#nigh impossible. i do not know where to start

[welcometogrouchland]

I love dipping my toes back into comics, remembering all the C and D list characters I love and getting that sense of intrigue again, sliding into headcanon territory like "MAN if they just made a series about this they'd totally have me hooked again!". Then I continue reading about the state of current comics (i.e where those C and D list characters are rn and what the state of canon is) and think about the amount of complexity and set up you'd need to even get halfway close to the perfect vision in your head and how impenetrable current comics are so you wouldn't even know where to start with catching up...

And then I'm once again relieved that I'm not caught up with comics anymore and am simply backreading now irrelevant comics at a glacial pace

#ramblings of a lunatic #posts inspired by me catching up (via osmosis) the current state of flash comics #s/o to irey west #you could have such a good turn as impulse if DC would let you your brother and bart progress (according to the vision in my head!) #same thing w/ the current superman run that's apparently on going #i am Very intrigued by the premise of lex apparently a) leaving his company to clark and b) wanting to team up w/ superman #as well as whatever Marilyn Moonlights deal is (SHE SEEMS SO COOL FROM HER INITIAL TEASER APPEARANCE) #but i simply cannot look past the convoluted state of the superfam rn with how present they seem to be in current comics #again there's 17 yr old jon (im glad you're bisexual but sorry that (age up) happened to you) #but also there's. twins now??? huh???? #they're revamping power girl???? huh #it's just. too much. it intimidates me #maybe my current goal will just be to keep reading gww ms marvel til the romance bores me (bc i think it gets romance heavy after a while?) #and then try and finally finish sandman (i like the anthology stand alone issues more than the story ones tho tbh...) #but also idk man. comics have so many things i love and they've been on my brain recently but trying to enjoy them at this moment #nigh impossible. i do not know where to start

[prismatic-bell]

HEY EVERYONE

Do you enjoy the idea of Sticking It To The Man, but also you’re fucking tired? Maybe you appreciate the idea of direct action of some kind but ADHD, depression, or physical disability has made it nigh-on impossible for you to actually, you know, do shit?

Well, friends, allow me to introduce you to a small but significant thing you can do to Stick It To The Man while also benefiting your own mental health:

I haven’t bought green onions in a year.

If you’re sitting here thinking “holy shit, Nina, those look like hell,” you’re not wrong—they’re recovering from some unintended abuse. They survived two weeks in triple digits (that’s upward of 35 degrees for y’all with the weird sciencey math units) while I, uh. Forgot to water them. The outer layers dried out to protect the inner layers and as soon as I watered these thirsty bitches they went

They literally looked dead three weeks ago. So yeah, they’re not too pretty right now, but you wouldn’t be either, and they’re bouncing back nicely.

So, how to do this simple thing?

1) obtain dirt and a pot. You’ll want to do this first because the next steps go surprisingly fast. My green onions live in a 6” terracotta pot and some gardening topsoil, but you can use potting mix (not Miracle Gro tho, that stuff is trash), dirt from outside if you live in a place where it’s safe to do so, any kind of soil will do provided it’s clean and doesn’t contain pests (although most pests will leave alliums alone because they hate the smell). To be clear, because we love and respect our biosphere in this house, “pests” in this context means “bugs that specifically will attack green onions while providing no benefit to either the onions or any other plants you may have.” The pot is mandatory, however—if you want to do this year-round, you need to be able to move the onions inside/outside as weather allows/demands.

2) buy some green onions. You can skip straight to step 4 from here if you want, but if you’re planning to use them first…

3) cut them only to the tops of the white bits. In other words you ONLY want to use the green part.

4) put the white bits in a ramekin, measuring cup, etc. with some water. I’ve used things as big as juice glasses for this, but that’s really on the big end. Put your container in a window with some sun.

5) 3-5 days later, you should see about half an inch of root growth on the bottoms of your onions, and possibly the beginnings of a tiny green spear at the top. (Maybe a bit more, if they’re overachievers.) Plant them in your pot with just a bit of the white sticking up overtop of the soil.

6) water just a little bit, every other day. You want the soil to always be moist to the touch, but never out and out wet.

