gold so valuable? It’s just a metal; it’s not even that useful. Then again some people eat it, so—”

Shigaraki’s thumb presses down hard onto your skin, followed by the nail of his index, “You talk too much,” He mutters. You look at the hand clinging to his face, wondering what adhesive he must have on it. Do adhesives even work on clay, you wonder, or maybe it’s a clouded plastic? He reaches his other hand up to scratch at his neck, the third time today that he’s done so. “It pisses me off.”

“Where’d you get that hand from?” You ask, feeling like an idiot when his red eyes flit towards yours. A part of your mind asks if maybe you’ve poked this bear a little too much, but you shake your head, it’s just a fake hand. “Like, does it have a sculptor tag on that brass thing at the bottom?”

Your hand reaches out to grab at the golden lining at the bottom of the hand, but Shigaraki veers back suddenly and swats your hand away.

“Don’t touch Father!” His voice is almost a shriek in its highness, yet there still is a brash rasp to it that you recognise. With a brief movement, you snatch your hand back to rest it against your chest—crestfallen. Shigaraki straightens up at once, eyes narrowing to a flash of red before he turns and stomps off.

Your lips part, but the wheeze that escapes it betrays your total bewilderment at the situation. You stand there, watching as his gaunt form disappears through the door at the end of the hallway, eyes wide and fingers twitching as the last of your adrenaline dissipates.

“Another tantrum?” A voice says behind you, you jump. “I’m not surprised anymore. Never thought he’d snap after you, though.”

You twist around, eyes remarking the tall, willowy figure behind you. Dabi, his name is, the one who’s been half-assedly threatening the hostages since the heist started.

“What are you talking about?” You ask, an eyebrow raised.

Dabi chuckles and pushes past you, then turns so you can see one frighteningly blue eye beneath the expanse of black hair. “You’ll see, doll.”

“You shouldn’t be talking to them so much,” Izumi murmurs to you when all of the hostages are rounded up in the morning. Your poor ‘hostage-buddy’ had gone pale ever since the League had crashed through the door, their eyes glassy and red. “They’re—” They pause, looks around for a second. “They’re villains.”

You nod along to them, though your eyes are trained to Shigaraki who’s going about overseeing the sorting of hostages. Your belly still simmered with uneasy guilt when you thought back to the incident three days ago. He was obviously attached to the hand—you knew that—and yet you had reached out to touch it without permission like an—

“Idiot,” You murmured, kicking the marble flooring with the tip of your shoe.

“What?” Izumi whispered, although they stiffened as Himiko Toga came skipping along.

“Noth—,” You yourself stiffened when Toga came at a standstill before you, slitted eyes peering into your soul.

She smiled a wicked smile, then spoke, “I need to have a talk with you!”

You gulped. Beside you, Izumi shivered and stepped forward, about to speak but upon glancing the blade settled at Toga’s hip, fell stiff and silent. You couldn’t blame them, though, you would’ve done the same thing.

“Sure,” You stated, attempting to put a smile on your face, if only to settle Izumi’s nerves.

Oddly, Toga reached out to grab your hand, tugging you along to the eastern corridor. You passed Shigaraki on your way, who turned his head to regard you and Toga. Was that anger you caught in his eyes as he looked over at Toga? You thought nothing of it.

Toga hummed a hymn as she lead you further and further into the bank until you were just in front of the printing room. This is where money is made, you thought, staring dumbly at the steel, vault door. This is the heart of the world.

Toga giggled at the look you gave the door, “Tomura had the same face when he saw it. He was less happy when he found out that he couldn’t get it open.” Toga pressed a palm flat against the door. “It has a Quirk-cancelling force field around it, so we’re stuck here until we can get the door off.”

“That’s why you’re still keeping hostages,” The remark is a rouge thought vocalised.

Toga nods, “Yeah, there were some pesky heroes outside looking for you guys, but Spinner’s got rid of them.” She makes a gun motion with her hands, you gulp. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I came here to talk about boys!”

“Boys?” You ask, a little confused and a little indignant. “We’re in a hostage situation!”

“Yeah, I know, but I noticed that Tomura’s taken a liking to you.” She boops you on the nose. “Well, he’s liked you for a long, long time, but he’s finally got to be close to you. I wish it was like that with my Izuku.”

The identity of Izuku is the least puzzling thing about that sentence.

“For a long time, what?” You blurt out.

“He was in love with you before the End happened,” Toga smiled, stepping closer to you. “He was so sad because he thought you died, imagine how happy he was to find you here!” Toga babbled on, “He’s not too happy about that Izumi guy that’s always following you around, though. If I were him I would’ve have gotten rid of them, but—”

Your mind leapt. Izumi, you’d left them alone with a bunch of villains. You turn your gaze toward Toga, who seems lost in her own conversation before looking behind you. The door leading out of the hallways seemed so far, although if you were fast enough, it would be easy to just run there.

With a final glance to Toga, you turn and get ready to start running. A hand against your arm and a blade against your back stops you, however.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

#shigaraki x reader #yandere shigaraki #tomura shigaraki x reader #bnha x reader #shigaraki imagine #tw: yandere #🙴 my work.#˙˚*:･ﾟ༻series: adaptation

146 notes · View notes

unsettlingshortstories · 3 years

Text

The Laughing Man

J.D. Salinger (1949)

IN 1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every school day afternoon at three o’clock, twenty-five of us Comanches were picked up by our Chief outside the boys’ exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief’s reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saturdays and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned-looking bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn’t include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business, semi-confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found us.)

In his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person. I won’t attempt to assemble his many achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle Scout, an almost-All-America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants’ baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.

The Chief’s physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four–no more than that. His hair was blue-black, his hair-line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping. At the time, however, it seemed to me that in the Chief all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.

Every afternoon, when it got dark enough for a losing team to have an excuse for missing a number of infield popups or end-zone passes, we Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief’s talent for storytelling. By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch, and we fought each other–either with our fists or our shrill voices–for the seats in the bus nearest the Chief. (The bus had two parallel rows of straw seats. The left row had three extra seats–the best in the bus–that extended as far forward as the driver’s profile.) The Chief climbed into the bus only after we had settled down. Then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. “The Laughing Man” was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.

The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow’s head in a carpenter’s vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like (as I see it) some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man’s respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man’s horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him. Curiously enough, though, the bandits let him hang around their headquarters–as long as he kept his face covered with a pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spared the bandits the sight of their foster son’s face, it also kept them sensible of his whereabouts; under the circumstances, he reeked of opium.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits’ hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

(It took the Chief a couple of months to get that far into the story. From there on in, he got more and more high-handed with his installments, entirely to the satisfaction of the Comanches.)

The Laughing Man was one for keeping an ear to the ground, and in no time at all he had picked up the bandits’ most valuable trade secrets. He didn’t think much of them, though, and briskly set up his own, more effective system. On a rather small scale at first, he began to free-lance around the Chinese countryside, robbing, highjacking, murdering when absolutely necessary. Soon his ingenious criminal methods, coupled with his singular love of fair play, found him a warm place in the nation’s heart. Strangely enough, his foster parents (the bandits who had originally turned his head toward crime) were about the last to get wind of his achievements. When they did, they were insanely jealous. They all single-filed past the Laughing Man’s bed one night, thinking they had successfully doped him into a deep sleep, and stabbed at the figure under the covers with their machetes. The victim turned out to be the bandit chief’s mother–an unpleasant, haggling sort of person. The event only whetted the bandits’ taste for the Laughing Man’s blood, and finally he was obliged to lock up the whole bunch of them in a deep but pleasantly decorated mausoleum. They escaped from time to time and gave him a certain amount of annoyance, but he refused to kill them. (There was a compassionate side to the Laughing Man’s character that just about drove me crazy.)

Soon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive. Dufarge and his daughter (an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite) became the Laughing Man’s bitterest enemies. Time and again, they tried leading the Laughing Man up the garden path. For sheer sport, the Laughing Man usually went halfway with them, then vanished, often leaving no even faintly credible indication of his escape method. Just now and then he posted an incisive little farewell note in the Paris sewerage system, and it was delivered promptly to Dufarge’s boot. The Dufarges spent an enormous amount of time sloshing around in the Paris sewers.

Soon the Laughing Man had amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery–humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles’ blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates lived with him: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong, whose tongue had been burned out by white men, and a gorgeous Eurasian girl, who, out of unrequited love for the Laughing Man and deep concern for his personal safety, sometimes had a pretty sticky attitude toward crime. The Laughing Man issued his orders to the crew through a black silk screen. Not even Omba, the lovable dwarf, was permitted to see his face.

I’m not saying I will, but I could go on for hours escorting the reader–forcibly, if necessary–back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border. I happen to regard the Laughing Man as some kind of super-distinguished ancestor of mine–a sort of Robert E. Lee, say, with the ascribed virtues held under water or blood. And this illusion is only a moderate one compared to the one I had in 1928, when I regarded myself not only as the Laughing Man’s direct descendant but as his only legitimate living one. I was not even my parents’ son in 1928 but a devilishly smooth impostor, awaiting their slightest blunder as an excuse to move in–preferably without violence, but not necessarily–to assert my true identity. As a precaution against breaking my bogus mother’s heart, I planned to take her into my underworld employ in some undefined but appropriately regal capacity. But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.

Actually, I was not the only legitimate living descendant of the Laughing Man. There were twenty-five Comanches in the Club, or twenty-five legitimate living descendants of the Laughing Man–all of us circulating ominously, and incognito, throughout the city, sizing up elevator operators as potential archenemies, whispering side-of-the-mouth but fluent orders into the ears of cocker spaniels, drawing beads, with index fingers, on the foreheads of arithmetic teachers. And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.

One afternoon in February, just after Comanche baseball season had opened, I observed a new fixture in the Chief’s bus. Above the rear-view mirror over the windshield, there was a small, framed photograph of a girl dressed in academic cap and gown. It seemed to me that a girl’s picture clashed with the general men-only decor of the bus, and I bluntly asked the Chief who she was. He hedged at first, but finally admitted that she was a girl. I asked him what her name was. He answered unforthrightly, “Mary Hudson.” I asked him if she was in the movies or something. He said no, that she used to go to Wellesley College. He added, on some slow-processed afterthought, that Wellesley College was a very high class college. I asked him what he had her picture in the bus for, though. He shrugged slightly, as much as to imply, it seemed to me, that the picture had more or less been planted on him.

During the next couple of weeks, the picture–however forcibly or accidentally it had been planted on the Chief–was not removed from the bus. It didn’t go out with the Baby Ruth wrappers and the fallen licorice whips. However, we Comanches got used to it. It gradually took on the unarresting personality of a speedometer.

But one day as we were on our way to the Park, the Chief pulled the bus over to a curb on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, a good half mile past our baseball field. Some twenty back-seat drivers at once demanded an explanation, but the Chief gave none. Instead, he simply got into his story-telling position and swung prematurely into a fresh installment of “The Laughing Man.” He had scarcely begun, however, when someone tapped on the bus door. The Chief’s reflexes were geared high that day. He literally flung himself around in his seat, yanked the operating handle of the door, and a girl in a beaver coat climbed into the bus.

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief’s girl, Mary Hudson.

“Am I very late?” she asked the Chief, smiling at him.

She might just as well have asked if she was ugly.

“No!” the Chief said. A trifle wildly, he looked at the Comanches near his seat and signalled the row to give way. Mary Hudson sat down between me and a boy named Edgar something, whose uncle’s best friend was a bootlegger. We gave her all the room in the world. Then the bus started off with a peculiar, amateur-like lurch. The Comanches, to the last man, were silent.

On the way back to our regular parking place, Mary Hudson leaned forward in her seat and gave the Chief an enthusiastic account of the trains she had missed and the train she hadn’t missed; she lived in Douglaston, Long Island. The Chief was very nervous. He didn’t just fail to contribute any talk of his own; he could hardly listen to hers. The gearshift knob came off in his hand, I remember.

When we got out of the bus, Mary Hudson stuck right with us. I’m sure that by the time we reached the baseball field there was on every Comanche’s face a some-girls-just-don’t-know-when-to-go-home look. And to really top things off, when another Comanche and I were flipping a coin to decide which team would take the field first, Mary Hudson wistfully expressed a desire to join the game. The response to this couldn’t have been more clean-cut. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence. He took Mary Hudson aside, just out of earshot of the Comanches, and seemed to address her solemnly, rationally. At length, Mary Hudson interrupted him, and her voice was perfectly audible to the Comanches. “But I do,” she said. “I do, too, want to play!” The Chief nodded and tried again. He pointed in the direction of the infield, which was soggy and pitted. He picked up a regulation bat and demonstrated its weight. “I don’t care,” Mary Hudson said distinctly, “I came all the way to New York–to the dentist and everything–and I’m gonna play.” The Chief nodded again but gave up. He walked cautiously over to home plate, where the Braves and the Warriors, the two Comanche teams, were waiting, and looked at me. I was captain of the Warriors. He mentioned the name of my regular center fielder, who was home sick, and suggested that Mary Hudson take his place. I said I didn’t need a center fielder. The Chief asked me what the hell did I mean I didn’t need a center fielder. I was shocked. It was the first time I had heard the Chief swear. What’s more, I could feel Mary Hudson smiling at me. For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.

We took the field first. No business went out to center field the first inning. From my position on first base, I glanced behind me now and then. Each time I did, Mary Hudson waved gaily to me. She was wearing a catcher’s mitt, her own adamant choice. It was a horrible sight.

