#it’s also been a while since I’ve progressed this far with an original project and ngl.. I really missed this feeling 😭

[dahldahlbills]

just hit 50k in cryptids wip :’)

#chugging along but the book is getting WRITTEN #I have 12.5 scene left btw… #technically in my outline I’m a little past the halfway point #but I think I have ~30k left to go 👀👀 #it’s always so funny when you reach a milestone like this bc despite the agony of writing the thing you get all tingly and sappy like.. #oh yeah :’) I wrote all that!! I’ve made it so far!! #ive got weird feelings abt this story but i am quite proud #it’s also been a while since I’ve progressed this far with an original project and ngl.. I really missed this feeling 😭 #creating is cool!!! we love writing!!! #and just you wait until I reach the end. I’m gonna be so annoying about it (<— will most likely feel too shy to even say anything) #I wrote 5 scenes in like.. twoish weeks. which doesn’t seem like a lot but with the little time I have it honestly is #so if I’m consistent I could finish this draft in ~4 weeks???? 👀👀👀 like. #in a month I could have another book done. that’d be crazy. #anyway. yeehaw :D #blahblahbills #lol I know this means nothing to most people bc I literally never share anything abt this project lol #ew I used lol at the beginning and end of that tag but I don’t feel like retyping all that 💀

[shrekgogurt]

Well folks. I’m on my substitute teaching grind again this week! Scheduled each day up in hopes of getting some good writing done. I did on Monday! And then proceeded to finally start reading @ninemagicks Game/Set/Match yesterday and did that every bell so uhhhhhh. Today………..well ummmmm…..yeah today I worked on chapter graphics because I’m in big procrastination mode. I want to keep riding this wave of engagement (that sounds corporate gross) but I’m also very much in my head about delivering. I should probably channel this energy into writing the chapter since such pressure is Baz’s literal arc but uhhhhhhhh why do that when I could Simon avoid. I love being mentally well!

One might say I need to find my own bravado. (more under the cut)

lol the chapter title for 13 is bravado by lorde

ok anyway

“Work In Progress Wednesday” right? That means I can talk about the progress of every part of the process? Huh? Yeah? Are you gonna stop me? TRY! TRY TO STOP ME!

Aggression aside, let’s get into it.

As previously stated on Sunday, we find ourselves at intermission. But that’s just the theatrical way of slicing up the story. The fun thing about 24 chapters (I got rid of my originally planned intermission chapter because I didn’t want to write it anymore) is that math really loves the number 24. It’s scrumptious. Yummily divisible. Ergo, IKABIKAM also has/is/will be deliciously divided. Afterall, I do keep saying I’m cooking on it.

Now, to put @alexalexinii on blast (sorry for perceiving you), they wrote in the tags of a Chapter 12 reblog: #made me realise that this fic had proper arcs? And I grinned. I cackled. I rubbed my grubby little hands together at the top of my tower as I’ve been doing this whole time because oh ARCS???????? YOU WANT ARCS???????????? I’VE GOT ARCS LYING IN WAIT LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE. (I love overselling myself.)

Allow me to let you in on some of the building blocks thus far.

Chapters 1, 2, 3: a complicated reunion which is shaky but ultimately sets up

Chapters 4, 5, 6: developing the friendship which is a crucial foundation for

Chapters 7, 8, 9: the gay (Baz’s increasingly more external “hi i’m gay”, Simon’s internal “oh wait me too”) which then explodes into

Chapters 10, 11, 12: all that political parent stuff that’s been hinted at in passing which is BIG relevant and incredibly intertwined in this tangled up mess that leads into the work of….

You get it. They’re mini trilogies. Don’t ask me about dividing the chapters into groups of four because I didn’t have that in mind while writing. I like threes better. Always have. Absolute banger of a prime number.

If you for some reason want to read more about the structure, I write a little more about it in this wipsday from when I was procrastinating 9.

Now, @cutestkilla keeps telling me I’m at the downward slope now but honestly delivering on what I’ve set up scares the shit out of me WAY more than the grunt work. I’m uhhhhh yeah. This is why I’m chronically unable to finish projects but by GOD I will finish this one. I swear by it.

So here are three sentences. You get to guess from who and when.

Loving him comes as naturally as breathing. It’s intuitive when I’m not thinking. Or rather, when I’m not panicking.

If you want to follow along with all the songs I’m hyperfixating on as inspiration I’ve been sharing them over on the “shrogurt” instagram. There’s nothing I love more than talking way too much about this damn fic. Thanks for reading!

And thank you for the tags today: @nausikaaa @facewithoutheart @hushed-chorus @artsyunderstudy @prettygoododds @emeryhall

Now tagging: @brilla-brilla-estrellita @captain-aralias @dani-vc @ebbpettier @excalisbury @facewithoutheart @fatalfangirl @hagnoart @iamamythologicalcreature @ileadacharmedlife @imagineacoolusername @ivelovedhimthroughworse @j-nipper-95 @larkral @letraspal @martsonmars @messofthejess @moodandmist @mooncello @nightimedreamersworld @onepintobean @palimpsessed @raenestee @rimeswithpurple @theearlgreymage @theimpossibledemon @thewholelemon @valeffelees @whogaveyoupermission @youarenevertooold @you-remind-me-of-the-babe

#as i was typing this an eighth grader started singing that jack harlow song help #wipsday #ikabikam #vainposting #Youtube

[yukidragon]

The Phantom of Sunny Day Jack Headcanons Teaser

Good news, everybody! I've been given the green light to share some of my headcanons about the world of the Phantom of Sunny Day Jack! It's just a little taste of the worldbuilding for now, but soon I'll be allowed to cut loose completely and ramble to my hearts content about the world, the project, and future plans.

Believe you me, I have thoughts about this AU.

First of all, as I’ve said previously, this AU isn’t just a retelling of Phantom of the Opera with a Something’s Wrong with Sunny Day Jack reskin. Jack isn’t Erik from the musical, book, or whatever. He’s in a similar role, being the phantom of the opera house who wears a mask, but he’s still Jack. Considering the character of the phantom changes quite a bit depending on the telling of the story, I should hope that this won’t be too surprising. ;3

The MC takes the role that Christine Daae typically fills in a Phantom of the Opera story, but they are definitely not Christine. Their name, appearance, backstory, etc. are far more malleable, but they are 25+ years of age like the love interests, similar to the original SDJ game.

MC is a singer at the opera house and made some friends there, including the friendly director, who quickly became their best friend and a great support. Even the diva who is the shining star of the opera house is looking their way, though their relationship is more of a friendly rivalry since he’s seen MC’s potential to outshine him. MC has a childhood sweetheart that they lost touch with for what were less than ideal reasons, who has suddenly come back into their life wanting to mend their relationship.

Then, of course, there is the mysterious phantom of the opera who has never revealed his face to anyone… except a very special person who brightens up the dark and lonely life that he’s forced to live in the shadows by being his ray of sunshine. He sees the beauty in MC and their voice, and wants to help them to shine brighter than anyone else. He’s surprisingly sweet, kind, and supportive, which is a total opposite to all the dark rumors swirling around him. Surely they must be exaggerations, right?

While this is taking place in the late 19th century, this is an alternate universe, so things are a little different during this period than in our world. For one thing, the fashions and colors of this world's 19th century France are amazing. Just look at these gorgeous outfits!

Wait until you can see these without the shadows obscuring them. These sprites are just so, so pretty. EC and everyone else working on the art for this project has really created a world full of style~ ✨

Clearly, this world’s textile technology is pretty advanced, even if they’re still lagging in other areas. Also their cuisine is far more advanced as well since, let's face it, if we’re going to make an indulgent and stylish AU, why not throw in some comfort foods like pizza and hot cocoa with whipped cream as well?

An area where this world is far more progressive than our modern day world is with LGBT+ acceptance and rights. No one bats an eye at what pronouns you use, being trans or cis is just what you are, loving someone of any gender identity is just plain love, and it's not strange if you simply don’t have romantic or sexual desires, or just less of it than most.

Overall, this AU is meant to be an indulgent and comforting gothic romance, while also offering elements of intrigue, drama, and horror for spice. Sure, there are bad ends, but sometimes it’s fun to explore those sorts of darker narratives too along with softer happy endings full of love.

@channydraws @earthgirlaesthetic @sai-of-the-7-stars @cheriihoney @illary-kore @okamiliqueur

#Sunny Day Jack #Something's Wrong With Sunny Day Jack #SunnyDayJack #sdj #swwsdj #The Phantom of Sunny Day Jack #Headcanon Ramblings

[sumire-no-nikki]

To Be Here

October. My beloved October. The kotatsu blanket is back on, the indoor plants don't need as much watering, the fallen leaves in the backyard need sweeping and the Summer clothes have been put away. Funny how many friends I've recently chatted with about the bliss that comes with October. It's a burst of orange ochre and apple red in my head. When the season turned, the sun who has since made herself scarce is a warm embrace whenever she pokes her head out. The wind and clouds are constant companions. The evening is perfect for mysterious reads under candlelight. What a splendid month.

As I am typing this, however, October is nearly done. Something this good always leaves too soon, doesn't it? I love the first taste of cold after the pesky Summer heat and September’s false promises of colder days. October is where it really gets going. But it's always nearly done before I feel like I can properly savor it. How melancholy!! But isn’t that how it always goes? Love is more deeply felt after only the crater it left is the one thing you’ve got to remember it by? Love defined by the lack, the absence, the loss? There will never be enough Octobers for me. I’m a creature of want in this way, yearning is an instinct for me. I watch the days go by and the thought that there won’t be another October until next year is like quicksand for my mind.

That said I’ve spent the month working diligently and on the whole being rather productive in both work and personal matters. There’s this project I’ve started and making good progress on! Once completed I promised myself a trip where I can apply what I’ve learned and I’m so excited to reach that goal. I’ve also read a lot this month. I really surprised myself. I’ve read six books and the month isn’t over yet! I read two Agatha Christie books, all three of the Toshikazu Kawaguchi series (the fourth one is coming out next month!! And I’ll have to read the fifth one in Japanese because I don’t want to wait for the translation to come out!!!) I also read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library as recommended by a friend and I'm so glad she brought it up! I've had a copy of it for ages but just never managed to pick it up due to associated memories (it was given to me by someone during a bad period in my life!!) I swear that book might've just saved my life. I also finished two manga volumes in Japanese this month. It's a series called Yotsuba&! which is just the most wholesome series. Maybe I'll talk about it someday on here. But that series is such a light in my life. I picked it up on one particularly tough day last week and it instantly revived hope in my heart that there's still good out there no matter what.

Other things I've been up to: I've been running a lot these days and I'm actually surprising myself with how much I enjoy it. Earlier today (I'm typing this before bed) I went on a run while it was drizzling. I felt like a kid playing in the rain. I couldn't stop smiling!

Also, the podcast show I mentioned some entries ago!! Case 63!! It has a season 2!! Actually, I found out it's originally by a Chilean writer, so the version I listened to is an English adaptation. Anyway, I'm so happy there's more of it. Season 3 is the final season in Spanish so I expect the English adaptation of that will also be made (since they went so far as to continue with season 2). Fingers crossed! I'm so intrigued as to how it will end!!

As for TV, I started and finished watching HBO's Barry in like a week. I was absorbed!! All four seasons! Mind you, each episode is only 30 mins so it wasn't really that long. It's such a funny and dark show I love it so much. I've heard good things about it through the years but I never found the time to get into it. Plus I have this terrible illness of "I-Can't-Get-Into-Things-When-It's-Super-Mainstream-I-Need-To-Wait-Until-The-Hype-Dies-Down-itis" lol. No, seriously I just didn't feel like getting into a new show until this month apparently. But I'm so glad I watched it. The show is a goldmine, the best Hollywood/LA culture satire I've seen in ages. The way it highlights the gender gap in the workplace, how a writer must compromise on truth in order to sell something, even the way a woman needs to be a "perfect victim" in order for her story to be worth anything! It's so witty!! And the central question of can people truly change--I'll be thinking about this show for a long time. It's so good. Watch it if you can.

Early this month I also managed to sneak a quick trip to Croatia and Slovenia which was so relaxing and peaceful. Trips can be quite stressful for me especially when it's a big city full of tourists due to my OCD (I'm looking at you Paris, and literally all of Italy smh... jk jk) But this trip was restorative and gave me a genuine sense of discovery and wonder, which is what I aim to travel for.

I've been listening to the new Mitski album and rethinking my home library's organisation system! I haven't decided yet but I mainly want my Classical Mythology books, both fiction and non-fiction in one area. Also wishing I bought two Caryatid statues in Athens last year instead of one! Would've been nice for her to have a buddy!!

Now, the title of this entry comes from a realisation I had this month--a very important one. As someone whose nature is to think and think and think, it's difficult to be in the present. I'm always in agony over the past, and anxious about the future. I can be quite dismissive of what's in front of me as a result. This is a chronic issue of mine. But while reading The Midnight Library, tucked in my reading chair, savoring the scent of a pumpkin pie candle, all the pieces of advice I've read both online and in person suddenly clicked.

When writing a first draft of a novel, it simply needs to exist.

When making art, it simply needs to be there.

When yearning to do something, I must attempt it

When wanting to exist, I simply am.

