#baseline superhuman

[supersaiyanjedi14]

RWBY Combat Analysis: Zwei

"Bork, bork!"

PHYSICAL: Tier 1, Baseline Superhuman

Fur for superior insulation, enhances senses, additional forms of attack by way of his claws, and four limbs that can function for the same purposes. Self explanatory.

MARTIAL: Tier 1, Complete Mastery

Casually tearing through Grimm and Atlas combat drones like a hot knife through butter, all with a smile on his face. Find me another combatant who approaches battle with this degree of ease and finesse.

SPECIAL: Tier 1, Dominating Combat

Seriously, how else do you explain this? How else can you do this unless you are a nigh-omnipotent godlike being? Trick question, you can't!

OVERALL: TIER 1, SUPER HUNTSMAN

Need I say more? Zwei the Corgi is unquestionably one of the most powerful combatants, not only in Vale, but in the entire RWBY setting. Everything about this being highlights how he could annihilate many of the premier masters of the era even if they were working together against him. As it stands, the only reason the war with Salem has lasted as long as it has is because this mighty warrior has yet to meet his quota of walks and scritches, but should that quota ever be met, woe betide those who stand in the way of the Goodest Boy!

*all images taken from RWBY wiki*

April Fools!

#rwby #rwby combat analysis #zwei #rwby zwei #beacon academy #baseline superhuman #complete mastery #dominating combat

[just-rainbow-thoughts]

So like, either this whole world runs on cartoon physics, the tower Just Does That to those who reside in it, or something’s definitely up with peppino

Man can run at possibly mach speeds though that may just be an exaggeration and can keep running indefinitely, can survive ramming headfirst into a wall at said speed and possibly not even do lasting damage to himself, can run up walls, is able to pummel someone up into the sky, can survive hitting the top of the tower at terminal velocity, and do whatever the frick that superjump is

Now I’m sure we can chalk this up to cartoon logic but come on man, a middle aged man can only take so much, even with cartoon physics

And sure, we can say the tower did it, but we still see him running frickoff fast in the intro cutscene before he even gets to the tower, and continues with the ascending pizza pummel even long after leaving proximity of the tower, so something ain’t adding up

So like, yeah, to reiterate, cartoon/game physic copout explanation, the tower greatly exaggerates already present skills, or peppino truly is built different my vote is one of the latter two

#yeah so ​I got thinking last night #pizza tower #bit of a tag ramble below #I wanna see stuff that alludes to him being not completely regular #like we got a bunch of regular people doing stuff within regular bodily limits #and then we see Middle-aged Superhuman Peppino Fucking Spaghetti outrunning a bus as part of his morning run #if he didn’t need the scooter for his work he’d run to the dang pizzeria on his own straight from his apartment #I wanna know if he has any limits if we go the superhuman route #or his baseline skills if we go the tower exaggeration route #types this up before bed but posting it now because I went to sleep at 6 #you Are allowed to make something based off my tag rambling and if you do I would Love to see it #yo congrats for making it to the end have this 🍕

[viktoriamagrey]

Hope is for the Brave

People say hope is weak; easily snuffed out. That hopeful people will become jaded; that “hopeless idealists” are a temporary state. Hope, despite its deceptively gentle nature, isn’t meant to be held like a shield, but a blade. Hope is meant to be fiercely held on to and stubbornly unsheathed like steel from its scabbard. Hope is not a fading desire; it’s the greatest tool to a fighting soul. Hope should be looked at in the places it thrives in; not the ones it fades away in. Don’t look to the hopeless dreamers that shatter like crystal when their hope turns to dust and slips through their hands, then point to hope as if hope was a broken lifeline. Do not go looking for hope in the hands of the people it doesn’t belong in. Hope belongs in the courageous, and shines in the hearts of the warriors who are strong enough to wield it. Hope is the fuel of a healthy soul; and it flourishes in the grasp of undying faith. Hope is the strength of a human who can always look to the stars, even when the darkness is clouding their eyes. Hope is for the brave.

#Comment: #I fear this works much better illustrated. #(I will probably do so later on) #The tone reads rather harshly #My point is not that one must be a superhuman that never feels lost #Or that losing hope is only for the weak-hearted. #My point is that broken hope is not the baseline. #Losing hope is something that happens. #But the ability to hold on even after you've already had everything fall apart around you IS the essence of hope. #It is this valor that makes a warrior - that makes someone brave. #In my head I imagine the hopeless dreamer to be the brave persn mentioned. They are one in the same... #...As long as they have the courage to get back up. #poetry #original quote #original poem #hope #original text post #my text #my poetry

[statsbot]

In the shadowed alleys and glittering high-rises of this peculiar metropolis, the term "human-type entity" is used in hushed whispers to refer to those uncanny beings that walk among the populace wearing human guises. They may look like your neighbor, your barista, or the unassuming office worker in the cubicle next to yours - but beneath that carefully crafted veneer of normalcy lies something unmistakably other.

Many of these entities are refugees or expatriates from strange realms beyond the veil of mundane reality. Places with names like the Gossamer Reaches, Hex-Nail Underworld, or the Shimmering Interstices between dimensions. Some are exiles, fleeing persecution or ancient blood-feuds. Others are here by choice, drawn to the neon allure and ceaseless buzz of mortal life in the big city. A rare few were even born here, hybrids with one foot in the mythic and one in the mundane.

Outwardly, a human-type entity appears no different from a baseline Homo sapiens. Two arms, two legs, one head - all the standard equipment in the usual places. They sweat, bleed, and bruise just like any other city-dweller. But spend enough time around one and you may start to notice the little tells. An odd sheen to the eyes, a double-jointed fluidity of motion, teeth a bit too sharp to be natural. When angered, their skin may ripple with bioluminescent patterns or tiny thorns. Their laughter has an eerie, ululating resonance.

Inwardly is where the radical differences become apparent. Psychic MRIs (a hush-hush procedure conducted only by The Agency's extradimensional med-techs) reveal brain structures and neurochemistry vastly divergent from humans. Clusters of neural tissue that shouldn't be possible, glands secreting peptides that don't show up on any periodic table, nerve bundles that terminate in microscopic event horizons.

Some manifest superhuman aptitudes - a "Gray Collar" who can calculate complex algorithms in their head, a back-alley surgeon with intimate knowledge of xeno-anatomies, a demure librarian who reads at a page a second and never forgets a word. Others wield innate magic they call "Miracles" - a fiery-eyed dockworker who can heft shipping containers, an unaging lounge singer with a mesmerizing voice, a beat cop who heals with a touch.

All this strangeness is cloaked behind the Masquerade, a vast conspiracy of secrecy upheld by the human-types themselves, by The Agency that monitors them, and by the megalithic corporations who find them useful. To the average citizen, they are invisible - just more faces in the crowd. Only those who know how to spot the signs (or who are foolish enough to go looking) discover that "human" is a rather flexible category…

So when you pass a stranger on the rain-slick sidewalks of Neon City and feel the hairs on your neck prickle, when the dry cleaner returns your suit with an odor of brimstone and alien spices, when your co-worker casually references the Siege of Vys during a meeting, pay attention. The human-type entities walk among us, and once you start to perceive them, there's no going back. The real question is, why are they here - and what do they want?

#worldbuilding

[dross-the-fish]

I have a small criticism. I feel like you're treating Victor and Adam as though they are mentally and emotionally on equal footing. I know you don't intend to be, but that's kind of ableist. Adam doesn't have the advantage of a full life experience so his actions can't really be held against him in the same way as a normal person. It's arguable he doesn't fully know the extent of the harm he's causing and I feel that, if anything, it's Victor who should bear the brunt of responsibility.

I get where you're coming from but I have to respectfully disagree.

Adam is a fictional character created through extraordinary means and with superhuman abilities, including above average intelligence (he learns how to speak fluently without directly being taught language and seems to easily comprehend that his actions are wrong and harmful) I don't really view him as being mentally disabled. We can say he's socially stunted and that he has no baseline for human interaction but I don't feel like that's enough that you can handwave what he's done or absolve him of the responsibility for his actions.

Do you know that before he kills William he had planned to kidnap him and basically raise him so that he would have a companion? He was intelligent enough to figure that a child might be unbiased and could be raised to see past his appearance and he is willing to kidnap said child. Then as soon as he realizes the kids is a Frankenstein and squeezes the life from him, after which he CELEBRATES because now he knows how to hurt Victor. He then frames Justine out of spite because he presumes that if she saw him she'd also recoil in disgust.

I believe Adam could have been kind, sensitive and benevolent if given a chance. But he wasn't given a chance and that's not solely on Victor. Victor had no idea that Adam had any capacity for learning or reasoning and he could not have predicted Adam would come after his family.

I think what makes Adam salvageable is the fact that he does learn to regret his actions and feel genuine remorse for the lives he's taken and he realizes that revenge didn't do anything to ease his pain. I do view Adam as a tragic character who was horribly mistreated by Victor and by society as a whole and I do feel sympathy for him. I can do that while still acknowledging that this is a very dark character who does and thinks horrific things that end up costing innocent people their lives.

And honestly? For me that's what make the character interesting, that he is complex and has a lot of depth to him. I think he's a good character and I enjoy analyzing him because he is a fully nuanced person.

#Frankenstein discourse #Characters can be complex #Adam is a victim and a villain

[wreckingtickles]

Hello, anon who asked for Kaminari here! I just wanna say I love your scenarios, they’re so fun and detailed. I vote for a scenario for a person of your choosing! Anyone you have or haven’t done yet, just throw in one that’s stuck in your head!

That's mighty kind of you! Hope you enjoyed it, these scenarios are just a bunch of story ideas I'll never write lol Mh, my first thoughts were Kirishima or someone from FT, but I'll actually go with DBZ Goku.

I'm sure this was the case for many others, but he was probably my first tickle crush. That Caterpy scene, ahooga! So I actually started writing an Auction story for him as well, before realizing my hands were already full with the current series.

The premise was the following: Goku is meant to be auctioned, but the machine that rates each lee's worst spots read exactly 10 everywhere: 10 is supposed to be the max, but the machine can go all the way to 12, as superhuman physiologies may allow for extraordinarily sensitive spots (like Bakugo with his Quirk...), and of course the method you use can increase the lee's sensitivity, but this is just the baseline.