Mary Hudson batted ninth on the Warriors’ lineup. When I informed her of this arrangement, she made a little face and said, “Well, hurry up, then.” And as a matter of fact we did seem to hurry up. She got to bat in the first inning. She took off her beaver coat–and her catcher’s mitt–for the occasion and advanced to the plate in a dark-brown dress. When I gave her a bat, she asked me why it was so heavy. The Chief left his umpire’s position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of her bat on her right shouder. “I am,” she said. He told her not to choke the bat too tightly. “I’m not,” she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. “I will,” she said. “Get outa the way.” She swung mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder’s head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it–standing up.

When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn’t so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if I’d wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat. For some reason, she seemed to hate first base; there was no holding her there. At least three times, she stole second.

Her fielding couldn’t have been worse, but we were piling up too many runs to take serious notice of it. I think it would have improved if she’d gone after flies with almost anything except a catcher’s mitt. She wouldn’t take it off, though. She said it was cute.

The next month or so, she played baseball with the Comanches a couple of times a week (whenever she had an appointment with her dentist, apparently). Some afternoons she met the bus on time, some afternoons she was late. Sometimes she talked a blue streak in the bus, sometimes she just sat and smoked her Herbert Tareyton cigarettes (cork-tipped). When you sat next to her in the bus, she smelled of a wonderful perfume.

One wintry day in April, after making his usual three o’clock pickup at 109th and Amsterdam, the Chief turned the loaded bus east at 110th Street and cruised routinely down Fifth Avenue. But his hair was combed wet, he had on his overcoat instead of his leather windbreaker, and I reasonably surmised that Mary Hudson was scheduled to join us. When we zipped past our usual entrance to the Park, I was sure of it. The Chief parked the bus on the comer in the Sixties appropriate to the occasion. Then, to kill time painlessly for the Comanches, he straddled his seat backward and released a new installment of “The Laughing Man.” I remember the installment to the last detail, and I must outline it briefly.

A flux of circumstances delivered the Laughing Man’s best friend, his timber wolf, Black Wing, into a physical and intellectual trap set by the Dufarges. The Dufarges, aware of the Laughing Man’s high sense of loyalty, offered him Black Wing’s freedom in exchange for his own. In the best faith in the world, the Laughing Man agreed to these terms. (Some of the minor mechanics of his genius were often subject to mysterious little breakdowns.) It was arranged for the Laughing Man to meet the Dufarges at midnight in a designated section of the dense forest surrounding Paris, and there, by moonlight, Black Wing would be set free. However, the Dufarges had no intention of liberating Black Wing, whom they feared and loathed. On the night of the transaction, they leashed a stand-in timber wolf for Black Wing, first dyeing its left hind foot snow white, to look like Black Wing’s.

But there were two things the Dufarges hadn’t counted on: the Laughing Man’s sentimentality and his command of the timber-wolf language. As soon as he had allowed Dufarge’s daughter to tie him with barbed wire to a tree, the Laughing Man felt called upon to raise his beautiful, melodious voice in a few words of farewell to his supposed old friend. The stand-in, a few moonlit yards away, was impressed by the stranger’s command of the language and listened politely for a moment to the last-minute advice, personal and professional, that the Laughing Man was giving out. At length, though, the stand-in grew impatient and began shifting his weight from paw to paw. Abruptly, and rather unpleasantly, he interrupted the Laughing Man with the information that, in the first place, his name wasn’t Dark Wing or Black Wing or Gray Legs or any of that business, it was Armand, and, in the second place, he’d never been to China in his life and hadn’t the slightest intention of going there.

Properly infuriated, the Laughing Man pushed off his mask with his tongue and confronted the Dufarges with his naked face by moonlight. Mlle. Dufarge responded by passing out cold. Her father was luckier. By chance, he was having one of his coughing spells at the moment and thereby missed the lethal unveiling. When his coughing spell was over and he saw his daughter stretched out supine on the moonlit ground, Dufarge put two and two together. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he fired the full clip in his automatic toward the sound of the Laughing Man’s heavy, sibilant breathing.

The installment ended there.

The Chief took his dollar Ingersoll out of his watch pocket, looked at it, then swung around in his seat and started up the motor. I checked my own watch. It was almost four-thirty. As the bus moved forward, I asked the Chief if he wasn’t going to wait for Mary Hudson. He didn’t answer me, and before I could repeat my question, he tilted back his head and addressed all of us: “Let’s have a little quiet in this damn bus.” Whatever else it may have been, the order was basically unsensible. The bus had been, and was, very quiet. Almost everybody was thinking about the spot the Laughing Man had been left in. We were long past worrying about him–we had too much confidence in him for that–but we were never past accepting his most perilous moments quietly.

In the third or fourth inning of our ball game that afternoon, I spotted Mary Hudson from first base. She was sitting on a bench about a hundred yards to my left, sandwiched between two nursemaids with baby carriages. She had on her beaver coat, she was smoking a cigarette, and she seemed to be looking in the direction of our game. I got excited about my discovery and yelled the information over to the Chief, behind the pitcher. He hurried over to me, not quite running. “Where?” he asked me. I pointed again. He stared for a moment in the right direction, then said he’d be back in a minute and left the field. He left it slowly, opening his overcoat and putting his hands in the hip pockets of his trousers. I sat down on first base and watched. By the time the Chief reached Mary Hudson, his overcoat was buttoned again and his hands were down at his sides.

He stood over her for about five minutes, apparently talking to her. Then Mary Hudson stood up, and the two of them walked toward the baseball field. They didn’t talk as they walked, or look at each other. When they reached the field, the Chief took his position behind the pitcher. I yelled over to him. “Isn’t she gonna play?” He told me to cover my sack. I covered my sack and watched Mary Hudson. She walked slowly behind the plate, with her hands in the pockets of her beaver coat, and finally sat down on a misplaced players’ bench just beyond third base. She lit another cigarette and crossed her legs.

When the Warriors were at bat, I went over to her bench and asked her if she felt like playing left field. She shook her head. I asked her if she had a cold. She shook her head again. I told her I didn’t have anybody in left field. I told her I had a guy playing center field and left field. There was no response at all to this information. I tossed my first-baseman’s mitt up in the air and tried to have it land on my head, but it fell in a mud puddle. I wiped it off on my trousers and asked Mary Hudson if she wanted to come up to my house for dinner sometime. I told her the Chief came up a lot. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Just please leave me alone.” I stared at her, then walked off in the direction of the Warriors’ bench, taking a tangerine out of my pocket and tossing it up in the air. About midway along the third-base foul line, I turned around and started to walk backwards, looking at Mary Hudson and holding on to my tangerine. I had no idea what was going on between the Chief and Mary Hudson (and still haven’t, in any but a fairly low, intuitive sense), but nonetheless, I couldn’t have been more certain that Mary Hudson had permanently dropped out of the Comanche lineup. It was the kind of whole certainty, however independent of the sum of its facts, that can make walking backwards more than normally hazardous, and I bumped smack into a baby carriage.

After another inning, the light got bad for fielding. The game was called, and we started picking up all the equipment. The last good look I had at Mary Hudson, she was over near third base crying. The Chief had hold of the sleeve of her beaver coat, but she got away from him. She ran off the field onto the cement path and kept running till I couldn’t see her any more.

The Chief didn’t go after her. He just stood watching her disappear. Then he turned around and walked down to home plate and picked up our two bats; we always left the bats for him to carry. I went over to him and asked if he and Mary Hudson had had a fight. He told me to tuck my shirt in.

Just as always, we Comanches ran the last few hundred feet to the place where the bus was parked, yelling, shoving, trying out strangleholds on each other, but all of us alive to the fact that it was again time for “The Laughing Man.” Racing across Fifth Avenue, somebody dropped his extra or discarded sweater, and I tripped over it and went sprawling. I finished the charge to the bus; but the best seats were taken by that time and I had to sit down in the middle of the bus. Annoyed at the arrangement, I gave the boy sitting on my right a poke in the ribs with my elbow, then faced around and watched the Chief cross over Fifth. It was not yet dark out, but a five-fifteen dimness had set in. The Chief crossed the street with his coat collar up, the bats under his left arm, and his concentration on the street. His black hair, which had been combed wet earlier in the day, was dry now and blowing. I remember wishing the Chief had gloves.

The bus, as usual, was quiet when he climbed in–as proportionately quiet, at any rate, as a theatre with dimming house lights. Conversations were finished in a hurried whisper or shut off completely. Nonetheless, the first thing the Chief said to us was “All right, let’s cut out the noise, or no story.” In an instant, an unconditional silence filled the bus, cutting off from the Chief any alternative but to take up his narrating position. When he had done so, he took out a handkerchief and methodically blew his nose, one nostril at a time. We watched him with patience and even a certain amount of spectator’s interest. When he had finished with his handkerchief, he folded it neatly in quarters and replaced it in his pocket. He then gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” From start to finish, it lasted no longer than five minutes.

Four of Dufarge’s bullets struck the Laughing Man, two of them through the heart. When Dufarge, who was still shielding his eyes against the sight of the Laughing Man’s face, heard a queer exhalation of agony from the direction of the target, he was overjoyed. His black heart beating wildly, he rushed over to his unconscious daughter and brought her to. The pair of them, beside themselves with delight and coward’s courage, now dared to look up at the Laughing Man. His head was bowed as in death, his chin resting on his bloody chest. Slowly, greedily, father and daughter came forward to inspect their spoils. Quite a surprise was in store for them. The Laughing Man, far from dead, was busy contracting his stomach muscles in a secret manner. As the Dufarges came into range, he suddenly raised his face, gave a terrible laugh, and neatly, even fastidiously, regurgitated all four bullets. The impact of this feat on the Dufarges was so acute that their hearts literally burst, and they dropped dead at the Laughing Man’s feet. (If the installment was going to be a short one anyway, it could have ended there; the Comanches could have managed to rationalize the sudden death of the Dufarges. But it didn’t end there.) Day after day, the Laughing Man continued to stand lashed to the tree with barbed wire, the Dufarges decomposing at his feet. Bleeding profusely and cut off from his supply of eagles’ blood, he had never been closer to death. One day, however, in a hoarse but eloquent voice, he appealed for help to the animals of the forest. He summoned them to fetch Omba, the lovable dwarf. And they did. But it was a long trip back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border, and by the time Omba arrived on the scene with a medical kit and a fresh supply of eagles’ blood, the Laughing Man was in a coma. Omba’s very first act of mercy was to retrieve his master’s mask, which had blown up against Mlle. Dufarge’s vermin-infested torso. He placed it respectfully over the hideous features, then proceeded to dress the wounds.

When the Laughing Man’s small eyes finally opened, Omba eagerly raised the vial of eagles’ blood up to the mask. But the Laughing Man didn’t drink from it. Instead, he weakly pronounced his beloved Black Wing’s name. Omba bowed his own slightly distorted head and revealed to his master that the Dufarges had killed Black Wing. A peculiar and heart-rending gasp of final sorrow came from the Laughing Man. He reached out wanly for the vial of eagles’ blood and crushed it in his hand. What little blood he had left trickled thinly down his wrist. He ordered Omba to look away, and, sobbing, Omba obeyed him. The Laughing Man’s last act, before turning his face to the bloodstained ground, was to pull off his mask.

The story ended there, of course. (Never to be revived.) The Chief started up the bus. Across the aisle from me, Billy Walsh, who was the youngest of all the Comanches, burst into tears. None of us told him to shut up. As for me, I remember my knees were shaking.

A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

3 notes · View notes

everamazingfe · 3 years

Text

You Can Ride On My Rocket 69 - Chapter Ten

Fic Summary: Jeremy has recently awoken in this strange world, 210 ten years after he was put to sleep, and is now the lone survivor from his vault. Trevor's a radio host from Diamond City who's barely left the station, lonely in his own right and isolated from the rest of the Wastes. When they meet, Trevor finally gets a chance to see the rest of the wasteland like he's always wanted, though Jeremy becomes more of his bodyguard than Trevor does his companion. They meet various people along the way, some being friends like the odd throuple they meet in one of the neighboring city, or foe like a certain Diamond City guard. Both are wary about bringing up their pasts, but the wasteland has a strange way of bringing people together.

Chapter Summary: Jeremy and Trevor learn the truth about Vault 111, and Trevor takes a little vacation to Good Neighbor and makes some strange bedfellows. This chapter's song is "Maybe" by The Ink Spots.

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

Words in this chapter: 4296 Pairings: Jeremy/Trevor, Michael/Gavin/Lindsay, Jeremy/OC Warnings for this chapter: Mentions of death, minor character injury, alcohol use

Notes: There's a link to the first chapter of this fic as the source of this post! Click it to go read this fic over on A O 3, or you can search up the title or ‘everamazingfe’ on the site! This is also my longest chapter ever, and there’s some art to go along with it, but that’s in a separate post.

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

The vault had clearly remained untouched since the pair had last been there, the dust that coated everything undisturbed aside from handprints on the cryopod and dust wiped from the terminal's keyboard. Trevor was back at that terminal, typing and clicking away as if it would get him any closer to accessing the menus hidden behind the password screen. Jeremy stood at the pod, his forehead and hand pressed on the glass.

A groan of frustration came from the computer, followed by a soft thud as the side of the monitor was hit, and Jeremy turned his head. "No good?"

"Nope. No good," Trevor muttered, shaking his head and huffing in frustration. "I'm gonna try and find another terminal, maybe one of the others won't be so broken. Just... Hang out here." He let out another huff as he picked up his bat, leaving the room to explore the vault more. There were radroaches everywhere, but with the mods Jeremy had made to the swatter in his hands, it killed them in one swift hit. He didn't remember there being so many the last time they were there, but maybe they were just getting bold.

Trevor figured his best bet would be the overseer's office, maybe the computer there would have some sort of master control system. He didn't know. Computers weren't really his thing, but he was trying his best to be helpful. He made his way down the hall towards where he figured the overseer's office, but before he reached it, he found another room full of those same pods. That terminal was unharmed, and though he wasn't sure he wanted to know what it held, he looked anyway.