7) watch them sprout. This is excellent for your mood, by the way. Science says having and tending green things provides visible benefits to both your physical and mental health. We also know that making tangible things is good for your mental health, and green onions grow quickly, so you get benefits fast.

8) As they grow, you can reduce watering to three times per week because they’ll be able to store more water. The leaves will feel firm and “thick” (you’ll understand what I mean when you get to feel a properly-watered green onion) when they have enough water, much like a succulent’s leaves will get thicker and firmer when it’s well-hydrated, so it’s relatively easy to tell if they need a drink.

9) trim your onions as you need them! I try to never take more than 3-4 leaves in a week—about half a bunch—so it has time to grow more, but if you live with a bunch of people you can get around this by just starting more green onions. Buy three or four bunches and plant them all. They don’t go bad because they literally just grow until you need them. I’ve actually planned meals around “I have not used enough green onions lately and the leaves are bending under their own weight, I need to trim some tops.” Although the ones you see in the grocery store have open tops, you’ll notice closed spears on your new leaves, and these are completely edible. Yes, I regret to tell you they cut off and probably waste the tapered bits just for The Aesthetic. They’re just like any other green part of the onion.

AND YOU WILL NEVER NEED TO BUY GREEN ONIONS AGAIN. Just add a little soil now and again to replenish the nutrients.

Yes, they’re cheap. Yes, this is a small thing. But many small things added together are a big thing. And when you’re confident in your green onions, if you have the desire and ability to do more, there are many other plants you can grow from grocery-store starters.

GO FORTH. ENJOY THIS KNOWLEDGE.

[sky-scribbles]

You know what I really appreciate about Kaidan's character arc? He gets a story about finding self-acceptance and letting himself let go and feel things - but at the same time, he still gets to be an introvert. He still gets to be, in his words, someone who isn't 'the life of the party, who has a lot of friends'.

I mean - in ME1, Kaidan fully admits to a romanced Shepard that he doesn't feel human. When he killed Vyrnnus, he became someone Rahna was afraid of, someone she saw as dangerous... so he holds himself to nigh-impossible standards. 'You never let yourself lose control,' Shepard tells him. He's very, very indirect in a lot of his conversations with Shep, because he's trying so hard not to be too direct, too forward; he's constantly polite and disciplined and professional because he can't be a problem. He can't let anyone see him as unpredictable or dangerous because that's when they start seeing you as terrifying. That's when people you love look at you like you're not human.

But Shepard can encourage him to let himself feel, and show it - 'I might need to loosen up. A little,' he admits, sheepishly - and when you see him again on Horizon, he lets his feelings be open and messy and a Problem. By ME3, he's completely embracing his nature as a biotic, gleefully letting everyone know at the Citadel party that he can Reave now, joining in with the other biotics roasting James in the 'biotics vs strength' argument. He's accepted himself, he knows his friends accept him, and he's letting himself laugh and drink and dance like a complete dork, and he's grown so much, and yet -

And yet, he's still a fundamentally quiet, self-contained person. Maybe I'm just jaded from all the media where introverted characters get told to loosen up, and then they suddenly realise that they do want to be the life of the party now actually. But Kaidan? Kaidan hangs out in the observation deck, perhaps the quietest part of the Normandy - the same place where Samara spent her time, a place where no other characters are present. (Ashley, in comparison, spends a lot of time hanging out in the bar, where there are constantly other characters around). Kaidan's Citadel hangout with Shepard? He doesn't head out onto the Silversun Strip with you like many of the other characters; his ideal evening is cooking a meal for his friend/partner and having a chill time with the two of you. A lot of the conversations you have with him on board ship are quiet, introspective. His hangout place on the Citadel is a quiet Presidium cafe.

It's just... comforting to me. He grows, but he doesn't have to change who he fundamentally is, y'know? ME3 Kaidan is more confident and sociable and (despite everything) happy than ME1 Kaidan, but he's still a guy who's not fond of too much lights or noise or crowds, who's soft-spoken and sensitive, who gets caught up in his own thoughts sometimes. I just really appreciate that.