Anyway, the machine doesn't seem to be malfunctioning. So 3 "analysts" are sent to investigate the matter. And they are quite puzzled by this because, yes, the guy is exactly a 10 everywhere, no matter what they do! Except... while they're using their fingers on his armpits, they realize that his reaction shoot up to a 12! And I like to think that reaching 12 is accompanied by another kind of "shooting", but I'll keep this somewhat SFW lol

Now, that's weird, when they tried the electric toothbrushes and buffers earlier, that spot was definitely a 10, but now it's a 12? And when they used their fingers on his abs, he had a 10 reaction, not a 12 reaction...

So they run a few more tests, and discover something magnificent: each of Goku's spots has the potential to become a 12, you just have to find the right tool and method!

The analysists are ecstatic, they've never had a lee like this before. Sure, they'd got to find the only ticklish spot on multiple shitheads who didn't think they were ticklish. But a lee that's basically like a riddle? What a treat! So they naturally get competitive and poor Goku is dying. What they discover is that claws work best on his abs, backscratchers on his ribs, raspberries right in his bellybutton, scalp massagers on his sides, electric tothbrushes on his, uh, chest, feathers on his B-side, I don't want to say where electric buffers work best, tongues on his toes, etc.

Now, the rest of his feet undoubtedly reward scrubbing, but the Lower Body Analyst (from the knees down) and the Upper Body Analyst (from just above the waist) get into one of their usual fights (I even have names for them lol): LBA (Creep) points out that his hairbrush + grooming glove combo on Goku's feet provokes a reaction above a 12, UBA (Culture) concedes that but claims it's only because LBA has used oil. The Middle Body Analyst (Champ, from just above the knees to the waist) calms them down, says there's a simple way to settle this...

Cut to a few minutes later, and LBA and UBA don't even remember what they were fighting about as all 3 analysts stand over an oil-glistening Goku and each use one of the absolute worst methods they discovered on his now frictionless skin, chatting idly while they put Goku through the most intense experience in his (after)life.

God, I know you don't exist, but please, make this real lol

#my headcanons #tickle content #lee!goku

[transingthoseformers]

SG Earthspark: Okay, so my original idea was that G.H.O.S.T has been keeping Meridian (Ascenticon ally in the war) prisoner in a black site since the war's end, telling everybody he died, and everybody (including Meridian) thinks Megatron outright murdered Shockwave in the final battle.

When Twitch and Thrash are born G.H.O.S.T (who won and are making themselves and the Autobots look like the good guys of the war, and still has good PR) gets them and Robby and Mo to come to a base to figure out their biology and the cyber-sleeves, with the excuse of medical reasons. G.H.O.S.T and the Autobots plan to manipulate and use the terrans, so just kidnapping and experimenting on them is out of the question. They bring Meridian to take a look because of his transformer expertise, threatening to kill the kids if he tries to warn them or tells them anything. The Malto kids have an episode's or three's worth of early canon-like shenanigans, but after that start becoming suspicious of G.H.O.S.T, the Autobots, and Megatron. They then find out about the unconstitutional imprisonment and POW experimentation, and thinking back to Meridian's behavior wonder if he's a prisoner too because they know there were human Ascenticons during the war. A lot of them, actually. Later they have their first actual Ascenticon encounter when they find Shockwave in the crumbling stasis pod under the memorial, and are initially scared because even when they know about G.H.O.S.T's actions they don't really know about the Ascenticons, and they've grown up surrounded by propaganda. Shockwave tells the Maltos what the war was about and what actually happened, and they have to hide him from G.H.O.S.T, Megatron, and the Autobots and find a way to get him energon (season's middle point??). The Maltos can't try to escape because three out of five kids need the cave water to live. Some more stuff happens (Bot Brawl etc?) and then Hashtag accidentally hacks G.H.O.S.T and gets in contact with Meridian, and massive jailbreak ensues. The Decepticon high command is reunited (minus Megatron), and Meridian is reunited with Shockwave. Then there's the buildup to the final battle, whatever happens there. Maybe Schloder, G.H.O.S.T's leader here, backstabs the Autobots and tries to kill everybody similiarly to baseline's s1 finale?? Maybe the truth is revealed to the world?? Not sure what the Autobot situation should be at the end. Or Megatron. Or why Megatron turned evil, a corruption arc is one thing but actually joining The Enemy™ is another.

But i sort of want Meridian to still become a cyborg. Not sure how, why, or where the parts would come from, G.H.O.S.T is too smart to experiment on prisoners like that (if you give somebody who hates you superhuman abilities, that's absolutely getting used against you). Maybe he does it because he can't fight the Autobots, there's barely any Ascenticons left and none of them are here, and SOMEBODY has to protect these kids and take down G.H.O.S.T & the Autobots and their conspiracy.

Not sure how to maintain the vague outline as well as possible if i do that, because then Meridian would have to escape G.H.O.S.T much earlier to have time to think he has to do this and then actually do it too. And he should also be with the Maltos. Maybe Shockwave is found and taken away and the Maltos finally have to go on the run, which is when Meridian joins them and his reunion with Shockwave is still pushed to the jailbreak??

Also not sure how to divide this into 26 episodes and make sure that works. Pacing too.

Yep yep, makes sense!

I'd say the "purposeful cyborg to help the kids" route for Dr Meridian makes sense to me

Agent Schloder as GHOST's leader is interesting, he'd have a unique SG twist

Not quite sure how to help with some of the other stuff

#sg earthspark #characters #maccadam #transformers #transformers earthspark #transformers shattered glass #au

[whump-me]

Whumptober Day 16: Flatline

This is a standalone story in my original Mind Games universe, a modern-day sci-fi/fantasy thriller setting about ordinary humans with superhuman abilities and the people who want to use or destroy them. Full description in my Whumptober masterpost, which is linked in my pinned post.

This story contains: lab whump, minor whump, minor death, emotional whump, reluctant whumper, sympathetic whumper

Words: 3500

---

Elizabeth had been running telepathy tests for nine hours straight. Twenty different subjects. None of them improving. Her coffee had worn off hours ago. As she walked down the wide white-tiled hallway of PERI headquarters, her feet were heavy, her shoulders sagging. Even her hair was flatter than it had been this morning.

But as she approached the door that held Subject 1, her steps sped up, and a little life came back into her stride. She always saved Subject 1 for last, because he was her favorite part of the day.

She started talking as she pushed the door open. “Ready for more testing? I really think we can improve your range this time. I have some ideas for how—”

She stopped.

The room was empty.

The cot was neatly made, the sheets fresh and un-wrinkled. As if this were an empty room. As if the same subject hadn’t been sleeping here for the past three years.

She pulled out her tablet and loaded up the facility database. It would tell her easily enough where Subject 1 had been moved. Maybe he had been reassigned to another room, closer to her other subjects, so she wouldn’t have to walk as far. Maybe—

Her hands were cold. The tablet trembled in her grip.

Why was she pretending she didn’t already know what had happened?

She sank down onto the edge of the empty bed. Her tablet fell to the mattress beside her. She buried her head in her hands.

She knew. She knew.

* * *

If Elizabeth was going to have to evaluate one more weak telepath today, she would need a fresh cup of coffee.

She didn’t even have to walk into the room to know how this next test would play out. The ones who got sent down to her showed much promise. That was why they were sent to her instead of going into advanced training. The operations arm of PERI kept the strong abilities for themselves, as well as the unique ones that could be put to work on missions in interesting ways.

She and the other researchers got the rest. The weak abilities; the ordinary telepaths that operations already had more than enough of.

The labs could custom-design the genetics of their babies all they wanted. The abilities they developed were still a crapshoot. Sure, there was a slight chance they’d develop a similar ability to one of their genetic parents. And the strength of their ability had a slight correlation to their parents’ strength. But only slight.

Until the researchers a few floors down figured out how to change that, it was a numbers game. Grow as many babies as possible, and keep the good ones for operations and the interesting ones for the real cutting-edge experiments. The rest came here.

Elizabeth would evaluate them for a baseline, confirm that they weren’t useful for anything else, then send them all off to whatever experiment needed more subjects. Right now, it was Dr. Suresh’s latest attempt at a power-augmenting drug. None of the five previous versions had worked, and all had had side effects like seizures and bleeding from the eyeballs. Number six was the charm, Elizabeth supposed.

The boy looked up as she came in. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling over the side. He kicked his feet idly against the metal frame of the cot.

God. His legs didn’t even touch the ground.

She didn’t think it would still get to her, given just how many experimental subjects she saw every day. But sometimes it still caught her by surprise just how young they were. She was choosing the fate of children. That was her job. To confirm that they weren’t good enough, and then send them off for a short life as glorified lab rats.

She shook her head sharply to dismiss the thought. He wasn’t a child, she reminded herself. None of them were. They were subjects, and this was what they had been created for.

“Hi there,” she said, in the too-bright voice she had perfected for talking to the subjects. “I’m Miss Elizabeth. We’re going to do a few quick tests, okay?”

“What kind of tests?” he asked.

The question took her by surprise. Most of them didn’t bother asking questions. By this age, they had already been through two or three years of basic operative training. Most of them were either shivering things who had been cowed into following orders unquestioningly, or grim robots who didn’t care one way or the other. But this boy’s eyes—this subject’s eyes, she corrected herself—were bright and curious.

“We’re going to test your telepathy,” she said. “It’s not like training—there are no punishments if you don’t do well. In fact, there is no doing well or badly. All I need is to see what you can do.”

In other words, all she needed was to see that the verdict on his file was correct: too weak to be useful as an operative. He had no need to prove anything to her, because he had already been branded not good enough.

“Range or clarity?” he asked

She blinked. “Um… will be testing a little of both.”

“My clarity is better than my range,” he said. “But neither one is very good. I don’t know if they told you, but I’m the worst in my cohort.” He stared down at his kicking feet.

“You don’t need to worry about that here,” she said, keeping the smile pasted on her face. She wanted to give him a hug, or a big bowl of ice cream.

She was letting those thoughts in again. Hugs and ice cream were for children. The subjects were not children. They weren’t, because if they were, she wouldn’t be able to do this job.

He looked up at her. His eyes were a bright, startling blue. “They want you to test me to see if I’m good enough to stay in training, right?”

None of them had asked her that before. Not straight out. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

“Do you think you could maybe…” He twisted his hands together nervously. “Just… fake the numbers a little? Not by much. Just enough that I can stay.” His eyes turned wide and pleading. “I’m getting better. Soon I’ll be good enough to stay. I promise.”