I just need to be here in the most literal sense. To be. Not in the past tense, not in the future tense. There's no need for qualifiers. There is no standard to fulfill. I know this is neither new nor revolutionary, but in the embrace of an October evening, digesting this advice and accepting it made me feel so brave.

It hit me like a sucker punch. I thought, I need to untangle my sense of self and my worth from anything external. I cannot keep on doing this to myself. Because the truth is if I don’t stop this constant self-flagellation, I have simply replaced my mother in adulthood. I will have been no different from her and her constant need to criticise me. This is something I've been actively trying to improve recently and I can feel myself getting better. I feel, somewhat ironically, that by being present, I'm regaining a sense of hope that I haven't felt since childhood. Like somehow my past is healed and my future is assured.

So despite how much I've gone on about loving October at the beginning of this entry, as much as I know I will miss it, I have to be where I am. That means accepting that all things end--good or bad. That means being in November when it comes. That means understanding that what I've lost, while dearly missed, is out of my grasp now. That means what will happen to me is tomorrow's business.

This entry's song I've repeated to death (which is a very good thing) this month. It's by an artist I really enjoy. I cannot wait for new material from her and this new single is a sign of really good things to come!

I leave you with a photo of a friend I made while out on a walk. What shall I name him?

Have a wunderbaaahhh rest of Octobaaaahhh! 🐑

#diary #sumire-no-nikki #Spotify

[undertaletheplayersfate]

[ENGLISH]

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I last talked about The Player’s Fate and my progress on it, so I decided to tell you guys what I’ve been doing lately (And you can probably tell what it is lol).

So, my current plan for TPF is making one whole season with around 6-9 Eps. I’ve already planned some things for the 1st season, but I am still not fully satisfied with a few things, like the lack of development in a few characters and the exploration of Chara’s “mysterious power”. So far I’ve already written 3 episodes, and I gotta say I am pretty satisfied with how they turned out! I had a lot of fun writing the scenes and dialogues, especially Chara and Asriel’s because they are a very comic duo and their dynamic is pretty adorable (I guess you guys will like them as much as I do).

But the only Episode that I’m 100% satisfied with is Ep 1, because it works perfectly as a first episode to introduce this crazy world of The Player’s Fate (specially the first and last scenes, but I’m not spoiling that!). I actually wrote a much shorter version of it originally but I decided to increase the world building and explore the region of New Home, a place that we barely spend time in the original Undertale and I thought of an interesting new approach to the region. 

I know you guys must be very confused with some things that I’m saying! lol “Development?” “World building?” You may ask… But these are simply a few writing tips I learned to help increase the writing of TPF. But it is still important to remember that I am just an amatour, I don’t actually know how to write a perfect script of anything like that, but I am trying to make the best one I can with my basic knowledge. 

Still, I am very confident with TPF’s 1st Ep, but you might be wondering why I haven’t begun making it yet, and I have a very special announcement to make… The Player’s Fate will have voice acting. Yes! I know! Crazy, right?! XD 

I want TPF to have voice acting since I think it helps transmit the emotions of the characters and make intense moments being way more intense than if they were just by texts on a screen. I know it’s much simpler to add a text on a screen, but honestly I couldn’t find a good way of adding these texts to the screen without it covering too much of it, and when I usually plan a shot to animate I imagine it without any texts on it, so when I have to add the text it takes out the original emotion I wanted to show. And I also think voice acting and lip sync can help make the characters more alive and make you connect with them much easier.

I know I probably made you guys excited for the result, and I gotta say I also am, but I haven’t decided who I’ll be working with to create TPF, and also I will be paying these voice actors so I have to find a way of raising enough money to do so… I have a very long way to go before actually making the 1st Ep, but I know it will all be worth it in the end!

One last thing I wanted to say is that I think the 1st Ep will come out next year (2024) or the beginning of 2025. I know it’s hard to wait so much but I need to focus on my Youtube channel in the meantime, since the series will be posted there and I want as many people as possible to watch it (and also because I’ve been pretty inactive there in 2023 and I want to get back on track for that). It will be a bit difficult, since (if everything goes right)  I’ll be dealing with college next year which will make my schedule very tight to work on TPF. 

And I also plan on making a special video talking about everything I can about this project, like the series premise, the themes, the voice acting stuff, and a lot more, since I don’t think I’ve ever talked very openly about it. I want to do all this so more people can know about TPF and become interested in it. I know it may seem kinda dumb but TPF is one of the most important projects of my life, and I want it to work and be the best thing I can produce even being an amatour on the area. 

Thank you so much if you read all that! XD 

And thank you so much for your support, I can’t put into words how much this means to me. Thank you for keeping up with me until here. I’ll see you guys soon! :D

-

[PORTUGUESE-BRAZIL]

Oi pessoal! Já faz um tempo desde a última vez que eu falei sobre The Player’s Fate e meu progresso nele, então decidi contar pra vocês o que tenho feito ultimamente (e vocês provavelmente devem saber o que é ksksk).

Então, meu plano atual pra TPF é fazer uma temporada inteira com cerca de 6 a 9 Eps. Já planejei algumas coisas para a 1ª temporada, mas ainda não tô totalmente satisfeita com algumas coisas, como a falta de desenvolvimento em alguns personagens e a exploração do “poder misterioso” do Chara. Até agora eu já escrevi 3 episódios e devo dizer que estou bastante satisfeito com o resultado deles! Eu me diverti muito escrevendo as cenas e os diálogos, especialmente os do Chara e do Asriel porque eles são uma dupla muito cômica e  a dinâmica deles é muito fofa (acho que vocês vão gostar deles tanto quanto eu).

Mas o único Episódio que estou 100% satisfeita é o Ep 1, porque funciona perfeitamente como um primeiro episódio para introduzir esse mundo louco de The Player's Fate (principalmente na primeira e última cenas, mas não vou spoilar agora!) . Na verdade, eu originalmente escrevi uma versão muito mais curta, mas decidi aumentar a construção de mundo e explorar a região de New Home, um lugar onde que mal passamos tempo no Undertale original e eu pensei em uma nova abordagem interessante pra região.

Eu sei que vocês devem estar muito confusos com algumas coisas que tô falando! ksksk “Desenvolvimento?” “Construção de mundo?” Vocês devem estar se perguntando… Mas essas são apenas algumas dicas de roteiro que eu aprendi para ajudar a melhorar o roteiro de TPF. Mas ainda é importante lembrar que sou apenas uma amadora, e que eu na verdade não sei escrever um roteiro perfeito assim, mas eu tô tentando fazer o melhor que posso com meu conhecimento básico.

Mesmo assim, eu tô muito confiante com o 1º Ep de TPF, mas vocês devem estar se perguntando por que ainda não comecei, e tenho um anúncio muito especial a fazer… The Player’s Fate terá dublagem. Sim! Eu sei! Loucura, né?! XD

Eu quero que TPF tenha dublagem porque eu acho que ela ajuda a transmitir as emoções dos personagens e faz com que os momentos intensos sejam muito mais intensos do que se fossem apenas com textos numa tela. Eu sei que é muito mais simples adicionar um texto em uma tela, mas honestamente eu não encontrei uma boa maneira de adicionar esses textos na tela sem cobrir muito, e quando costumo planejar uma cena pra animar eu imagino sem nenhum texto, então quando eu tenho que adicionar o texto ele tira toda a emoção original que eu queria mostrar. E também acho que a dublagem e o lip sync podem ajudar a tornar os personagens mais vivos e fazer com que você se conecte com eles com muito mais facilidade.

Eu sei que provavelmente deixei vocês animados com o resultado, e devo dizer que também tô, mas eu ainda não decidi com quem eu vou trabalhar para criar TPF, e eu também vou pagar esses dubladores, então tenho que encontrar uma maneira de arrecadar dinheiro suficiente pra isso… Eu tenho um longo caminho antes de realmente começar a fazer o 1º Ep, mas sei que no final tudo vai valer a pena!

Uma última coisa que queria dizer é que acho que o 1º Ep vai sair ano que vem (2024) ou no início de 2025. Eu sei que é difícil esperar tanto, mas preciso focar no meu canal do Youtube enquanto isso, já que a série vai ser postada lá e quero que o maior número de pessoas possível assista (e também porque eu tive bastante inativa em 2023 e quero voltar com tudo agora). Vai ser um pouco difícil, já que (se tudo der certo) eu vou estar lidando com a faculdade ano que vem, o que vai deixar minha agenda bem apertada para trabalhar em TPF.

Eu também pretendo fazer um vídeo especial falando tudo o que puder sobre esse projeto, como a premissa da série, os temas, as dublagens e muito mais, já que acho que nunca falei muito abertamente sobre isso. Quero fazer tudo isto para que mais pessoas conheçam  TPF e se interessem nele. Eu sei que pode parecer meio bobo mas o TPF é um dos projetos mais importantes da minha vida, e quero que dê certo e seja a melhor coisa que posso produzir mesmo sendo uma amadora na área.

Muito obrigado se você leu tudo isso! XD

E muito obrigado pelo seu apoio, eu não consigo expressar em palavras o quanto isso significa para mim. Obrigado por me acompanhar até aqui. Vejo vocês em breve! :D

#undertale #undertale au #au #alternate universe #the player's fate #undertale the player's fate #undertale tpf #chara tpf #chara #asriel #asriel dreemurr #asriel dreemurr tpf #digital art #photoshop #anouncement #animated series #progress #update #sorry for the huge text lol #mary mask

[rockinracket]

Get Ready to Revise and Reorganize

My experiences so far of writing for an actual video game and not just a fake one

By Caleb Dougherty - Lead Writer/Narrative Designer/Producer of Rockin’ Racket 

What they don’t tell you about coming onto a project and taking over the existing story, is how much work you are going to be doing to get in line with the original idea. And even when you do, there’s always something you ended up missing, meaning you need to go back and fix what you’ve already done. Revision is a constant factor when it comes to writing, and writers know that. And it’s not fun.

By now, I’ve adapted to the story of our game when I came onto the team, and now I’ve expanded on it and made it more of my own work. I mean, we’re pretty much less than 2 months away from launching so it’d be really bad if I didn’t know what I was writing about.

Now since I’m primarily working on the writing of the story and dialogue, I’ve been working with one of our teams’ programmers to get my work into the game, Ken. To do this nicely, I’ve been using a nice little writing program called Ink from Inkle Studios. I can write dialogue, dialogue options, variables, tags, etc… all in there and then send it to him so he can use a Unity plugin to process the Ink files and use them within Unity. There are plenty of other steps in that process, but that’s the gist of it.

Now here’s where the revising comes into play. As the game progresses, so do parts of the story, meaning that I have to go back into all of the dialogue files and make sure they reflect that change if they need to. So if a character dies, then I don’t want a bit of dialogue after their death to be mentioning the dead character walking the streets. Now our game doesn’t have anything like that going on, but that’s the general idea. The revision process is also used a lot to go back through and correct spelling and grammar mistakes, things that I do often enough for me to need to triple check my writing from now on. 

And most recently in my revision process are tags! They basically track who is speaking within Ink using a certain name so that whenever Unity sees those tags, it can update art assets to match it. That way, when Harvey speaks to Ace, Harvey’s sprite looks like it’s talking while Ace looks like he’s listening. Before, we just had neutral art assets so I was using some generic tags for all the characters. But now we have emotions portrayed by the characters, which means that I get to go back into all of my dialogue files soon to update the tags to have those emotions.

Reorganization of dialogue files also comes into play with the revision process. For us, basically every conversation needed to be in an Ink file all on its own instead of all of them being in a single file. This was pretty annoying early on because I had all of my writing in one file. So I spent a good amount of time separating it all out into different files. It’s all good now, but boy was that a mess to deal with.

So for those of you who aren’t writers, just know that this is the kind of stuff your writer friends have to deal with. It’s not fun (most of the time), but it’s part of the job. So better to get used to it as early as possible to help in future endeavors.  Anyways, check out our game Rockin’ Racket on Twitter (X), Instagram, and YouTube to follow the state of our game and the progress of the band on their journey to fame!

#gamedev #indiedev #game design #indiegamedev #pop punk #devlog #game development #gamemaker

[aburruso-capstone-uhwoacm]

Progress Report #1

These past two weeks, I’ve been working on the pre-production materials for my capstone game (working title: Sneaker).  Most of it involved making concept art (which I’ll get into later), but there were some other major things that happened.

Before I discuss what exactly happened, I first need to explain my capstone idea.  Basically, it’s a puzzle game where the player has to input coordinate points.  These determine where their character will move and shoot.  This is important to know because it will explain the first major event that happened in these past two weeks: I revamped the story of the game.  The idea I was originally going to go with involved a high school student shooting down evil drones.  The problem with this, however, is that I wanted to integrate a grid in the game (since it’s about coordinate math).  I couldn’t figure how to do this without it clashing with the plot, which would take place in a city.  So, I decided to completely scrap the “kid vs. drones” idea and instead went for a story that took place inside the metaverse; my reasoning is that the floor could look like a grid (because it technically takes place inside a computer).  Now, the plot of Sneaker involves a girl going into the metaverse to take down servers that allow people to hack into others’ computers.  There is a bit more to it, but that’s the basic idea.

