DP x DC Prompt:
Summoning circles are more complicated than people give them credit for. They’re a bit like a mix between a thumb print, a name, a phone number, and a recipe; and at the same time, nothing like any of those things.
In reality, most summoning circles in spell books and ancient texts are incomplete, representing only a fraction of a particular spirit’s identity.
A complete circle will actually be a series of different summoning circles, with each concentric ring representing an aspect of the spirit’s identity and having individual requirements and/or offerings needed. Ghosts have an innate awareness of them and are able to draw and describe their requirements from any sort of inward reflection.
Ghosts will often give out incomplete circles as a means of communication and transportation. A single ring of the circle will only open the door, and each ring added makes the pull and connection to the summoner stronger. Ghosts will also sometimes use incomplete circles to mark and monitor their haunts and as a way of claiming territory.
A complete summoning circle will occasionally but inevitably change over time, as parts of the spirit’s identity change.
The circle will always be a closely guarded secret. This is because, much like giving your true name to the fae, giving out your full summoning circle will allow the summoner to not only capture you, but to command and control you.
After Danny was shown Dan’s future where he killed the world, he made Jazz memorize his complete circle and told her to use it if he ever turned evil. She thought he was being ridiculous, but learned the spell when she saw how frightened he had become of himself.
When the summoning circle of the Ghost King was added to his identity, he tried to make her memorize the new circle, only for her to flat out refuse, saying it’s not healthy for him to make these kind of contingencies. They get into a really bad fight and Danny flies off determined to find someone he can trust with his circle should he turn evil.
As he’s flying over his town he feels the slight tug on his consciousness indicating someone is trying to summon the Ghost King. He lets his awareness bleed through the summoning just enough to see that… yup it’s cultists again. At least there’s no sacrifices this time.
He’s about to shrug the summoning off like he has so many others when he suddenly sees someone fighting through the cultists. Oh! Make that several someones.
With a giddy sort of eagerness Danny watches Batman and his sidekicks cut through the crowd of religious fanatics, even taking down a couple that looked like they were using ghost-based magic. He’d always admired the Dark Knight, but seeing him fight in person is something else.
It’s as the hero is tying up the cultists and checking their injuries that a lightbulb goes off in Danny’s head, and, after a moment of steeling his determination, he lets himself be pulled through the summoning circle.
The Bats all tense up as the circle at the center of the room grows brighter, readying themselves for another fight. Danny tries to smile reassuringly as he feels his form materialize, though they likely can’t see it in the bright flash of light that accompanies it.
He frowns when he realizes the summoning had dressed him in his royal armor and cloak, the crown of fire burning above his head and ring of rage glaring from his right hand.
He tries raising his hands in an “I am not a threat,” pose, before realizing it looks exactly like the Box Ghost’s “Beware!” pose. He tucks his hands under his armpits, then awkwardly waves at the group of vigilantes.
“Hi there! Wow that was really cool- Thanks for taking care of these guys for me.”
The vigilantes once again tense up as Danny steps out of the circle towards them. Danny smiles sheepishly.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I really need to talk to you, Batman.”
Batman steps forward, approaching Danny as he stands just outside the circle, a living shadow that looms larger than life. Still, Danny senses something soften in his gaze as he looks over the teenage Ghost King, stopping just out of reach of him. Danny gazes back at his childhood hero, hoping he’s making the right choice.
“I have a favor to ask of you.”
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I keep on telling people you're the only one who knows how to plot. Can you teach all of us how to plot, please? I love you.
I AM SUMMONED? PLOT BRAIN SUMMONED?
I love plotting. It's my favorite part of the writing process. Plot is "things that happen" and the best part of writing is imagining things that happen. I'm going to assume that whoever may be reading this knows how to imagine The Happenings, so I'm gonna be talking more about structure, but in like, a kinda abstract sense.
A good plot is a little bit more than a string of events. Plot is like music: there's variation in rhythm and sound and melody, but ultimately there's cohesion, because it's all one song. You can have a bunch of wild things happening, but no matter how strange, there should be something that links them all together, because you're telling one story.