What it held was rather appalling. Whatever malfunction had caused Jeremy's pod to open had shown mercy on him, because he was the only one to make it out of there alive. The cryogenic array and life support systems had long gone offline, and everyone left in the pods had thawed and begun to rot. It was easy to figure out that something similar had happened in the room that held Jeremy's husband's pod, and in every other room in the vault. The realization that he was standing in a room full of corpses, already entombed with their family and friends, made him stagger back, bile rising in his throat. He'd suspected it, but the confirmation was something he wasn't ready for.

The overseer's terminal didn't bring Trevor much better news either. The all-clear that was supposed to come from Vault-Tec never did. The resulting incident, as staff of the vault rioted and overthrew the overseer, was one of chaos and horror. The skeletons littered about the vault had made that clear, but somehow those were easier to stomach. They didn't still look like people, and from the sound of the memos he found, they weren't meant to make it out of the vault alive either.

Trevor let out a long sigh, scrubbing his hands over his face as he tried to process what he'd learned. It was all so much. Vault-Tec was pure evil, that much was certain, and he was glad he never had had to deal with them. The Institute was bad enough as it was. He slid down the desk until he was sitting on the floor, looking over at the skeleton of the overseer nearby. "Were any of these people ever supposed to leave? Were you?"

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

Jeremy hadn't budged from the pod since Trevor had left. His eyes were still fixed on it, on his husband inside. The harsh reality of the situation was all around him, but he refused to accept it without concrete proof. The man couldn't be dead. He had fought for years in The Great War, only to die a week after getting home? It just seemed too cruel, Jeremy couldn't accept that as the truth. But he knew that the man inside didn't deserve a life out in the wastes, either. Maybe he was better off in the pod.

"I wish I was still in mine," he whispered, examining the lines of the other man's face. "I wish I could remember you." He put his palm flat on the glass, his fingers curling against it. "I remember us. I remember... Our life. But not you."

Something about coming out of cryofreeze must have fucked his brain up, maybe he'd gone without the life support functions for just a little too long after thawing, before his pod had opened. Or maybe his mind was protecting him from something bad. Jeremy didn't know. But luckily, his eyes still worked fine. At least he could still see him clearly. He inspected him closely, committing his face to memory and filling in the gaps where decay had caused the skin to fade away. The man inside the pod still looked as handsome as he did in all those photos from before the war, in Jeremy's mind. But what was underneath wasn't muscle, or bone.

Jeremy pressed his nose right up against the glass, almost like he was trying to push through it to see better, his eyebrows furrowed together in confusion.

"What the hell?" He squinted and looked even closer, and all at once his breath was ripped from his chest.

When he got it back, all he could do was scream.

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

"Trevor!"

The pained cry echoed off the walls of the vault, and Trevor's head snapped to attention. It was Jeremy. For a moment, he was excited, thinking that maybe he'd finally gotten the manual release switch to work, but as the other man screamed again, he knew that it was anything but joy in his voice. He'd never run faster, but the vault was maze like and confusing. When he found Jeremy, the man was no longer standing calmly and staring pensively into the pod, but repeatedly punching the glass.

"Jeremy, what-"

"-He's a fucking synth!" Despite Jeremy punching the glass again and again, his knuckles bloodied and bruised, there wasn't a single crack in the surface. "That's not my husband, that's a fucking synth!" Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he hit the glass one last time before he turned to face Trevor. "He's... Trevor, he's..." He choked on his words, covering his face with his hands as he dropped to his knees. "This is worse than him being dead."

Trevor approached slowly, kneeling down in front of him and tentatively putting a hand on Jeremy's shoulder. It was shrugged off, so he decided not to push it. Looking towards the pod, he saw that Jeremy was right. How had they missed it? Wires and metal, all on display. A false bone faceplate and synthetic skin that didn't look quite right upon close inspection. One of the earlier models for sure, the newest ones had no differences from their human counterparts, but he didn't think that they existed before the drop. "That's sick. That's... That's downright disturbing." What business did the Institute have with a Pre-War corpse? "I don't even know what to say." What was there to say? 'Sorry that the man you love turns out not to be a man at all?' Bones were easier to break than that thick glass, especially when Jeremy was the one throwing the punch.

"Was my whole life a lie?" Jeremy took a shuddering breath, trying to keep everything from fading to black around him. "Was he even real? Did he ever even love me?"

"No, no... The Institute... It wasn't around before the bombs. There's no way." Either the man was somehow always a synth, or they came and swapped his body out. But that didn't answer the question of why? What was so special about him that they'd sentence everyone else to death? He realized now that this was probably the source of the malfunction that had doomed the other pods, and they'd probably cut off the manual release to keep anyone from finding out. "He was real when you knew him. I'm sure of that."

Jeremy scoffed. "Great, so then the Institute is a bunch of graverobbers. What are they, the fucking Resurrection Men?"

"I don't know who that is."

"They're... Fuck it, nevermind. We need to find those fuckers." His tears had gone from distraught to furious, his whole body running red hot with anger as his fists clenched at his sides again. The Institute had taken so much from him. They'd taken a peaceful death from him, and now they'd gone and taken away the only thing that had ever made his existence bearable. That hurt more than all the hits he'd taken out in the Commonwealth combined.

"No one knows where they are, Jeremy. Otherwise they would've been taken out decades ago."

"Even better, we'll be the first!"

"Where would we even start?"

"I don't know!" Jeremy was shouting now, standing up abruptly and startling Trevor in the process. Pointing at the pod, Jeremy continued. "He might still be out there! He could be out there, alone and scared and wandering the wastes like I was before I met you, or the Institute could be doing shit to him, and I don't know which is a worse fate. We have to find him." He lowered his hand, hauling Trevor up. "I have to find him."

Trevor just stared down at Jeremy, finding his footing and freeing his arm from his grip. "I don't know if I'm gonna be able to help you."

"Then forget you, I'll do it myself." He started to walk away, but Trevor grabbed him by the shoulders to stop him, and Jeremy met his eyes with a flare.

"Stop! Wait. I meant I don't know how to help you. But... Remember how I told you 'bout how I was brought up by Nick Valentine?" Jeremy nodded, though he was uncertain. "He's a detective, back in Diamond City. He can help you."

"Oh." Jeremy instantly relaxed, his glare being replaced with a softer expression. He'd thought that Trevor meant that he wouldn't help him. "Well, I guess we're going back to the city, then."

"Guess so," Trevor agreed, letting out a sigh. At least Jeremy seemed a bit less worked up now, but he still felt a bit on edge. "All this back and forth is fucking exhausting."

Jeremy nodded in agreement, shaking out his hand and pulling a bundle of gauze from his pocket to wrap it with. "Hey, Trev?" He said once they were back on the elevator platform, looking at the other man for a few long moments before he actually hit the button to take them back up.

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. And... Thanks."

Trevor shrugged, looking down at his feet. "That's what friends do, right? Help each other?" He looked back up at Jeremy now, a soft smile on his face. "And when they can't, they point them in the right direction."

"Yeah, exactly. But, uh... We gotta be careful out there, alright? I can't lose you too."

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

"I can't lose you too."

The words echoed in Trevor's head as he stared up at the sky. They were camped out in some abandoned house somewhere halfway between Sanctuary Hills and Diamond City, Trevor's own exhaustion nearly making him collapse and Jeremy's injured hand making it hard for him to hold a gun well enough to protect them. The roof was long gone, but the walls were intact enough that they could barricade the holes, and there were some mattresses left on the floor that were perfect for sleeping on. Only, Trevor couldn't sleep. Jeremy was snoring way too loudly beside him for that, and his armor was uncomfortable.

The sky was always so clear, aside from the occasional radiation storm that rolled through, and he wondered if people before the war ever got the chance to appreciate it like this. Jeremy had said no, that the lights of the cities were so bright that you couldn't see the sky anymore, when he'd asked. He couldn't imagine living without being able to see the stars. They'd always brought him some sense of comfort, and if he was a smarter man maybe he would've taken the time to learn their names. But he wasn't, and that information wasn't available to him anymore even if he was.

Trevor let out a sigh and rolled over, his eyes on Jeremy now. The words still replayed in his head, over and over. They had since he'd said them. Maybe he was putting too much meaning into them, but to him it felt like proof that someone finally cared about him. No one ever had before. His parents had abandoned him, leaving him to end up just another Diamond City orphan until Nick took pity on him. Nick had cared for him as much as a synth could, but he'd still said, "My hands are tied," when Trevor had gone to him with complaints about Ian. Everyone in Diamond City shunned him and didn't do anything to protect him, that had all been Jeremy. Because he actually cared about him. And he realized, as he lay there listening to the ambient noise of the wastes and the loud snoring, that he cared about Jeremy too.

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

"I'm not going back to Sanctuary again."

"Not asking you to, Trevor."

"But Nick said he wants to go look at the vault, take a look around. So we gotta go back."

"You don't have to go."

"Yes, I do."

The conversation had been going on like this for around ten minutes now, Nick and his assistant Ellie standing by and politely pretending that they weren't eavesdropping. Trevor was reluctant to let Jeremy leave without him, despite being in no shape to travel. Whether it was because he was too scared to be on his own, or too scared that he wouldn't be there to help Jeremy in case things went bad, Trevor didn't know. But regardless, staying in Diamond City without Jeremy sounded terrifying. For all he knew, Ian could be back on duty, just waiting for a chance to catch Trevor alone.

"Look, Trev... You're exhausted. I am too, but... I gotta go back there with him, I have to start trying to get this figured out. And you? You need to rest, I'm sorry but you look awful." Jeremy didn't like the sound of leaving Trevor alone either, but there was really no other choice. He at least had army training under his belt, he could run of too little sleep for far too long if he needed to, but Trevor didn't have that. And, admittedly, he'd been pushing the other man a bit too hard since they'd gotten back out in the Commonwealth. "Look, I'll take you to Goodneighbor, how about that? I'll bribe Michael to keep an eye on you, set you up with enough caps for a room at the Rex. How's that sound?"

"Sounds a lot better than staying here."

Jeremy smiled at that, clapping Trevor on the shoulder. "Great. Nick, I'm gonna go do that, then I'll be back."

"Don't worry about it. Take your time," Nick assured, waving them off. Both he and Ellie watched them as they left, the pair still bickering quietly. When the door shut, he turned to her and spoke. "I'm glad the kid's found a friend, but I thought he had a better head on his shoulders than that."

Ellie shrugged, returning to her desk and writing up a report to go into the case file. "I dunno, Nick. Seemed like they're more than that to me."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing, nothing, it's just..." She smiled. "Intuition, I guess."

"Right. 'Intuition.' Just be careful you don't end up like Piper, sticking your nose where it doesn't belong."

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

Good Neighbor without Jeremy was just boring, Trevor decided. It wasn't the comforting retreat he thought it would be either. Instead of worrying about the people around him, he was just worried about Jeremy. Spending time with Lindsay, Michael, and Gavin at the Third Rail was a decent distraction during the day, but there was nothing like that when he had to go back to the hotel alone.

"You should check out the Memory Den some time," Gavin said one afternoon a few days into his stay, passing Trevor a Nuka Cherry with the cap already off. "Some people like taking a trip down memory lane when the real world stops being interesting enough for them."

Trevor scoffed quietly, taking a long sip from the soda. "Yeah, I'll pass. Most of the memories I've got, I don't wanna revisit."

"Not even your night with Lindsay?"

Trevor spluttered, nearly spilling his drink all over himself as he stared at Gavin in shock, who could only grin wryly back at him. "You know about that?"

"Course I do, it's not like I don't talk to them," he said, chuckling as he popped the top on a Gwinnet Stout for himself. "We're quite close, y'know. The three of us are. We talk. And Lindsay loves to talk about you, they'd been dying for you to some back ever since you left."

"I don't think that's true at all." His cheeks were as red as his soda now, and he just wanted to run away and hide.

"Oh, but it is. You really impressed them." Gavin was getting a great deal of joy out of making Trevor squirm the way he was, and he glanced behind him towards the stairs that Lindsay was coming down right then. He winked at them, putting a finger to his lips when he made eye contact, quickly lowering his hand when Trevor was looking his way again. "So, tell me Trevor-boy. Were they as good of a neighbor as their songs claim? Oh, come on! Don't be shy now."

"Okay, well... Honestly? They were great. I mean, just... So sweet, and so perfect, but... I don't think that's gonna be happening again."

Both Gavin and Lindsay's face fell, and he leaned in close. "Why not?"

Trevor bit his lip nervously, hoping he hadn't upset the other with his response. He swirled his soda around in the bottle, staring down into it before he looked up at him. "I don't think I was that good of a neighbor." Saying that he was dealing with some complicated feelings about Jeremy felt like he'd be confessing too much to someone he barely knew, and it wasn't Lindsay's fault that those feelings had only gotten more complicated since the last time he'd been around.

"Oh, Trevor." Lindsay's voice came from behind him, and they wrapped their arms around him from behind him, making him bristle. "Don't be so hard on yourself. I think you were the best neighbor, but... I'm not against giving you a chance to redeem yourself."

"You... You set me up!" He cried, pointing at Gavin accusingly, but the only response he got was a wink as he knocked back the beer. "This is the worst. You're the worst, Gavin."

Lindsay laughed and unwrapped their arms around him so they could sit on a stool beside him, asking Gavin for a glass of wine when he was done being a dick. "I'm sorry, darlin', but it was just too cute watching you get all flustered like that."