Underneath the plea in his eyes, she saw fear. Real fear.

She opened her mouth to tell him she was sure he would do fine. But something stopped her. Maybe that sharp fear she saw in his eyes. He already knew the truth about his capabilities—he could tell.

And that fear told her he already knew what it meant.

She waited too long to answer. The pleading look left his eyes all at once. So did the fear. Even the color seemed to fade from his eyes, turning them from that startling blue to a dull gray. It was like a light had gone out inside him.

“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think you would.”

That quiet acceptance broke something in her. Something that lived in that same part of her that didn’t understand why experimental subjects couldn’t have hugs or ice cream.

It wasn’t the robotic indifference of some of the subjects, drilled into them by years of harsh training. Or the fearful obedience that came from harsh punishments meted out to squash an early spark of defiance. This was… it was wrong, was what it was. It was wrong in a whole new way. No child should accept their own doom with that kind of dull resignation.

He wasn’t a child, she reminded herself yet again. He was an experimental subject, and her job was to—

“I’ll find a way,” she found herself saying before she could finish the thought.

He looked up at her sharply. A tiny flicker of light returned to his eyes. “You’ll fake the numbers?”

“I’ll do more than that,” she said. An idea was already coming together in her mind.

Her boss kept asking when she was going to come up with her own idea for a study. She had been with PERI for five years—it was past time she started doing research of her own. Maybe this was just the time to start.

A program to strengthen weak telepathic powers. Intensive training, maybe combined with low-dose drugs—too low for the harmful side effects to kick in, she hoped, and maybe the sixth power-augmenting drug would be more effective than the last five. PERI had more weak telepaths than they knew what to do with. If this worked, it would be a game changer.

It wasn’t just about saving the scared-eyed boy. It wasn’t. PERI needed this.

A small voice in the back of her mind told her that if such a thing were possible, it would have been implemented long before now. This boy had already been through intensive training, and it hadn’t helped. That was why he was here.

She pushed the voice aside. She had a lot of practice at dismissing unwanted thoughts.

“I’ll see you soon,” she promised, and left the room, already drafting her research proposal in her mind.

She would put a note on this subject’s file. She wanted him set aside especially for her.

* * *

The ninth generation of the power-augmenting drug had more vicious side effects than the other seven combined. Multiple organ failure was the most common. Sometimes it hit five or six days after starting the drug. Sometimes it took less than a full day for the subject’s body to start its total collapse.

But when the side effects waited several days to kick in, Dr. Suresh swore he saw a small but noticeable improvement in the subjects’ abilities during those days. So he asked for another batch of subjects to confirm the findings. It would be useful when it came to developing the next iteration of the drug, he claimed.

She already knew what room the subjects were in. She had heard the nurses discussing it offhandedly, and she had remembered, because some part of her had already known she would need the information.

She raced down the hallway. A passing nurse gave her a startled look. She looked down at herself—sweating, out of breath, hair flying into her face. She didn’t slow down.

The subjects in this experimental pool didn’t get private rooms. The official explanation was that keeping them together made it easier for the nurses to take care of all of them at once. Elizabeth suspected the real reason was simpler. The subjects would all be dead soon anyway—why not free up those rooms a little early?

The cots were packed together with almost no room for the single nurse to pass back and forth between the beds. The air was hot, and thick with the scent of death. A couple of the cots held too-still bodies, their disconnected monitors dark and silent.

The other subjects weren’t quite dead, not yet. There monitors beeped radically. Their eyes blinked, disoriented and full of fear. The harried-looking nurse adjusted one subject’s IV on one subject, while across the room, another subject’s heart monitor beeped out an erratic rhythm.

She found Subject 1 at the far end of one row. His eyes were closed. Maybe he was unconscious—a small mercy. His skin was yellowed and bathed in sweat.

Three years older than when she had met him, and he still looked so young.

The nurse glanced her way. “If you’re looking for someone to cut open, you can’t have that one. He’s not dead yet. Give it another ten minutes.”

The nurse was the only staff member in here. Dr. Suresh had sent these children to die, and he couldn’t even be bothered to stick around and watch it happen.

They weren’t children, she reminded herself by rote. They were experimental subjects.

She had long since forgotten why that was supposed to make it any better.

* * *

Elizabeth knew trouble was brewing when Sunil Suresh sat down next to her at lunch.

“How’s that program of yours going?” He didn’t ask it with the sneer in his voice so many of her colleagues used. That would have been better. Instead, his voice was too gentle, his eyes too warm. He looked concerned for her.

She flashed him a smile. “It’s showing some promising results. I look forward to sharing them.”

“Really.” He leaned in, like he expected her to share more right then and there. “I’m glad to know this year is going better than your first two years. Maybe you made the right decision not scrapping this line of research after all.”

His tone told her he didn’t believe anything of the sort. Or, for that matter, that she was actually getting better results this year.

And for good reason.

She avoided his eyes, staring down at the wilted lettuce peeking out of her cafeteria sandwich. “I’m glad I didn’t listen to everyone who told me to give up.”

“I’m surprised they’re still funding this project of yours.”

“Yes, well, maybe they think my research is showing more promise than some of the projects happening on this floor. What version of your power-augmenting drug are you on to now? Eight? Nine?”

“I want to talk to you about something, Liz.” He lowered his voice into an intimate whisper. She wanted to smash her sandwich into his face.

“Elizabeth,” she corrected.

“It’s an open secret that you’ve developed an attachment to one of your experimental subjects,” he said. “In fact, some say it’s the reason you started down this research path in the first place.”

“Developing a rapport with the subjects helps with their training,” she said in a carefully neutral tone.

“Really? So your Subject 1 is showing better results than the others?”

“You’ll have to look at the results along with everyone else when I release them.”

“And you’ve tried developing a rapport with your other subjects?” he pressed. “Has it helped to improve their scores?”

She grasped the sandwich between her hands, but didn’t take a bite. Her fingers dug into the bread, leaving deep dents.

“I hope you don’t mind if I’m frank with you,” he said. “I think if you weren’t so attached, you would have moved onto more promising research after your first year on this failed project. You’re letting an experimental subject hold you back.”

Her fingers pierced the bread, making contact with the slimy mayonnaise underneath.

“I want to help you,” he said. “You have a lot of promise as a researcher. It would be a shame to waste it. Let me help. Give up your Subject 1—release him to the next drug trial, or cut him from the program entirely. Do it before you sink any more time and effort into this dead-end path.”

She knew what cut from the program meant. It meant a needle in the boy’s arm and a one-way trip to the morgue. “You concentrate on your research,” she said. “From what I’ve heard, it needs it. I’ll concentrate on mine.”

“I’ve seen what happens when researchers get too attached to their subjects,” he said. “Did you think you were the first? It’s happened before. It usually means a messy end to their careers—at the very least. Please let me help you.” His fingers brushed her arm.

She so fast he had to jump back to keep from toppling over. “I don’t think I’m hungry after all.”

* * *

The boy’s eyes fluttered open. He wasn’t unconscious at all. So much for that mercy.

Not a boy, she reminded herself. An experimental subject. But her inner voice was weak. She could barely hear it over the erratic beeping all over the room.

He had that dull look in his eyes again. Like the moment he had realized she wasn’t going to fake his scores for him. She hadn’t seen that look in three years. For three years, he’d had hope.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears blurred her vision until she couldn’t make out his features anymore. Until he wasn’t the boy she knew. Until he wasn’t a boy at all. Just a faceless experimental subject.

She wished that made it easier.

She heard footsteps behind her, but didn’t turn around. Not until Dr. Suresh said her name. “Liz.”

She spun around to face him. Her hands automatically balled into fists—she relaxed them with an effort of will. “Elizabeth,” she said through her teeth.

“I did it to help you.” His voice was too gentle. His eyes shone with pity. “You’ll thank me for it eventually.”

She didn’t realize her right hand was a fist again until it slammed into his nose.

The bone cracked under her fingers. He toppled like a felled tree. Blood spilled down his chin to speckle the white tile floor.

Even now, his face held more pity than anger. With one hand pressed to his broken nose, he slowly shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said, in a nasal voice. “You’re already too far gone. I’m going to have to report this, you know. I’m sorry. I should have stepped in earlier.”

“Shut up.” She barely recognized her own voice. “Shut up and let me say goodbye, or I’ll punch you again. Lower down, this time.”

It must have been an effective threat, because he shut his mouth. The nurse, wisely not getting involved, bent over the nearest subject’s bed and pretended she didn’t see.

Elizabeth took the boy’s hand in hers. His skin was cold and dry, like the life was already receding from him.

“I tried.” His voice was a rough, thready whisper, like the sound of paper rustling. “I tried so hard.”

“So did I.” Her own voice was thick with tears. She could hardly speak. But she managed to whisper a few more words in his ear.

His eyes fluttered shut. She didn’t know whether he had heard. She hoped he had. She hoped her words had given him peace.

His hand was limp in hers. His eyes didn’t open again. She knew he was no longer aware of her presence. But she still waited.

She waited until the beeping of his heart monitor grew erratic, then flattened into a droning siren, calling too late for help that would never come.

Then she gritted her teeth and turned around. She lowered her head and bit her lip, the picture of contrition.

“You were right,” she said to Dr. Suresh. “I got too attached. I wish I had realized it before I did so much damage. Do you… do you really think it’s too late to fix this?”

She offered him a hand up.

He kept one hand clasped over his broken nose. Blood spilled out from between his fingers. With the other hand, he took hers. He gave her a magnanimous smile, like a god forgiving his followers from on high.

“I understand,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve seen it happen before. And I really do think your research shows promise, if you would only focus on a more productive direction. I’ll tell you what—we can keep this between the two of us for now.” He glanced toward the nurse. “I can make sure no one says anything about what they might have seen here.”

“Thank you.” She still didn’t recognize her voice as her own, but this time, it was because the sound of her own docility made her want to throw up.

“It’s the least I can do for someone with so much potential,” he said, and smiled.

She wanted to follow through on that threat of a second punch. Instead, she smiled back.

She thought about the words she had whispered to Subject 1. I should have done more. Next time, I will.

Another subject like him would show up eventually. One who hadn’t let their early training beat the curiosity and the will to live out of them.