Afterwards, I got started on the concept art.  Designing the girl (whom I named Sasha) took a lot longer than I expected, mainly because I had trouble finding a good hairstyle for her.  The final hairstyle I chose is heavily inspired by Meryl Silverburgh’s from Metal Gear Solid.  While I wanted to emulate the way her hair flares out, I also didn’t want to copy it completely.  Combined with the possibility that Sasha could only be facing to the right for most of the game (I’m still figuring that out), I decided to change the bangs so that the larger bang is on Sasha’s left instead of the right; this is because I didn’t want her hair to cover the eye that would be facing the player most of the time.

After I finished designing Sasha, I also designed the servers and some obstacles.  These took less time than Sasha, though I did try to experiment with different ideas.  For example, there is an eviction bot that takes the form of a hole.  Originally, I made it circular, but then I decided that it would fit the setting better if I made it a square.

While this is all good and great, I still have one big issue: the color scheme.  So far, I’ve made all the designs on paper.  However, I don’t think I have enough color pencils to give Sasha and the obstacles the colors I want for them.  I’m thinking that I may have to go digital for this.  Otherwise, I’d have to figure out the colors when I start making the sprites (which would not be ideal).

Besides the concept art, I’ve also been creating a “full” game design document for Sneaker.  I’ve been using Scott Rogers’ template from his book Level Up.  However, I did make some adjustments to account for the fact that my project just consists of a single demo level (such as removing the game progression outline).  Earlier, I had made a 1-page and 10-page document (also following Rogers’ templates) containing a lot of information about the game.  So, I could just copy-and-paste some of the text from them into the full document.  Still, I have to add more content, such as the player metrics and artwork.

Based on my workback plan, the pre-production stage isn’t over until Saturday.  So, I’ll try to finish the rest of the concept art (primarily the UI and the color schemes) and the game design document.  Once I’m finished with that, I’ll be able to start the first build of Sneaker.  :)

#capstone #cm491 #gamedev

[chaos-and-chill]

re: p!atd’s new singles. i have thoughts.

firstly, almost everyone i’ve talked to about them (viva las vengeance, middle of a breakup, and local god) has found them very underwhelming. i enjoyed them, personally, but i absolutely see where they’re all coming from. all of the songs sound *incredibly* similar, and while they feel like a continuation of brendon urie’s music, they don’t feel like a continuation of panic!’s music.

of course, panic! hasn’t been panic! since too weird to live too rare to die, at the very latest, but at least death of a bachelor still felt like a decently accurate progression and expansion of panic! as a band. at this point, though, i think brendon has really turned panic! from the continuation of the original band into his solo project, and it feels like he’s just continuing use of the name for the status within various communities and pop culture that the name is associated with.

however, i digress. these most recent singles are not representative of p!atd in its truest form, but that alone doesn’t make them bad. my biggest thought, upon listening to these songs, is that they were likely well-written, but very poorly produced. there are a number of changes i would make, were i involved in their creation (for instance, i don’t think a key change into the chorus is actually necessary until the final repetition in local god, and that’s off the top of my head), and frankly, they feel over-produced, cliche, and formulaic, meant to appeal to a mass market of stereotypical modern teenagers, as opposed to long time or genuine fans. of course, there is absolutely a place for songs such as that, but panic!’s discography is not it. there is a certain tinge of desperation to these songs that i appreciate; they feel like the singer is trapped within this bubble of popularity that he must conform to or die trying, and he desperately wants to escape it but can’t, leaving him to play by the rules no matter how much he doesn’t want to (think of a gilded cage, or hotel california by the eagles). however, the spit-stained concrete feeling of early panic! is missing, along with the raw edges of the lyrics so many people, myself included, fell in love with the band for. the first few albums were absolutely *drowning* in symbolism and metaphor, to the point where you had to swim through oceans to find meaning, and even then, those meanings tended to be projections of the listener. now, i find myself desperately searching for any sort of metaphor to dive into, but i only find myself standing in a puddle of ankle-deep rainwater- the shallowest facsimile of a far-away place. 

the misrepresentation of nostalgia (and the relentless milking of the nostalgia cash cow) is, i believe, what most of us are actually upset about, as opposed to the music itself. there is a deficit of authenticity in these songs, and frankly, it is going to hurt the reputation/image of the band more in the long run. it would’ve been far better to pull the plug and end things on a high note with too weird to live, too rare to die, and then have brendon become a solo act under his own name for all the albums afterwards.

if this is the road panic! is going down, i will absolutely follow along for the ride, but it will be out of morbid curiosity and nostalgia more than genuine musical appreciation for their current style.

addendum: it’s also definitely worth mention that brendon is a 35 year old man, and it is unrealistic to expect such a raw, emotional worldview from him now as he had when he was 18. i don’t think he’s necessarily the one at fault here, but i don’t appreciate the way panic! has continued on long past its natural expiration date. my chemical romance pulled the correct move in this regard, in my opinion: disbanding allowed them the option to come back, but didn’t force anything that wasn’t meant to be, allowing (as far as i’m aware) a much more genuine and appreciated reunion. 

#call me chaos #p!atd #patd #panic! at the disco #panic at the disco #viva las vengeance #middle of a breakup #local god #i barely reread this so i have no idea whether it's actually coherent/grammatically correct #long post

[bvannn]

Weekly Update September 15, 2023

Life is hitting hard. I had a big interview for a really important internship, and while I think the interview itself went really well, the rest of the week has been pretty rough, with the exception of a nice discord call I had with a friend. I don’t know how much of this is bad luck, physical stress on my body due to nerves, or bad decisions on my part, but most likely a mixture of the three. I have not heard back from the internship yet but I do think it went really well, it’s the second time I’ve interviewed for it, and I was really close to getting it last time, and that was before I had officially completed all the relevant courses I took that semester, and also before the lab job I worked this summer. I think I’m in good standing, but I don’t want to be overconfident either. I was told I’d hear back by the end of this week, but given that they’re changing a lot about how they’re doing things I was expecting to hear back closer to next Wednesday, which looks to be the case. I’m fine with the wait, but given what my nerves have been doing to my body, it does unfortunately mean I won’t be able to make as much progress on art projects as I’d like.

I said earlier this week I’d be done for the rest of the week, but I have gone back on that a little. I sketched out some nice shots of Shaun to use as more blood practice, which I’d like to digitize in the near future, and I have kept work on TRGA going. I finished up the character animation for shot 1-2, and have started keyframing Jon for 1-3. 1-3 should be a lot quicker, as it’s short, it has few keyframes, and Tim does not appear, meaning there’s theoretically 33% less animation to do (although in practice it’s more like 12-25% less since Tim has been less complex so far, although I know it won’t stay like that). I’ve probably got almost as much done as I would’ve if I hadn’t ‘called this week off’, but I’m still not going to hold myself to my schedule on it until I hear back about the interview (and possibly then some). It’s still going good though.

I’ve also been messing with effects and whatnot for drawings in general, I’d like to be able to animate with some as well, but I’m going to stick with current projects for now. I’d like to mess with after effects as well, as I’ve been learning a bit about the features it has, and I think I can probably do more with it than animate. I think Adobe programs are meant to be used in tandem with one another anyway. I don’t think I’ll need it for the current animation, but I’ll keep it in mind for maybe the next TRGA. Or I could do more tests in-between.

I think I should be investing more time into music as well, should I have time this weekend I may take another crack at it. I’ve been writing down bass patterns as I hear them from music I listen to, although I’m not trained enough I can identify notes of their own, just in relation to one another, so I probably mistranscribed, meaning what I wrote down would technically be original. I’ll try to mess with that and drums, until I get something nice enough sounding. I already tested my strategy for finding original Melodies, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time but it does work. I really should make a bigger push for music I think it would be pretty good for my state of mind. I need to commit to a basic project but I’ll keep the larger one in mind.

I’m going to keep taking it easy but I’ll try to get stuff done. I’ll keep trying.

#weekly update

[purrincess-chat]

Cat’s Writing Tips: 10 Things I Learned Rewriting MDCSP

For anyone that doesn’t know at this point, I rewrote a fic of mine last year called Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s Spite Playlist and rereleased it as Marinette Dupain-Cheng’s Spite Playlist: Remix. The whole journey of revising the 86,000 word story took me about a year over which time I completely edited the original text and added an additional 52,000 words of new content. I learned a lot about the writing process along the way and feel like my writing leveled up as well. Here are 10 things I learned along the way while revising this absolute beast of a story that may help you on your writing journey as well:

1. Revising takes time

When I first set out to rewrite this story, I thought I could get it all done during NaNoWriMo. Aka, I thought I could do it in 1 month. And I probably could have if I’d been more on top of things and didn’t also have a full time day job. The whole process from start to finish took me about a year. That included editing the original text, writing the new content from scratch, getting everything beta read, going through feedback and making more revisions. I learned that the process of revising is a long one, but it’s a process that is so worth it. I’m really proud of the Remix, and I love the way it turned out in the end. Even if I felt like I was limping to the finish. My advice is take your time to do revisions well. You’ll be much happier with the end result. 

2. Outlines are a literal godsend

I plan to make a whole separate post on outlining because motherfucking outlines saved my ass. I have outlined every story I’ve written since then. I mean, I usually would go into stories with some type of outline or at the very least an idea of what I wanted, but I started making detailed outlines for the new chapters, and let me tell you, it’s now a standard practice in my life. 

For the enemies AU I’m working on, I have had the whole project outlined for months now from chapter 1 all the way through chapter 22. I’m still tweaking the ending, but for these beginning chapters, I know exactly what is going to happen in each chapter and have been able to map out Adrien’s whole journey throughout the fic. Outlining takes the guess work out of writing. If ever I forget where I’m supposed to be heading with a particular chapter, I glance back at the outline. By putting in the legwork to decide on all of the important plot points in the story ahead of time, it saves me that paralysis while writing where I have to stop and think hmmm what happens next. It keeps me from writing myself into corners, and it allows me to shape the story exactly how I want, so when it comes time to sit and write, I can just sit and write. I don’t have to stop and figure anything out. I’ve done that already. It’s what has allowed me to sit and spit out 8k within a week at times. Writers block? We don’t know her anymore. If I’m not able to write, it’s because I literally don’t have the time, which still happens because again, I have a full-time day job. But having a detailed outline completely removed mental blocks for me.

3. Set goals/keep a journal

I started keeping a writing journal to track my progress throughout this rewrite. I’d set weekly goals and keep track of how much I was writing on any given day. It helped keep me focused on what I needed to do next as well as keep me organized. It was also a way to hold myself accountable when I didn’t meet my goals. Something about putting things in writing makes you far more likely to do them. In my writing journal, I’d track daily word counts and set goals for what I wanted to work on/finish that week. Usually I’d be finishing one chapter, editing another, and starting on another almost every week. I didn’t always meet my goals, but setting them kept me motivated and helped me know what came next. 

4. Skip around

This is something I still do and one area where outlines come in handy. My betas can attest that I always drag my feet when it comes to writing fight scenes. It’s not that I’m not good at them, I’m sure anyone who has read a fight scene written by me knows I’m not bad at it. It’s just that they’re tedious. It requires a lot of thinking and action and there are a lot of variables that go into them. Several times while rewriting MDCSPR, I’d get to a fight scene that I wasn’t quite mentally prepared to tackle, but the fight scene was sandwiched between a scene I really wanted to get to. So, I’d just skip the fight scene and keep writing from the next moment that I could clearly picture. This allowed me to get higher word counts every day because most of the time if I wrote the beginning and end, filling in the middle wasn’t hard because it gave me a clear picture of where I was headed and what I needed to connect to. It kept me from getting stuck on one word or one sentence and getting paralyzed for days or weeks at a time on one thing. Allowing myself to skip something and go back to it alleviated that sense of perfectionism that tends to nag me when I’m writing. 

A word of caution about skipping around is don’t skip too far. Especially if you’re writing from scratch. Often times, even if you outline your story, you might change your mind about certain things or adopt a different vibe as you write. So if you skip ahead and write the ending before you’ve written the beginning, you might change your mind on that ending and have to scrap it and rewrite it later on. If I skipped around, it was usually within a single chapter or two, and I’d always make sure to go back and finish filling in the missing parts before I moved on. 

5. Work in chunks

Rewriting a 20 chapter story was daunting at times. 86k is a lot of words to read and reread and rewrite. The only way I got through it was by working on one chunk at a time. I was usually working on at least 2-3 chapters at a time. This worked well for me for a couple of reasons. 1. If I got bogged down on one chapter, I could just move to a different one. 2. It helped me get more done at a time. Breaking a story down into chunks makes it way more manageable because it allows you to focus on one thing at a time rather than the whole thing at once. Writing 138,000 words sounds like a lot. Writing 2k right now is much more manageable. And eventually those 2ks add up, and now you’ve got a whole story. 

6. Keep going

Along with my last point, this one kind of seems obvious, but keep going. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint. Though writing sprints do help you get through the marathon. I find that writing long stories especially is a matter of building and maintaining momentum. Pace yourself and keep making steady progress, no matter how small. I didn’t write every single day while rewriting MDCSPR, but I made sure to keep making steady progress whether by skipping around, working in chunks, or outlining something and plotting. If you feel yourself start to get stuck, work around the blockage. Skip it and work on something else. You can always go back and edit a bad first draft, but you can’t edit something that doesn’t exist. Keep up the momentum if you’ve got it. Nothing has been more freeing to me than getting to a point that’s stumping me and just skipping a few lines and writing [insert fight scene here], then moving onto whatever happens next. Skip shit. Keep going. Watch those word counts rise. 