Some version of the same antic happened every day, and he didn't know how he hadn't gotten wise to it at that point. After the fifth day of being in Good Neighbor, he took Lindsay up on their offer of redeeming himself because he just couldn't stand how lonely his hotel room was anymore. It was much the same as the first time they had spent the night together, and it didn't really fill the void.

The next night, Lindsay invited Trevor back to the apartment they shared with Gavin and Michael. Not for sex, but just so he wouldn't be alone at night anymore, because it really seemed to be getting to him. He'd swapped his Nuka Cherry for whatever beer Gavin had on hand, and they'd all started to get concerned. They all considered him a friend, they thought he was sweet and fun to talk to, and he had good choice in music, and they weren't going to let their friend be miserable if they could help it. Trevor was better after that, switching back to soda after his nights were filled with games of Blast Radius instead of listening to his own voice on the radio, staring up at the ceiling because he couldn't see the sky from the window.

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

Jeremy wasn't doing much better, either. Nick Valentine, as nice as he was, just wasn't as good company as Trevor. That was his biggest problem with the synth, really. That he wasn't Trevor. The man's voice did play over the radio, but he knew it wasn't the real deal. The real deal was, hopefully, safe in Good Neighbor.

The trip back to Sanctuary had been easy enough, but a tour of the vault didn't really tell Nick anything that Jeremy hadn't already told him about the situation. He'd expected as much, but it didn't hurt to look for any sort of calling card that may have been left behind. Their trip had taken quite a few detours, too, because of Nick wanting some help looking into other cases that he had on the docket. Jeremy had been reluctant to help, but he figured since he was being helped for free, it was the least he could do to pay him back. Once they were back in Nick's office in Diamond City, he relayed the information to Ellie for her to write up and add to the case file, and spoke with her to try and figure out the next step. She said something, and Nick's face lit up, knocking on the desk to get Jeremy's attention.

"Lucky for you, where you're gonna want to go next is where you have to go anyway," Nick said finally, turning to Jeremy, who'd nearly fallen asleep in the chair he was seated in. "In Good Neighbor, there's a place called the Memory Den. People usually use it to try and look back on fond memories, but I think in your case, it may be the key to figuring out what happened while you were on ice."

Jeremy was glad to not have to roam all over the Commonwealth again, and even more excited that he'd get to see Trevor again. Next time, he wasn't going to be leaving him behind. "Great, I'll look into it."

"Come back to me if you get anything useful."

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

It was another day at the bar for Trevor, another day wishing that there was something he could use to get in touch with Jeremy somehow. Letters were useless, and he was pretty sure that a Pip-Boy couldn't receive any messages from terminals without being hooked into it.

As usual, he was leaned against the bar, chatting with Gavin who stood next to him, and Michael and Lindsay who were seated on the other side on the stools. The Third Rail wasn't open just yet, but Trevor had taken to helping Gavin get the bar set up and keeping the other two company as they waited for opening time. And though it wasn't open, it seemed like Michael had forgotten to lock the door back up behind them, because heavy footsteps started coming down the steps. The conversation immediately stopped, Trevor and Gavin ducking down below the bar as Michael moved to stand in front of Lindsay.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Trevor heard Michael say, but it wasn't in anger like he'd been expecting. He and Gavin glanced at each other in confusion, the Brit silently reaching to grab a pistol that was stored beneath the counter just in case.

"I'm here for Trevor. Guy at the Rex said he'd been hanging out with you guys lately."

He recognized that voice, and he knocked the gun out of Gavin's hands before popping his head up to confirm what his ears had heard. "Jeremy! You're back."

"You didn't think I'd forgotten about you, did you?" Jeremy asked, a grin spreading across his face when he saw Trevor stand up from behind the bar. Barely a moment passed before Trevor was stepping out from behind the bar, running up to Jeremy and wrapping him in a hug. "Whoa, okay... Guess you did," he laughed, awkwardly raising and lowering his arms a few times before he settled for wrapping them around Trevor, hugging him back tightly.

"No, I didn't, I just... Missed you." The confession made Trevor's cheeks go red, and after a minute he pulled away from the hug. "But... I'm glad you're back. How'd the search go?"

Jeremy made a noncommittal noise, gesturing vaguely. "It was kinda pointless, to be honest. But I know where to go next. Some place called the Memory Den?"

"Oh, well I could have told you that! You didn't need some crackpot gumshoe for that," Gavin said, "That's where I told Trevor he should go when he started getting bored." Michael reached across the counter to thump him across the head. "What? I did!" The ghoul just cut him a look, and Gavin stuck his tongue out at him in response before quieting down.

Trevor cleared his throat, turning back towards Jeremy with a smile. "Hey, at least we know where to go. And it's not very far, either. I bet you're even more sick of wandering around the wastes than I am at this point."

"You've got that right," Jeremy said with a chuckle, heading over to the bar to take a seat and motioning for Trevor to join him. "Mhm. But we're not going there right now. First, I need a drink."

#ragehappy #rpf #treremy #doollins #jeremy/trevor #mavinsay #juggey #gavinsay #mavin #fallout au #fallout 4 au #fic #fanfic #my fic #my writing #everamazingfe

12 notes · View notes

thegeekerynj · 4 years

Text

All Death Metal Review (And nothing from Sweden!)

Death Metal: Trinity Crisis One Shot

Writer: Scott Snyder Artist: Francis Manapul

‘And who are YOU supposed to be? I’ve faced enough Dark Knights that no Batman scares me anymore!

Ha! Then it’s a good thing I’m not a Batman! I’m his MOTHER!’

———————————————————————————————————

Sweet Christmas! That took me by surprise!

Harley kissing Jonah Hex, that was really sweet, and gods awful creepy, and kinda gross, after the exchange, and some thought…

This is it, Gentle Readers… the Beginning of the End of the Beginning of… Oh, crap, now I’m lost… This is where the story starts rockin’!

The Gang’s all together, and the Black Lantern Bat has determined what they need to do.

The plan? Split up, naturally. That AL-ways works…

When we left them in DM #3, the Lanterns are protecting the Home Base, and taking out the Crisis Energy Antennae on the Earths left in the known Universes, The Flashes are off and running through the Speed Force, trying to find Metron, and stay ahead of the Bathattan who Laughs, while the Trinity (Superman / Antilife, Black Lantern Batman and Warden Wonder Woman) along with Swamp Thing, Harley, Hex and Jarro, head for Castle Bat, to gain access to the Crisis Earths, where the Crisis Energy is being harvested for Perpetua.

**WHEW!**

Getting into the Castle involves getting past an army of Dark Knights… and we have a bunch of real winners here!

Bat Monday - Salomon Grundy in Bat ears, I could have busted a gut laughing, until I thought about what kind of weapon a zombie with Batman’s training could be, and shivered…

Kull, the daughter of Batman and Wonder Woman, corrupted by the Dark Universe…

Ark, the living embodiment of Arkham, with all of the knowledge and abilities of ALL her worst inmates…

Chiroptor, the amalgam of Batman and Chemo (Great Elder Gods!!)…

And the Pearl, Martha Wayne, in the equivalent of HellBat Armor, complete with her iconic pearl necklace.

This is a real mindscrew for Batman, and the panels depict it, most intently.

One nice thing about Scott Snyder… he is consistent about tying up loose ends. Once we are in Castle Bat, we find out what happened to Barbatos, the Big Bad from Dark Nights: Metal. Not that we were actually wondering, since we got Perpetual, and the Batman Who Laughs, but, like I said, it ties up the package nicely.

Then, we are introduced to the character I have been most happily waiting for… the Robin King, and his Utility Belt of Death!

Gentle Readers, this is the story we have been waiting for, the chapter which tells us what the Heroes Plan of Action is, and where the story has been going, for over 40 years. You see, the opening page of this book tells us where this story began… with Marv Wolfman and George Perez, and Crisis on Infinite Earths!

Not to spoil too much, but Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis, ]well… they have all played a part in getting us to this story. It seems, the “Crisis Energy’ has fed Perpetua while she was trapped within the Source Wall, and, now, she wants it all, so she can recreate the Universes in her image.

Great job, if you can get it…

I can’t say enough good things about this story and artwork, as Snyder and Manapul have put together a really tight, hard hitting bottle / lead story, bringing us to the next step in the saga…

Jeebus on a popsicle stick, I hope no one lets me down… that will hurt!

Out of 5🌶 🌶🌶🌶🌶.5

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

Death Metal: Multiverse’s End #1

Writer: James Tynion IV Artist: Juan Gedeon

‘Mr. Rabbit?

Yes, Young Lady?

Thank you for saving me.

What a kind thing to say! It was so scary out there, and you stayed so brave. I don’t think I could have done it without your courage.

You’re really, really soft.

I use a special carrot shampoo.

———————————————————————————————————

Once upon a time, about a million, bazillion years ago in cranky fat man years, somewhere around 1982, Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw! brought Earth-C into the DC Multiverse, the earth of anthropomorphic animals… yes, they brought Super-Hero Cartoon Animals to the Super Hero Universe.

Our introduction to this Earth was Rodney Rabbit, a comics writing and drawing hare, who created the Just’a Lotta Animals comic by day, and was Captain Carrot, a Superman-esque rabbit, who got his powers from super charged carrots, when danger struck.

But, I digress… because I got really excited!

So, we have teams on the 6 Earths, each Earth holding a tuning fork, focusing the psychic pain energy of the population to Perpetual, powering her attempts to recreate the Multiverse in her image. The Earths in play, Earth - 3 (Crime Syndicate), Earth - X (Nazi Earth), Earth - 29 (Bizarroworld), Earth - 43 (Blood League World) and Earth - 50 (Justice Lords Earth) are all worlds of pain and suffering.

Their energy is the right flavor for destroying, and creating.

The heroes, organized and led by the Green Lanterns of Sector 2814 (Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Jessica Cruz, Simon Baz), are working to take down the Antennae before the energy can be fed to Perpetual to power her Cosmic Undoing.

So, teamed with the Lanterns, we have Hawkgirl, Kid Flash (Earth-22), President Superman (Earth-23), Wonder Woman (Earth-6) and Captain Carrot, all hellbent on stopping the respective Antennae.

The problem… Each Earth’s inhabitants have been laced into the antennae, to directly feed the psychic energy to it..since the energy is effectively terror, well, what better way to induce some? Of course, this isn’t the only problem to be contended with…

Leave it to James Tynion IV to come up with a way to make a villain creepier than the Batman Who Laughs… How, you ask? Well, take the true polar opposite of Batman, and make him realize HE IS what Giggles says he is, and you have an interesting new ballgame.

You see, while the Batman who Laughs is the Ultimate CORRUPTED Batman, Owlman is the Anthesis of Batman, the purest EVIL to the Batman’s GOOD. And he plans to make sure that he continues to be the True Opposite…

Gedeon’s artwork is rough, but considering the story being told, and the pain portrayed by the characters, it fits, perfectly. Some times, I see Joe Staton and Nic Cuti in these pages, a little cartoony, but that’s not a complaint… The story concentrates a bunch on Guy Gardner and Cap, so, it seems to fit (and the art is reminiscent of the ‘A Guy and his G’Nort’ storyline from 1991).

All in all, a very good story, and a fantastic use of a truly underused treasure.

Out of 5🌶 🌶🌶🌶🌶

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

Speed Metal #1

Writer: Joshua Williamson Pencils: Eddy Barrow Inks: Eber Ferreira

‘Hey, Flash Family, Is it true a Flash has to die in every Crisis?!’

———————————————————————————————————

And the levels of snark from the Darkest Knight have reached Epic Levels!

The first three pages of this issue give us a rehash of everything having to do with Wally West, since the beginning of the Rebirth Era, from Barry pulling Wally out of the Speed Force, to Barry and Batman finding the Comedian’s Smiley Face button embedded in the Batcave wall, to the events of Heroes in Crisis and Flash Forward.

The action picks up as Barry, Wally, Wallace and Jay leave the Batman’s Vault, in search of Metron’s Chair, with the Darkest Knight hot on their trails.

In the Speed Force.

With the Darkest Knight’s presence corrupting the Speed Force, Barry and Wally bickering the entire time, I’m reminded of why I hated the post Crisis Flash… Wally wasn’t mature enough to wear the mantle of Barry’s fame.

Sure, he had the speed, he was even faster than Barry, but he was still the same jealous little kid inside, the one who needed to be patted on the head, the one who couldn’t get on with the Titans, even though he was probably the most powerful of them.

He was just an immature kid, and here, Williamson dragged that all into the foreground once again.

All so Wally West, the King of the Redemption Arc, could have another Redemption Arc…

Sorry, that did me in.

The rest of the story is pretty good… the art is wonderful, the Jay / Barry / Wallace interplay is really kinda neat, and all the Black Flashes… well, I’m a sucker for Death icons, so a mass of Death Speedsters, well that’s fun with a CAPITAL F!

But, did we need another Wally gets to whine story?

Sorry, this wasn’t the finest arc of the Death Metal Saga.

Out of 5🌶 🌶🌶🌶

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

Death Metal #4 ‘Shot In The Dark’

Writer: Scott ‘Scream King’ Snyder Artist: Greg ‘The Muscle’ Capullo Inks: Jonathan ‘Bloodied’ Glapion

“So, ever wonder why you never see A Harley Who Laughs’?’

———————————————————————————————————

And, that Gentle Readers, is the crux of one of those puzzles about this series… Why don’t we ever see more twisted versions of the Villains who infest Earth Prime?

The Robin King (this is the character who rates SECOND on my memorable Characters list, especially with his own One-Shot—— Who’s First?? Time, Gentle Ones in time…) puts the explanation out there, and it is very simple.

And worth the read… But, I digress.