#this is rambly. it's just such a comforting arc to me. #mass effect #kaidan alenko #mass effect meta

[st-juliet]

Can I request an nsfw fic sitting on Sherlock Holmes’ lap while he explains a case to reader, she start kissing his neck and he starts stuttering 😩😩 (also, Im literally in LOVE with your works 😫 😭)

Pulse Point

Fandom: Henry Cavill as Sherlock in Enola Holmes

Summary: To help him relax in the midst of a trying case, Reader exploits Sherlock’s only vulnerability.

Content: 18+ for smutty smutty smut, Sherlock’s filthy mouth, unprotected sex, and pure domestic bliss.

Notes: My first prompt! Thank you thank you thank you, Anon; I love this so much. I wrote it quite quickly and unedited, so apologies for any imperfections!

“Come, sit with me, darling girl.”

Standing in the door of your husband’s study, you fall even more in love with Sherlock Holmes. He sits behind his desk in his leather wingback chair, attired in his shirtsleeves, coat discarded, posture tense—it has been hours since you saw him come home, carrying a crate of papers and wearing the expression of determination and passion that lets you know the game is well and truly afoot.

Eager to be of help, you follow his directive at once, crossing the room to his side. He settles you on his lap and places a chaste, gentle kiss to your temple, pausing to breathe in the scent of your hair. A little of his tension seems to melt away with your closeness, and you return his kiss—but on the lips, this time—with a smile. He smiles, too, and whispers, “I love you so.”

“As I love you! Now, tell me the matter of the case,” you prompt, with another light, teasing peck. “Begin at the beginning, and perhaps some new detail will reveal itself in the telling.”

Sherlock smiles, a little wearily, but with a clear relief at your presence and enthusiasm.

“Yes, pray lend me a little of your brilliance, Mrs. Holmes, for I am at my wit’s end.”

“Nonsense; your wit is endless,” you scoff, and at last he laughs, too. You share another kiss, deeper this time, and he settles more comfortably into the chair.

“It is Moriarty,” he sighs, loosening his cravat and tossing it aside. “It is always Moriarty, the spider in the center of the web. But for once, he torments me with leisure, not urgency. There is no captive aristocrat, no explosives planted, no threat of impending murder; and thank god for it. But instead, he spins me an ever-expanding list of riddles, each more obscure and particular than the last. To what end I do not know.”

He tips his head back against the chair, exposing the long line of his throat to your gaze. Though you would find it nigh impossible to select a favorite part of your husband’s body—for truly, it seems that every night as he fills your aching channel so perfectly, so completely, there is some new, glorious detail of his physique thrown into prominence—Sherlock’s neck is especially tempting. It is a singular point of vulnerability in such a massive, muscled man, and one you love to exploit: you know well that so much as a single kiss can bring the man to his knees, or else drive him to bend you over the nearest surface and make you his in the most primal, profound way.

“He boasts of the reach of his accomplices by infiltrating those systems in which we have the greatest trust, so much that the average man may not even notice anything has changed.”

You simply cannot help yourself.

Delicately, you shift upon his lap, wickedly delighted that he has fixed his eyes upon the cluttered wall opposite his desk, where his series of pinned-up schedules, diagrams, and ciphers distract him from your intentions.

“But I first noticed that the regular seven o’clock train from Trafalgar to Charing Cross was delayed on Tuesday—“

With a slow deliberation, you kiss the point where his pulse beats steadily beneath his jaw.

“—initial—initially—by seven—“

You part your lips ever so slightly and kiss him again.

“—by seven—se—“

A large, lissome hand lands heavily on your thigh. You do not let this deter you; no indeed, it only incites you further, and you press your lips more firmly against his neck.

“By seven minutes!” he concludes in a rush, and you take advantage of his pause for breath to trail your kisses lower, pulling aside the collar of his shirt for a better vantage. 

You lightly sink your teeth into his flesh, just at the juncture where his neck and shoulder meet, and he moans.

“Angel—oh, my g—god…”

As you work your way back up to his pulse point, he still stutters out a little more on the subject of the case: “Angel, the—the trains—I am—tr—trying to—explain…“

You raise your head up innocently.

“Shall I stop, sir?”

