#hyu's de chozen vun sveethot

[brawltogethernow]

I find it extremely interesting like, anthropologically. That five or six separate people have complimented the Girl Genius urban fantasy AU prompt ficlets as a good Buffy fusion. I have seen one episode of Buffy that I actually remember watching (it was the musical episode though so I’m good), so like. I have no idea what about them registers as having that vibe strongly enough to make that many people completely confident it was the unspoken intention. My thesis with that ‘verse's lore is 90% “go with the first tropey thing distilled from every urban fantasy series I’ve ever read that pops into my head, ESPECIALLY if I instinctively hesitate over it being too cliche*” -- which kind of reads like an insult to Buffy but is probably actually a compliment to it as a genre touchstone -- but what I've been holding up as my standard for that is fuck'n...City of Bones and whatever the series it's from is called. (This one IS aggressively mediocre, or at least, the ones I read are, which is part of what optimizes it for this.) So like! I'm just incredibly interested in this. Five or more is a lot of people to say the same thing about a fic for a webcomic fandom.

*This is why I HAVE to make Gil and Zeetha’s backstory that they're half werewolf-except-cooler-and-called-Lycans and half long-line-of-human-monster-hunters.

#pardon the immediacy of talking about this but late september is like yesterday to me #i really ought to make a tag for it before i post this #is #hyu's de chozen vun sveethot #too long/hard for random people to remember exactly how to type? #well i'm enacting it

[brawltogethernow]

hey i just saw that urban fantasy thing with jaegars and i really liked it i hope you have a good day

Instead of trying to convey how direct messages like this turn me into some kind of rainbow good vibes explosion reaction gif and cause me to do cringey pleased wiggle dances, I’m just going to use this ask to post another word doodle set in the same universe. Part..3 of 4 except 2 doesn’t exist yet, or something.

- -

Gil didn’t get the texts immediately, because smartphones reacted to areas where magic was really dense about the same way they did to extreme temperatures. And to follow that metaphor he’d been out in below freezing weather all day. Fighting...polar bears?

Okay, maybe that comparison had outlived its usefulness.

Anyway by the time his phone turned back on, they were already a few hours old.

hey, they read.

baby bro.

so i’m not HUNDO P sure, obvs

but i THINK there was a monster in my laundry closet?

my roommate and i murdered it for great justice, tho, or something. again, not sure. thought you’d want to come check it out either way

so come tell me if my dryer is haunted and i’ll make you chai

Weird. Gil worried his boba straw with his teeth.

I know how to make my own chai, he typed. This was the only name the spiced milky tea recipe their mother had made up to give baby Zeetha had.

ya but u think mine is better! don’t lie i know it

Zeetha’s was, on some ephemeral level, better. Gil maintained that this was an objective fact, and also deeply unfair. He actually paid attention to ingredient measurements when he made things. Zeetha cooked with her feelings. It should not matter that she had grown up with their mom, actually watching her throw her handful of pet recipes together, if he was exactly duplicating the preparation process!

Sure thing, LITTLE SIS, he sent, spitefully.

They did not actually know who was older. It was a point of contention.

Gil’s stupid-sharp teeth split the thick plastic. He gagged and spit out the tip of the straw. Wonderful.

that’s a yes. see u soon - wait r u nearbish or nah?

I’ll take a Ley, he typed. Then he added, Nearbish.

*nearish

i typed nearby and changed it bc your travel times are disengaged from common sense don’t razz me

He typed, Look, I’ve never had a sibling before. I’m kind of pulling from TV for guidance, looked at it, then backspaced all of it.

Sorry? he sent.

it was a joke, nerd!

Maybe he should’ve just sent it.

A café factotum guy’s Roomba-esque route around the room brought him bumping up against Gil’s booth. “Heyyy, are we still good here?” he asked in a fast drawl.

Then he paused a beat and gave Gil an appreciative once-over so overt that Gil, who had been called “charmingly dense” about when he was being flirted with in the past (by his childhood friend/nemesis, who had then stared at him for a long moment as if hoping he would pick up on some subtext which was still unclear to him), actually noticed.

He felt his face heat up.

Maybe he should have gotten a new shirt before getting a snack? This one was kind of Kirked up. He just...lost a lot of shirts. To the line of duty. He wasn’t actually sure if he had any unharmed ones left. And his jacket was still fine! Well, the zipper was broken. But that hadn’t been because of anything with claws, it had just been eaten by a washing machine.

Waiter guy crooked a smile at Gil. “Get back from a rough day at...”

His gaze paused on the two-handed sword Gil had laid across his table so he could to try to wipe dark purple ichor off of it with recycled paper napkins dipped in his complimentary ice water.

“...At...” he tried again.

Gil also looked at the table. The sword was slightly too long not to hang over the edge by a few inches. It was surrounded by a field of devastated paper.

“Lacrosse,” said Gil. “Lacrosse drills.”

He felt bad about guiding people into easy-to-swallow misapprehensions. But he felt even worse about leaving them to flounder around until they came up with explanations on their own, so. Gil was a fictitious connoisseur of...so many contact sports, most of which he had never actually played.

Thus redirected (Gil was a monster, and it had nothing to do with the teeth), waiter guy proceeded to laugh that he didn’t know anything about lacrosse but bet it gave you great arms, then cheerfully bullied Gil into ordering a takeout container of soup.