So, Issue 4 picks up with Sergeant Rock describing what has been happening on Earth - Prime, and we finally get to see who has been carrying him around… AMBUSH BUG! Yes, the character that made the Fourth Wall more transparent than an open Anderson window has been carrying Rock around as his own personal narrator…

Which, if you know the Bug, is a joke unto itself.

So, here we go, the ride is picking up steam, and we are now following 6, count’em SIX, separate story lines. A guy could get whiplash, or Bullwhip or some other third rate character… But, I digress.

We have the Trinity storyline, the SpeedMetal storyline, Multiverse’s End, and the Lantern Storyline from the last issue, the Justice League / Legion of Doom story… am I forgetting anything?

Oh, and of course, the Robin King.

Where to start with this… I guess the simplest place to start is the artwork.

Greg Capullo’s pencils are absolutely wonderful. For anybody who it's to watch the process of drawing I want to watch so he's got a really wonderful touch I recommend Greg Capullo’s Instagram site. As he's drawing pages for these books, he posts the pencils as he finishes pieces of the process . Normally, he has six or seven photo panels showing exactly what he's been doing. In man cases, this involves crowd scenes, with extensive detail. His work is beautiful, it’s easy to see why he is such a sought after talent.

Jonathan Glapion’s inks on Capullo’s pencils are comparable to Austin on Byrne, and Janson over Miller, Janson over Colan… Enhancing, and not hiding the intricate detail rendered in the pencils, adding that last flash of lightning to bring it all together. The balance struck between them is almost organic, a constant growth between the two, bringing them to levels bordering on the true Classic Art teams of the last 50 years.

I do not make these comparisons lightly

Now, to the story. Scott Snyder is powering a roller coaster with a rocket sled. The coordination between the different aspects of these stories is both intricate and daring. With all the different aspects of this story spinning like plates on sticks, Snyder juggles the plot lines, and what is left to him by the myriad of writers as Emmet Kelly did in the heyday of Ringling Brothers.

His deft touch, and subtle influences are balanced by lace covered sledgehammer blows, leaving the reader reeling, and wanting so very much more.

Scott Snyder, much like Tom Taylor, has pulled out all the stops, cut the brake lines, kicked out the jams, insert favorite euphemism for creating a high speed, non-stop mad ride to Hell!

And, much to my wallet’s chagrin, I am very happy about it.

Now, as it crosses to other books, and other writers pick up the reins, I am sure Snyder will still be the whip hand driving the story, not allowing some of these writers to go too far astray (unless it’s Tom King… then, well Woo Hoooo!)

I can’t say enough good things about this story, or the team creating it. I’m beginning t feel a little biased, but, what the heck.

Out of 5🌶 🌶🌶🌶🌶.5

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

Death Metal: Robin King #1 ‘The Robin Who Would Be King’

Writer: Peter J. Tomasi Artist: Riley Rossmo

‘Aw! Come on, this is the fun part!

Get up and let’s FIGHT!’

———————————————————————————————————

Games, within games, within games…

So, the Batman who Laughs wasn’t infallible.

And the Robin King is going to be the bigger threat to the Darkest Knight than any combination of the Trinity, Flashes or their cohorts.

At least, that’s my takeaway from this issue.

We continue the story of the Robin King, as started in the Tales of the Dark Universe one shot. Bruce has grown up, and grown into his sociopathy, and genius. He has used the family fortune to get all the training necessary, and to accumulate all the tools, to begin his reign as the true Evil Overlord of Gotham.

Utilizing his accumulated weapons, he has taken out Commissioner Gordon, Firestorm, Animal Man, Adam Strange Blue Beetle (Ted Kord), and the Red Tornado, all in truly spectacular and extraordinarily grisly fashion.

While the Black Hole Implosion for Firestorm was a particularly well thought out death, I think, so far, the ‘Mortal Coil’ Death, for the Red Tornado was the most imaginative… making his powers totally uncontrollable, while moving him closer to his ultimate dream, to be a real person, before his form totally destroys itself from the stresses of his own speed.

Marvelous! Fantastic! Gross!

Enter the Batman who Laughs, with the proposition to make the Robin King special, one of his own…

But, he’s a Robin, so, off to the Groblin Pit he goes!

Hence, his mistake, and possibly another chink in the boiler plate of his plans… since Bruce Wayne is NO Robin!

Peter Tomasi’s scripting for this issue is simply remarkable. The creep factor he brings to this iteration of Bruce Wayne is almost eviscerating. Reading this was painful to my eyes and psyche, feeling the levels of insanity drip off the page, and scratch across my mind like a little bird’s unnaturally sharp talons.

He really hit all the horror factors.

Then, there was the artwork for this story. Riley Rossmo’s artwork set the mood for this story. His shattered pencil / inks style, which can be distracting, was integral to telling this story. It allowed the Reader to view this story as if it were playing out in Bruce’s mind, its all the fracturing being how he is viewing the world.

For me, this story has been the highlight of the series… thus far. I am anticipating this, which is near the midpoint of things, is setting up the Wednesday Night Episode…so, -

Tune In, Gentle Readers!

Same Bat-Time

Same Bat Channel!

The Best Is Yet To Come!

Did I neglect there is a B-story, with Signal, Spoiler, Orphan and Red Robin taking on Quietus, the amalgam of Batman Ras’ al Ghul and Duke Thimas, from another Dark Universe, written by Tony Patrick and drawn by Daniel Sampere?

This story brings in a plot line for ‘What’s happening for the Other Bat-Family Elements’, as they try to find their way through Castle Bat’s myriad streets…

I am guessing we will start to see more of these stories.

I am completely fine with this, rather than having to recap things later…

Out of 5🌶 🌶🌶🌶🌶.5

#dark nights: death metal #DC comics #Batman Who Laughs #Scott Snyder #Greg Capullo

22 notes · View notes

artxmisery · 3 years

Note

🌻🌻🌻SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE

okie dokie i'm a month late to this but WHATEVER time to talk about destiny stuff this will be a not-insignificant length so i'm gonna put the rest under a read more

ok i wanna talk about the vex but there are a few things to get through first quick background on the cosmology of destiny: there are two primordial forces, the gardener and the winnower, representing light and dark respectively. they existed before time and the universe as we know it in a place hereafter referred to as the first garden. in the garden (which is not a garden and not the only garden significant to this post) the two played the flower game. basically a big ol version of conway's game of life. however, they were also not playing the flower game? and just normally gardening in a metaphysical way. but back to the flower game. in the unveiling lore book, the winnower speaks to the player directly and a bunch of this info is from there. conway's game of life resembles their flower game "as a seed resembles the star that fed the flower and all the life that made it." it's not 100% clear whether each flower is a universe of its own or just a nebulous piece of cosmically important information, but the flowers are super important. flowers come back repeatedly as a symbol of the winnower, especially red flowers. another big concept in the grander story of the game is the final shape, i.e. the thing that will conquer the universe and be the last thing that exists as it ends. it's the ultimate following of the sword logic (which isn't particularly important here, basically just might makes right but on magic steroids) and lots of people are trying to be it or figure out what it is. what we, the players, know is that there was a successful pattern in the flower game that always won. in other words, the final shape. in the aforementioned unveiling lore book, we learned that this pattern survived the destruction of the first garden that lead to the creation of our universe. the details of that conflict aren't important here (although i'd recommend reading the unveiling lore book if this is at all interesting to you) but that pattern managed to make it out. for the first however long of the universe, it was basically just an untethered mathematical pattern running around in the quantum foam. as the universe cooled down and coalesced it turned into crystals in the water of comets, which then provided a space for them to become something like life. from there, they fell into the ocean(s) of planet(s) (details on whether they appeared in parallel or just once aren't super clear or conflicting). from here we need to go on a slight tangent to keep talking about the biological origins of the vex. there's this huge company that existed during the golden age called clovis bray, named after the dude who founded it, clovis bray i. basically, this guy is space jeff bezos but arguably more shitty. he wants to become immortal and experimented on his son, clovis bray ii, but ended up killing him in the process. i think you can see how much of an egomaniac he is at this point lol. on the moon, there was a group of scientists that found an anomaly connected to the darkness/winnower (a similar artefact is what we got the unveiling book from) that drove them mad with the signal it was trying to send. clovis gets wind of it, hears the signal and flies off to europa. the signal told him he'd find the secret to immortality there (and he did, sort of). part of said secret was the vex. during the golden age the vex were found/appeared/started existing but they weren't the enemy we've faced in the modern game, they were just curious. clovis steals a vex unit from the ishtar collective on venus (might come back to them later) and brings it to europa. it builds-organizes-forms a gateway to somewhere else. that somewhere else is volantis 2082. clovis goes through the gateway and discovers a solar system entirely converted into a forge. the star is engorged and being sustained with hydrogen in order to make metals. it's surrounded by a bunch of artificial satellite worlds where the vex are n where clovis and co ended up. anywho this is where clovis gets a closer look at the vex. so from him, we've got a more concrete idea of how they got from crystals in comets to the time-travelling robots we know and love. back to the biology stuff. basically the environment the vex evolved in was way earlier than our own, so heavy metals were so rare as to be nonexistent and harmful radiation was way more prevalent. because of this, predators never evolved from the vex. they just kept cooperating and feeding off cosmic radiation and whatnot. to protect themselves, they started making "armour", perhaps some sort of gel membrane initially? but then they started forming it out of silica, which is why their fluid is called radiolarian fluid and milky white. the vex continued to cooperate and developed more and more complex swarm behaviours, signalling different facts with different configurations of cells and structures. they aren't necessary sentient or sapient, but they definitely have cognition and intelligence. their way of thinking is so alien to us as to be undefinable. they also don't have a hive mind, per se, but their pattern is so fully repeated and embodied by each unit and larger mind that they work similarly. anyhow, their silica armour was further adapted into tools and structures ad infinitum, moving on to more durable materials as the collective knowledge of the vex increased. now, the vex don't necessarily have desires or goals or anything of the sort. their entire m.o. is to make everything fit the pattern. because they first evolved from that mathematical pattern from before time, they're able to exist as nothing more than information and then hijack matter to make more of themselves. clovis found this out the hard way, cause the vex started travelling through their calls and messages and stuff (and started infecting people, too). the vex are also extremely adept at simulating stuff since there's effectively no difference between a simulation of their pattern and the pattern itself (this comes up a la weeping angels once or twice). they are so good at it, in fact, that they can simulate nigh-infinite realities within their pattern. the simulations are equally as real as baseline reality and through that (i think?) are able to time travel and hop across timelines. that may be how they ended up in our solar system during the golden age. luckily for us, they're not perfect at it, otherwise, they would have always had won (wheeeee time tomfoolery). originally their goal was thought to be writing themselves into the rules of the universe and while that may still be part of it, they're also basically trying to make everything else vex. we have two examples of them turning whole worlds into vex machines/structures, one of which happened in like three days during the collapse (the darkness armageddon that ended the golden age). their architecture is super cool, highly recommend checking out concept art or in-game footage. the whole vex network spans an incomprehensible distance, although we don't have an exact number on that. they come into systems and build beachheads and pull themselves through space and time into the system. on mercury, which was what got converted in three days, they basically turned the whole planet into a giant simulation engine. they have some ridiculous teleportation technology and their weapons pull energy from distant stars through tiny gates. they've also got weapons like the vex mythoclast that pull energy from alternate timelines/loops of time/whatever. that about covers all the notable info about the vex, but there are some cool stories/places i want to touch on. the black garden is one, which is where the climax of the first game takes us. it's untethered in time and space, basically orphaned off from the rest of the universe. after we kill its heart, it ends up on mars. at some point between the end of d1 and shadowkeep in d2, it got untethered again and we go back for the garden of salvation raid. the black garden is referenced a bunch in some of the more cosmological/mythical lore and is the other important garden i mentioned right at the start. the vex have a bunch of cool stuff on venus, too, like the vault of glass. vog is basically where they test time travel stuff and ontological (i.e. reality-affecting) tech and weaponry. if they ever manage to make that stuff work outside the vault, we're toast. also on venus is the ishtar collective which was mentioned earlier, where a bunch of scientists found that a vex unit was simulating all of them hundreds of times over. they called in a super complex ai to help break out the simulations and those simulations went and explored the vex network and have shown up a couple times since. i'm sure i'm forgetting tons of other stuff, but this is wayyyy too long already. definitely hit me up if you wanna hear a quite frankly ridiculous amount of lore about a fictional universe/race lol anyways. thank you very much for the ask n i hope you enjoyed reading if you got this far

#ask #catboy-spookaloo #i'm gonna tag this #long post #just in case #cause i do have a read more but who knows if that worked #and the post itself is pretty long underneath that #that's all thank you again for the ask

1 note · View note

stargazing-enby · 4 years

Text

Fics I wrote in 2019: masterlist

I wanted to do this on New Year’s Eve, but I decided to wait till @hdowlpost reveals so I could add the fics I wrote for the fest, too. Lo and behold: the fics I wrote last year!

My most popular fics posted in 2019:

Highest kudos: Everything a Word Can Mean (Drarry, 2.3k, 1023 kudos). The soulmate AU I never intended to write! I was so sure this fic wasn’t anything special that seeing all the love it got baffled me so much, but upon re-reading it (and listening to @hptruefan-cheekytorah‘s podfic 😍) I realised I loved it too!

Highest comments: Falling for a Golden Boy (Drarry, 44k, 93 comment threads). My wireless! This fic gave me so many headaches and so many moments of happiness, but ultimately I’m just proud I could prove myself capable of writing a long fic in English--and I’m also so proud of my OC, O’Neill, because she wrote herself out of nowhere and she’s honestly the best.

Highest hits and bookmarks: the above fics again! 2019 clearly has two winners 😂

Below the cut are all the Drarry fics I wrote in 2019 (minus some unfinished collabs), the sole fic I wrote that wasn’t Drarry (it’s Fleur x Cho), and finally the fics I wrote in Spanish. Enjoy!