Plot structures are patterns in stories. I'm pretty sure most of them were developed as analysis tools (as in, story already exists > look! it follows this pattern) rather than as writing tools, but people use them as writing tools because it's a neat little way to organize the chaos that is "shit happens." Stories follow patterns for the same reasons music follows patterns: we enjoy the certainty of hitting certain beats. But we also like being surprised. A good pop song doesn't sound like a random collection of sounds, but it also doesn't sound like the middle slider of other songs.
There is this shared concept in both music and writing: the idea of tension and release. Basically, you're playing with reader expectation: there's an imbalance in the experience (tension), and we want to see that imbalance resolved (release). All the common plot structures deal with this basic pattern:
You set an expectation
There are complications to the expectation
You meet the expectation
And this rhythm is happening on multiple levels in writing. Scenes follow this structure (we're gonna get past that door, we're gonna find the murder weapon, we're gonna collaborate and come up with a plan) and all those scenes feed into the overarching expectation (we're gonna solve this murder!). I usually think of chapters as their own mini-story, part of the larger whole. And I think of scenes as their own mini-story, part of the larger chapter. I have engineer brain. I see the gears spinning in the clock. That's why all my chapters have at least One Important Thing happening, because that's that particular chapter's Step #3.
And One Last Important Thing:
In music, a delayed resolution is almost always more interesting than the standard resolution. In writing, that means you wanna drag out Step #2 for as long as you can. That's where the bulk of the story is happening, that's how you build tension, that's how you get people to turn the page.
So when you write a fake dating fic, those bitches better not get together until the very end. I came here for fake dating, not for real dating, damn it. If you resolve that expectation early on, you better replace it with a different expectation that's just as engaging.
But also don't drag it out for too long. Sorry. The hard part of writing is learning the difference between too short and too long. Writing is unfortunately a nuanced skill which is why my advice is like "do this but not too much teehee." But tension and resolution is just rhythm, you can build a sense for it if you engage with enough stories.
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Among all those comments, a particular one caught her attention.
– Dear author-nim. It was a great read. May I ask about your release schedule?
Such an unparalleled naivete that made him use his real name as the username. Han Sooyoung stared at that name for a long, long time. She looked closer, and discovered another comment attached to it.
– Are you… going to release another chapter tomorrow?
She repeatedly clenched and unfurled her fists many times. Sweat was soaking her small hands.
Is it really okay for me to write this?
Even then, isn't it fine this way?
Han Sooyoung hesitated for a long time, before typing her reply.
While thinking about a certain someone, still alive beyond this screen.
While thinking about a certain boy who'd breathe, eat, shout some nonsense about 'I'm Yoo Joonghyuk', and do whatever it takes to endure his own apocalypse.
And so, the story of a regressor that reached 3149 chapters started in this manner.
– Yes. A new chapter will be published tomorrow.
I WAS RIGHT!!!!!!!!
Well, I was right after I spent like half the novel convinced the author was actually Dokja. At least I wasn't alone in thinking that, considering Sooyoung thought so too. 😂
Though I do love that it's not at all how I thought it was. I figured she was the author and just forgot because she lost half her memories to her avatar and just assumed that Dokja wrote it because that was the most logical option that her Predictive Plagiarism could come up with.
Was not expecting all this wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff, though I guess I should have by the time I reached the end of the novel and all sorts of things in the beginning were being affected by the ending. Time travel. Dimension travel. Just full of paradoxes.
I loooooove though that the novel is "trash" because she has to speed write it as fast as possible based on vague memories while using Predictive Plagiarism (...plagiarizing herself...) because she only has a limited time with her own body and also because she needs to keep Dokja engaged, needs to pump out chapters as fast as humanly possible to give him his reason to live until the next day.
And I love that the reason it only has one view is because she doesn't bother to read it, not even to typo check. She already knows it has a reader. A paradox it may be, I love that the novel truly was written for Dokja and not just after the first hundred or so chapters when all the other readers fell off. Nope, it was written for him and him alone from the very beginning. Sooyoung already knows that she doesn't have to make it good, she just has to make it, and that in turn will save him, even if it dooms millions of others.