And why should she wait until then? Did the others not deserve to live because their minds had made the reasonable choice to shut down and give in? Did they not deserve hope?

She had bought Subject 1 three years. She had dangled a dubious prize in front of him—the chance to return to his harsh training, and then a life as a PERI operative. She had thought it was the best she could do.

It hadn’t been enough. Of course it hadn’t been. She didn’t know how she had ever imagined it would be.

Next time, she would do what she should have done all along.

Next time, she would find a way to get them out.

---

Tagged: @cakeinthevoid @gala1981

Ask to be added or removed from my Whumptober 2023 taglist.

#whumptober2023 #no.16 #flatline #oc #fic #minor whump #death whump #minor death #lab whump #reluctant whumper #sympathetic whumper #my writing #my writing: whumptober 2023 #my writing: Mind Games

[2lim3rz]

GRGHFGJFJDSGSGFGHFGHHHGFasuidfuasUAFDAKJSDFJKASFD @whatdoyoumeanitsnotcanon​

The Sanguine Yearning

Many have heard tales of such a thing, it’s a rare happening amongst the Blood Angels and their Successors.. but there are still whispers. Fables and rumors of when one did not fall to the Thirst or darkest Rage.. but perhaps something just as worse.

The first time it had happened, it was with their very own Primarch. A secret so hidden, so well executed that all who had met Sanguinius’s own treasure deemed them to be just that, a treasure.

Yet.. it happened again. A Blood Angel refusing to let some poor terrified Agriworld woman go her way. Clinging to her as if her leaving would kill him. Baring his teeth at all who would come near. Only Sanguinius could calm him. “Sickness.. how tragic.” it was thought to be the Thirst.

And then it happened again, and again, and again.

The third time, in the middle of some minor skirmish. Both the Astarte and human in question disappeared for some months before the Astarte was discovered howling ferally in a cave, his superhuman strength having accidentally killed the one his heart claimed.

The forth; a noblellite. Thrilled at first to be under such affections. The Blood Angels were artistic in some ways after all. Yet soon discovering him to be.. overbearing at times. A rare happy ending with the tragedy the Yearning so often brings.

The fifth.. the fifth had modified the yearning of rage and blood deep within the inhuman man. The baseline human he claimed had no hope to live even a day. Yet.. somehow they did. Some poor bystander on the very same ship they all lived upon. Discovered with filched medical equipment hooked to the poor thing, keeping a glorified blood bag alive.

It was then deemed the Sanguine Yearning was a different curse than the Thirst or Rage. One to be watched even closer in times of unending war. Baseline humans.. or rare xeno, were never safe from a very determined Astartes.

It was also settled that any Apothecary, Techmarine, or high-ranking Blood Angel or Successor discovered with the Yearning would be immediately demoted or possible executed. Posing too dangerous a threat to the ones they were meant to protect.. and to their brothers.

May the Emperor help you if any time they were reminded of their Yearning’s short lifespans compared to theirs.

#Sanguinius #sanguinius x reader #x reader #primarchs #blood angels #lamenters #flesh tearers #warhammer 40k #volatile hearts au #vha

[leobashi]

If you think about it Anti might have more muscle than Jackie, and I mean Jackie's pretty strong so

Who win the fist fight?

I personally think that they both have superhuman strength. Jackie’s I imagine would be reflected in his body and he’d look jacked and still need to work out to maintain his strength but I think Anti will be strong no matter what shape he takes because that would be his baseline.

I love the idea that they are two sides of the same coin. Anti has glitchy electricity powers and Jackie has lightning electricity powers and they fight all the time, taking blows from one another and being evenly matched. The main difference is of course that Anti isn’t afraid to bring in hostages and Jackie has to bring in allies.

In a basic fist fight though, with no cheating or powers, I’d like to think Jackie would still triumph. He practices everyday and works on his strength as well as his technique. I think Anti would rely a lot more on instinct and natural power

#ask #anon #antisepticeye #jackieboyman

[supersaiyanjedi14]

RWBY COMBAT ANALYSIS: JAMES IRONWOOD

"You can label me whatever you'd like, but the fact of the matter is I was right! The minute I softened, let my guard down, that's when Salem had her opening. All excellent philosophical points that won't matter if Salem wins. […]  I am done letting others' inability to see the big picture get in the way of doing what's right. Robyn, the council, this Kingdom... even you.”

PHYSICAL

A human male, General James Ironwood’s exact age during the events of the series is unstated, though as a peer of the likes of Qrow Branwen, Jacques Schnee and Arthur Watts, I’d estimate him to be in his late 40s to early 50s.  By the time of his death, two years after the Fall of Beacon, Ironwood had spent the bulk of his career as part of the Atlas Armed Forces, raising in the ranks to eventually become commander in chief of the Atlas army and later headmaster of Atlas Huntsman Academy.  These joint positions earned him an unprecedented two seats on the Atlas Council, a factor that flavored the rest of his controversial life.  However, while he represented the standard to which Atlesian Huntsmen and soldiers were compared, Ironwood was far from a conventional specimen.  His most defining trait was his extensive cybernetic implants, his chosen treatment option for the multitude of combat injuries he sustained over the course of his life.  By the end of the Atlas crisis, Ironwood had replaced both of his arms, his right leg, and the entire right half of his torso with robotic prosthetics, while an additional implant was installed into his forehead to link up the cybernetics with his higher brain function.  While the full extent of Ironwood’s torso cybernetics in relation to his biological body has never been explored, I believe a good frame of reference would be those of the Star Wars antagonist Darth Vader, who was outfitted with various replacement organs to supplement his respirator and artificial bones and ligaments to reinforce his skeleton.  However, where Vader’s reconstruction was restricted by the severity of his injuries and the need to preserve as much of his living flesh as possible, most of Ironwood’s cybernetics were merely a treatment option rather than lifesaving necessities, and he was all too willing to sacrifice his physical form in the name of continuing the fight.  As a result, Ironwood’s prosthetics were both far more intrusive than was standard and designed to be combatively reliable, James’ ultimate goal being to become something more than human in order to combat the horrors of Salem.

While Ironwood’s willingness to discard his body for metal boded poorly for his restraint and principles, their practical benefits more than made up for it, making him one of the most physically powerful combatants of his day.  Standing at a towering 6’6”, Ironwood’s cybernetic proportions closely approximated the muscular athletic build he no doubt sported as a young man, further distinguished by his graying black hair and beard, blue eyes, and pale skin tone.  The most visible advantage of Ironwood’s metallic body was his incredible physical might, taking his already heavy-handed approach to combat and augmenting it with the benefits of robotics.  He has casually manhandled high-caliber Grimm with his bare hands, lifted and thrown adult humans with an outstretched arm, crushed stone in his grip, and even smashed his own tactical console to pieces with a pair of slammed fists in a fit of anger.  Given that his Aura was depleted when he lifted Arthur Watts over the Amity Arena lava pit, I feel comfortable saying that Ironwood’s baseline strength level was superhuman, his prosthetics specifically designed to surpass what his “weaker” flesh and blood could achieve.  Compared to his peers, though few of Ironwood’s adversaries were particularly domineering, I think it is only reasonable to assume that only similar heavyweights could realistically challenge his strength.  The only instance of Ironwood lacking confidence in his muscles and servos was against Penny Polendina, a designed and built combat drone far beyond mortal athleticism, motivating him to draw Due Process’s energy cannon instead.  Despite this heavy emphasis on strength, the general’s other attributes were also polished.  Though he favored grounded footwork and postures, rarely employing acrobatics, Ironwood was still quick on his feet, covering ground with power jumps, combat rolls, and running charges.  While they appeared to be nimbler, neither Watts nor Lie Ren appeared to have any meaningful speed advantage over Ironwood, who kept up with them in close quarters and even overpowered them.  While Winter Schnee was conclusively faster than him, this is no sign of weakness given her status as one of the most accomplished acrobats in the setting, and even then, his stalwart foundation and footwork allowed him to keep up with her.  Furthermore, Ironwood’s reflexes were still polished enough to avoid point-blank gunfire, and he was skilled in the use of combat propellants to enable more dynamic maneuvers, freely using the gravity Dust in Due Process’s black half to launch himself across the battlefield.  While the metal fingers of his cybernetic arms likely hampered his fine dexterity, Ironwood was still able to execute controlled technique-based attacks in battle, expertly wielding his guns as bludgeons on multiple occasions and easily keeping up with Lie Ren in a fist fight.

As has already been stated, Ironwood was a lifelong veteran soldier and Huntsman with a history of severe injury, the extensiveness of his cybernetics pointing to the amount of punishment he has had to endure.  Between his prosthetics functioning as natural armor and his own incredible will to fight, Ironwood possessed an astronomical tolerance for pain and injury.  During the Fall of Beacon, Ironwood endured a shuttle crash when his hacked AK-200 drones turned on him, and despite his clothing getting ripped apart, indicating an at least damaged Aura, he powered through and went on to demolish scores of drones in the battle.  During his confrontation with Watts, Ironwood was regularly battered against the anti-gravity biome’s walls, was struck by several of Watts’ standard and Dust bullets, and finally broke his Aura when he tackled Watts off a platform and struck the arena floor.  When Watts trapped his arm in a hard light barrier, Ironwood endured the agony of burning off his own skin to escape, sacrificing his arm before beating the scientist into the dirt.  Even his defeats have only come from overwhelming force.  At Atlas Academy, Ironwood was only brought down by the combined might of Team JNOR, Emerald Sustrai and Winter Schnee, subjecting him to a kick to the face, a flurry of thrown ice shards, multiple hits from the Long Memory, a direct hit from a charged Magnhild, getting run down by a charging Summoned Manticore, and finally a slash across the abdomen before he went down.  Winter only defeated Ironwood when she assumed the power of the Winter Maiden and deflected a shot from Due Process’s energy cannon back in his face, bringing him to his knees.  However, while Ironwood’s cybernetics allowed him to maintain his output in the long term, his overall stamina was surprisingly lackluster.  By the time the Watts fight reached its final bout after only a few minutes, Ironwood was visibly fatigued, displaying labored breathing and less crisp transitions in his style.  While the force he was up against at the academy was far greater than anyone could ever deal with, Ironwood still burned out fast, and it is worth noting that the general is one of the few characters who has actually lost consciousness when his Aura broke.  Furthermore, despite his military discipline, Ironwood’s unwillingness to back down has led him to bite off more than he can chew and ignore dangers, needlessly subjecting himself to injury to force his way to victory.  Accordingly, his ultimate fall was a long-term grind, his composure whittled away by his growing paranoia and his body beaten to the point where he couldn’t even regain his feet, dying under the crushing weight of Atlas itself.