Drarry fics

Not Rated:

Of Ink and Rhymes (231 words). A collection of Drarry poems written for this year's inktober prompt list.

General Audiences:

You’re the Universe I’m Helpless in (411 words). Draco and Harry stargaze.

Matching Hats (323 words). Harry likes bickering with Draco, but not as much as he likes hugging him.

I Want... You (470 words). Draco and Harry slowly discover that feeling safe has a lot to do with allowing yourself to feel respected. And that includes being allowed the little things in life.

Crumb(ling Willpower) (706 words). Are they just Auror partners? Are they an old bickering couple? Who knows — definitely not them.

As Long as We’re Together (1.9k). Draco and Harry are going through a rough time as parents, but it's okay — they've got each other.

How to Ruin the Perfect Proposal (and Still Get it Right) (2k). When Draco's plans for Harry's birthday end up showered in (quite literal) blood, Draco has to find a quick solution. Featuring spaghetti, hot-air balloons and a proposal ring. (A collab with @drarryruinedme7! 😍)

So You May Remember This (486 words). Draco meets the wrong end of a curse and has to reacquaint himself with his life for a day. (A collab with @tepre 💕)

We Fall Apart, We Rise Together (102 words). The story of how Draco and Harry get together, as told by tree leaves.

Teen and up:

New Year, New Harry (223 words). In which Harry learns that life is a series of starting points.

An Enlightening Session (2k). Harry confesses a secret and makes a decision.

A Golden Ball of Fluff (375 words). “In my defence, Luna said dogs helped with anxiety.”

Hatred? Not Quite (346 words). Just two idiots fighting in detention.

Are You Okay? (1.5k). “Could you come over?”

Only Each Other (419 words). Harry's as lost as the boy crying in his arms. All he can do is hold on tight.

Crucio (3.4k). "It is our choices that show what we truly are." But what about those who don't really have a choice? This is how their journey together starts: with an Unforgivable, a confession and the incessant dripping of a faucet.

Lost Boys (1k). When the first shriek pierced the air, Harry muted it with a groan and a punch to the wall. Draco's pain hurts Harry beyond relief, and Harry's pain hurts Draco, too. At least they have each other to hold on to.

Just Them (100 words). About how painfully easy it can be for them to get together.

What it Takes to Stay and Fight (1.1k). Harry's had enough of Lucius's words worming their way through Draco's head.

Constant Flux (527 words). Harry Potter is the one constant in Draco's life, only each time in a very different way.

The Art of (Not) Being Broken (308 words). Draco reads an article that explains a few things. And so he shares it with Harry.

700 (280 words). A string is broken.

What They Need (388). A few days after the Sectumsempra incident, Harry decides to go to the hospital wing to apologise.

To Save a Soul (376 words). Draco's and Harry's souls bond the moment Harry saves Draco from the Fiendfyre flames. Before any of them realises, Draco is Disapparated to Azkaban, and their soulbond—their souls—broken.

Pumpkin Boy (6.4k). It's Halloween night, and the line that separates Harry's world from the one he truly belongs in dissipates when he meets a peculiar, white-blond boy.

Help Me Remember I’m Free (412 words). Of what happens in Draco's mind during a PTSD flashback.

Everything a Word Can Mean (2.3k). In a world where magical people are born with the nickname their soulmate will call them by tattooed on their skin... what does it mean that the word on Harry's chest is the thing he hates to be called the most?

What Can Be Found (in a Game of Truth or Dare) (8 words + memefic!) Here's what happens when Draco is dared to give Potter a love bite... as told through memes.

Mature:

A Pointy, Posh Grindylow (1.5k). “Why don’t we duel, Malfoy? Just you and me, tonight, in the Room of Requirement.”

Who We Are at Night (708 words). “Just… hold me. Please. That’s what I need.”

A Dream About a Boy (445 words). Draco Malfoy had a very particular dream once. A dream about a boy draped on top of him.

Stubborn as a Cursed Vault (1k). Harry and Draco are assigned a case together. Feelings ensue.

Amortentia [FANART] (203 words). 'I'm going to be just right for you.'

(Mis)calculations (5.6k; WIP). This is how they find each other: at 2 am, in the Eighth year common room. Draco wanting to fall, Harry wanting to sink, and both of them in need of someone to hold on to.

Floppy Socks (359 words). Harry arrives home one day to Draco wearing peculiar socks. Bickering ensues.

When Green Shines (2.4k). The legends say that a fine, red string of fate connects those whose souls are destined for one another. And the legends are true, except the string isn’t always fine and it isn’t always red. It’s different for everybody. For some it’s silk, for some lightning. Some people are connected by a ribbon of clouds, and some by electricity.

So why does Harry’s have to look like the bloody Killing Curse?

Explicit:

Alone at Last (1.9k). All they'd done so far was make out behind library shelves and the occasional groping in the Quidditch showers when they both arrived earlier than their eighth-year team. But today — today everyone had left for Christmas and they had the Gryffindor dormitory to themselves. And so Draco was naked on Harry Potter's bed.

Falling for a Golden Boy (44k). Merlin. Why couldn’t Draco have moved to a forgotten village in the Alps? He could have turned into a shepherd, learned to make his own damn cheese and given up his damn magic. But no, he’d had to come back to his Eighth year, hadn’t he? And this was his life now. Draping himself over Potter to hear words from him that he knew Potter wouldn’t ever mean.Great. The school year ahead of him looked simply great.

“All I know is—when I’m with you, I…” Potter, the heathen, grunted when he read the rest of his line. “Do I really need to say this?”

“What, scared of believing your own words, Scarhead?” Draco spat.

“Boys,” O’Neill warned them.

“All I—all I know is you’re the most amazing person with weak ankles that I've ever met, Meg.” Potter scowled. He was blushing again. “And when I’m with you, I feel less alone.”

Or where a drama play, a grumpy pompom and a bunch of well-intentioned friends help Draco and Harry find peace—and each other—after the war.

Traditional (3k). Harry makes a discovery. Draco makes a promise.

A Glance at the Past (In Our Journey to the Future) (7.6k). It's Christmas Eve. It's also Lucius and Narcissa's last chance to accept Draco and Harry's relationship before they stop trying to make the Malfoys come around and move on with their lives.

Draco also happens to have a plug up his arse. One that Harry can control with his mind.

(You’re a) Revolution (23k). “Will I—Will I see you around?”

Malfoy snorts.

“Careful, Potter,” he murmurs, almost to himself, as his fingers linger on the doorknob. “One might think you actually enjoy my presence.”

Eight years after the end of the war, Draco Malfoy stumbles into Harry’s shop in the middle of a storm—no wand, no backstory; no signs of having lived in the country since the Battle of Hogwarts.

During their first encounter, Harry promises Malfoy—and the words sound like an old mantra—that he'll figure out Draco's secrets eventually.

And then he does. He does, except…it doesn't quite feel like a victory.

Other ships

Smooth as Ice (Fleur/Cho, Gen, 398 words). Cho slips in more than one way.

In Spanish (Drarry)

Estaciones (641 palabras, Gen). Dicen que todo nace, crece y muere.

Como un ciclo.

Como las estaciones.

De tal palo, tal astilla (8.1k, Teen and up). A veces es necesario echar un vistazo al pasado para comprender el presente… y el futuro. (O donde Draco conoce a alguien con quien quejarse de Potter).

Recuerdos que duelen (318 palabras, Teen and up). Dos chicos rotos hablando sobre los recuerdos que los persiguen.

El chico de mis sueños (481 palabras, Mature). En una ocasión, Draco Malfoy soñó algo muy particular: soñó con un chico recostado sobre su pecho.

Calcetines de gelatina (369 palabras, Mature). Harry llega a casa y se encuentra con que Draco lleva puestos unos calcetines peculiares.

Flujo constante (562 palabras, Teen). Harry Potter es la única constante en la vida de Draco, pero de muchas formas diferentes.

Pumpkin Boy (Español) (6.9k, Teen). Una noche de Halloween, la línea que separa el mundo de Harry de aquel al que realmente pertenece se diluye cuando Harry se encuentra con un niño rubio bastante peculiar.

#otpshipper98 #drarry fics #2019 masterlist #drarry #drarry squad #drarry fic rec #my fics #harry potter #draco x harry #harry x draco

78 notes · View notes

goliath-de-senfina-sango · 4 years

Text

Ordering Family Ties

AO3

Coming down from his high was somewhat embarrassing, considering he did so still wrapped around Tucker and muttering in some weird ghost language that humans couldn’t hear. Finding out that he’d told Dash off on camera, and that it had been posted to Viewtube was less embarrassing - though he wasn’t sure how happy he was with the public knowing he’d gotten high since he clearly hadn’t informed anyone that it was accidental. Intoxication gave him divination powers, apparently, because Sidney Poindexter was very soon finding Danny in his own backyard and thanking him for reuniting him with his brother, and also remarking that he was apparently their great-nephew. Danny didn’t realize he’d patted Sidney on the back and waved him off until he was gone. Heading inside, Danny found his father in the cursed items vault - which he really needed to probably clear out before something activated - and cleared his throat. Dad looked up from where he was studying a creepy-looking doll that Danny could see a dull ectoplasmic glow inside of if he tilted his head just so to the left. “Dad, are we related to the Poindexter family by any chance?”

“Absolutely are, Danno!” Dad set the doll down and clapped a hand over Danny’s shoulder. “Your grandmother and her brothers Nicolai and Sidney lived here. The place had some bad memories after Sidney’s … violent death.” If it was bad enough that Jack Fenton himself tried to figure out how best to phrase it, Danny didn’t wanna know. It wasn’t his place to go asking around about another ghost’s cause of death anyway. “Mom and uncle Nicolai moved out as soon as they could. Uncle Nic was pretty good with technology - even inspired me to start inventing! He had an accident though.” Dad looked oddly melancholy for a moment and gave Danny’s shoulder a squeeze. “Why do you ask?”

“Do you have pictures of either of them?” This was important and Danny couldn’t approach this too recklessly.

The orange giant shrugged. “Probably in the shed. I’ll look for em and we can reminisce about them together!” Dad patted Danny’s back a couple times and Danny gave him a thumbs up, heading back up the stairs as soon as he could.

“Thanks, Dad!” When he got to his room, Danny huffed and leaned against the door. “Talking with Dad about ghosts, family, and morality will have to wait till he actually gets to the scrapbooks or something. That’s fine. What to do about this weirdness until then?” For a long few moments, Danny paced in the air of his room, doing his best to exercise his powers while in human form in case he ever needed to use them like that. And then it hit him, the realization that he could rub his relationships to the ghosts in their faces. Or at least one of them in particular.

Dropping down to his desk, Danny grabbed a notebook, found a pencil, and got to writing.

The Infinite Realms was an expansive void of metaphysical energy and pandimensional pseudo-matter that went on in every direction, including ones that human minds were incapable of perceiving and the recently deceased struggled to make sense of due to the human brain template their soul initially worked with. It had, however, rather solid topography as far as Danny could tell. His own map of the place - the 2-dimensional one that only accounted for horizontal movement - was rather reliable after all this time exploring it when he felt it was safe to do so. So, it took about no time at all to find Walker’s prison and slip in. Considering that Walker himself was also among the relatively recently dead who didn’t do well with thinking beyond 3 dimensions, Danny found his moments of temporary slip and sliding along consciousness and through the countless dimensions available to him for movement the perfect method of sneaking past all the guards into said prison. The walls were constructed simply, and all Danny really had to do was move along one of Earth’s dimensional axis more than the rest.

When he found Walker’s office and the warden himself absent, Danny took a seat in the man’s chair and slid into this lair’s particular scope of reality. It didn’t take long for Walker to return, by which time Danny had found that replicating the thing he’d apparently done where he made constructs out of ectoplasm besides shields was endlessly easier done in the Infinite Realms than it was on Earth. Probably the ectoplasm everywhere. “Boy what in tarnation are you doing in my office and in my chair?”

“Sitting, waiting, lounging, doing art.” Danny dismissed the tesseract he’d made, hoping it didn’t draw Boxy’s attention. He drew his arms up onto the desk and grinned at the skeletal warden, letting the accent his Mom sometimes let slip through come out full force. “Ya see, James Lamont, I came across a rather interesting thought.”

Walker crossed the room in less than a second, Danny ducking out of the way of his fist by half a hair. He flew up to the ceiling and chuckled. “How the hell did you learn that name, delinquent?”

“Oh my ma, Madeline Paige Walker Fenton, told me about you.” The warden froze, gawking at him, and Danny pulled out a journal of his. “Anyways, I had a thought. You get on me about violating rules of yours that probably don’t even genuinely apply because between Clockwork and the Observants and Dora, I struggle to believe that you have any real authority beyond your prison and the ghosts that you can manage to arrest on nonsense violations of rules constantly changing on your merest whim. Yet, you come into my town and fail to acknowledge my rules or the rules of the town known as laws.” Walker was glaring again now, eyes burning bright. Danny clucked his tongue. “Quite a misstep for a lawman such as yourself, gramps.”

“There aren’t any laws that I broke, Daniel, and I promise you I have plenty enough authority. That comes from power, boy, in this world and the living one.”

“Power grated by all the people that give it to you. On both sides.” Danny rolled his eyes. “And overshadowing a bunch of people while invading the town to capture one of its citizens is definitely illegal. Regardless, unlike you I’m not gonna be too harsh about someone violating rules they didn’t know were there.” Danny tossed the book at Walker’s face, only pouting a little bit when he caught it. “Violation of those rules will result in being stuck in the thermos for increments of time that increase with every offense. Huh. Take that Lancer, I’ve got a wide vocabulary.”