7. Fix it in post

I think a lot of writers suffer from a nagging sense of perfectionism. They slave over every word while they’re writing because they want to write the perfect draft. The most important thing I learned while writing MDCSPR is to throw perfection to the wind because the perfect draft doesn’t exist. I can’t tell you how many times I was writing something new, and it wasn’t going exactly how I wanted. I had that nagging voice to stop and fix it then and there, to agonize over a single sentence until it was “perfect.” But the most freeing thing I learned how to do was say eh, I can fix it later. Keep going. Let the sentence be bad. You can fix it later. As I said before, you can fix a bad first draft. You can’t fix a draft that hasn’t been written. Edit later. Allow yourself to write poorly and just spit the words onto the page. 

8. Walk away/let it rest

This is something a younger me struggled with. I'd write something and want to post it immediately. I am an excitable person that struggles to keep projects secret XD I always want to tease things and share what I'm working on. For this project, though, I waited until I had edited 21 chapters to start posting it. That was an excruciating amount of time and effort put in with little pay off until it was time to share it, but patience and time make for much better writing. My betas kept me going because I could at least get some feedback on what I was making, but since this was a revision, I didn't want to send my betas sloppy drafts either. I tried to make every chapter as polished as possible before sending it, and the main way I did that was by walking away for a while.

Cat, that sounds counter intuitive. Okay, hear me out. I talked about keeping a writing journal and how I'd usually be finishing one chapter, editing another, and starting the next one within any given week, and I found that this system worked well for me. It can be tempting when you finish a chapter to immediately start editing it, and oftentimes I would give the chapter a read through after I finished it initially, but I wouldn't send it to my betas at that point. I started walking away from finished chapters and letting them rest while I worked on something else. Getting my eyes off a chapter for a week or two greatly increased the quality of my edits when I came back to it. When the chapter is fresh in your mind, it's harder to spot mistakes because you've read it a dozen times, and your eyes start to glaze over typos and mistakes more easily because you're used to the text. Walking away for a little while and letting your brain purge it a little bit allows you to come back with fresh eyes that can more easily spot mistakes. It also helps if you're iffy on a part, you can usually come back with fresh ideas and/or new solutions.

Even now with my enemies AU, I tell my beta to give me a few days after I finish a chapter because I walk away before going back to proofread it. The writing process can be stressful, and most writers I know struggle with the nagging sense of perfectionism. We want to edit and edit again until a piece is perfect. Accepting that an initial draft is going to need work and allowing myself to just walk away and let it be bad for a little bit while I consider ways to improve it makes for better revisions in the long run. The drafts I send to my betas are far more polished, and I tend to be happier with them. Let your stories rest, then come back to them. It will help level up your writing tremendously.

9. Find betas you work well with

All that being said, my betas were the real mvps of this project. I revised 21 chapters before I started posting this one (and tbh it was more than that because it took time to get previous chapters beta read so I'd just keep going). My betas were my sole source of feedback on this project for months. I recommend having a variety of skillsets in your beta team. I had someone who was more grammar focused, someone who gave general feedback on the direction of the story and characters, and someone who gave more reactionary feedback to specific things within the chapter. They reacted as if they were a reader to give me an idea of whether or not readers would enjoy the story. These comments were what kept me from getting discouraged or burned out.

Writers naturally crave feedback and comments from readers. We want to know people enjoy our work. Going months working on a project with no feedback can be agony. Find betas you work well with. Or friends. Get other eyes on your work to leave you comments. Not only will it improve your craft because betas can spot things and offer outside perspectives you may not see on your own, and they can give you much desired feedback to keep those dry patches from swallowing you and your motivation.

Trust me, I spent a long time in this fandom just spitting out stories and throwing them on ao3 dot com. And I will say I don't get everything beta read. Short drabbles and one shots I just edit myself. But for big projects especially, I highly recommend getting a beta or two or three. You will improve. Guaranteed.

10. Always be doing something

This sounds obvious, but not in the way you're probably thinking. I said always be doing something, not always be writing. Editing is something. Outlining is something. Brainstorming is something. Reviewing beta feedback is something. There are many other aspects to writing than just writing. Even on days when I wasn't writing for mdcspr, I was doing something. I was editing, I was reviewing my outline and brainstorming, I was making my playlist, I was considering what songs to use for what scenes, I was setting goals, I was rereading old chapters that were finished. Pretty much every day I was doing something to keep the story fresh in my mind and keep forward momentum on the project.

But Cat, I thought you said walk away. Yes. From individual chapters. But you should be doing something for your project most days of the week. Take a break if you need it, but if you want to finish, you have to keep working. I found that if I needed a break from writing, working on the playlist or compiling outfit references on pinterest was a good way to keep the story at the front of my brain. I was working on it, even when I wasn't physically writing. This helped me develop a deeper understanding of my characters that made them easier to write in the long run. Understanding their style helped develop their personalities and mannerisms. Figuring out what songs and lyrics the characters might relate to in any given scene helped put me in their head. You don't have to write every day, but you should do something. Big projects take time, and they're going to take even longer if you take long breaks. Marathon, not a sprint. Keep the momentum going, pace yourself, do something.

Keep in mind, writing is a very individual process. What works for me, may not work for you. These are just a few things I found that helped me push through a big project. Find a process that works for you and go for it. If these tips work for you, great! At the end of the day, you have to figure out what works for you and develop your own methods and process. I hope that this is helpful for some of you! If you have anything else that works for you that you'd like to add, feel free to reblog and share! Contrary to popular belief, writing isn't an individual activity. Writing a novel takes a whole team. We improve by interacting with each other and giving advice and encouragement.

If you want me to cover any other topics in writing, feel free to comment or message me. I'm not a professional writer, but I've been writing for 16 years. I've learned a thing or two over that time 🤷‍♀️ Happy writing!

#writing advice #writing #writing reference #writing ref #cat speaks #cats writing advice

[minecraft-sideblog-tm]

Rambly build project post!

Been renovating one of the nearby villages lately! This all stemmed from the realization that I’d made too many new villagers here and it looked so cluttered having like 2 or 3 beds in all of the houses and workplace buildings plus random workstations just placed wherever I had put them. 

At first I was only planning to add a few more default houses, then look up references for the normal plains village workplace buildings and make the ones I needed verbatim, but changed my mind. It’s still a work in progress, but:

(Before, all I’d really done was fix up the paths)

(After!)

Instead I ended up swapping the block palette, and I’m building custom workplaces because I just really don’t feel like having to look them all up and then copy the buildings. This is more fun anyway. Somehow it just feels a lot more lively now! And you can bet the second that hanging signs are in the game, I’ll be placing them everywhere in this village lol

More rambling and pictures under the cut!

So far I’ve changed the block palette, added 5 of the 5x5 houses (soon to be 6 because I left my bed on the ground too long and they made another villager.... lol), one of the double-door houses, a train depot kinda thing, and two custom workplace buildings (for a fletcher and a cartographer). Also expanded the existing library a little to fit the two lecterns I needed and some bookshelves

Still a work in progress though, because I need to make the aforementioned extra house and a building each for the weaponsmiths, butchers, cleric, shepherds, and mason. I’ve added....many villagers to this village.... Enough so that while mining nearby one day and waiting for a new villager to grow up, two iron golems spawned in it (I may or may not have killed the original one a long time ago...)

Also hanging glowberries from chains to look like hanging basket plants is something I learned recently from a youtube video and I am obsessed with it

I actually renovated a smaller village first; it’s about equidistant from spawn to this one but in the other direction. It only generated with one villager, a nitwit, and only had 5 buildings, so I thought it’d be a nice test run for changing out a block palette.

However, in the small village I used a block palette that’s mostly the usual oak and cobblestone with some dark oak added in since it’s very close to a dark oak forest, and a little deepslate. 

In this village I chose to mostly use oak and birch, as it’s near a regular forest, plus lots of deepslate and copper. The idea was like since this is a much larger, more established village, maybe it’d make sense for them to have more building materials that require mining than a little town of one villager would. Used a little dark oak for accents though since there are two dark oak forests in a reasonable distance to say it could have been carried back to the village, and I swear I am so incredibly normal about my minecraft build projects

*ahem*

anyway, bonus screenshots of the other little village. 

I guess I did use a tiny bit of copper here too. I lowkey call this village like Floaty Rock, or Floating Rock or something because of those few blocks in the sky on the top right that just naturally generated there lol. It’s how I used to remember where this village was when I first found it because you can almost see those from spawn

the nitwit lives in the house on the far right here, away from the other 3 houses, and I mean it when I say he’s literally the only villager that ever generated here. Just a dude living his life I guess. Good for him

#i started this world in 2021 for the sole purpose of getting a few achievements #that would unlock certain wearable things from the minecraft marketplace #since I couldn't earn them from the server I played on #And I had no intention of doing literally anything else with this world #and yet here we are lmao #funny how that works #lee speaks #minecraft #stuff i built #sorry this post is so long I just have lots of thoughts

[cannolicorgi]

2022 Art Recap

 base by @/sabattons on twitter

more under!

My favorite recent character desgins

my outfit designs for my persona

original design for my cat demon oc, Amalthea

wanderer’s troupe outfit for tighnari

my wonderland x teyvat designs so far! I especially love Paimon’s, Scaramouche’s, Kaeya’s, and Venti’s! Honestly just crop off the last line and they’d all be bangers (I don’t hate the last line, it just needs work to be how I envision)

an idol MC character

designs for a manga project

an ocean goddess design for a possible future project (I literally dreamed her and then like 3 weeks later Columbina’s outfit was revealed it was so hard not to scream)

a one off sea monster design!!

Genshin adeptus oc! (the topmost is her most recent changes, though I’m still working on her)

a school/work uniform wip for an old oc

What do I want to improve on?

I want to work harder on my comic ideas! I want to finish my scripts and start drawing right away. I’ve been working on concepts for so long, but haven’t really put my heart into actually getting the hard parts done. I want to work hard so “ Himeko-chan is Haunted by 100,000 spirits  = I . I = “ and possibly even “Aether in Wonderland” will be out during 2023.

I want to spend more time with my ocs. I really do love genshin, but I miss drawing my ocs. Leaving my ocs behind has also left me with less friends, and I want to reconnect with my fellow oc designers and writers. I love my ocs, and as silly as it sounds, those characters have helped me through a lot.

I want to get better at drawing full compositions. I have so many ideas that I feel like I cannot express correctly because my background skills are lacking compared to my character skills. I also want to get better at posing. While I am much better at posing then I am backgrounds, I feel I often do not apply what I know to my for funsies portrait paintings and have a hard time with adding a natural background to my poses.

I want to get better at colors and lighting. I love Yoontrsh’s art so much! Her gradients and color combinations in lighting are so beautiful, and it makes even her sketches look so much better. I think I’m pretty good at this, but I want to be even better!

What am I working on right now?

Sumeru x Caracal oc

A sumeru alchemist oc

Thoma x Amber. I love them so much but I paused this drawing because it was just getting so frustrating. My thumbnail just looks so good but I’m not at all happy with my skin rendering or the entirety of Thoma. It drives me mad

The Balance Between Who I Was Before. I started this the day Scaramouche’s redesign came out, but I got so frustrated with the poses. Which sucks because everything I am happy with is killer!

nothing much to say about this one. I don’t actually think I’ll finish it since it was more about just getting the pose, skin, and hair on paper, which I’ve already accomplished.

a complex Ningguang painting, she exudes so much elegance I always use her as my subject when I want to draw elegant China.

I’ve really been working on my music a lot this December, but I still have so many plans for my visual arts. Haha, I wrote these 2 days ago and I’ve already made so much progress I had to update it.

Thank you for your support. I’m so happy I can share what I love doing with other people, and that I have this space to record my progress and ramble about my art goals.

#art summary 2022 #art recap 2022 #2022 art summary

[pixie-mask]

I’ve got more writing going on than ever before, while also in a pretty unhappy headspace and state overall. I’m far too late in life to be still figuring out so much and being entirely lost in general.

But anyway looking at my writing right now has been a hell of a mixed bag dipping sadly into the negative.

On the one hand I am writing that’s a plus in of itself. I got back into writing with Arcane, did a fic for The Bad Guys and am currently doing fics for The Quarry (far too many.) And I’ve been having a lot of fun with it and am still having fun with it though it’s brought more to the forefront. Honestly it’s things that I’ve been aware of but what I’m doing now with The Quarry has me thinking about it more.

For starters and moving to the other side of things I have put faaaaaaaar too much on my plate. I’ve got  several fics started, none on their second chapter and I still have several in the wing. 

It’s not like I’ve forgotten about these fics, they’re still right there in view. Trying to figure out how to go about progressing them, cause I don’t want to give the impression that I’m never going back to them, it’s just a lot and all of them are multichapter. Like taping double digits. This would be a big first for me even though I’ve had two fics prior that I should have done this for eons ago. 