Sherlock kisses your lips hungrily, squeezing you tighter, and you wriggle in delight, feeling him grow hard at your ministrations. It gratifies you to no end, when this stern, controlled man falls prey to his own lusts, unable to help the way his length strains at his trousers—and all for you.

“No, no—“ he breathes, and you take your cue eagerly, shifting to straddle his thighs, their breadth forcing your legs wide apart. “Don’t stop, my sweet—ah—angel.”

He fumbles with the fastenings of his trousers, but can’t seem to manage the simple motor function, such is his arousal, especially as your lips return to his neck.

“Let me help you,” you offer, murmuring against his throat as you pepper it with more kisses. “Let me please you, please, Sherlock…”

“God, lo—look what you’ve—done to me,” he sighs, throwing up his hands. Laughing breathlessly, you finish the job yourself, a rapturous smile of triumph gracing your lips as your hand wraps around his freed cock, already leaking and flushed with desire. “You…you undo me completely,” he groans, thrusting up into your grasp. “Fuck, please, my darling girl, please, let me feel you—“

“Yes, Sherlock, anything you want!”

This seems to reinvigorate him, and he growls, pushing aside your skirts roughly. He does not allow the time for you to rise and doff your undergarments, but instead simply tears the delicate fabric at the seams to reveal your dripping petals.

“I’ll buy—buy you more,” he promises, as you rock your wet heat against his achingly hard cock. “What do you want, angel? What can I give? All the lace in the world. A dozen gowns, a hundred, anything for you—emeralds or pearls or—oh, Christ, you are so fucking tight I can hardly—“ This as you sink down on him, sheathing him to the hilt with your own a cry of ecstasy. “I’ll give you the world. Oh, my love…”

You continue to besiege his neck as you ride him, finding out each sweet spot that makes him clutch your hips all the harder, with Sherlock babbling out a litany of absolute filth mixed with romantic nonsense:

“That pretty, pretty mouth god your lips—you will be the death of me, angel!”

Sherlock hardly lasts a moment more after your climax causes you to clench around him, holding him tight and deep and perfect, and he gasps your name and a stammering profession of love as he spills himself inside you. You gaze into his eyes as they come back into focus, and you share a little panting laughter, for you are both an absolute mess of half-discarded clothes, dripping seed, and riotously disheveled hair. You have even left a clear mark on his neck, which makes you feel as grand as the empress of the earth, to have laid such an intimate claim upon his otherwise unassailable body. Murmuring quiet, loving little praises, you help one another to undress fully, till you stand before one another fully natural, each drinking in the sight of the other.

“My god. Just look at you, Mrs. Holmes.”

“You are the most beautiful man alive!” you cannot help but exclaim, and he tosses his head in evident pride at the compliment. How you love to make him vain.

“And at last, I am thinking clearly—for the first time all day!” he says, making you laugh again, then he lets out an exultant “Ha!” and strides over towards the gallery of evidence pinned to the wall. “You’ve done it. By Jove, Mrs. Holmes, you have knocked the scales from my eyes. I see the whole design now…”

“Then let me fetch you fresh clothes—and some water to wash, hmm?”

“Yes, give me leave a little while to dole out justice upon Moriarty. And then turnabout’s fair play for you, wife: I think your lovely neck deserves a mark or two of its own…”

If you enjoyed, please do leave a comment, reblog, or visit my Masterlist!

#Sherlock Holmes x Reader #henry cavill sherlock #henry!sherlock holmes #sherlock holmes x you #sherlock holmes x ofc #enola holmes fanfic

[wanderer-six]

Golden Hour (for @starrylothcat)

NSFW (MINORS DNI)

AN:  This is a gift for @starrylothcat as thanks for reading over my veRY long fic for the clone fic exchange--THANK U SO MUCH AGAIN and I really hope I did this prompt justice to thank u properly ahh HUNTER IS SUCH A DOLL and indulging in island life with Hunter ohhh what a dream skldhfls PLEASE ENJOY and thank u so much again ♥♥

Relationships: Hunter x Fem Jedi!Reader

Summary: You and Hunter have always harbored feelings for one another, but the galaxy always had something more pressing for the two of you to focus on. Now that you've arrived on Pabu, it seems you finally have a chance to be honest with yourselves and share how you truly feel... nerve-wracking as that may be.