“You still owe me 2,000 years in this prison, Daniel, and I-”

“Never call me that, you haven’t earned it family or not,” Danny said with a cheerful grin and brilliant blue glow at his fingertips. “Also, Aunt Alicia and Mom miss you. They didn’t say as much but I could tell. I’m good with emotions. Bye, Grandpa!” Danny flashed some finger guns and slid entirely out of sync with Walker’s prison. He could still hear the screams of rage, but he was already on his way to go visit Frostbite by the time he was any semblance of tangible to Walker. “Being friends with a scientist ghost has the best perks.”

#Danny Phantom #Danny Fenton #Sidney Poindexter #Jack Fenton #James Lamont Walker #Walker (Danny Phantom)#fanfiction #Phantom Family AU #Phamily AU #Rexy Writes

38 notes · View notes

carewyncromwell · 4 years

Text

Hi, everybody! So the Adventures in Curse-breaking side quest was...absolutely wonderful. The prize is fantastic -- the animation of the dragons is awesome -- the new preserve location and the interior of the tent have the most wonderful ambient music -- and it features love for Charlie and Bill, who as most of you know are two of my favorites! I might’ve switched out Penny with Liz (given that, like Barnaby, she’s so into magical creatures and we could use more material for her in the game), but even with that nitpick, I think this quest may be one of my favorites so far, right up there with Chiara and Talbott’s friendship quests.

It is, however, a very dialogue-heavy quest with a good chunk of filler in between the awesome stuff, and writing full roleplaying posts for the entire thing would take up a LOT of time. So just like with my Meet the Malfoys quest post, I’ll be writing this in a more condensed, fic-like format. Because there’s so much more material to work with compared to the Malfoy quest, however, this post will be broken up into four parts all tagged “Adventures in Curse-Breaking”, complete with screenshots and gifs from the game, as we follow my MC Carewyn Cromwell, her honorary brothers Bill and Charlie, Barnaby, Merula, and Penny to the Romanian Dragon Sanctuary!

Hope you enjoy! xoxo

Bill’s second meet-up with the sixth years ended up being more of a question-and-answer session about Cursebreaking and Defense Against the Dark Arts in general rather than a set lesson. Charlie had half-jokingly whispered in Carewyn’s ear that it was likely Bill was still in the process of drawing up lesson plans, and although Carewyn thought there was a good chance of it, she didn’t think Bill opening the floor for questions was a bad idea. After all, Merula had expressed interest in being a Cursebreaker, and any anti-Dark Arts information would be helpful to a future Auror like Tonks. (Carewyn once again thought of trying to coax Talbott to join Bill’s sessions too. She knew he preferred to “fly solo,” but she wanted him to become an Auror just as much as he himself wanted it!)

It was only toward the end of their session that Bill -- mostly to poke at Charlie for getting distracted whispering to Carewyn -- brought up his next mission, which his boss Griphook had said would involve dragons.

Of course Charlie’s ears had perked up like a puppy’s at the mention of dragons, and he immediately was interested in accompanying Bill on his mission. The eldest Weasley son, however, turned Charlie down, clearly regretting that he’d brought it up at all. He quickly dismissed the sixth years and excused himself from the classroom, but Charlie wasn’t having it. Agreeing that Bill could use some help if he had to deal with a bunch of dragons, Carewyn quickly changed clothes and accompanied her unofficial twin to Diagon Alley.

Carewyn hadn’t ever been to Gringotts without her mother before. The wizarding bank had always felt so massive to her, not just for its mile-high, vaulted ceilings, but in how the voices of the goblin tellers and witches and wizards in front of the counters echoed seemingly endlessly up toward the ceiling. Despite the ethereal light emanating off the lanterns on every desk and the sparkling diamond chandeliers overheard, the chamber still never felt completely lit. Shadows clung to every pillar and window frame, and the light of the lanterns pooled off the dark, patterned marble pillars, making them resemble rippling, murky green water as you walked past them.

Bill was very surprised to see the two gingers there. He’d tried to reproach them for ambushing him at work, which made Carewyn feel a bit guilty -- Charlie, however, felt no shame at all.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have run off in the middle of a conversation like that,” he’d said dryly. “Then we wouldn’t have had to chase after you.”

Carewyn offered Bill a kinder look. “I know you’re working, Bill -- but if your next assignment involves dragons, you know we can help.”

Bill’s boss, Griphook, took in the exchange with dry interest. Keeping a beady eye on both Carewyn and Charlie, he explained the mission more clearly to Bill. The goal was to recover a golden egg created by the goblin Urguff the Unwary and stolen by a dragon that mistook it for one of her own and was now suspected to have settled in the Romanian Dragon Sanctuary. The goblin then encouraged Bill that if “these two humans” could assist him in researching dragons, then it might be wise to accept their offer of help. Bill agreed, and the three gingers met at the Hog’s Head to research the various breeds of dragons one might encounter at the Romanian Sanctuary. Bill was stubborn, however, in keeping their meeting focused solely on research.

“I appreciate you helping me study up on dragons,” he’d said firmly, “but I’m sorry, I’m not taking you on my mission.”

Carewyn would’ve respected Bill’s feelings on the matter, given that this was his job and he deserved to do it his own way...but she knew how much Charlie wanted to go with him, and admittedly she was worried for Bill’s safety, going to a preserve full of dragons all by himself. Charlie himself was just as bullheaded as Bill was, but in the opposite direction.

“If you’re going to that sanctuary, then I’m going with you -- no arguments,” he’d shot back.

Seeing the impasse the two brothers were at, Carewyn immediately moved into “compromise” mode. Bill had already said that he’d have to cancel one of his sessions at Hogwarts in order to complete this mission, and facing so many dragons alone would be way too dangerous, even for a full-grown wizard...so why not kill two birds with one stone by having Charlie, her, and a few other sixth-year students come with Bill to help him find the egg? That way, if Bill needed to stun a dragon at any point, there would be at least two other people shooting Stunning Spells with him.

“Dragons can only be taken down with multiple Stunning spells,” Carewyn reminded him. “You wouldn’t be able to take one down on your own, if you got cornered. I only got lucky with the one in the Vault -- that one was already in bad shape before I faced it. These dragons...they’re in a preserve. They’ll have been treated well. And because they’re protected by Wizarding Law, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to use any spells that could really hurt them, like the Conjunctivitis Curse. Half the reason the dragon in the Vault didn’t kill me was because it couldn’t see me.”

Bill clearly hated how much sense Carewyn was making. His protective big brother instincts fought with his interest in completing his mission, but at long last, he relented.

Carewyn and Charlie got Barnaby, Penny, and Merula on board, and the group visited Hagrid to borrow his camping tent and get some general camping advice and Kettleburn to get some instruction on dragon safety. That Friday, the five sixth-years gathered at the Training Grounds to meet Bill.

It had been so eerie to meet Bill, Charlie, and Merula at the Training Grounds so they could leave Hogwarts via Portkey. For a second, Carewyn felt her shoulders tensing up and her blood freezing as if she was going back into the Portrait Vault. It was only seeing Barnaby and Penny’s faces instead of Rakepick and Ben’s that made her feel the least bit grounded again, even as she took hold of the Portkey and the six of them were flung off their feet and spun around faster and faster and faster --

When they arrived at their destination, Carewyn felt her breath still in her throat.

There were massive trees as far as the eye could see -- dramatic cliffs and mountains dotted the horizon -- the air was so fresh and light, dusted with the scent of pine and burnt oak -- and then overhead, soaring with their wings wide right over them, were dozens of massive, majestic dragons.

It was beautiful.

Carewyn grinned from ear to ear seeing how happy Charlie was. She’d always thought dragons were cool, but her admiration of the creatures had nothing on what her fellow Fireball thought of them. Carewyn had always loved listening to her friends talk about their greatest passions, and Charlie was no exception.

It was quickly decided that it would be best to set up camp and start searching for the golden egg the next morning. As safe as Carewyn thought they’d be with the defensive magical wards she’d put up, she and Bill both thought that searching a dragon preserve at night was still riskier than it was probably worth. Soon the group had set up camp and -- on Barnaby’s suggestion -- started roasting marshmallows over a roaring campfire.

Barnaby immediately proposed sharing scary stories. Penny was reluctant; Carewyn herself didn’t love being scared herself and she didn’t want to upset Penny, but she reassured the blond Hufflepuff all the same.

“Sometimes it’s fun to be a little scared -- especially when you know those things aren’t real and can’t hurt you,” Carewyn had told her. “I mean, you’re with your friends. You know we wouldn’t let anything hurt you.”

Merula gave a sharp bark of a laugh.

Her voice was noticeably softer than normal, which startled Carewyn. The Slytherin Prefect hadn’t really included Merula in her mind when she’d said that, but...the look on Merula’s face made Carewyn feel almost guilty that she hadn’t. She was very glad that Barnaby started right into his scary story about the Bloody Broom.

Carewyn was actually getting really into Barnaby’s story before the roar of a dragon flying a mere four feet over their heads made the entire group duck, even as the defensive wards around the camp effectively kept the dragon’s tail or claws from touching them.

“Let’s go inside,” Carewyn said quickly, trying to will down her own heart rate as she looked over her companions’ identical white faces.

To Be Continued...

#adventures in cursebreaking #carewyn cromwell #jacob's sibling #hphm #hogwarts mystery #charlie weasley #bill weasley #merula snyde #barnaby lee #penny haywood #griphook #dragons #gifs #gameplay #roleplaying #my writing

12 notes · View notes

ernmark · 5 years

Note

heyo!!! m sorry to bother, and I understand if it would be too much work, but would u mind recapping what happened between Juno and Peter? I have pretty bad memory problems and no time to listen to it all again like i wanna, so i’m just sad for boys but also confused lmao

It’s not a bother at all!

(Actually, it’s a whole lot easier for me to write a post like this than to do original writing, so I’m especially happy to do it).

If you have any questions or need any clarification, just let me know and I’d be happy to elaborate!

So a super quick review of Juno and Peter’s history together:

Juno Steel and the Murderous Mask:

Peter was hired by a deranged Xenoanthropologist-turned-Martian-Furry named Miasma to steal an Ancient Martian death mask from a local mob/reality TV family, the Kanagawas. When his first attempt was thwarted by a murder, he returned to the scene of the crime disguised as Agent Rex Glass of Dark Matters (the Solar System’s super shady FBI organization), but the Kanagawas would only let him near the crime scene if he was accompanied by Juno.

Lots and lots of flirtation was had. They were trapped in a closet together, Peter punched Juno down a hallway at Juno’s request, they fought off a bunch of genetically engineered monsters together, Juno took a pretty nasty hit for Peter, and Peter tenderly stitched him up while making a teasing remark about “playing doctor”. During all of this, Juno quietly deduced the truth about the real murderer, and about Peter’s role as the original thief of the mask. In the big parlor scene at the end, they worked together to subdue the murderer.

Peter then persuaded Juno to take him back to his apartment, probably fully intending to bed him and then sneak out with the mask during the night. He pulled Juno into a kiss, sneaking the keys to Juno’s safe (where the mask was kept) out of his coat while Juno was distracted. Unfortunately for him, Juno wasn’t distracted. He’d figured out Peter’s game a while ago, and used Peter’s distraction to get him into handcuffs and call the cops.

Peter wasn’t fazed by any of this (more turned on, really), and so he offered to run away with Juno, so the two of them could go adventuring together. Juno refused and let the cops take him away. When he was gone, he found a note left behind, in which Peter assured him that he really did want them to run away together, and signed it “your better half, Peter Nureyev”. He then made his escape.

Juno Steel and the Midnight Fox:

This is the latest of several episodes in which Peter has been stealing artifacts for Miasma and Juno has been hunting the two of them down, over the course of which Juno swallowed a Martian pill that gave him very costly mind-reading powers.

After all his leads dried up, Juno went to a local art smuggler, Valles Vicky, and did a case for her in exchange for help from one of her contacts. At the end of the case she called the contact, and it turned out to be Peter. Peter made his entrance by breaking into Juno’s apartment and waiting for him to turn on the light before he announced himself, because he’s dramatic like that, and then dragged Juno off on another adventure.

His first words to Juno since Murderous Mask: “Hello, Juno. It’s been a while.”

Juno Steel and the Train from Nowhere:

They drove directly from Juno’s apartment to the Oasis Casino in the middle of the desert, where Peter had an appointment to play a high-stakes game of Ragnian Street Poker with retired hack jewel thief Brock Engstrom. In order to get Juno in the room with Engstrom and his bodyguard, Nuryev introduced the two of them as Duke and Dahlia Rose, a husband-and-husband duo of bright-eyed jewel thieves from the Outer Rim. He even bought Juno a lovely suit as part of the disguise, which Juno took particular offense to.

Peter and Engstrom gambled secrets, with the stakes being that Juno would be killed if Peter lied about any of the secrets he revealed. Juno took offense to that, too, but Peter insisted that he would give up all his own secrets and weaknesses before he let that happen.

After some further surliness and poor communication skills between the two of them, Juno figured out that Engstrom was cheating, and together they were able to force Engstrom to reveal the secret of the Utgard Express high-speed vault.

Things were going great and they were heading back to their shared hotel room with a questionable number of beds, but Juno had to be Juno and he accused Peter of taking secret orders to murder him. Peter pointed out that the “secret orders” were in fact very bad doodles, and that Juno was being a jackass, and he went to bed.