Which for that matter I feel upset with the fact that I’ve given up on (thus far I hope maybe) my RWBY fan fic especially cause it’s one I was really excited about, but I made two rough chapters and haven’t returned. There’s an Arcane AU I kind of started but likewise I haven’t gone back too, but I also haven’t really started that so it’s okay I guess.

But I’ve got myself wrapped up endlessly in fics and then I have two more events that I plan to do and will put the other fics on hiatus. NaNoWriMo 2022 and the Hackearney Fic Exchange. Probably not the wisest to take on more writing projects but like…🤷🏽‍♀️ that’s me🤦🏽‍♀️.

NaNoWriMo is even worse though since like logically I should probably continue on of the Hackearney fics I started but I desperately, desperately want to write one of my original stories. Have taken too long in trying to figure out what I want to write in general cause research is going to be a pain in the ass. There’s the choice of something original, continuing a current fic, or starting that damn Pokemon fic. I am so tired of myself.

Which only dips further into my writing because frankly I’m ashamed of what I’ve written both in the sense of subject and in the sense of skill. The former is the biggest issue as it’s pushing against some ongoing dilemmas and beliefs and extends even past my writing a little, it’s one of the reasons why (at leas for The Quarry) I’m going to be going back and re-evaluating what’s been written. Might orphan some things and destroy the link where I have them idk.

It’s kind of a pompous action of looking forward into what I would look back on if I ever made something of myself.

Also for skill I’ve decided to take on the obnoxious task of going back through pretty much everything I’ve written and re-editing it. I went through some fics due to comments recently and still found mistakes..

So that’s where I am I on this. Given that it’s the one thing in motion right now it’s my most upfront plague. I was going to say primary or greatest but it’s just one in several that I have.

#Pixie Talk #Pixie ramble rampage #self #writing #fan fiction #The Quarry #NaNoWriMo

[fascinatedhelix]

Binge read Ava’s Demon a couple days ago and have a ton of thoughts on it. Here’s just some general story thoughts and theories (Spoilers Ahead!):

The whole tone of the comic is less... frustrating when one takes into consideration that the original version was made back in 2001, by a depressed 13 year old. Things just come together better with that context in mind; the characters, how they interact with their setting, the construction of the setting itself. It just screams “if people took stories written by kids seriously.” It’s oddly charming, in my opinion.

The setting that TITAN Inc creates is perfect for a YA story, since their indoctrination practices seem to hinge on isolating and disenfranchising children while also placing an ungodly amount of responsibility on them from an early age. Like, Gil was made to talk about his career at age 11. It certainly fits with TITAN’s goals, though it also comes with perhaps the unintended side effect that they probably have a bigger rebellion problem than they show. Adolescents tend to be especially impulsive and prone to acting out when under pressure, and if you give them the ability to actually navigate important technology and resources in your pursuit of quick and easy minions, you’re going to get a lot of amateur hackers, thieves, smugglers, and other minor criminals who probably wouldn’t be doing any of this had they not been forced to make life-changing decisions so early.

It’s really weird that Gil was put through eight years of medical training, just to become a medical janitor. One would think that TITAN Inc wouldn’t want to waste resources on a “failure” if Gil didn’t perform well enough in his evaluations, and would have just flunked him if he didn’t meet their standards. I’m thinking the medical janitor thing might have been a cover for something higher ups didn’t want the lower level administrative staff to know about. Strategos Six did seem to involve a lot more investment into Gil’s future as a follower than one would expect. If Six had a habit of saving kids from the Scavengers, I don’t think they would have been able to recognize Gil as well as they did. I’m thinking they wanted to use him for some sort of project outside of the public eye, like working with the Scavengers or working against Wrathia’s Plan. Six does seem to be familiar enough with Wrathia to recognize her appearance and power, perhaps they wanted to use Gil to counteract that.

The pace, while great for characterization, isn’t all that promising. From what I’ve gathered it’s been going since 2012, which means it’s taken eight or nine years just for the plot to take off the ground. While I can understand side projects and life issues might slow progress down, I can also understand the fandom’s frustration with the pacing of the comic. You know, this sort of issue is why Homestuck’s panels were, for the most part, relatively low effort; a simpler art style and reuse of assets makes a more regular update schedule much more manageable. I appreciate the work that’s being done, of course - the art’s easily the best part of the comic - it’s just that I can see why things would be slow going.

That being said, I do hope that things pick up a little after this point, because I am absolutely itching to see some character development. It’s only really been establishing characters and setting up the beginning of the plot so far, and it’s only been maybe a day or two since the story began, in-universe. I’m hoping that, if Erios joins the “friend” group, they’ll be able to offset the bad vibes of the main cast through their own good ones.

#ava's demon #avas demon

[davidmann95]

Sooo… Superman and the Authority?

magnus-king123 asked: Your thoughts on Superman & the authority Give it to me...lol

Anonymous asked: Seeing Bezos take his little trip into space the same day Morrison puts out a Superman comic that touches on how far we’ve fallen from the days when we dreamed of utopian futures where everyone explored the stars was a big gut punch. Not used to Superman being topical in that way.

Anonymous asked: What'd you think of Superman and the Authority#1?

This is far beyond what I can fit in the normal weekly reviews, so taking this as my notes on the first six pages, with this and this as my major lead-in thoughts:

* Janin's such a perfect fit for Morrison - the scale, the power, the facial expressions selling the character work, the screwing around with the panel formatting as necessary to sell the effect, the numinous sense of things going on larger than you can fully perceive amidst the beauty and chaos. It's a shame he wasn't around 25 years ago to draw JLA, but I'll take him going with Morrison onto other future projects.

* His intro action sequence is such a great demonstration of why Black actually does have something to offer, and also how he's such a dumbass desperately needing Superman to save him from himself.

* While Jordie Bellaire didn't legit go with an entirely monochromatic palate the way early previews suggested, it's still an effect frequently and excellently deployed here. And glad to see Steve Wands carry into this from Blackstars since there's such an obvious carryover from its work with Superman.

* "Gentlemen. Ladies. Others." Great both because of the obvious - hey, Superman's nodding at me! - and because it's a phrasing that reinforces that this take on him (and let's be real Morrison) is old as hell.

* I'm mostly past caring about whether this is an alt-Earth Superman until it becomes indisputable one way or another, this and Action both rule so what does it really matter? But while there are still a couple signs in play suggesting some kind of division (the Action Comics #1036 cover, Midnighter up to time-travel shenanigans) the "lost in time" quote clearly thrown in after the fact to explain how he could have met Kennedy outside of 5G that wouldn't be necessary for an Elseworlds, the assorted gestures towards Superman's current status quo, the Kingdom Come symbol appearing in Action, and that Morrison would have had to completely rewrite the ending if this wasn't supposed to be 'the' version of Clark Kent going forward as was the intent when they first planned it all say to me that no, no fooling around, this is our guy going forward one way or another.

* Janin and Bellaire making the first version of the crystal Fortress ever that actually looks as cool as you want it to.

Anonymous asked: I like that Superman and The Authority is basically the anti-All-Star; instead of the laid back, immortal Superman who is supercharged, we have a stressed, ageing Superman whose tremendous powers are fading. The former will always be there to save us, but the latter is running out of time and needs to pull off a Hail Mary. Also, he mentions in his monologue to Black that he was "lost in time" when he met JFK, so maybe he is the main continuity Clark. Or he's the t-shirt Supes from Sideways.

* You're absolutely right - the power reversal is obvious and the ticking clock in play seemingly isn't for his own survival but everyone around him as he wakes up and realizes all the old icons grew complacent with the gains they'd made and he's not leaving behind the world he meant to. Both, however, are built on the idea of preparing the world to not need them anymore - it'll still have a Superman in his son, but that'll only work because of the others he empowers and inspires. The question is what happens to Clark if he's not going to live in the sun for 83000 years.

* Clark's 'exercise' here does more to sell me on the idea of Old Man Superman as a cool idea than however many decades of Earth 2 stuff.

* Intergang being noted alongside Darkseid and Doomsday speaks to how much Kirby informed Morrison's conception of Superman.

* This isn't exactly the most progressive in its disability politics but at least it makes clear Black's being a piece of shit about it.

* It's startling how much Clark can get away with saying stuff in here you'd never expect to come out of Superman's mouth. "I made an executive decision" "Privacy, really...?" "You have nowhere to go, Black. Nothing to live for." "There are few people in my life who I instinctively and viscerally dislike, and you've always been one of them." It only works because there's zero aggression behind it, he's just past the point of niceties and being totally frank while making clear none of these assessments preclude that he cares and is going to unconditionally do the right thing every time. He is absolutely, per Morrison, humanity's dad picking us up when we're too drunk to drive ourselves home.

* The story doesn't put a big flashing light over it, but it's not even a little bit subtle having the material threat of the issue be a ticking timebomb left by the carelessness and hubris of generations past.

* Manchester keeps trying to poke the bear and prove his hot takes about Superman and it's just not working. The front he put up under Kelley is gone after decades of defeats, and as Morrison understands what actually conceptually works about him as a rival to Superman underneath the aging nerd paranoia he's exposed as what he absolutely would be in 2021: a dude with a horrific terminal case of Twitter brainworms. I was PANICKED when I heard there was an 'offensive term' joke in this, I was braced for Morrison at their well-meaning worst, but it's such a goddamn perfect encapsulation of a very specific breed of Twitter leftist who uses their politics first and foremost as a cudgel and justification to label their abrasive, judgmental shittiness as self-righteousness (plus it's a killer payoff to a joke from way back in his original appearance). Cannot believe they pulled that off when they're so very, very open about basically not knowing how the internet works.

* @charlottefinn: Manchester Black using his telekinetic powers to force someone he hates to fave a problematic tweet so that he can screenshot it and start a dogpile

@intergalactic-zoo: “Once they cancel Bibbo, Superman won’t be *anyone’s* fav’rit anymore!”

* Friend noted this issue had to be fully the conversation because the whole premise stands on the house of cards of these two somehow working together, and with three 'silent' inset panels the creative team pulls off that turning point.

* So much of this feels on the surface like Morrison bringing back the All-Star vibes with Clark, but when he drops a "That's all you got?" in a brawl you realize what's underlining that bluntness and confidence in the face of failure is that deep down this is still the Action guy too. This dude ain't gonna get wrecked in his Fortress while the other guy chuckles about him being A SOFT WEE SCIENTIST'S SON!

* Bringing up Jor-El made me realize that Morrison already spelled out that this is the final threat to Superman, what he faces at the end of the road:

"Now it's your turn, Superman."

* A l'il Superman 2000/All-Star reference with the Phantom Zone map!

* There's so much intertextuality going on here even by Morrison standards - Change or Die with the old hero putting together a team of morally nebulous folks out to 'fix' everything, Flex Mentallo with the muscleman trying to redeem the punk, Doomsday Clock with the fate of the world hinging on whether Superman can get through to a meta stand-in for an idea of 'modern' comics cynicism, DKR and New Frontier and Kingdom Come and Multiversity and Seven Soldiers and What's So Funny and All-Star and Action and the last 5 years of monthly Superman comics and Authority and probably Jupiter's Legacy and Tom Strong - but none of that's needed. You could go in with the baseline pop cultural understanding of the character and not care about any of the inside baseball shit and get that this is a story about a leader of a generation that let down the people they made all their grand promises to as inertia and day-to-day demands and complacency let him be satisfied with the accomplishments they'd made long ago, looking at a new era and seeing the ways its own activists are dropping the ball. The only thing that fundamentally matters in a "you have to accept you're reading a superhero story" sense is that because he's Superman he's willing to own up to it and listen to people who might know better about some things and try to set things right while he and those who'll take his place still have a chance. And yes, the oldster looking back on their legacy with a skeptical eye and hoping for better from the next generation, hoping most of all that their little heir apparent can fulfill the promise inside of him instead of being a provocating little shitkicker, is obviously also autobiographical.

* The overlaying Kennedy reprisal is such a great visual of a sudden intrusive thought.

* The Kryptonite secret is the obvious "This is going to matter!" moment, but "He lied about his son" is a bit that doesn't connect to anything going on right now so maybe that's important here too? More significantly, the Justice League can't actually be the villains here but that Ultra-Humanite's crew are in an Earth-orbiting satellite makes pretty clear what's up.

* I've said before that between Superman, OMAC, and a New Gods-affiliated speedster this was going to use all of Morrison's favorite things. King Arthur playing a role isn't exactly dissuading me.

* Love the idea that all the antiheroes have their own community in the same way as the capes and tights crew. They definitely all privately think the rest are posers though and that they alone are Garth Ennis Punisher in a mob of Garth Ennis Wolverines.

* Manchester's fallen so far he's gone from trying to convince Superman to kill to convince him to dunk on people for their bad takes and Clark just doesn't get it. Official prediction of dialogue for upcoming issues:

"According to these bloody Fortress scans, the only thing that can restore your powers is an unfiltered hit of dopamine. Don't worry, Doctor Black has a few ideas."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll plant a nice tree?"

"...fuck you."

* Ok I already talked about how great the Fortress looks in here but LOVE this library.

* A pair of pages this seems like the right spot to discuss from Black's original appearance that underlines both his and Superman's inadequacies up to this point:

Responding to the problem of "the government and penal system are hopelessly corrupt" neither of them has any actual notion of what to do about it in spite of their respective posturing beyond how to handle individual outside actors - each is in their own way every bit as small-minded and reactionary as the other. Clark's coming around though, and he's holding out hope for the other guy.