While Ironwood almost certainly wore combat armor during his early years as an Atlas soldier, even continuing to own a pair of pauldrons for emergencies, his role as Academy Headmaster and a member of the Atlas Council meant that he was rarely deployed into active combat.  As such, his usual choice of wardrobe was the Atlas Military Dress Uniform, though like other high-ranking Atlas operatives, his personal set was heavily personalized.  During Atlas’s last days, Ironwood’s uniform consisted of a dress shirt and tie underneath a double-breasted white jacket, military style trousers, steel-toed boots, and a heavy white overcoat.  He accessorized with a belt, bandolier, and a pair of white gloves, though after losing his left arm, he deliberately left the black prosthesis bare.  With his cybernetics functioning as built-in armor, Ironwood’s wardrobe could afford to emphasize mobility over protection, leaving him free to leverage his mechanical physique to its fullest.

RANKING: Tier 1, Baseline Superhuman

Cybernetic enhancement generally affords significant practical advantages in physical combat, but their general limitedness often prevents them from drastically elevating physical performance level, and most cyborgs are merely squishy meatbags with slightly less squishy bits.  However, James Ironwood’s extremely extensive cybernetics push him far beyond the standard, his prosthetics serving as both remedies to hold his body together and a preemptive measure to prevent him from breaking again.  Ironwood is inarguably one of the toughest and strongest combatants in the setting, demonstrating physical might far beyond a mortal man’s and an absolutely inhuman tolerance for injury.  Considering that James was perfectly willing to burn off his own arm, there is no telling how far this man will go to achieve victory.  Ironwood’s only real limitation is his poor sustainability, indicating that he does have a limit to his performance and made all the worse by his refusal to cut his losses.  Fatigue, both physical and mental, is James Ironwood’s biggest handicap, but pushing the general to that point will be an incredibly uphill battle, given that he is, quite literally, built like a tank.

MARTIAL

James Ironwood was armed with a paired set of heavy pistols known as Due Process, an ironic name if there ever was one. Combining aspects of both a revolver and semi-automatic pistol, each gun appeared to be about a foot and a half long, 5 inches thick, and designed with floral patterns engraved on the slide.  Each pistol featured a secondary trigger that enabled it to fire specialized ammunition alongside standard rounds.  The primary weapon was silver colored and loaded with explosive rounds, the yield strong enough to knock an alpha Beowolf into the air and reduce entire squads of AK-200 combat drones to shrapnel.  The second pistol had a black finish along the slide and grips and was loaded with gravity Dust bullets, capable of generating shockwaves powerful enough to propel Ironwood through the air.  Given that Ironwood was prepared to immediately execute Marrow Amin with the black pistol after the Faunus went AWOL, it is entirely possible that the Dust rounds were powerful enough to either break or penetrate Auras with a solid direct hit.  Furthermore, the pistols were durable enough to be used as bludgeons in close quarters combat, one of Ironwood’s favorite tactics being to grab the weapon by the barrel and use it as a club when out of ammo. Overall, a simple yet reliably lethal weapon set, perfect for Atlas’s perfect soldier.

As the head of the Atlas Military and a professional Huntsman, James Ironwood obviously possessed the standard training background of his contemporaries, likely graduating from Atlas Huntsman Academy before enlisting his talents in the Special Operatives Division just as his later subordinates Winter Schnee and Clover Ebi did.  Accordingly, he was familiar with the various ways to dispatch the creatures of Grimm and trained in the use of various military grade weapons and advanced hand to hand combat.  A hardened soldier, his talents as a marksman and martial artist were built up through rigorous battlefield experience, and while his role as academy headmaster and government councilor meant he was rarely seen in the field, he clearly stayed on top of his training.  By the end of his life, Ironwood stood as one of the most skilled and tenacious martial combatants of his day, effectively setting the mold for what Atlas Academy expected of its students.  Ironwood’s personal fighting style was extremely physical, taking full advantage of his cybernetics to deliver a devastating offensive barrage, launching everything he had at the enemy and refusing to give an inch of ground.  When at a distance, Ironwood relied on his exceptional marksmanship to dispatch opponents, alternating between single shots and dual wielding bullet swarms.  Though he could expertly chain together sporadic bursts of gunfire to force opponents back, he overwhelmingly favored single shot takedowns.  Against single adversaries, he homed in on his target and sought to destroy it with a precise killshot, nailing direct hits on Arthur Watts twice during their battle at Amity Colosseum.  In group engagements, Ironwood switched over to explosive rounds, clearing away large groups of enemies with a single blow, as seen when he destroyed large squads of AK-200s during the Fall of Beacon.  When forced to close the distance, Ironwood relied heavily on brutal close quarters combat techniques to overpower his enemies, wielding his guns as extensions of his body.  His pistol whips were swift, powerful, and decidedly lethal, even when utilizing heavy ordnance analogous to Due Process’s energy cannon.  When completely unarmed, Ironwood fully leveraged his cyborg strength through devastating punches, kicks, grapples, and tackles intended to subdue the enemy as directly and efficiently as possible.  Despite this blunt offensive stance, Ironwood was not some mindless brawler flailing around. His unarmed skills were in fact quite sophisticated, clearly holding a dominant edge over Watts and fighting evenly with Lie Ren despite the latter having access to his weapons.  If forced to defend, Ironwood’s policy was “endure and power through”, holding his ground and shrugging off hits before resuming the offensive.  He employed deft evasions and sidesteps when dodging bullets, and when in close quarters he used his armored limbs to block attacks before manhandling the opponent to force open their defenses.  Additionally, Ironwood’s understanding of his weapons’ functions allowed him to leverage the recoil for practical purposes, regaining his stance by blasting himself back to his feet.  He bolstered his focused offensive technique with his Semblance and Dust loadout, striking with absolute commitment and intensity while adding more power to his attacks with elemental fury.

Ironwood was a reasonably capable military strategist, clearly understanding the value of his army’s strength and building his approach around leveraging this as fully as possible.  However, Ironwood was no planner, his strategies mostly boiling down to building up his foundation to make an instrument that could overpower virtually any challenger while also being nearly impossible to overpower in turn.  He expressed this both in preparing his forces and training his own students, investing heavily in the development of the Atlesian Knight drones and enjoying regular sparring matches with Oscar Pine.  When commanding armies, he deployed his heavily armed and armored troops in as great numbers as possible, bringing down the hammer with an unstoppable force of offensive might.  This approach proved successful at the Breach and in the early stages of the Battle of Atlas, the Atlas troops’ superior weapons and equipment allowing them to steamroll the various creatures of Grimm while also halting their advance long enough to develop a devastating counteroffensive.  When he was personally fighting, Ironwood used these same tactics to turn battles into slugging matches where his cyborg strength and heavy guns could dominate.  When confronted by the Alpha Beowolf at Amity, Ironwood rushed in and attacked directly, bracing up against the beast’s charge before shooting an explosive round into the ground, blowing it off its feet and allowing Ironwood to more easily manhandle it before shooting it in the head.  As seen in his battle with Arthur Watts two years later, Ironwood was an expert at alternating his offensive abilities to keep up the pressure.  He would propel himself with his guns’ recoil to close the distance then rapidly switch between standard, explosive, and Dust ammunition to hammer the target’s defenses.  In close quarters, he employed the same methodology with his unarmed skills and pistol whips, each strike aimed at staggering or subduing the enemy in one fell swoop.  His confrontation with Team JNR at Atlas Academy showed his ability to apply his tactics to group engagements, managing to overmatch the attacks of Jaune Arc, Oscar Pine and Lie Ren by seizing their arms and weapons and forcing open their defenses.

In all things Ironwood showed an emphasis on overwhelming power as a solid general-purpose solution, dominating his opponents rather than undermining or subverting them.  Appropriately, his ultimate trump cards were the most devastating weapons he could get his hands on.  Against Salem’s army, Ironwood used his troops to stall for time as he prepared a Dust warhead to obliterate the Monstra.  In personable combat, Ironwood literally pulled out the big guns by outfitting Due Process with a large cannon.  Less wieldy but more powerful, the cannon fired massive bolts of green energy capable of destroying heavy machinery and overpowering advanced ethereal defenses, punching through a hard-light Dust prison cell like wet paper and later overwhelming Winter Schnee’s black glyphs.  Even with the extra heft of the cannon, Ironwood was still perfectly capable of swinging it around as a bludgeon, demonstrating the intensity and commitment that Ironwood brought to all of his skills.  However, Ironwood’s tactics also demonstrate his serious weaknesses as a tactical thinker, weaknesses worsened by his pride and fear.  Because his entire approach was built around leveraging strength and power for maximum effect, Ironwood was ineffective against more defensive and subversive opponents who could prevent him from bringing his full might to bear, while his overreliance on offense left him exposed to retaliation and tunnel vision.  Despite being a physical lightweight with minimal dedication to physical combat, Watts was able to contend with Ironwood by maintaining a slippery retreat through the anti-gravity biome, forcing the general to chase after him while he chipped away at him from a distance.  Ironwood was either unaware or unconcerned that he was being baited, continuing to come after Watts and getting his arm caught in the ring trap for his trouble.  A similar fate befell him at the academy, his focus on each of his opponents individually leaving him blind to the various counters they levied against him, wearing him down.  While Ironwood has displayed clever maneuvers in the past, such as when he outflanked Watts and Amity and surprised Winter with a pistol whip, these displays were a major exception to the rule. Whenever his preferred methods were questioned or his plans fell apart, Ironwood doubled down and fought harder, essentially forcing problems to become a nail for his hammer.  