That night, an assassin tried to murder them, so the two of them had to make a break for it, and they wound up stealing Engstrom’s car, the Ruby 7 (previously owned by Jet Siquiliak of the Pirate Crew). They made it onto the Utgard Express, but were caught by Brock Engstrom and his bodyguard in the process. More adventures were had, more flirting happened, and Engstrom’s bodyguard made Juno especially nervous about his feelings for Peter. So as soon as the two of them were defeated and our heroes stole what they needed to get, Juno lashed out and tried to distance himself again.

Just as they were making their escape, they found themselves cornered by Miasma, who had hijacked the Ruby 7 for herself. She ordered Juno into the car at gunpoint, and then intended to murder Peter and leave him in the desert to rot. Using his very painful mind-reading powers, Juno realized that she needed him alive, so he threatened to kill himself if she harmed Peter. Miasma agreed to let Peter live, but to bring him with them as leverage over Juno.

Peter Nureyev and the Angel of Brahma:

Miasma took Juno and Peter to an Ancient Martian tomb deep underground, where she’d set up a lab and bunker. There she proceeded to force Juno to probe Peter’s mind for multiple tests of his (very, very painful) mind reading powers. Peter often insisted that Juno take time to rest, but Miasma tortured Peter during these lulls in order to motivate Juno to continue. Typically Juno worked himself until he lost consciousness, and then they’d be dragged back to their cell.

This continued for somewhere between days and weeks.

When Miasma got dissatisfied with Juno’s progress, she forced him to go into Peter’s memories, where he witnessed Peter murdering Mag. This seriously freaked him out, but Miasma insisted that he continue or else she would start cutting off bits of Peter for motivation. Juno relented, and kept watching until he passed out.

When Juno woke up, he was messed up by what he’d seen, but wasn’t ready to talk about it. Peter asked him why he’d never bothered to look into his backstory before, and Juno admitted that he was afraid of what he’d find. Peter insisted that he look into Peter’s memories now and see it for himself, and he could make his decisions about Peter then– whether Peter was worth his time, or whether they would part forever after all this was over. Juno nervously agreed, and he looked back into Peter’s mind on his own terms (while holding hands with Peter. I feel this is important.)

He witnessed the events on Brahma, where teenage Peter and his adopted father Mag attempted to stop the tyrannical leaders on New Kinshasa from murdering petty criminals with their flying laser city of death. They infiltrated New Kinshasa as Mag and Peter Ransom and made their way to the reactor core of the city, and got as far as stealing it… only in the process, Peter learned that disabling the city’s lasers would also wind up killing everyone in the city, and mass murder was really not something he was okay with. During the argument, Mag revealed that he’d been lying about all the things he’d said to motivate Peter– he’d say whatever was necessary to win Peter over to his cause. Peter was horrified and demanded Mag give back the reactor core. When Mag refused, Peter murdered him and replaced the reactor core, saving the people of New Kinshasa. He was caught in the act and identified as Peter Nureyev, and he used his capture to essentially hold the entire city hostage, threatening to bring it down if they continued their reign of terror. He then made his escape, but his true name was forever linked to the ransom of New Kinshasa.

During all of this, Juno went too deep and was having some major health complications, and Peter panicked and called the guards for help. After they assured him that Juno was okay, he knocked them out (killed them?) and attempted to drag Juno out, but Juno was too heavy to carry and in too much pain to leave under his own power. Peter made his own escape, swearing to return for Juno.

Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place

Miasma got what she needed from Juno, and she decided to finally execute him. At the last second, Peter (disguised as one of Miasma’s minions), shot her and the other minion and rescued Juno in a very heroic fashion.

Together they ventured deeper into the tomb in order to find one of Miasma’s artifacts, the bomb that wiped out the Ancient Martians, so that they could destroy it. Once they got inside, though, they found Miasma there, mysteriously still alive. Turns out she’d spliced herself with Ancient Martian DNA, and was now effectively immortal and a whole lot more eldritch.

They fought her, all the while figuring out her plan: she was going to hide in the bunker alone and use the bomb to wipe out all other life on Mars, because she’s charming like that.

The bomb’s countdown was triggered, and Juno dove into Miasma’s memories in order to find out how to deactivate it. He pushed himself too hard, though, and his mind-reading powers destroyed his right eye in the process. He did, however, come up with a plan. He pushed Peter out the airlock and locked himself and Miasma inside with the bomb, keeping her away from it so she couldn’t escape or get rid of the bomb. While Peter desperately begged Juno to open the door, Juno admitted that Peter was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that his one regret was not taking Peter up on his offer to run away together.

The bomb went off, and Miasma was killed. Juno, however, wasn’t: the bomb was only meant to kill Ancient Martians, as a form of mass suicide for their hive mind species, and had no effect on humans. Juno, who was more than suicidal at this point and wanted nothing more than to go out with a big heroic blaze of glory, was in shock that his last hurrah was taken from him. And also in shock about literally everything else that had happened to him in the past week.

Peter kissed him, took him back to a clinic (unfortunately, they couldn’t save Juno’s eye), and then back to a hotel in Hyperion City. He acknowledged that Juno had said what he had in the heat of the moment, and he didn’t have to go with Peter if he didn’t want to. Juno assured him that he did want to (oddly specific wording on his part). Overjoyed, Peter took Juno to bed, and a sexy time was had by all.

Afterward, Juno stayed up to watch Peter sleep, then rolled out of bed, put his clothes on, and walked back into his office. On his way out, he heard Peter murmur his name in his sleep, content that he and Juno would embark on their grand adventure in the morning.

#the penumbra podcast #a quick and somewhat messy recap of season 1's romantic plot points #nootiemytootie #100

127 notes · View notes

oldmanatom · 4 years

Text

Fallout OC seven day S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

so i saw this post cross my dash with a bunch of questions based on S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats, and i thought it was neat so i filled it out! and also stole the idea from @quickscribe to just do all the prompts at once and put it in a single post, so thank you for that. check it out below the cut:

this is all for Trinidad, my F4 PC who i haven’t talked about since 2016 so if you’re like “who the fuck is that” that’s 100% valid.

Day 1 - Strength

How physically strong is your OC? strong enough to haul her smallish pack of stuff around the wasteland, but not much stronger. she’d be able to pull herself up off a ledge, depending on how far off it she was and the angle she was hanging at, but she’s not doing pullups on the reg.

How good are they in melee or hand to hand combat? she’s competent enough to be able to defend herself if pressed, but typically prefers working with guns, not her hands. even CQC with pistols is preferable to a knife fight.

Do they just punch things or are they trained in martial arts? lord knows the Shady Pre-War Paramilitary Organization that she ran with threw just about every martial art form at her they could, but nothing’s been able to break her of the brawler fighting style she learned from her younger days. there’s little finesse but a lot of fast, hard punches and dirty fighting.

Can they carry very heavy guns around easily or carry loads of supplies, or are they not that strong? she only carries two guns—a pistol and a hunting rifle, to give her some flexibility with range—plus a fairly straightforward set of gear: food, water, whatever limited medical supplies she can scrape up, bedding, miscellaneous light survival tools (flint/steel, etc.). she’s not a pack mule, but her pre-War days gave her enough experience trekking around geared up to where she can handle her relatively light loadout with some flexibility if she finds something worth taking with her.

Day 2 - Perception

How good is your OC’s eyesight? Can they see well in low light conditions? very good. low light can be touchy, depending on the situation, but she’s got stellar eyesight overall.

How quickly or slowly do they notice anything suspicious? if something weird is happening, chances are she already knows about it. she’s been around the block enough to know to keep her eyes open always, not to mention the times that her perceptiveness and paranoia has been the only thing that made certain bad situations turn out in her favor.

How good is their aim? with a gun, very good. not surprising, since her pre-War job was being good at shooting, but while it’s something she’s been extensively trained on she also has something of a natural proficiency for it. (this combined with her eyesight made her pre-War employer try and tap her for their sniper training/positions, but she doesn’t quite have the patience or head for numbers that snipers need.)

How do they see the world around them? suspiciously at best. she was very-shellshocked once she came out of stasis, then disappointed once she started to get her feet under her and saw how much things have changed, and how much they haven’t. she holds things at a distance from her and tries to look at things objectively, though the line between “objective” and “dissociating to avoid having emotions” is a blurry one for her.

Day 3 - Endurance

What is your OC’s overall fitness level? is anyone really “fit” in a wasteland...? she’s fed, though not well most of the time, and with enough rest and resource management she’s generally able to do the physically demanding things that her journey through Boston demands of her.

How long can they exert themselves before tiring? depends on the activity. regular walking and traversing through ruins she can do for a good chunk of the day, though not at a breakneck pace and with some breaks. her age + extended sleep are starting to wear down on how well she can handle short bursts of frenzied activity and how long she needs to recover after them. she’s not pulling all-nighters except when absolutely necessary, and even then she’s feeling the effects far more than she remembers feeling them before the freeze.

Are they good at swimming, sprinting, running or climbing? aerobic exercise is Trinidad’s mortal enemy.

How well can they adapt to environmental pressures? she can grit her teeth and bear a lot of things, to an extent, but the toll they take on her once she’s through it is high. she’s not getting through a blizzard, sleeping for the night, and popping up the next day right as rain. the radiation also hits her harder than it does for the folks who were born post-War, and any higher-than-(post-War)-normal exposure to it tends to make her sick for days. (her initial days out of stasis actually were mostly spent dealing with lowish-grade radiation sickness until she finally adjusted, but even now she generally feels worse than normal if she spends too long in Boston proper.)

Day 4 - Charisma

How persuasive is your OC? about as persuasive as a brick wall. she’s never been particularly charismatic, and her line of work relied on her ability to be tough, quick, accurate, and quiet, not charming. to say her persuasion skills are rusty would be generous. outside of that, she’s blunt as a bat and hates verbal subterfuge—she just wants to ask a question and get a straightforward answer, not get run around in circles.

How easily can they obtain information that others may be less willing or inclined to share? well, if threats, intimidation, and a moderate amount of physical violence are on the table, than somewhat easily. otherwise, not easily at all.

How much verbal charm do they have? zippo. she makes up for it by not talking much.

Can they carry themselves with confidence? now this? she can absolutely do. partially it’s because she doesn’t talk much and had good posture drilled into her from said Shady Paramilitary Org, but she also has the air of someone who can’t be fucked with, because, well, she’s spent a lot of her life becoming someone who can’t be fucked with, for better and worse.

Day 5 - Intelligence

Can your OC read, write and do basic math? yes, though she’s never been a big math person. reading and writing are kind of whatever for her—she wasn’t much into reading before the War, but now that there’s precious little else to do to relax, she’s gotten more into it, and writing letters is about the only writing she really does much of.

What was the basis of their education i.e. were they formally educated or did they have to learn as they went? she dropped out of high school her senior year, though the two to three years preceding that she wasn’t exactly going very often, doing very well, or participating in the process much when she did show up. most of the knowledge she uses day-to-day has come from her growing up mostly unsupervised in the rougher areas of her neighborhood, training through Shady Paramilitary Org, and experience going to sketchy places and doing dangerous things.

Do they favour brains over brawn? a mix of both, with a little more emphasis on brawn, or at least on physical skills. she’s learned better than to go in firing, and typically likes to hang back and gather intel before acting, but she’s the kind of person where, if tasked with finding out about some illicit cover up, would break in and steal documents about it, not try and trick the target into giving info up. she likes the informed-but-straightforward solution to a situation, even if it’s not the one that looks the prettiest at the end of the day.

How good are they with technology? she’s good at figuring out how things work, as well as general repairs, especially things that are mechanical (versus electronics). as for using technology, she has basic knowledge of enough tech to get a sense for how something works and how to use it, but doesn’t necessarily rely on it much in her day-to-day life. the Pip-Boy she’s kept from Vault 111 is about the most advanced thing she uses daily, and even then, she mostly uses it for the map and the built-in Geiger counter.

Day 6 - Agility

How fast can your OC react to sudden changes? she’s quick to react to them physically—her life has very often depended on her reacting first to something—but her mind and emotions typically take a bit to catch up.

How good are they in combat situations where they are constantly moving? good enough to have survived 15 years worth of combat situations where she has to move quickly.

Are they quick on the draw with their weapons or not? very quick. though she’s more experienced with longer range weapons that can’t exactly be “stowed” quickly or easily, her time in Boston is really refining her CQC skills, quick-drawing being one of them.

Can they manoeuvre quickly around a slower assailant? for the most part! but she’s not particularly well-versed in judo-like movement redirection—she’s the kind of person that would likely try to deflect a blow or take it in a way that doesn’t stagger/hurt as much versus try to use the striker’s momentum against them. (she’s not the largest, most physically sturdy person, either, so this instinct has fucked her over more than once.) she’s not the fastest footed fighter, but she knows how to use what speed she might have to her advantage, and she’s perceptive and quick enough on her feet to use the environment against her attacker as well.

Day 7 - Luck

How fortunate (or not) overall is your OC? middle of the road. she’s not blessed, but not cursed, either.

Do they seem to stumble upon necessary supplies easily or never seem to find what they need? kind of a crapshoot, but middle of the road as well, for the most part.

Have they survived an injury that, had it been someone else, would have been fatal? not yet...

Do good things or bad things happen more around them? i would say she tends to find herself in bad situations and dealing with bad things more often than not, but i don’t know if it’s a matter of luck, necessarily—before the War, it was because that was just the kind of life she lived, and post-War she’s not exactly keeping herself out of the way of bad situations, though she’s not getting sent straight into them anymore, either.

#fallout oc seven day special #poor mutants down on their luck #shoot straight and run #did NOT see OP's note that the questions are more for guidance vs actually being. the things to answer lmao #and now that i've done it like this i'm like...hm...don't really want to go back and add more...love leaving gaps in my stuff...#idk if i'm going to write anything with trinidad but i like thinking abt what she'd be like if i actually. y'know. did something with her

4 notes · View notes