* Superman: Have a lovely mineral water :) proper hydration is important :)

Manchester Black: *Is a dude who can get so mad he vomits and passes out. At water.*

* That last page is the one to beat for the year, and does more to put over the idea of this as an Authority book than that Midnighter and Apollo are literally going to show up. It also feels like Morrison tacitly acknowledging all the ways the premise could go or at least be received wrong - from Superman saying 'enough is enough' to who he's bringing into the fold to go about it - in the most beautifully on-the-nose fashion imaginable. Maybe they'll save us all! Or maybe they'll drown us in their vomit.

#Superman and The Authority #Superman #The Authority #Manchester Black #Grant Morrison #Mikel Janin #Jordie Bellaire #Steve Wands #Opinion

[teacupfulofstarshine]

LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP CHAPTER 10

PLEASE HEED THE CONTENT WARNINGS!!! this chapter features Evil Scientist Lady and her Fucked Up WorldView a LOT, and there are also some Major Plot Events that involve Violence. i will put a summary in the end notes if you decide at any point that this particular chapter is too much - that's super valid! i will also mention here that no main characters are going to die in this story and no one dies in this chapter either.

huge huge thanks to @flamingfawkes for beta’ing!

CW: extreme disregard for human life, mentioned human and animal cruelty, toxic workplace environment, violence (both imagined and actual, mildly graphic), gun mention, minor blood, death threats, extremely unethical character, unethical science, stalking

chapter 1 // chapter 2 // chapter 3 // chapter 4 // chapter 5 // chapter 6 // chapter 7 // chapter 8 // chapter 9 // read it on ao3!

“This is the same result we’ve gotten the last twenty times -”

“I don’t care, Steven, run it again!”

Steven sighs, punching at the keyboard to run the statistical analysis sequence again. “This is ridiculous! I’ve run this sequence so many times it feels like my eyes are going to bleed. Why can’t we just turn in the results we have and -”

“Because she’ll behead us,” James snaps, “and then she’ll destroy our reputations and our families and they’ll get no severance. I have three young children at home, Steven, I need this money.” Steven softens a little, fingers running smoothly over the keys as he combs the data again. Next to him, James has a computer screen full of frame-by-frame stills of what little data they recovered from the probe before it was destroyed; Penny across the room is surrounded by ancient texts a mile high and at least three laptops.

“Why is she so interested in this, anyway?”

“It’s beyond me. Since when do we question the whims of what we’re told to do?”

Steven squints at the screen, pushing his chair back and rubbing at his eyes. “If I have to stare at these numbers for one more second, my brain is going to explode. I feel like my eyeballs are going to melt out of my skull. I wanna scream.”

James pulls up another image, staring at the blurry image of the merman before him. Steven pushes away from his own screen and squints at James’s. The merman in the photo looks young, not much older than his kid brother, but they don’t know anything about the lifespan of these creatures. He looks confused, squinting at the camera. As James flicks through the stills, the merman transitions from confused to angry to enraged, and then he attacks.

“He’s not happy about the camera.”

“Would you be happy about someone spying on you and your family?” James says, switching to the next still.

“I wouldn’t be happy if I thought someone was doing anything we do in this lab to me or my family.” James elbows Steven, but luckily no one else seems to have heard.

“This lab isn’t the most ethical place I’ve ever worked, but it pays the bills,” James mutters. “And we’re not even in the experimentation lab. We just do data analysis. We’re removed from the situation.”

Are we? Steven wonders. He sees James reach out and touch the framed picture of his daughters, and keeps his mouth shut. He turns back to his computer, watching the little spinning color wheel of his mouse as the program calculates the same numbers again and again. The results come up identical to the previous ones, and Steven clicks “Run Program” again wordlessly.

They work in silence for a while, the three of them, broken only by James’s muttering and the occasional thud of one of Penny’s books and the clicks of keyboards and mice. If they weren’t so reliant on technology, Steven thinks, there would be an enormous corkboard spanning three of the four walls, covered in pushpins and handwriting and red string connecting images. He debates actually building one, if only to increase the levity in the room, but decides against it.

He’s seen people punished or fired or who-knows-what-else for far less, after all.

Instead, after his program tells him for the twenty-third time that his results are the same (and didn’t someone say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?), Steven scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms and opens the data entry window. Maybe the problem with the results has to do with the entry of the data; did he input something wrong? It’s possible . . .

Here he goes again, he supposes. He stands up, stretches, and leans back to crack some vertebrae. “I’m gonna grab a coffee, take a short screen break, and go back to the beginning. Maybe there’s something in the input that I missed. You want anything?”

James groans, thunking his head against the desk. “I want something with enough caffeine to kill three elephants, please.” Steven nods, looking over at Penny. She shakes her head, and he heads for the shitty coffee machine a few doors down.

Several floors below, a young woman pulls her lab goggles up to rest on top of her head with her perfectly-pinned protocol-compliant bun. “The latest round of tests is completely done, ma’am. I think you’ll find the efficacy . . . striking.”

She takes the clipboard, glossy perfectly-painted nails pinching the sheets of thin paper and flicking between them. “I’m afraid I don’t do so well with the scientific side of things - Kathleen, was it? Explain this to me, would you?”

“Certainly, ma’am. As you know, the kill time for the most effective neurotoxin currently available, tetrodotoxin, varies from thirty minutes to four hours. Average time for symptoms to manifest is seventeen minutes, and from there the symptoms progress through tingling of the lips and tongue, headache, vomiting, muscle weakness, ataxia, et cetera. Death occurs as a result of respiratory or heart failure, and the poison is nearly undetectable if you do not specifically test for it.”

“The untraceability is a plus, but that is far too wide a range of times, and too slow a time even at its fastest.”

“Of course, ma’am, but as far as naturally-occurring marine poisons go - actually, as far as naturally-occurring poisons go, full stop - it is the most effective. Until now, that is.”

“Oh? What are your findings?”

“Which trials would you like to start with, ma’am?”

“The human trials, Kathleen. The only ones that matter. I hardly intend to go around killing mice and hoping that no one traces their deaths to a novel neurotoxin.” She laughs airily, and Kathleen nods along.

“Certainly, ma’am. The most recent data points indicate an average efficacy time of thirteen minutes for our compound neurotoxin, with a full range between nine and seventeen minutes passing before subject death. Subjects began to show symptoms around five minutes, give or take twenty-five seconds.”

“And those symptoms were?”

Kathleen flips through the document. “Seizures, vital organ failure, blindness, painful muscle spasms, suffocation from the inside out.”

She hums, tapping a manicured finger against the report. “Well, Kathleen, that is certainly impressive, especially for a preliminary human subject trial. These results . . . I must say, they are not nearly as disappointing as I anticipated when I came down here.”

“Ma’am?”

“How long have you worked for this company, Kathleen?”

“Almost five years, ma’am, but I’ve always been an assistant. This is my first time as lead researcher and biochemist on a project, ever since you . . . laid off the previous lead researcher.”

“Kathleen, let me be frank. These results are not what I hoped for. The efficacy time and symptom onset times are both far too long for my liking, and the range of efficacy time is too broad. By all accounts, I should consider this a failure.” Kathleen swallows, but remains poised. “However, you’ve managed to shave off a considerable amount of time from the tetrodotoxin readings. The range of symptom onset time is an acceptable breadth, and your results are far beyond anything your predecessor ever accomplished for me. This is truly impressive, all things considered.”

“Thank you, ma’am. How should I proceed?”

“I want the efficacy doubled - tripled - I want it upped by anywhere between four and five hundred percent. I want the pain increased, too. Feel free to increase your requests for test subjects, but get me the results I want. You said the original tetrodotoxin was untraceable?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“Can you keep that feature intact?”

“As of right now, it is intact, ma’am. I will endeavor to keep it so in future experiments.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Welcome to your new position as head of this research division. Don’t let me down.” She holds out a slender hand, and Kathleen takes it, trying not to seem too eager.

“I won’t, ma’am.”

“How soon can you start this experiment up again?”

“The cleaners should be finished by tomorrow morning, ma’am, and I can tweak chemical formulas until then.”

“Excellent.” Her watch beeps, and she lifts it, pursing her bright lips as she examines the message she’s just received. “If you’ll excuse me, I have another matter to attend to. Someone will drop off your master access key for Lab Three within the hour.”

She steps into the elevator and lifts her watch up to her face, swiping through the messages from her secretary. One finger reaches out to press the button for the digital analysis labs floor, and the other taps away at her watch.

When she steps off the elevator, her secretary is waiting. “Ma’am.”

“What do they have for me?”

“Unclear. They said it was something they wanted to report directly to you and you alone, but it seems to be something big.”

“Hopefully it’s a big step in the right direction, or they’ll be taking a big step out of a job.” She relishes in the way the employees she passes all unfailingly flinch and then snap to perfect attention when they hear the sharp echo of her heels against the floor. She lifts her head and walks faster, striking the tiles with her heels like a gavel, sharp and precise against a judge’s desk.

The computer labs are disorganized when she enters, but there is a string of promising-looking numbers on the main display monitor. There is a woman surrounded by books and a man pulling up photos on his computer, and there is a third man standing in front of her like a toy soldier. She focuses on that one.

“I hear you have news for me? Make it swift, and make it good.”

He swallows, hard, and her eyes idly trace the line of his throat. If he disappoints her, perhaps she will drive her heel through it, to make an example of him. That would be far too messy; perhaps his dominant hand will do.

“I have narrowed down the location of the missing net, ma’am. I believe it to have washed up somewhere around these general GPS coordinates.” He fiddles with a remote in his hand, and the image on the screen changes. It shows an aerial satellite view of a secluded strip of beach, framed by rocky cliffs with larger rocks studded out into the open water. “It should have washed up somewhere in this one-point-three-seven-mile strip of beach. The whole area is property of one Doctor Thomas Sanders.”

She snarls. “That man. He won’t let us on that beach willingly until hell freezes over.”

The other man, the one scanning through photo stills and video footage, jumps up, knocking his chair backwards. “I found something!”

She turns towards him, and his excitement freezes and sputters into something much more controlled and terrified. “Show me.” He clicks something and pulls up video footage from one of their surveillance drones, zooming in on a particular patch of ocean along the stretch of Sanders’ beach. Her eyes widen when she sees what he’d noticed - a hump of red-and-white tail arcing above the waves before a pattern of ripples streaks off towards the cliff. He pauses the footage, rewinds it, uses a laser pointer to show an opening concealed in the cliff face.

“There’s some kind of grotto in there, hidden by the cliff. It’s on Sanders’ property, he has to know it’s there. And it looks like the merman from the destroyed drone knows it’s there too. Which means -”

“That must be where he’s keeping them.” Something burns in her chest, brilliant and terrifying and all-encapsulating, like wildfire. “We’ve found them, at long last.”

“What would you have me do?” her secretary asks. “I can arrange for a recovery squad at your earliest possible convenience, ma’am.”

“Assemble the squad, but do not have them move out. They will wait for my orders. When they go, you are to go with them.” Her secretary nods, once, sharp and sure. “Dispatch a crew to Lab One and clear it out. I want it prepped for containment, vivisection, chemical tests - the works. Get at least three tanks set up and one strap-down human table.”

“A human table, ma’am?”

“Yes. We have to deal with Sanders once and for all to ensure that he does not ruin any future experiments.”

“Will we be taking him as well?”

She hums thoughtfully. “No. Pull up the file we have on his known associate?”

A few swift clicks and flicks and a photo appears on the large screen: a young man with brown-and-purple hair, sleeves rolled up, carefully lowering a perfectly viable specimen into the ocean and letting it go, like some kind of fool. “His doctoral student, ma’am. The longest one he’s ever kept - this one has been with him a few years.”

“Excellent. When you raid the lab, take him.”

“Should we kill Sanders?”

“No. Rough him up a little, but leave him alive. Taking his protégé and leaving him alone, helpless to rescue him, will be the highest form of torture for such an insufferable person. The agony will eat him alive until his dying day.”

Her secretary nods, taking the notes down dutifully. The other employees look vaguely horrified, but she pays them no mind. No sacrifice is too great to be made in the name of progress, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a weakling who will never get anywhere in life.

She refuses to be one of those weaklings.

*~*~*~*~*

Logan wakes up confused.

He’s warm, warmer than he thinks he’s ever been in his whole life. When he stirs, he moves farther than he meant to - he must not be underwater. That’s enough to send a jolt of concern through his sleep-addled brain. Why isn’t he underwater? Why was he sleeping if he was above the surface? There’s no way his dad is here, and Roman hates surfacing, where are they? Where is he? But he’s so comfortable . . .

Someone shifts beside him, an arm draping across his waist, and Logan forces his eyes open. He shifts his lower half, confused when two things move instead of one, and there are layers upon layers of thin, flat, soft things wrapping around him. What is happening?