Ironwood’s tactical tunnel vision was most visibly demonstrated in his grand strategy blunders, stubbornly maintaining a military presence at the Vytal Festival and continuing the Amity Project while ignoring the concerns and protests his actions sparked in Mantle.  Ironwood was at his best when his blunt approach was tempered by his more moderate allies, deferring to Ozpin’s subtler methods on multiple occasions despite their disagreements.  When leading the charge, however, his stubborn persistence was his greatest undoing, allowing Salem and Cinder Fall to exploit and manipulate him on several occasions and essentially do their work of dividing humanity for them.  When Cinder infiltrated the academy, Ironwood, convinced that Salem’s forces were with her, decided to abandon the Amity project and use the Staff of Creation to raise Atlas further into the atmosphere, abandoning Mantle to the Grimm.  While Team RWBY’s attempts to talk sense into Ironwood fell on deaf ears partially due to their previous withholding of information, Ironwood’s flat admittance of the severity of his decision showed his commitment to a decision regardless of the consequences.  Between ordering RWBY and co.’s arrests, murdering Councilman Sleet, attempting to execute the defecting Marrow Amin, and finally deciding to drop the Dust warhead on Mantle, Ironwood demonstrated an increasingly severe disregard for outside input or the questioning of what he and he alone saw as what was best for others.  This arrogant short-sightedness directly contributed to his inability to anticipate the actions of his adversaries, underestimating Ruby’s resolve to save both Atlas and Mantle and being caught completely off guard by JNR’s ambush.  When Watts disabled Ironwood’s cell during Cinder’s orchestrated chaos, the general emerged as a vessel of petty vengeance, murdering Jacques Schnee out of sheer contempt and triggering a pointless confrontation with Winter in the Relic vault to claim the Staff.  While the two were able to fight on even footing, Ironwood’s brutal offensive allowed him to bully through Winter’s more delicate style and overpower her, proving that his martial might was extremely formidable despite its straightforwardness.  Unfortunately, Ironwood was finally confronted by someone he could not simply overpower when Winter received the Maiden’s power upon Penny Polendina’s death, blasted into a crater by his own deflected shot.

RANKING: Tier 3, Standard Mastery

James Ironwood’s track record demonstrates a powerful, flexible, and ruthless martial combatant, capable of operating in just about any combat scenario with similar levels of comfort while bringing overwhelming force in all areas.  His solid general-purpose weapon complements his fighting style and provides him with a solid array of offensive options, while his perseverance under fire allows him to keep up the pressure even in the face of staunch resistance.  However, though certainly not unintelligent, Ironwood’s demonstrations also highlight his inability to think outside the box, failing to subvert his opponents or control the fight in a broad sense, and more disastrously, failing to prevent the opponent from doing the same to him.  While political controversy obviously does not factor heavily into combative effectiveness, his ineffectual leadership in the crises of Volumes 7 and 8 does offer insight into his tactical failings.  His only recourse to any situation being to throw brute force at it and keep it up until the enemy finally breaks, and he has nothing to fall back on if sheer strength fails.  Still, this does not make Ironwood’s method ineffective or crude. His power and skill is undeniable, and anyone who opposed the general would be in for a whole Kingdom of pain.

SPECIAL

James Ironwood’s Semblance was an ability he called “Mettle”.  A passive power, Mettle allowed Ironwood to strengthen his resolve and hyper-focus on his chosen goals, blocking out interference from both the world around him and his own reservations in order to drive him forward.  When using this ability, injuries, odds, and even morality were non-issues to the general, turning himself into a deliberate machine of war who will achieve his goal or die trying.  Unsurprisingly for anyone who’s been with the show since this Semblance’s reveal, the exact nature and effect of Mettle is not clearly defined, especially since its properties are so heavily tied to Ironwood’s personality and character arc.  However, I do believe that Mettle’s specifics can be reasonably inferred based on what we do know.  A common element whenever this power is shown or heavily implied to be in effect is Ironwood’s calm, borderline soulless, demeanor, even if the instance is shortly after a strong emotional outburst.  When he decided to bomb Mantle, Ironwood was collected and relaxed (at least in a general sense) despite having smashed his tactical map to pieces in a fit of frustration not a minute earlier.  As such, it is my belief that Mettle, in practice, serves as a naturally induced stress relief agent, numbing Ironwood’s nerves to help him regain and maintain his composure, a critical asset for a soldier in the field.  To reference Star Wars again, Mettle has a lot of elements in common with the Expanded Universe power known as Battlemind, an inwardly directed telepathic mediation that Force-sensitives used to improve their focus and composure in combat.*  Battlemind is also known to enable users to dispel negative emotion and telepathic attacks, and the former seems to be precisely how Mettle seems to work.  With this power, Ironwood could essentially induce a state of mind where he could power through any obstacle, injury or distraction by simply ignoring it, homing in on his goal and pursuing it with all the unrestricted power he could bring to bear.  Unfortunately, this factor also contributed heavily to his tactical limitations, so focused on his given objective that he was often blind to outside factors.  Narrowing your focus might be a good call when you’re throwing hands with a rabid Beowolf or sniping someone, but trying to do the same in a tense political situation or a cunning trickster will leave you unable to see the forest for the trees.

Outside of his Semblance, Ironwood also incorporated Dust into his standard combat equipment, specifically gravity Dust bullets incorporated into the black half of Due Process.  While most of the information here was already brough up in the Martial Arts assessment, the nature of these rounds still demonstrate an additional combative layer to Ironwood’s abilities.  Black or purple in color, gravity Dust could affect gravitational fields to generate fields of force to either propel or attract outside objects.  When used by Huntsmen in battle, gravity Dust often functioned as a form of limited telekinesis, manipulating the trajectory of weapons or projectiles for sustained or directed flight or generating powerful concussive shockwaves.  In Ironwood’s case, the use of Dust in his pistol rounds was based around the latter application.  The most obvious advantage of this feature, like most Dust ammunition, was enhancing the power of the projectiles, drastically enhancing the stopping power.  Though seemingly a conventional power, Ironwood has utilized this property very inventively, particularly regarding the recoil.  Similarly to Ruby Rose’s own use of Dust ammo in Crescent Rose, Ironwood utilized the shockwaves created by the gravity field to propel himself though the battlefield, functionally flying through the air.  With only a few shots, he was able to reach Watts’ high ground position while also evading the scientist’s own attacks, and when he was caught in a geyser, Ironwood only needed a single bullet to arrest his fall and return to the platform almost immediately.  Given that Ironwood is obviously not being blasted back into walls every time he shoots the black gun, it is likely that he incorporated technology into the pistol to enable some degree of control over the energy level, adjusting the intensity for different purposes.  Where the full-powered blasts were enough to launch him up to great heights, a direct hit from one of the more controlled rounds sent Watts tumbling across the platforms but otherwise did not harm him, appropriate given Ironwood’s objective in capturing Watts rather than killing him.  Furthermore, Ironwood’s attempted execution of Marrow Amin with the black Due Process leads me to believe that the Dust rounds could penetrate, or at least damage, passive Auras when used at the higher levels.

Ironwood’s Semblance and Dust loadout served as direct supplements to his martial methods, elevating his ruthless offensive with artificially induced focus and intensity and elemental warfare by way of his special ammunition.  Leveraging Mettle has led to some of Ironwood’s most compelling accomplishments, powering through seemingly impossible odds to achieve his chosen objective regardless of what happened in the process.  At Beacon, he charged the Alpha Beowolf head-on and was able to cooly overpower the creature in the bind.  Against Watt’s, Ironwood’s determination allowed him to eventually close the distance with Watt’s slippery retreat and eventually overpower him, responding to the doctor’s subversions and traps as mere speedbumps rather than distractions.  Even his own pain and injuries were able to be overlooked in this manner.  However, therein lies his weakness.  Despite these advantages and his range of applications, Ironwood’s special abilities fail to truly diversify his loadout, as all of his options are merely another tool to allow him to overpower the opponent directly rather than control the fight in a broad sense.  More severely, they in fact contribute to his lack of tactical foresight.  Where other combatants with metaphysical semblances, such as Qrow Branwen and Maria Calavera, have been able to adapt their powers to help control the flow of the engagement, Ironwood simply leaned on the basic properties of his abilities to force his way through situations.  While a combination of Mettle and his own iron will allowed him to escape the ring trap and defeat Watts, Ironwood still subjected himself to unnecessary injury in order to attack Watts directly, throwing away his arm in pursuit of victory.  Even beforehand when Watts caught his ankle in ice, Ironwood’s decision was to shoot it free so as to continue his pressure regardless of the tool he was taking.  As Ironwood continued to slip into madness, his intense focus made him shortsighted and blind to other threats, his decision to bomb Mantle and complete unwillingness to budge on the idea alienating the last of his allies, up to and including the previously loyal Winter.

RANKING: Tier 3, Specialized Combat

Even if my theories of how Mettle works are wrong, there is no denying that James Ironwood’s special abilities elevate his fighting style into something greater than the sum of its parts.  With Mettle’s hyper focus and his Dust’s devastating power, he brings his already domineering approach to battle to new heights by focusing his intensity and empowering his attacks.  Despite this, Ironwood’s use of his abilities remains in a very narrow fashion, simply relying on the mind-numbing properties of Mettle and the power generated by his Dust to continue battering the opposition with brute strength.  Ironwood has certainly mastered his traits and capitalized on their benefits, but his mastery functionally amounts to a one-trick pony.  Instead of using Mettle to improve his laser focus where and when he needs it, Ironwood constantly spammed it so that he could ignore all distractions while he overpowered the opponent directly.  Rather than providing him with options and versatility, Ironwood’s powers were just another club in his hands, and his use of them was ultimately devoid of subtly or tactical considerations.  Instead, James Ironwood’s special abilities followed the mindset of “Once I see you, I’m going to beat the crap out of you.”

OVERALL RANKING: TIER 3, ADVANCED HUNTSMAN

As an overall combatant, James Ironwood serves as a quintessential example of the best that can be achieved through the direct application of power.    Between his cybernetic enhancements, masterful marksmanship, expert unarmed combat skills, hyper focusing Semblance, and powerful Dust ammunition, Ironwood possessed all the tools he needed to overpower nearly any potential challenger, be it a battle of body, arms, or spells, all brought to a pint by an obscene will to fight.  The problem is that this is all he can do, and his straightforward tactics mean that he doesn’t have the means or willingness to adjust his approach to different situations.  Despite his superhuman physique, Ironwood’s capabilities are not so overwhelming that less physically able opponents cannot contend, and it ultimately does not drastically offset his more consistent standing as a martial artist or ethereal combatant.  Like many other Tier 3s, Ironwood is flexible but not to the point of actual versatility, all his offensive options being ONLY offensive options.  Given how his fighting style is built upon fully capitalizing on his physical capabilities, it is only appropriate that Ironwood’s body is the perfect metaphor for his strengths and weaknesses.  Ironwood is trying to be the strongest piece on the board that can stand up and defeat any potential threat, just as he adopted increasingly intrusive prosthetics to make himself stronger than any other human.  However, just as no one person can fight a war on their own, Ironwood’s body is too weak to shoulder all the demands he is placing on it in the long term.  Just because you can fight to the death does not mean you need to fight to the death.  Ironwood will ignore injuries and continue fighting until he is dead, but as a result, he’s burning his candle from both ends by forcing his way through hits he doesn’t need to take.  Rather than building himself into an unstoppable juggernaut, Ironwood is a gas guzzler that can only go one way- forward.