Gil started sifting quarters out of his change purse so he could tip without flashing Empire-stamped ingots, which were whammied with the meanest Fade-concentrating spell to counter the innate insecurity of establishing a standardized money system. (He should probably just get a separate wallet, he thought for approximately the 72nd time that week.) His phone, set on a carefully gore-free corner of the table, lit up with a reminder notification. He tapped it back on.

Is your roommate okay? he sent.

pretty sure, Zeetha answered. she had backup?

she brought three...weird...old men. frat boys?

...frat men.

What?

i don’t know!

Okay, turn the horseshoe upside-down, I’ll be there tonight.

#girl genius #w #fic #anonymous #asks answered #hyu's de chozen vun sveethot

[brawltogethernow]

Agatha and Da Boyz - urban fantasy AU for the ask box meme, please?

Maxim, experimentally, reached out with his tongue, circled it around a package of cup ramen sitting innocently on the gas station shelf, and drew it, styrofoam and clear plastic wrapping and all, into his mouth.

He bit down. It went, KRERNUNCHffkfCH?

“No!” hissed Agatha. Futilely, she bat at the general area of his shoulders with her hands, head swiveling around to look for witnesses.

The cashier, a woman with purple-dyed hair and a chain connecting a piercing in her nose with one in her earlobe, was indeed staring right at them, mouth open slightly. As Agatha watched, she blinked with unnatural slowness, her face flickering like she was struggling to get a firm grip on one expression.

Finally her face cleared, and she smiled as genuinely as someone in a service job was likely to. “Oh, ha!” she said. “Munchies, right? Yeah, I’ve been there. Just make sure you bring me the package so I can scan it, alright?”

Agatha turned back to Maxim, who was fully engrossed in chewing consideringly. The package was definitely gone.

“She izn’t gonna see ennyting veird,” Oggie informed her easily. He was staring into the little mirror over a rotating display of sunglasses, trying to get a pair on without the single horn on the side of his head knocking them askew. “Iz de Fadey Ting.” Agatha could hear the capital letters. “Hit keeps pipple from noticink magic schtoff who izn’t all speshul-like.”

“Like hyu!” Dimo supplied, horribly casually.

“Dot’s vhy hyu roommate didn’t scream vhen she saw hyu lock dot big tentacly tingy in hyu’s broom closet,” Oggie continued, cheerfully. One of the stems of the star-shaped sunglasses he was trying to get to sit straight snapped in his hand. He sighed and put them back on the stand. They sagged, languorous.

“She izn’t gonna notice vhen hyu keel it, needer, so dun vorry,” Maxim finished, now done with his snack. “Vill just congratch’late hyu for taking out a rilly big rat, sumtink like dot.” He ran his unreasonable tongue over his jagged teeth, thoughtful. “Nize texture,” he declared. “Hy vants to try de odder liddle flavors.”

Agatha emitted an unhappy tea kettle noise, scooped up a miscellaneous armful of cup ramens (SALE! declared a little sign above them in screaming yellow and red), and swept them over to the poor cashier, who she deposited them in front of. Anything to get them out of here faster.

The cashier, enterprisingly, counted them and then picked one up and scanned it sixteen times. So that solved the issue of Maxim’s 33¢ debt to society.

“$12.22,” she declared after Agatha handed her the things she had actually come in for. Three containers of salt, and a plastic barbecue lighter.

Dimo leaned around Agatha and deposited a gold nugget on the sticky counter. It had a winged chess piece stamped on its side. “Buy hyuself sumting nize with de change, sveethot,” he rumbled, grinning. With, oh, too many teeth.

The cashier picked it up with businesslike efficiency, flashing Dimo a tight smile, then started to deposit the nugget in the register, paused. Her hand drifted to hold it over the tip jar, back. Paused. She stared down at it, looking fuzzy.

She looked back up, dreamy, and then more present as her gaze lit on Maxim. “That’s such a natural looking ombre!” she said, gesturing with her empty hand at Maxim’s hair, which was the same shade as hers. That his skin was also purple did not seem to register. “So subtle, I love it. What brand do you use?”

She looked down at the nugget again. Her brow furrowed with confusion. Her wrist twitched in preparation for resuming its circuit between the register and tip jar.

Agatha leaned forward, twitched the gold out of her hand, plunked it into her shirt pocket, and slapped a twenty down on the counter. Then she grabbed all three of her monsters by various bits of wrist and tattered jacket lapel and pulled them out the automatic door. Maxim, snagging up his bag of instant noodles, came rustling.

“Dot vos fon,” declared Oggie, as they stepped out into the pool of lime-tinted electronic light, refracting in almost steamy just-post-rain air, outside the gas station. He lifted his head and sniffed the bouquet of petrichor and gasoline fumes appreciatively. “Ken ve finish tellink hyu about hyu’s ancient birthright now?”

“Monster first,” declared Agatha, stomping off into the night, salt gripped tightly in her hand.

“Oh, killink,” replied Oggie, pleased.

“She doz have her priorities in order,” said Dimo.

“Did hyu understand vot dot sparkly face gorl was sayink ‘bout mine hair?” asked Maxim. And they trotted along on Agatha’s heels, banter muffled by the misty night.

.

[In deference to the garbage urban fantasy aesthetic, the perception filter is called the Fade. ...Uuuunless Jaegers introduce you to it.

Now on AO3 / follow-up]

#girl genius #w #fic #okay this one i want to add to #to establish that the roommate is zeetha who can't see the supernatural but has a sword and that's ultimately more important #askbox meme #anonymous #asks answered #hyu's de chozen vun sveethot