Oh man, Sooyoung seeing him in the hospital after he tried to jump out of a window and wondering where the heck tls123 is, why haven't they started posting yet, they need to hurry up and save this unbelievably precious idiot. 😭💖
Sooyoung of all people having to wrestle with the knowledge that if she saves one person, she will kill billions (perhaps trillions) of other people across multiple worldlines.
Well, actually, perhaps it's fitting that it is Sooyoung of all people because I don't know how many others in Dokja's party who would doom this entire universe of parallel worlds to save a single person, even if that single person is Dokja himself.
Like, it parallels pretty well with what's going on with Sooyoung's other half...she's the weird one in the group who wants to go save the Dokja they left on the train while even Dokja's incarnation is worried that they're going to cause a lot of harm in the process and open up another worldline of tragedy, which they all know Dokja would not want.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Han Sooyoung is perhaps one of the few people selfish enough to save Kim Dokja at the cost of the entire universe and it's so interesting to think back on the fact that she literally tried to get Joonghyuk to kill him way back in the earliest chapters and now she's using Joonghyuk to save him.
(Oh man...when Joonghyuk finds out who his creator is...)
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Omega!Gojo Satoru x Alpha!Reader
I believe we are fated to do the things we choose anyway*
gege akutami is the kind of mangaka who makes fun of almost all their characters. with utmost affection, gojo deserves to be bullied a bit. we love that he's a little heartless, a little frivolous, that he's powerful as a fact, that he cares a little bit strangely, so doing him a bit of justice, here's the mirror to Getou's youth story
tw: canon character death, spoilers for the manga, gojo's emotional constipation and egotism
Toji Zenin cut so many threads the day he arrived on the Tokyo school grounds, but the one between you and Satoru survived. It's already a miracle that Riko was the only one who died that day. The miracle of surviving should have been enough, but now you've lived long enough to find out how much you could love someone too. You get to see how afraid someone is of loving you. Gojo Satoru had one friend. Gojo Satoru had one mate. That was it, that was all he could let himself have.
Springtime Tokyo is still cold. Not as cold as up north in the mountains, but the winter uniforms are blessedly warm. An assistant manager drops you off at Tokyo Jujutsu Technical School on a milky March morning where you are met by Yaga-sensei, the first year teacher.
This teacher has some kind of idea about building community, which is why he's clustered the four of you first-years in the same building, around a loud blue-eyed boy who barely takes one look at you, squinting around a pair of blackout sunglasses, at your purposeful non-expression, before he is grinning, far too wide and it feels like he gets even louder, movements expansive to pull you into the range of an argument he's having with a tall slim boy with long hair tied at the back of his head.
Yaga-sensei just shakes his head and introduces you to Ieri Shoko, who is physically leaning away from the noise as if to escape some blast radius and has the most distant smile you've ever seen in your life on her face.
It's unsettling is what it is. The dark haired boy is just rolling his eyes at the one who had somehow both dismissed you and pulled you into his orbit. The automatic response is to try and get that attention back, but you have at least a little more self respect than that. You climb the stairs to take a room on the same floor to Shoko-san's and leave them to their snipping. You don't see Gojo fall silent for half a second before carrying on bickering, Yaga now stepping in to separate them.
School hasn't quite started yet. It's a boarding school so everyone is just around, getting the lay of the school, setting up their rooms, exploring Tokyo, running into one another and trying to figure out how their pieces fit together.
Satoru has already sorted you all into neat little piles of adjectives
Polite: the boy with the long dark hair, Getou Suguru, although this doesn't necessarily mean nice he notes gleefully. Self righteous and reactive, as in he can be baited into a no holds barred fight, which is new for him. He hasn't been able to fight someone who could hold their ground for more than a minute since he was thirteen. Subversively irreverent.
Morbid: the shortie with the short hair, Shoko Ieri. She discovered her abilities somewhere and even Satoru has to admit some of the diagrams she pulls up are admirably disgusting. Neutral. Satoru has never met someone else who sticks so close to their own whims before but she isn't like anything he expected, dismissive, meandering, goading. And she can't explain how she does what she does, which is aggravating because he can't do it.
And you, the new one. The last to arrive. Fresh meat. Quiet, wary.