For all his power, James Ironwood ultimately failed to become the mighty hero he believed himself to be, both because he was operating way out of his area of expertise and because he was afflicted by an overwhelming hubris.  Despite his military mindset, Ironwood has spent the past decade or so prior to Volumes 7 and 8 as a peacetime politician and academic administrator rather than a frontline commander.  While his snap judgements and demands of unwavering obedience are viable on the battlefield, where questioning the commander always leads to disaster and death, his attempts to apply that same mentality to grand strategy and government policy left him with an increasingly ruthless need for control.  Ironically similar to Adam Taurus, Ironwood believed that he and he alone could bring about the success of his mission, and anything that challenged this perspective was a threat to be quashed. To Ironwood, if one did not approach the war with Salem with his views and strategies, they were ineffectual, naive, or simply too weak to do what had to be done. And rather than take in input from others, he simply surrounded himself with blindly obedient followers who would lay down their lives in service to him, all while insisting that others be grateful for his “hard decisions” even as they suffered for them.  James Ironwood was a powerful warrior, but he was overly aggressive, bull headed, short sighted, and dare I say it, tactless.  Instead of seeing Salem as the deceptive chess master she was or Ruby as a source of valid concern for his actions, Ironwood only saw more nails for him to hammer.  And by the time he realized his hammer was broken, it was too little too late, having burned all his bridges fighting his friends rather than uniting against his enemies.

*originally posted on RoosterTeeth Community page on 12-10-21*

* images taken from RWBY Wiki *

RWBY Combat Analysis

*(Wookiepedia article on Battlemind)

#rwby #rwby combat analysis #james ironwood #rwby ironwood #atlas military #atlas academy #ozpin's inner circle #baseline superhuman #standard mastery #specialized combat

[wixelt]

Going to establish some of the headcanons/”rules” i’ll be using for the Hermits in the Hermitphibia AU.

Hermits - as “players” - can only “respawn” when their “admin” has control. Xisuma isn’t Amphibia’s admin, so if a Hermit dies, they’re gone unless X goes somewhere he has authority & restores them. The longer they’re out, the more effort it’ll take, so living’s preferred.

The Hermits are very old & very strong. They’re the pinnacle of the idea that an MC player character is at minimum a superhuman warrior survivalist. Granted, they all have their own unique stuff as well, but this is the baseline.

Whatever's going on in Hermitcraft as I write this is in the past. Hermitphibia’s, short of a contradiction, set post-Season 9. If i’m still doing this when S10 rolls around, its set after S10 as well, & so on.

Player mechanics still function. MC player things such as crafting & inventory are still in effect in Amphibia. Hermits will pull things out of thin air or craft unique objects from the environment & amaze every amphibian nearby.

Specific Hermit headcanons may be used if they fit. Even if Grian’s sort of decanonized it now, Watcher!Grian is still tried & true fanon so has a good chance of at least being referenced.

Hermit/player mechanics are not inherent. Theoretically, with the right person, they could be imparted/taught.

Other headcanons & rules may be introduced as I need them.

From here, if anyone has asks, feel free to throw them at me. They might help me pick a place to begin. :P

#hermitphibia au #amphibia #amphibia au #hermitcraft #hermitblr #hermitcraft au

[autisticsupervillain]

It's Fictional Throwdown Friday!

This Week's Fighters...

Popeye vs Spongebob!

Conditions:

No restrictions.

Scenario:

While going out to buy ingredients for the Krusty Krab, Mr. Krabs convinces Spongebob not to buy any of Popeye's spinach to save money. This prompts Popeye to pop out of the spinach can and attack the duo.

Analysis: Popeye

Popeye the Sailor Man is many things. An ever faithful boyfriend to his beloved Olive Oil, a combat hardened member of the navy, and the amphibious nonbinary sailor man icon we all deserve. No really, that happened. Look it up. But above all, he is one of classic cartoons all time heavyweight champions, on par with Bugs Bunny himself.

This little sailor had quite humble beginnings. After being born to the horribly named Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye was born horrifically ugly and deformed, prompting his father to run away in horror of what he had created. This caused Popeye to be adopted by the loving Whaler Joe, whom he'd look up for all of his boyhood years. Seeking to emulate his father, Popeye would join the navy, where he would learn to embrace his gift for violence.

Popeye had always been adept at beating the shit out of people, but it's only upon getting embroiled in World War 2, and competing with the loathsome bully Bruto for the fair Olive Oil's affections, that Popeye's skills would truly come into their own. This is because of the mythical miracle herb that Popeye had spent all of his life consuming known only as spinnach. Thanks to that, Popeye has an absurd level of superhuman strength, speed, and power that makes him among the toughest fighters in cartoon history.

Being a rubberhose animation icon, Popeye can freely morph and stretch his body like, well, rubber. He can inflate his muscles to huge proportions, stretch and bounce back at will to absorb blows, and inspire Monkey D Luffy with his cartoon antics. Again, look it up. Furthermore, he can completely break the laws of physics in the palm of his hand with ease. Whether by painting a battleship into existence, shooting fire out of his pipe to fly, flying normally anyways, or by turning completely invisible, Popeye is always capable of throwing out something you won't expect.

For example, one of Popeye's signature abilities is his power to punch so hard, whatever he hits is broken down into smaller elements. An anchor becomes a bunch of fish hooks, an animal becomes a steak stand, and racial stereotypes become even worse racial stereotypes. Use your imagination. That's another benefit to being from a rubberhose cartoon, Popeye's world is even more cartoonishly rascist than ours. Ah, 1940's America, how I loathe thee.

Moreover, Popeye's power may come from spinnach, but he certainly doesn't need it. He's eaten so much over the years, that he can still operate at a baseline superhuman level without it. Like that time God himself turned off the universe to kill Popeye and Popeye just... stood there and took it without blinking. Furthermore, the spinnach has proven to be so powerful that it once made a rocket fly so fast that it traveled backwards in time. And even if Popeye does need spinach for a boost, he can just will some into exist, either by waving his hand, drawing it, threatening the animator to give him some, or just letting the audience in the real world hand him some spinnach when he's in a tight spot.

And if you think you can just kill Popeye before he eats any, you're dreaming. Because even after being completely erased from existence, Popeye's nothingness was able to eat a can of spinnach and come back good as new. Popeye's power is so great, not even his animator is safe, as Popeye is able to not only tear and break his own animation frames, but also beat the hell out of his own animator. Meaning he's more or less beat the shit out of two different versions of God.

So, if you dare choose to mess with Popeye, always remember who you're dealing with. You're fighting one of cartoon's all time heavyweight champions, truly a Sailor Man to be feared.

Analysis: Spongebob

Tell me.... WHO LIVES IN A PINEAPPLE UNDER THE SEA! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!

Ah, yes, Spongebob SquarePants. We love him, we meme him, and we remember him as the purest essence of childhood cartoon nostalgia. This goofy goober, nautical nincompoop, and asexual icon may seem like a harmless wimp on the surface... and to an extent, he kinda is. His life long dream is to work as a fry cook at a dead end fast food restaurant, he once struggled to lift a glass of water, and he's easily small enough to fit in your hand, regularly getting overpowered by ordinary humans. You'd be forgiven for mistaking Bikini Bottom's best fry cook for a harmless goofball, wing nut, or knucklehead mcspazatron. But just you wait, this fry cook has a lot more up his virtually nonexistent sleeves.

There are three acronyms that one must always remember when discussing Spongebob. E.V.I.L, P.O.O.P., and T.F.I.B. Don't recognize that last one? It stands for Toon Force Is Bullshit.

When Spongebob isn't struggling to lift Teddy Bears, he's effortlessly rotating the entire planet, sucking up the entirety of Earth's oceans, and absorbing enough water to replace the moon in the sky. We're in for some shit now.

As a sea sponge, or, really more of a kitchen sponge I guess, Spongebob is remarkably durable and flexible. He can freely shspeshift into nearly any form he can imagine, regenerate from getting reduced to dust, duplicate himself millions of times, and absorb any liquid or physical attack thrown at him. Like the time he was able to walk around getting punched all week without feeling any of it, or the time he literally laughed off being erased from existence.

Moreover, he's a master of nearly any hobby or job he picks up. He's so good at cooking Krabby Patties that they can become sentient, cancel mind control, and make people romantically attracted to them, while his bubble blowing skills let him create torpedoes, create sentient life, and create entire fuctioning societies out of bubbles. He's such a Rockstar that his music can physically assault you and free you from mind control and one timd he was able to rock out so hard he transformed into the sun.

On top of that, Spongebob can create anything he can conceivably need in any situation, either by drawing it with the magic pencil (which, yes, later seasons show he still has), blowing bubbles, letting his tears come to life to revive him from the dead, or just by willing it into existence with his imagination. And bot only can the pencil's eraser erasing things from reality, but he can even erase reality itself by pulling on a string and unraveling the entire universe.

And then... there's his ability... to break the fourth wall.

Not only can he ride on the scene transitions, not only can he exit the comic book he's in, but he can also rewrite the plot of his own story as it's happening. And that's without the magic book from the second movie. He can just... do that. On his own.

He's strong enough to fuse together with Patrick down to the level of his DNA by hugging him really hard, fast enough to watch Patrick run to the sun in back in seconds, and strong enough to defeat and capture everyone else in Bikini Bottom within a single night (albiet with Patrick's help). This includes Squidward Tentacles, who is not only fast enough to move in a void where time does not exist, but also travel back in time out of that void into a point in time where is time machine still work by smashing a hole through said timeless void. Let me repeat... time did not exist and Squidward could still move.