Warnings: sweet to start, leading to smut (oral m! receiving, unprotected piv sex) (@starrylothcat said "I’m ok with some smutty smut kissy kissy too" aND I HOPE THIS ISNT TOO MUCH SMUTTY SMUT KISSY KISSY slkdhflkdsh)

Word Count: 3.5k

After months of running from the Empire, after years of war, Pabu was a dream.

The setting sun painted the calm, sprawling ocean warm orange and red. Standing outside the little bungalow you’d been staying in, the breeze rolling through your hair, you felt like the star of some sappy holovid–certainly a far cry from the role of Jedi General that you used to play. 

The scene reminded you of the sunset over Coruscant, memories from back in your youth when you’d actually been able to enjoy such a sight. Having the time–the freedom–to enjoy it again now… you weren’t sure how to feel. 

Pabu really was a dream. But much like your fondest dreams, you struggled to grow too attached, knowing you’d inevitably wake up. You always did.

Still, it was nice to pretend, even if it couldn’t last. You had a quaint home, your beloved squad (who had found plenty to enjoy about the island, themselves)... why couldn’t you be happy, just for a little while?

“I was wondering where you’d run off to…”

A bitter smile formed on your lips. Whether he knew it or not, he was one of your lingering reservations.

Hunter ascended the stone stairway, making his way to your side and leaning against the half-wall of the balcony.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

“Seems like you already have,” you teased.

Hunter chuckled. His gaze turned out to the ocean, but yours remained on him for a moment. Though he looked perfectly at peace, you could feel a buried tension within him through the Force.

“This place sure is something, isn’t it?” he remarked.

“Yeah,” you nodded, “it’s nice, finally getting a chance to relax. We all needed it.”

Hunter hummed in agreement, before falling silent. Still, he wouldn’t–or couldn’t–meet your gaze. With the way his eyes darted, and his lips pursed, you could tell he struggled with what to say next. The silence overstayed its welcome, until finally, he spoke.

“You know, being here has me… thinking about things.”

“Oh?”

You hated this game you played with one another, this dance around a truth that both of you pretended not to know. With your Force sensitivity and his heightened senses, you shared an understanding of one another that no one else could comprehend. On the battlefield, it made working in tandem a breeze. Off the battlefield–where it was just the two of you with no distractions–it made denying this thing between you nigh impossible.

You only wish one of you would be brave enough to spit it out. And though the thought gripped your heart with panic, Pabu clearly filled Hunter with courage.

“I think Shep was right,” he sighed. “If there was anywhere I’d want to lie low and settle down, this would be it.”

You nodded, your gaze falling.

“We could certainly do worse,” you noted, though your disheartened expression didn’t match your words. You knew he couldn’t stall forever. You only wish you had any idea of how you’d respond once he broached the subject.

Quiet fell over you again, the gentle island breeze deafening in comparison. You waited for Hunter to speak, not bold enough to break the silence yourself. Eventually, you heard not his voice, but a frustrated sigh.

And to your utmost surprise, his gloved hand boldly took yours.

Face burning red, you looked up at Hunter–only to find him looking back at you, brow furrowed and eyes intense. You could feel his heart racing through the Force, but he didn’t falter, braving his fears to hold your gaze. That was the man you would gladly lay down your life for.

The man you had fallen in love with.

“Listen… I know this won’t be easy to hear–it’s certainly not easy to say,” he began, straightforward and blunt now, “but… we need to talk. About us.”

Just as he promised, it wasn’t easy to hear. You pouted slightly, though you kept your eyes on his.

“What about us?” you feigned.

Hunter narrowed his gaze.

“You know what.”

Though panic tried to bubble up in your chest, Hunter’s hand squeezing yours anchored you in the moment.

“If there was ever a time for us to try being more than what we are now, this is it,” he pressed.

Despite his vote of confidence, doubts still nagged at the back of your mind. You pursed your lips, grappling with your words.

“I don’t know, Hunter…” you mumbled.

Hunter stepped closer to you. He faced you now, and you faced him in turn. Gently, he took your other hand into his grasp, keeping his eyes focused solely on you.