You catch him not following you, but showing up near where you are a little too frequently to feel coincidental while you're making a point to meet the upperclassmen. He adds opportunistic and watchful to the list when he notices you do this, but some of the older students seem to find it vaguely endearing - the clan ones like a small animal they can toss treats, the recruited students who aren't trying to suck up to the clan kids with the cautious familiarity of greeting another outsider.
He tries tossing you a treat, granting you some offhanded attention in the common space of what is now the first years' block. Suguru laughs at him when you mostly look confused and apologetically tell him you've never seen either of the movies he wants to debate before refilling your water bottle and wandering back out onto the school grounds with your umbrella.
School starts regardless with some tentative unspoken agreement between the four of you to try and be friends, or at least classmates. There is after all, no one else to be friends with.
Class is boring, so Satoru watches his classmates. Where Shoko is passive and watchful and Satoru is staring into the air, you're openly attentive and Suguru more casually mirrors your attention. Which makes him want to call you another boring small-town bumpkin
Except you are in the same the advanced mechanics elective he is, and you and Shoko become animated discussing the curse anatomy lectures. Yaga takes you away to practice hand-to-hand with his dolls while he lets Satoru and Suguru pummel each other, which makes him think you must be too fragile to handle the two of them. Most people are, so he doesn't think much on it.
Satoru sometimes goes out alone to train when he can't sleep. He lashes out at the wooden dummies on the practice field, ducking under wooden arms and lashing out to see sections of it spin faster. On one of these nights, a week or two into the first year, he sees you standing outside the track, leaning on a railing, face buried in a thick scarf. He's aware of your vague attention, watching him without any particular interest, like how one might watch water sliding under a bridge, but when he sneaks a glance around the practice dummy, you're just as often more fixated on the sky. The moon is full and you're watching the clouds chase across the deep blue expanse, listening to Gojo Satoru's knuckles impacting on wood. And then at some point, he looks over and you're gone, your weird cursed energy signature fading in the dark.
Satoru only sees your technique the first time a substitute makes you spar with everyone else during training while Yaga is away. Apparently the teacher is someone you know because you get into the first argument he's ever seen before you send a spear flying so fast it hits the center of a target and topples it over.
The same teacher makes you fight Satoru, to already defeated attempts at appalled refusal. He'd usually help you push back just on principle, but he hasn't gotten to go on a mission with you yet and his sometimes oppressive curiosity has settled on whether you actually can keep up with him after all.
You can't, but this is Gojo Satoru at fifteen, not fully realized, and the first time he fights you he amends how he feels about "opportunistic". He flies right at your face and swears he makes contact, but you step back at the last minute and he feels an impending impact from his left that is almost the same strength as his own attack. He tries again and you twist out of the way much faster than he had expected. He tries to throw you and you end up descending slowly to the ground, trying to get the teacher to end the bout. Eventually Satoru overwhelms you and breaks your arm when you try to block too many hits in rapid succession. Shoko fixes it, and you wince with gritted teeth and tears in your eyes but don't cry or sob or glare at him with the kind of face that is calling him names you can't say out loud. The demonstration has him, fortunately or unfortunately, folding you into the energy of your little first year group like you'd been there all along.
He's a shaman clan kid, so it's interesting to see you now as not necessarily opportunistic but curious about the other sorcerers, about other people. What a novelty, to be inconsequentially curious. If he'd been too curious as a child he would be either lectured on responsibility or nearly drowned in related gifts meant to appease his moods
You don't appease his moods and the attention of him, one of the strongest sorcerer of the generation, doesn't appease you.
Satoru tries to bait you and things go right over your head. He tries to disrupt your silent, invisible schedule and you let him drag you away with minimal fussing, especially when Shoko or Suguru is involved, but will wander to the side on outings and either find some accidental trouble or something that makes him a little surprised at the intensity of your focus.
He forces you into a combat-determined wager that demands you stop using honorifics with his name and Suguru's name and Shoko's name (without asking the other two) and there's no way for you to get out of it or win so that forces some artificial closeness that becomes real. Language is very important for creating distance, for creating hierarchy and Satoru somehow isn't interested in a hierarchy between you.