Slowly, slowly, his mind clears, and he remembers the events of last night. He grew legs - he was a human, once, before he was mer - he couldn’t sleep underwater with Dad and Roman - Virgil was teaching him to walk - Virgil put “clothes” on him - Virgil was embarrassed that he didn’t have those “clothes” on him - Virgil took him out of the lab to sleep - Virgil agreed to cuddle him since his pod couldn’t -

Logan feels the strange burning in his face again as he shifts. He can’t see well in this new human form, but when things are close enough to his face they’re relatively clear. And Virgil, still sleeping, is close enough that Logan can smell him - he smells like salt water mixed with something sharp and something sweet and something else that Logan can’t quite identify but finds addicting nonetheless. Sunlight streams in and pools around Virgil’s face, illuminating the tangled mess of hair spread around him and flopping into his face, the small puddle of water leaking out from his open mouth onto the soft thing he’s resting his head on, the way his chest moves slowly with every breath. His arm is wrapped around Logan, pulling him close. Logan thinks he might explode if he focuses on this any more, so he rolls from his side to his back as carefully as he can, not wanting to wake Virgil. Virgil tightens his arm around Logan and mutters something indecipherable in his sleep, but he doesn’t wake.

Rather than focusing on his very confusing feelings for the very pretty man next to him, Logan focuses on what he can see of the room around him. He makes a list in his mind of things that he plans to ask Virgil about later today, including:

1: There are many draws attached to the small, smooth cliffs surrounding them. How do they stay there?

2: There are lots of “clothes” scattered all around the floor, and there were several on the bed, too. Is that normal for humans?

3: Last night, Virgil did something that made the room light up with trapped sunlight! How did he do that?

4: How did Virgil get ice to stay in those big frozen sheets in such a warm place to let the sunlight in?

5: How did Virgil make ice into that weird shape that he filled with water and drank last night?

6: How did Virgil get the water to come into this place?

7: Do all humans have a specific area set aside for sleeping? Logan and his pod usually just sleep wherever they can, but Virgil seems to have this soft slab set aside with all of these soft things to be comfortable and sleep in every night. Is this a Human Thing or strictly a Virgil Thing?

Logan looks out through the sheet of ice that protects Virgil’s area from the outside and gasps. He can’t see well, but there’s a glittering expanse of blue that shifts and moves and oh, is that the ocean?

He’s spent his whole life (well, his whole remembered life, anyways) in the ocean, and he’s seen some truly wondrous things. He travels around the world with his pod, he knows the ocean is big, but seeing it spread out like this is . . . awe-inspiring. Logan has never seen the ocean like this, and now that he has he doesn’t think he can ever not see it like this again. It’s like a perfect sheet of sea-glass, rippling and unbroken but dynamic in a way that he never really gets a sense of when he’s beneath it.

He knows that there are waves, of course. There are smaller swells out on the open ocean, and larger ones when the Second Goddess dips her fingers down from the Upper Ocean and swirls the storms to a thundering burst. There are waves along the shoreline, ones that he frolics in with Roman and batter him against the shoreline. There are waves created when he or his pod members surface. But watching the movement of the ocean from up here is . . .

Even with his imperfect vision, he is completely at a loss for words as he stares at the ocean.

Eventually, Virgil stirs next to him, and Logan turns away from the ocean to stare at him. Virgil is close to him, arms wrapped tightly around him, face pressed against him. Logan’s eyesight is not great, but Virgil is close enough that he can pick out little details of his face. There are brown face scales scattered all over him, but they seem to cluster on his nose and his cheeks. Logan has wanted to touch them for a substantial amount of time, and he can’t stop himself from gently settling the tips of his fingers over Virgil’s cheek.

His face doesn’t feel like Logan was expecting. The scales don’t give texture to his face the way that Logan’s do; the skin is smooth and flat. There are little bumps all over, but the brown scales aren’t raised off the skin like Logan expected. He lets his fingers trail along Virgil’s face. His bone structure seems to be exceedingly similar to Logan’s, at least in regards to his head. Logan’s finger rests gently on the curve of bone under Virgil’s eye, and Virgil exhales warm breath onto his palm.

Logan wonders what it would be like to have this for longer than just his recovery period. He wonders what it would be like to wake up next to Virgil all the time, to get to run his hands over Virgil’s face and arms and chest and examine the differences between their anatomy. He wonders what it would be like to learn to walk without falling over, and he feels a sharp, unexpected twinge in his chest as he realizes that getting better at walking means no more closeness to Virgil.

His chest feels strange, like there’s a school of small fish swarming around and tickling his insides and making him feel all foamy, like the froth churned up by a windswept sea. He feels like he does when he’s underwater - free, weightless, mobile, limited by nothing except his own imagination. He feels unstoppable.

Virgil makes a sudden, sharp inhale, blinking his eyes open slowly. Logan thinks that, perhaps, he might not appreciate being studied unknowingly - he hadn’t appreciated Virgil doing it, before he understood what was happening, when all he knew was the loss of his pod aching like a scraped-out seashell. As Virgil wakes up, Logan shifts, turning his gaze to the rest of the room.

Virgil makes a sleepy grumbling noise, opening one eye. Logan chances another quick glance at him, and when his eye slides open Logan is struck by its beauty. He doesn’t get much of a chance to admire it, however, before Virgil is jolting backwards like Logan’s struck him with lightning. Logan is confused, reaching out and gently touching his shoulder. “Virgil?”

“Wassat?! Wait . . . L’gan?”

“It is me,” Logan says softly. “Are - are you upset with me?”

Virgil yawns, jaw dropping to his chest, revealing a flash of teeth and a soft pink tongue. (Logan wants to lick it. Why does Logan want to lick it? Why is Logan thinking about Virgil’s tongue licking his tongue - why is Logan thinking about Virgil - what in the Seven Oceans is happening to him.) “Wh - no, no, ‘m okay, I just - woke up, forgot I had you with me, got confused about another person in my bed.” Before Logan can start to feel bad, Virgil adds, “S’okay if it’s you, though,” and the foamy, floaty feeling is back.

“Did you sleep well?”

Virgil laughs, low and rumbling, and Logan can feel it in his fingers where he touches Virgil’s skin. “I never sleep well.” He sits up, and the fabric of his pajamas shifts to let Logan see stretches of soft, supple skin that he usually doesn’t. Logan wants to touch it. He very determinedly keeps his hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “Gotta admit, though, last night was . . . better than usual.”

This appears to be the point where Virgil first notices their position - pressed together, arm slung over Logan, basically cuddling the way that Logan normally would with his pod. (No tangle with his pod has ever felt this . . . electric, this charged, this important to Logan before.) His face flares a brilliant red, and he shifts like he wants to move away but -

“I’m sorry,” Virgil says. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No!” Logan blurts out. Virgil blinks at him a little, and maybe he was a little overly enthusiastic, but - “I sleep in a tangle with Dad and Roman all the time. I have extreme difficulty sleeping without contact with someone else. It . . . helped me greatly.”

“Oh,” Virgil says, face turning redder still, smiling shyly. “That - makes me feel better. Thanks, Lo.”

Logan smiles, and Virgil smiles too, reaching up to gently move a piece of hair away from his face. Logan thinks that, as far as deaths go, his chest exploding (which seems to be getting more and more likely every fifteen seconds he spends in Virgil’s presence, only accelerated by all this skin-on-skin contact they’re having right now) seems to be the most pleasurable.

Virgil opens his mouth to say something, but whatever it was is interrupted by a Ping! noise from across the room. “What is that?” Logan asks. Virgil, sadly, untangles himself from Logan and the blankets, sliding out of bed and heading over to one of the other structures in the room (what did he call it last night? Dex?) and picking up a flat glowing rectangle.

“Is everything alright?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, I - Thomas sent me a text, it’s a little weird.”

“What is a text?”

“It’s a kind of human messaging system, it allows us to communicate when we’re far away from each other.”

“Like a pod call?” “Kind of? I’ll explain more later, I promise, I just - I gotta go down to the lab real quick.”

“I’ll come with -”

“No!” Virgil snaps. Logan flinches, and Virgil softens, crossing the room and gently touching his shoulder. “Hey, no, Logan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just - this message, there’s something off. I think something might be wrong, and I don’t want to put you in any unnecessary danger. Just - wait here, okay? Wait in my room, where it’s safe. It’s probably nothing, he’s probably fine, but on the off chance that he’s not, I want you to stay hidden safely up here.”

Logan isn’t sure why this makes his face heat up slightly, but it does. “Okay. I accept your apology, and I . . . trust you.”

Virgil smiles, soft and heartwarming, and Logan is beginning to give more credence to his “chest explosion is fine, actually” theory. “Wait for me here, okay? I’ll be right back. I promise.”

He leaves, shutting the door firmly behind him, and the foamy feeling in Logan’s chest dissipates a little. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but there’s something . . . off. If Logan didn’t know better, he’d think that he was sensing a predator approaching.

But that can’t be right, he isn’t underwater. His danger senses are likely just overreacting to his disappointment at Virgil’s absence.

. . . Right?

*~*~*~*~*

Thomas is beginning to regret letting Roman and Patton (specifically, Roman) out of the large tank before finishing his first coffee of the morning.

“I want some!” Roman complains.

“Do you even know what it is?” Thomas says. Roman pouts sulkily at him.

“. . . No,” he mutters, rolling his eyes. Thomas gives him the deadpan, no-nonsense, I-am-your-direct-superior-take-the-damn-samples-Virgil stare that he has perfected over the past few years. Roman wilts a little more, and Thomas feels slightly bad.

“It’s called coffee,” he says. “It’s a hot drink that lots of people have in the morning. Some people drink it plain, and some people add things to it to change the way it tastes. It helps me wake up more and get focused to start my day, and sometimes I drink it late at night to help keep me awake.”

Roman looks less like a kicked puppy and more like Logan, eyes wide and curious. “I want some!”

Thomas, taking a sip of his own two-seconds-of-cream-five-cubes-of-sugar coffee, nearly spits it out. He looks at Roman, eyes the very sharp, very detachable, very toxic spines covering his body, and says, “No.”

Roman’s demeanor changes entirely, switching from “curious toddler” to “toddler about to throw a temper tantrum” in a heartbeat. “Why not?!”

“Because when people drink coffee without being used to it, sometimes it makes them a little crazy.”

“I’m not crazy!”

“Do I need to recount to you how many times you’ve threatened me and my assistant since we met you?” Thomas says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not giving you coffee until I know I can trust you not to stab me with your poisonous spines that cover your entire body and can be fired at people.”

Roman pouts more, dropping under the water and letting out a gratingly harmonious string of mer that Thomas is pretty sure translates to Roman bitching about the coffee situation to his dad. Based on the pattern of Patton’s response, he’s pretty sure Patton is laughing at Roman.

More sulky chalkboard-violin music, and then Roman resurfaces grumpily. “Dad agrees with you and says no consuming strange human foods.”

“Did he laugh at you?”

Roman squints suspiciously at him. “You can’t speak our language.”

“Yeah, but I know what it sounds like when a dad laughs at his kid.” Roman, continuing to pout, sinks back into the tank, presumably to sulk some more. Thomas takes another very long sip of coffee that is definitely too hot for his mouth and turns back to his desk.

Virgil should definitely be awake and in the lab at this point. The samples he’s supposed to be analyzing are sitting in their little tubes, each neatly labelled with locations and dates and times and what, specifically, Virgil is supposed to be looking for. Thomas considers going upstairs and waking up Virgil, who’s almost never been late for work in this way, but he decides against it. Virgil is upstairs with Logan, and Thomas knows that there’s something building between them. He’s not sure how advisable that something is, but he trusts Virgil to make his own decisions.

Besides, he could probably use some practice. His water sample analysis skills are pretty rusty, he’s had Virgil doing them for years. “Virgil, you owe me big time for what I’m doing for you.” He carefully shifts the samples over to his own desk, slides his earbuds in, picks up a pipette, and gets to work analyzing the bacterial and algal concentrations for any abnormalities.

Thomas accomplishes about forty-five minutes’ worth of work before Roman interrupts him by flicking water at him and soaking the back of his neck. “Hey!”

“I tried your name, but your little ear bug things were keeping you from hearing me,” Roman says smugly. Thomas, not for the first time, considers retreating to the closet and throwing beakers until he feels better.

“Can I help you?”

“Dad wants to go hunting and bring back breakfast, but we can’t leave without you.”

“Are you not going hunting?”

“I’m going to stay here and observe you,” Roman says.

Thomas blinks. “Do I . . . need observing?”

“How do I know you won’t sell us out to your little human friends the second you get a chance? If I’m here, I can stop you. Plus, what if you do something to Logan while we’re not here to protect him? No, no, I’m staying right where I am and you can’t make me leave.” His spines ripple; Thomas steps closer to a whiteboard in case he needs to duck.

“I’m not going to do that, and I don’t want you to stab me.”

“Still! I’m staying here! Also, Dad’s bigger than me, and he’s a better hunter cause he’s faster and he’s been hunting longer.

“Does he need something to help him carry all those fish?” Thomas asks. Roman opens his mouth like he’s going to say something snarky, pauses, and stops.

“I . . . usually we just eat what we catch when we catch it. We make a pile of prey and take turns guarding it while the other two hunt. Then we make a sacrifice to the Seven Mother Goddesses and eat what’s left.”

After some debate, Thomas is able to fashion a sling of sorts from some waterproof tarps and leftover anchor rope to tie around Patton’s body. “You can put the fish in this pouch and carry them back here. Will you be able to navigate your way back to the grotto?”