“Look… I know you’re scared–and believe me, I’m scared, too,” he sighed. He frowned, his eyes pleading with you as he continued. “But what scares me more is the thought of going my whole life never showing you what you really mean to me.”

Moving even closer, his lips mere inches from yours, he set a hand gently on your cheek. Despite your words of hesitation, you leaned into his touch with ease. His thumb ran along your cheekbone as he gazed upon your face with such affection and warmth.

“I’m not going to force you to do anything, but if you’re willing… I want to try,” he said. “You’re worth it. We’re worth it.”

Having heard your whole life that forming attachments would lead only to suffering, the fear that possessed you in that moment made every bit of sense. Still, you knew that Hunter was being truthful to say you were not alone in your worries. From both the clones’ training and his own reservations, the thought of forming ties with you filled him with fear, all the same. Yet, he wished to brave that fear for you. It was one of many things you loved about him–that he could look fear in the eyes and push through it without question.

And if you could brave a thousand droids to keep him safe, you could brave this unknown–especially if he braved it with you.

Swallowing your fear, you closed the distance between you, pressing your lips to Hunter’s as you’ve longed to for years now.

Hunter didn’t waste a moment, readily sweeping you into his arms as the kiss deepened. His hands gripped at your waist as though he feared losing hold of you somehow, but with your arms draped over his shoulders, hands tangled in his hair, you made it clear you were there to stay. On this beautiful island, with the love of your life… where else would you rather be than here?

When at last you broke away, your eyes fluttered open, relieved to see Hunter smiling back at you. He pressed his forehead to yours, and you beamed.

“Can’t say how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he grinned.

“Not as long as I have, I bet,” you teased.

Hunter dotted a small peck on your lips, before heaving a sigh–not of frustration this time, but one of content. For a moment, you simply held one another, basking in the glow of the sun and the warmth of your love. After a while, you went to speak again, but before you could, the lanterns around you flickered on, illuminating you and the rest of the island as dusk faded to night. 

“Guess that’s my cue,” Hunter chuckled. “I should get going, but… I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

Hunter stepped away from you, but couldn’t go much further–not when your hands took hold of his. He looked back at you with surprise, only to find you pouting… and blushing.

“I… I want you to stay,” you murmured.

Hunter’s eyes went wide, but soon enough, he found his confidence–confidence made much worse by your bashfulness. It was rare for him to have a leg up on you, and he seemed eager to enjoy it while he could.

“Well, I’d love to, but… it’s getting late–I need to get back to my bungalow,” he sighed dramatically. His grin widened as he continued. “That is… unless you think there’s somewhere else I could sleep…”

You tilted your head, narrowing your eyes at him and frowning. Your expression told him all he needed to know: stop being such a smartass and stay the night. Unable to resist you, he chuckled, drawing you closer and pressing a kiss to your forehead.

“All right, all right; I’ll stay,” he conceded. “You won’t hear me complaining, that’s for sure…”

Smiling again, you kissed him once more, keeping his hand in yours as you led him toward the door of your place. 

, , ,

When you went inside, a small feeling of comfort came over you at the sight of your little bungalow. By all accounts, it was barren, save for the furniture that Shep and the locals had been kind enough to supply you with. You’d strewn around a few knick knacks you’d picked up in your travels with the Batch, along with some decorations you’d bought on Pabu itself. But even lightly decorated, it was the closest thing to a home you’d had since the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.

“Nice place,” Hunter teased, looking over the ‘nothing’ that comprised your humble residence. “Lived here long?”

As you locked the door behind you, you rolled your eyes. You turned to him with a smirk, draping your arms around his neck once more.

“Actually, I just moved in,” you answered, grin widening as his hands found your hips. “In fact, I was thinking just this morning about how it could use some breaking in…”

Hunter looked you over, his expression caught somewhere between love and lust.

“Heh… I think I could lend you a hand there,” he chuckled.

Boldly, Hunter lifted you into his arms, prompting you to wrap your legs around his waist as he met you in another kiss–though one far hungrier than what you’d shared before. He carried you over to the bed, laying you down on the plush white covers before parting from you with a kiss on the forehead.