He is however far more self conscious of his omega status than Suguru is. He won't say it, but it's a relief when none of you make a big deal out of it when you find out and also a surprising comfort when you and Shoko who don't have to suffer through the literal additional headache of heats try and make them comfortable
For Satoru this involves distracting him by playing video games with him, watching movies, or tossing balls of paper at him while he tries to stop it with his technique. Mostly he's with Suguru, especially if they sync up, but Satoru doesn't have the same heat symptoms as him. During first year even though he sleeps more than he does as an adult, it's typically less than the rest of you might want. Where Suguru gets tired, Satoru will get cranky and mean because he's bored and feverish and Suguru is too tired to entertain him. His family also was never very comforting during his heats so he knows what to do as far as nesting, but having people around is new for him.
He likes to call and text you if you're on missions during these times, which is typical given his clan's sensitivity to him being around alphas at these times.
So even when you're on campus, you and Shoko only spend a few hours with him at a time. Sometimes you play games and the heat makes him almost slow enough to beat on a DS link game. Sometimes he makes you do his homework. Sometimes he likes to throw throwing things at you to see how you use your technique to deal with it.
He adds "sentimental" to the list of adjectives when he realizes he can so easily pressure you in these times into revealing more of yourself to him than you usually do. He's bored and there's only so many things to talk about before you start telling him about an encounter with one of the rare cats that will tolerate living around the cursed energy of the campus, when you grimace and tell him about a terrible noodle stand in Yamanashi province that you still crave somehow, when you tell him about saving fallen leaves in a heavy dictionary you use for that purpose, or the one time you reveal that you've kept every pair of shoes your parents bought you to wear on the first day of school. You tell him these things and it makes him feel like maybe, someday, he might want to tell you things too.
It's not soft but there's a softness to it. A genuineness in the four of you together, in Satoru's and Suguru's growing strength and self surety. Satoru tries to make himself the center of the world, because it's fact that is where he has been all along. But he's not so easily the center of your world. You didn't come from his world.
Satoru doesn't fall. He doesn't think hard about why it becomes so. He barely thinks about it all. He just knows at some point that you're one of his. You're one of his and he wants you to pay him the attention he' accustomed to as center of the world (except he doesn't maybe. He'll be able to say it one day that what he loved was you treating him like he was as human as he could be)
He's terrible at acknowledging whether this possessiveness is anything in particular. After a sparring session, you watch Shoko patch a cut on Suguru's arm with so much longing and a pang of something worms its way in Satoru's chest. He crowds in next to Suguru before Shoko's done, draping over Suguru's shoulders. You don't see the way Satoru's eyes flicker from Shoko's steady hands to your wide-eyed gaze.
He's jealous the way a child is jealous of a favorite toy, hooking his arm around your neck if any omegas outside of school talk to you in the street. If you brush him off when he's trying to use you as a tool for self-affirmation, he sulks around until you acknowledge him in some other way and he will not admit to a single soul why it matters. When he's forced to go home for holidays like oban and returns in a terrible pique, you may fight with him if he lashes out in the worst, most personal ways. You push back and talk to instead of around him or through him and you also don't realize that is why he backs off.
He realizes slowly that he has to be careful with you. He forgets sometimes that you're more fragile that Suguru, that you need help Shoko doesn't need. On what you call the "worst school trip in existence" and Shoko calls "lucky we didn't all die" and Suguru smiles and calls "well we all made it out in the end", even Satoru got injured, yet he feels invincible, like he caught a bullet and threw it back.
When Toji nearly kills him and everyone he ever cared about, he awakens with the power to keep it from happening ever again. He thinks he can carry the world for all of you, for everyone, reveling in his power. He doesn't realize that his presence, the gravity well he made in the monster class's lives, doesn't exist the same way while he's not there because he has a tendency to think everything will be easy for him to fit back into when he returns, or not to think on the fact things could change at all.
Then Suguru leaves and the center of Satoru's world, his reference point, collapses
You're there in Shinjuku the day it happens. It's getting cold again. You're there to meet Shoko. Suguru has gone missing, Satoru is... away. Again. Still. He's been absent whenever he is around anyway. The jujutsu world doesn't have the resources to devote to hunting curse users in particular so the effort to find Suguru has been halfhearted at best and even if he's on your minds, you have jobs to do still.