“He will,” Roman says. “Dad knows more about the ocean than any human possibly could.” Another discordant song from the tank, chastising, and Roman huffs. “Dad wants me to reassure you that he’ll be fine.”

Patton settles into the mobile tank easily, and Thomas gets him down to the grotto leading towards the sea. “When you come back, let out one of your pod calls and Virgil or I will come and collect you and your catch. Take as much time as you need, okay?”

Patton reaches up and gently pats Thomas’s arm with one large, damp hand, and Thomas takes that to mean an agreement. “Alright, off you go.” There’s a whoosh and a rush of water as it flows from the tank into the grotto in a clean arc, carrying Patton with it. Thomas waits for a moment, letting Patton disappear into the open ocean, before returning to the laboratory.

Roman, for the most part, ignores Thomas. He asks the occasional question, which Thomas tries to answer in a way that he’ll understand, and leans over the edge of his touch tank, eyes guarded. Every time Thomas sneaks a glance, when he thinks Roman isn’t looking, his expression is wide-eyed and wondrous, like Logan’s usually are, but the moment he realizes Thomas is watching him his entire face closes up like a clamshell.

Thomas wonders what it’ll take to get Roman to trust him, trust Virgil, trust any human. Granted, he doesn’t know Roman’s history with humans, but he and Patton are both fairly scarred, and Thomas might not know the whole story but he’d bet a not-insignificant amount of his monthly income that the giant starburst scar taking up the majority of Patton’s chest isn’t the result of a clash with a marine creature.

He works quietly, fielding the occasional question, keeping one ear on the grotto tunnel for Patton’s return. He’s not sure how long he expected Patton to be gone, but he hears movement in the grotto tunnel far sooner than he’d expected.

“Thomas, what’s -”

“Shhhh,” Thomas says. He stands up, pushing away from his desk, but before he can say anything else, there’s a flood of movement coming from the tunnel. Bodies pour into the lab, swift and strong and carrying weapons that they immediately train on Thomas and Roman.

“What is this?” Roman snaps, bristling. He sounds betrayed, like he thinks Thomas is behind this. Thomas picks up a heavy glass beaker, fully prepared to shatter it upside someone’s skull if necessary, but something heavy and hard strikes the back of his skull and he feels his knees crumple. Roman cries out, and Thomas struggles to push himself up. A hand fists itself in his hair and yanks him upright, sharply. Thomas exhales sharply through his teeth, but before he can start struggling, something cool and round rests against the back of his neck, shutting him up and shutting his brain down.

Roman is puffed up like a hedgehog, apparently fully prepared to defend Thomas despite his strong and inherent mistrust. Before he can begin to attack, Thomas hears the click-click-click of shoes on the hard stone floor. Whoever’s holding his head yanks him back again, and he is forced to watch as a woman walks into his laboratory.

(It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke - a sick, horrible, twisted joke.)

She has black heels, black tights, a black pencil skirt, a black blazer, and a blood-red blouse. Her hair is scraped back into a tight bun, pulled so taut it must hurt, and is held in place with a pitch black stick. She carries a - clipboard? tablet? Unclear - held against her chest, and there’s a sleek silver weapon in her right hand.

“The one from the video?” she asks.

“Affirmative, ma’am,” says the person holding Thomas’s head. The woman nods, lifting her weapon, and fires at Roman. Thomas tries to scream a warning, earning himself another painful yank from his captor, but the projectile lodges itself in Roman’s shoulder anyway.

It isn’t a bullet, but something that looks like a small syringe. Roman swats it out of his shoulder, swaying a little, but it doesn’t stop him from swiping at the - mercenary, they must be - who tries to grab him with his elbow spines. The woman frowns, lifts the weapon - some kind of tranquilizer gun? - and fires again.

Roman screams, inhuman and animal, and tears the newest dart from his arm, throwing himself out of his tank and clinging to the nearest mercenary. His teeth tear into the man’s shoulder, spines piercing through his camouflage clothing and flooding him with neurotoxin. The man collapses against the concrete, alive but unconscious, and Roman snarls at the next man as though daring him to approach. He sways, weakened but awake, and bares his teeth.

“Of course,” the woman says, tapping something on her tablet. “His naturally produced neurotoxin must be providing him with some level of natural resistance. Unexpected, but not a limitation.”

It takes three more tranquilizer darts before Roman finally slumps down into his tank, unconscious. The mercenaries look hesitant to approach him, but the woman reaches for her tablet and they scramble to action at once.

“No - no, stop, let him go, he’s not an animal for you to cart off to your lab -” Thomas starts. The man holding him knees him sharply in the back and he cries out, coughing.

They wrap Roman in thick leather bands, roughly shoving his spines flat and binding them against his skin so that he can’t attack them again. The woman nods, once, short and sharp, and they drag Roman away, letting his head bang mercilessly on the ground. Thomas catches a glimpse of a logo - emblazoned on the back of the jackets, on the back of the woman’s tablet, on the side of her tranquilizer gun - and commits it to memory. He’s going to need it, if he gets out of here alive.

“- your phone,” the woman says, and oh, when did she get in front of him.

“My what?”

His mouth runs dry as she places the tranquilizer gun under his chin, barrel pressing against his throat, and tips his chin up. “I said, give me your phone.”

Thomas blinks. “My - the desk. It’s on the desk.”

She sets her tablet down, picks up his phone, and shoves it in his face. “Open it.”

“I - wh -”

“Unlock your phone, Dr. Sanders. Must I repeat myself a third time?” She rolls her eyes. “Doctorates are wasted on people like you.”

Thomas numbly punches in his passcode, and she swipes through to his messages app, frowning before turning the screen towards his face to reveal a message thread with Virgil. “Is this your assistant?”

Thomas glares at her, he’s not going to give her what she wants, he’s not going to just give her Virgil but then the - gun, it must be a gun, what else would they be holding against his neck like this - pushes into him harder, and it’s probably bruising, and he can’t get himself killed here because then he definitely won’t be able to take care of Virgil and -

“Yes,” Thomas says, hating himself for giving in so easily. “What do you -”

She turns away from him, nails clicking against his phone screen as she sends a text message - to Virgil, presumably, and that makes his heart sink like a stone - before dropping it on the floor and stepping on it to shatter it. “I have a message for you.”

“A - what?”

“Did they really hit you that hard, or were you this stupid before we came here?” she says coldly, picking up the tablet again and tapping at the screen. Thomas groans as the man yanks him to his feet, shoving him onto his chair and pulling a roll of duct tape out of one of his multiple pants pockets. He tapes Thomas’s wrists and ankles to the chair, keeping his weapon trained on Thomas’s temple at all times, before pressing it roughly against his head and gripping his hair again.

The woman sets the tablet on his lab table, and the screen flickers to life, and then there’s a woman in front of a dark black backdrop, smiling at him like a cat who’s caught a canary. “Thomas Sanders. How long I’ve waited for this day.”

Thomas recognizes her. He knows he recognizes her. She used to be his classmate, before . . .

His head hurts, so badly that he can barely keep his eyes open, and the memory slips away. “You . . . why are you doing this?”

“Why? Because I am a real scientist, unlike you. You refuse to do what is necessary, what must be done for the progression of the species. The sacrifice of some worthless animals is necessary for humanity to reach its zenith. You would really hinder the entire human race for the preservation of lower life forms?”

“Wh - I -”

“You think that ‘preserving the ecosystem’ and ‘keeping animals alive’ makes you a good scientist, but it makes you weak. You are weak, Thomas Sanders, and if the world was left in the hands of people like you, the human race as we know it would die out in a few centuries. Fortunately, there are people like me, who understand what must be done.”

“Caring about other people and things - it doesn’t - it doesn’t make you weak,” Thomas says, chest heaving, and the woman just laughs.

“One of many logical fallacies to which you subscribe, Thomas. They really gave you a doctorate? Of course caring makes you weak. All emotions make you weak. They corrupt your data and make your experiments worthless. You must be ruthless. You must be willing to do whatever it takes to pursue your goals and achieve the height of success. But no.” She rolls her eyes, face hardening, twirling a pen in her fingers. “You insist on ethics and principles and letting emotions cloud your judgement, and that makes you a failure as a scientist. It makes you weak. Your attachments will be your downfall.”

Thomas’s eyes slide shut, head pounding, and the man behind him yanks at his hair so sharply that he knows some has been ripped out. He forces his eyes open in time to see a smile slide across the woman’s face like a knife, teeth gleaming white as sun-bleached bone.

“You won’t - get away with this,” Thomas manages. He grinds his teeth together and curls his hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms to keep himself awake. “If you leave me alive -” Thomas, stop talking, why are you reminding her that she has the option to fucking kill you “- I will not rest until I find you. I’ll - you can’t -”

“You’ll what, Thomas? If you call the police, you’ll expose those creatures you’re so intent on protecting to the world. Are you really willing to take that chance?” Before Thomas can even begin formulating a response, she steamrolls him. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you were, I’m going to take some . . . insurance, shall we say.”

“Why not just kill me?” Thomas spits. Excellent idea, Doc, poke the murderous lady with a stick like a god damn hornet’s nest, the tiny Virgil in his brain hisses. Her smile, somehow, only widens, and that’s . . . that can’t be good, can it? Smiles are supposed to be good! They’re supposed to make you happy, but all Thomas feels is creeping dread and pain, so much pain, and -

Yeah. He’s . . . pretty sure he has a concussion.

“Because if I kill you, you get to take the easy way out. Your suffering will end. But unlike you, I don’t put limits on my science. I know how to cause you the maximum amount of pain.”

Thomas eyes the toxin gun, but the on-screen woman just laughs. “Not yet, Thomas. We need something from you, first.”

“You already took Roman,” Thomas says. “What more can you possibly take from me?”

“You named it? You’re even weaker than I thought.”

“He told me his name, he’s not an it, he’s not a thing for you to play with and - and I -”

There’s a strange sinking feeling in Thomas’s chest as the woman onscreen laughs. “I knew you were emotional, Thomas, but I can’t believe this! It looks like I’ll have more hanging over your head than you thought.”

“You -”

“Say, Tommy-boy, have you heard from your precious little assistant recently?”

Thomas’s entire body flushes ice-cold and then white-hot, immediately struggling against his duct tape bindings despite the man tearing at his hair and shoving the gun into his neck and snapping at him to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up before I do something we’re both gonna regret -

“Don’t you touch him!” Thomas snaps. “If you hurt him, I swear to God -”

“You’re not in a position to be making demands, and if you don’t calm down, I’ll paint your boring little lab bright red.” Thomas freezes, holding his entire body tensed like electricity is running through his blood.

There are footsteps on the stairs. “Doc? I got your text, what’s -”

“Virgil, run!” Thomas chokes. Virgil comes around the corner, holding his phone, staring at the screen in confusion. He looks up, eyes widening in horror as he takes in the scene.

“You know what to do,” the woman onscreen says. The other woman lifts her tranquilizer gun, and Thomas is sure that he’s screaming, his mouth is open and sound is coming out but his blood is rushing through his ears and his heart is pounding like waves against a boat in rough sea and he can’t - he can’t -

Virgil turns to run, but the tranquilizer dart hits in him the back of the neck and he collapses like a sack of bricks. The woman lowers her gun and jerks her head at the two remaining conscious, unoccupied mercenaries, who step forward and grab Virgil.

“Let him go!” Thomas screams, and his throat feels raw and his chest feels raw and his wrists are rubbed raw and his soul feels hollow and raw, like he’s been scraped out with a jagged piece of metal and only an empty shell remains. Virgil’s head lolls against his chest as they drag him down the grotto tunnel, and Thomas struggles and screams and stares after them until Virgil is out of sight.

His face is damp, and his eyes are burning, and he isn’t sure if it’s blood from his head wound or tears or some strange, morbid mixture of both.

“The greatest torture of which I can conceive,” the woman onscreen says, and it takes him a moment to realize that oh, she’s talking to me, “is to leave you alive, knowing that your precious little protégé is with me, and that there is nothing you can do about it.” She leans forward, and any trace of a smile is gone. “If you try to come after me, I will kill him. If you call the authorities, I will kill him. I already found you, Thomas. Don’t think I’m not watching. If I catch so much as a whiff of you planning something, his blood will be on your hands. Do you understand me?”

Thomas, numb and shocked, can’t even respond. “Knock him out and bring the specimens back to me,” the woman onscreen says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He doesn’t even feel the tranquilizer dart hit his neck, but he welcomes the sweeping darkness.

(Summary: Evil Scientist Lady has been spying on Thomas and she finds the entrance to the grotto where our mer friends have been hiding. She sends her assistant and several armed thugs to invade the lab, they drug Roman with tranquilizers and kidnap him. Thomas gets knocked around a lot and is mocked for being an ethical scientist and caring about people by Evil Scientist Lady and she gloats at him through Evil Facetime before kidnapping Virgil in the same way they did Roman, knocking Thomas unconscious, and leaving him tied to his lab chair. During this whole scene, Patton is out in the open ocean hunting and Logan is safely hidden in Virgil's room.)

#starshinewrites #lovely dark and deep #romantic analogical #sanders sides #platonic TLAMP