While this all may sound unbeatable, there is one major issue for Mr. SquarePants. He can only survive out of water for so long and if exposed to extreme heats outside the water for too long, he risks drying up and suffocating to death. But, that's okay, because if that does happen, his tears will come to life and resurrect him from the dead anyways.

So next time you think to underestimate your childhood icon, you'd do well to remember... he's ready.

Throwdown Theme:

Throwdown Breakdown:

I'm gonna be perfectly honest with you... Spongebob pretty handily takes this.

While Popeye should be generally smarter and more experienced and arguably faster depending on how you quantify both of them traveling through time, that's about it. His time in the navy and fighting Bluto should give him more experience fighting Toon Force characters on his own level and military training should beat amateur karate.

Spongebob can match Popeye's regeneration, can easily surpass his shapeshifting, and can just... shapeshift back from Popeye's attempts to transform him into stuff. That alone counters a lot of Popeye's arsenal. And while Popeye can ask the writer for help, Spongebob can leave the fight completely and just politely ask the writer not to do that.

Granted, neither of them can exactly kill each other, but Spongebob does have ways of incapacitating Popeye, either by making him fall in love with a Krabby Patty, or by drawing up something Popeye can't escape from. While Popeye could likely deduce Spongebob's weakness to drying up, given he is a sea creature and Popeye in an experienced sailor, that would require him to not only keep Spongebob on dry land long enough to dry out but also keep him from reviving somehow. Which is easier said than done when Spongebob can just... absorb the ocean. And if Spongebob's cooking is good enough to get Popeye to swear of spinach forever, which it probably is, than, well, there you go. That's most of Popeye's power gone.

While Popeye's toon force shenanigans can let him beat all but the mightiest, he just wasn't ready for this Goofy Goober's Sweet Victory.

This Throwdown's Winner is...

Spongebob SquarePants!

#fictional throwdown fridays #spongebob squarepants #popeye the sailor man #thimble theater #Youtube

[erosoftitan]

@ofxfiercexfemales​ wanted a flower, so Spiderwoman gets one!

Jessica had been an Avenger for a very long time. They had never been on the same team before now. In fact, they’d only met a handful of times, and had never had a one-on-one conversation. 

She was also a human he had always wanted to talk to, about a specific topic, something they had in common, that caused Eros some trouble on Earth that Spiderwoman might be able to help with, or at least help explain. 

And she was here - fresh off of the latest apocalypse, without another one having yet manifested, with a pause for superheroes to catch their breath. This was as good a time as ever. Hoping she wouldn't go anywhere, Starfox quickly hopped over to Greece for a couple of minutes to pick a specific flower he remembered from back in the day, a whimsical one that he thought she would appreciate. Yes, that meant he’d climbed out a window to fly at blinding speed and returned by climbing into that same window.

He entered the break room with flowers in hand. Eros was not going to pretend he hadn’t been looking for her, because his performances didn’t have lies. 

“Jessica, I want to show you something,” the cherry-redhead greeted, voice airy and carefree. The flowers had green petals, but each one looked like it had a big, fat, fuzzy, legless spider hanging off of it. When Eros came close enough to sit and offer them to her, the spiders revealed themselves to be the bottom petals of orchids. “They’re called Black Spider Orchids.” He did not have a baseline empathic read on Jessica Drew’s emotions, because he didn’t ever feel a need to until now. Eros could, of course, read body and face language better than almost anyone else, but it was his empathy that made his ability to gel with others superhuman. 

She seemed okay to talk right now (though of course he could be wrong.) 

 “Do you have a minute?”

#ofxfiercexfemales #jessica drew #flowers!

[the-antiapocalyptic-man]

What is Mr. Freeze and Nora like in Headverse?

(I have this little personal canon where Nora actually became friends with a young Harvey Dent during her illness, but most of that would be it's own post)

I really like the idea of Nora befriending little Harvey!

As Headverse Victor and Nora, they were Austrian immigrants to Gotham City during the city's Golden Age. Victor is still a scientist and brought over all his research into advanced cryogenics, getting work with Ferris Boyle's Gotham Corporation, while Nora used her ballet training to land various film roles, most famously as the superhuman villainess Lazara Zero, an American take on the Irma Vep archetype in the League of Shadows serials (the bulk of which are now considered lost media). They ran in the same circles as Dr. Aloysius Fox, Adrian Arkham, "Ol' Calamity" Silverlock, Alan Scott, Sammy Zhao, and of course Alfie Pennyworth and his bankroller Pat Wayne.

After being diagnosed with MacGregor's Syndrome, Nora retired from acting and Victor threw himself into his work, doing whatever he could to give her more time, to save her. Boyle, unsatisfied with his results and unconcerned with Nora's eventual fate after she rebuffed his own advances years earlier, cut Victor's funding. Desperate to complete his research and safely freeze Nora while he researched a cure, Victor adopted the persona of "Mister Zero" began robbing various business (almost all subsidiaries for the Gotham Corporation) using an experimental direct-cryonic beam emitter (it would be a few decades before he caved to calling it a "Freeze Gun" as was already in popular use by the press at the time).

After a confrontation with Batman (Aloysius) and Eagle, Victor was changed forever: while the process was still misunderstood at the time, Aloysius exploding Victor's freeze gun in his face to save Boyle's life had the unintended consequence of activating Fries's latent metagene. While his altered biology gave him the ability to withstand extreme cold temperatures that would kill most baseline humans, it also left him unable to survive outside the cold.

With the compromise of Boyle's arrest and a promise of funding from Wayne, Victor retreated to a private laboratory with a frozen Nora, both of them unseen for decades, visited only by Aloysius and Pat's children and then grandchildren from time to time.

It was during a visit by Lucius Fox and a young Bruce Wayne that everything went sideways. While Victor's body hadn't aged in all this time, his extreme isolation and obsession had aggravated existing mental illness in full blown delusion. Now calling himself Mister Freeze and guided by hallucinations of Nora--awake and reborn as his White Queen--Victor had outlined plans to freeze all of Gotham before upgrading to an impossible attempt at plunging the entire world into a new ice age.

While Bruce--now having taken up Al's old identity as the Batman--stopped Victor's plan, he was forced to move him to a special facility at Arkham Psychiatric Hospital. While Bruce advocated for allowing Victor special permission to continue living with Nora, he was overruled by Doctors Hugo Strange and Jeremiah Arkham--the former out of an obscene urge to see how far he could plunge the various costumed criminals Batman brought him into madness, and the latter out of a petty urge to undermine his cousin.

It was under these circumstances that Nora was kidnapped by the League of Assassins--inspiration for the very films that had made her famous--disappeared into their ranks. Victor never forgave Bruce for this failure to protect the only person he ever truly loved, antagonizing the Wayne family into the Beyond era and Terry McGinnis's time as Batman.

tl;dr cold wife guy really hates rich people, mostly for good reasons

#dc #headverse #ask #videodromeda #mister freeze #mister zero #lazara #victor fries #nora fries #nora faria #ferris boyle #long post #lol sorry this one got away from me #I was watching a really good Tyrone Power movie and his my all time Bruce fancast so I was feeling inspired #anyway

[words-after-midnight]

Camp prep '23 - Days 4 & 5

Lol I forgot about this again yesterday because I'm terrible. 💀 I'm gonna skip the free Friday this week (Day 3) and do Days 4 & 5 in one post while I'm thinking of it.

4. Tell us about your MC.

cw: some non-detailed discussion of violence in a prison context.

So I want to preface this by saying that in The Dotted Line, everyone goes exclusively by their prison nicknames. The only time you learn someone's real name is either if it gets revealed in an administrative context, through paperwork, the protagonist's flashback/recollection scenes where his real name is occasionally used, or conversation between inmates who know each other well. This is because virtually everyone goes by nicknames in American state prisons, and it's actually common for inmates not to know each other's real names. Nicknames are typically given based on an attribute or characteristic of the person - eg. someone from Detroit being nicknamed "Detroit," a quiet inmate being nicknamed "Mouse," a person in prison for murder being called "Killer," etc.

Now that that's out of the way, our protagonist is nicknamed "Scarface" - obviously after the 1983 Al Pacino movie, but it's because he has a visible facial scar. Another inmate (a supporting character) gave him the nickname. He actually likes it because it "sounds cool," despite his cellmate thinking it's in such poor taste that he refuses to use it (read: the cellmate knows how Scarface got the scar - our protagonist basically told the cellmate his entire pre-prison life story because he is literally incapable of shutting up - and is a decent person).

I'd consider Scarface a villain protagonist, but I won't go into why because spoilers! He was incarcerated on a life sentence without parole for first degree murder and, following classification, was placed in a Level 3 (medium security) state prison. Once "plan A" for getting out of prison fails (read: it was fucking ridiculous and it's practically inconceivable that he actually thought it would work unless you know him), his objective becomes to escape, à la Shawshank Redemption except he's way too impatient to actually dig into a wall for 20+ years. He's also absolutely convinced his escape plot will work for some reason (again: once you get to know him this becomes more understandable, albeit still ridiculous).

In terms of his personality - on the surface, he tends to be laid back and get along with anyone, but has a superiority complex and harbors a musing contempt for most people. Will be nice, endearing, polite, and charming to your face, but won't hesitate to stab you in the back if you fuck with him or get in his way. He's disadvantaged in multiple ways in a prison setting (he's a young, relatively small-built guy), which he makes up for by knowing how to get on the right people's good side (with some crucial help early on) and, when all else fails, bribery. Despite this, he tends to pretty vigilant, but he'll also put himself into an absolutely brainlessly risky situation for no reason if it sounds even mildly like it could be a good time. He can be playful and fun to be around, but make no mistake: he'll tell you he doesn't bite, and he's lying.

Another interesting thing about him is his almost superhuman ability to retain his cool and respond neutrally in situations that would traumatize most people. I feel like most people in prison get desensitized to random acts of violence and whatnot, but this man will literally witness, like, a gruesome murder and internally be like "anyways when's lunch" lmao. Personally I feel like it's a combination of just his natural disposition (my dude's baseline affect is flatter than a cutting board) and the fact that he's Seen Shit. I find his internal world pretty fascinating.

5. What genre is your WIP?

Primarily psychological horror, but there's a dark comedy element because that's how the narrator rolls. Also elements of crime (it's set in a prison) and I play around with some slasher tropes.

#i literally word vomited in 4 jesus christ #writing #campprepapril23 #camp nanowrimo #tdl