You're there in Shinjuku and when you don't find the person you're looking for, you find someone else, It shouldn't happen, but it does. You run into Satoru, mind reeling at Suguru's betrayal. You nearly don't see him and he nearly doesn't see you except he sees everything and he's been walking around the district like a ghost.
He appears like a ghost too, tall and pale and ridiculous eyes. You'd tried to see if the world reflected in them once, but now it's more obvious to you than ever that it's just him, nothing more and nothing less.
"Let's go back," he says, and for the first time in months, you return to the college, side by side on the train, feeling like there should be more people in the near-empty car. You get as far as you can before you get to a station that's closed where you can no longer transfer and then you get out and walk in silence.
You walk like there's another person jostling for space between you. When you get to the school, Shoko meets you at the red tori gates. When you get to the mostly empty dormitory building, now a little emptier, Satoru looks at you. And looks and looks and looks. This time, he feels like you might disappear in the pre-dawn light casting your faces in blue.
Maybe it's because he's already lost one precious thing long before he noticed it was gone that he grips your shoulders tight, so tight you almost wince, but turn into it instead, tilting your head as though, were you less careful people, you might brush your cheek against his hand. Just for a little bit of comfort, for a little familiarity.
Then Shoko makes a noise at the top of the stairs, the scuff of her foot, the tap of her palm on the banister. What a terrible day it must be if Shoko is interfering. And you step away.
Satoru doesn't go to bed. For the first time in his life he feels like he doesn't know who he is. He watches your light come on and then go off. He doesn't see you stand at the mouth of the hall leading to Suguru's room with a blanket around your shoulders until eventually you turn away and fall asleep on one of the common room couches, near to where a year of his body in the same spot had left an indent. He doesn't think about the world where you aren't here, where he never sees you again, because he can't quite fathom it.
Because even when he was gone, he never felt like he had let any of you go
It makes him feel sick to his stomach, the closeness of someone else, but it feels worse to push you away so you sit shoulder to shoulder with him some time in the morning. He pretends not to see the new dark shadows in your eyes. You sit and watch the mist burn off and pretend his warmth can hide how the world is a little colder.
*I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you
― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars
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Me: Okay, so I can ask for something I want. It’s not bad to mention a thing that would make me really happy.
Brain: Oh, so you’re gonna take advantage of someone? Nice.
Me:
Me: Okay, so how about something that’d drastically improve my quality of life?
Brain: Wow, way to be needy. You’re gonna scare people away if you keep reminding them how hard it is to keep you around.
Me: You mean little— Fine, I’m just gonna do the usual song and dance! I won’t let anyone fuss over me, but I’ll make sure everybody else gets their flowers, food and drink.
Brain: Keep talking.
Me: I’ll just withdraw so they don’t notice the burnout, and come back when I can win another fucking EGOT with my performances.
Brain: K, but refusing to lean on them is gonna hurt them more. They’ll be sure you don’t trust them, and they’re gonna notice that you’re holding them at arm’s length.
Me: No they won’t!
Brain: Yeah, you’re not that good an actor. You also suck at knowing when to dip before the cracks show, and staying away until you’ve covered them up.
Me: But—
Brain: In fact, you’re so bad at lying about not being in distress that it’ll just hurt their feelings. Might as well just—
Brain: Wait a second.
Me: 👀
Brain: =_=
Me: 🥤👀🍿
Brain: You miserable little shit.
Me: No no, go on. Tell me more about how I’m never going to pull off faking being okay. The people who care about me are too smart for that, so it’d just be insulting their intelligence.
Brain: I WAS HAVING FUN-
Me: Death spiraling my mental health? Mhmm. Feel free to continue.
Brain: You’re so annoying!
Me: Yup.
Me: Don’t forget the part about undermining their confidence. Like, I can baby them, but they’re not capable enough to help me? Devastating.
Brain: Why are you like this?!
Me: Bitch, I’m not the amalgamation of every piece of shit someone threw at me.
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