“Here, let me get these out of your way,” he said, getting to work removing the bulky armor pieces that he wore even over his so-called civilian attire. You watched him intently as he shuffled piece after piece onto the floor, until at last the clothes beneath were all that remained. When he reached for the bottom of his shirt and peeled it off over his shoulders, he met your gaze with a smirk.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

With a bright smile, you could only nod. You and Hunter had caught glimpses of one another in various states of undress before–living aboard a ship as cramped as the Marauder was bound to lead to that. But watching him strip fully before you–and for you, at that–thrilled you far more than an absent glance at his shirtless figure as he left the shower. No, at last, he was finally yours to see… though “seeing” was far from all you wished to do.

Now stripped to just his pants, Hunter returned to you, his lips finding yours again with ease. His body felt hot against your skin, but when his fingers trailed beneath the hem of your shirt, you shivered. You had gotten in the habit of dressing down on Pabu, enjoying the warm sun and cool breeze of island life. But while it made Hunter’s job of undressing you that much easier, it left you feeling that much more vulnerable.

Gently, Hunter worked your cropped shirt off your shoulders, his lips parting from yours as the fabric crossed between the two of you. Seeing you bare before him, Hunter’s eyes widened. A blush flooded your cheeks, and you looked away, ready to make a snarky remark about his staring. But when his hands found your chest, your words left you, replaced with a shaky whimper.

“Hunter…!” you gasped as his fingers sunk into the softness of your skin. Though rough from years of combat, his hands treated you so carefully. His caressing filled you with warmth, and you could tell he was enjoying himself just as much.

“I just can’t believe how beautiful you are,” he remarked. With a chuckle, he added, “And I can’t believe I’m finally lucky enough to tell you.”

With one parting kiss on your lips, his mouth moved down your body to lavish your breasts with attention. He latched onto one of your nipples, holding it gently between his teeth as his tongue swirled around it. You could hardly handle the sensation, short of breath with every purse of his lips against your skin, but it seemed he still had more in mind.

One of his hands trailed slowly down your stomach, slipping beneath the waistband of your shorts. Pressing lightly, but still firmly enough to drive you crazy, he began tracing tight circles on your panties–right over the place you craved his touch the most.

“Hunter!” you gasped again. Between his mouth and his fingers, it was no wonder your face burned. “Kriff, Hunter…”

His eyes practically glowed in the low light, doing nothing to help your flustered state when they peered up at you. He plucked his lips from your chest, smirking that awful smirk as he continued teasing you with his fingers.

“You’re already soaked,” he whispered, lips pressed to your ear in a way that far from helped the matter. “I’m guessing you’ve been hoping for this as much as I have…”

While any other night you’d be content to lose yourself in this attention, he guessed correctly–you had been hoping for this as much, and as long, as he had. Which meant, unfortunately for him, that you were far from ready to give in.

Mustering up your strength, you threw your weight around him, rolling him over so that he rested beneath you, with you straddling his hips. Though his eyes went wide, you smirked down at him, running a hand through that beautiful, long hair of his.

“Where do you get off, showing me all this attention?” you purred, fingers tracing down his muscular chest. 

Finding a smirk to match yours, Hunter tugged you closer by your hips. Between your legs, you could feel just how achingly hard he’d grown.

“I think you know where,” he snarked back. 

Rolling your eyes, you backed off of him, pulling his pants down to his thighs as you went. When his length was finally exposed to you, you could hardly contain your excitement. You took hold of him, delighting in the way his expression turned when you began to stroke his shaft.

“Ah… just like that,” he breathed, losing himself in the rhythmic pumping you spoiled him with. Though he seemed to enjoy this plenty, you had other plans in mind.

“Hm… just like this?” you asked, your playful tone causing him to raise an eyebrow at you. Boldly, you leaned in closer to his length. “But what about this?”

Before he could speak, your lips pressed against his tip, catching his words in his throat. With a swirl of your tongue around his head, you opened your mouth, taking his cock inside and sucking on him. The precum that flowed from his length coated your tongue, and you readily coaxed more from him with every bob of your head.

Hunter’s breath hitched in his chest, and his moans only made you more eager to please him. While one of his hands gripped at the white comforter beneath him, the other tangled itself in your hair, keeping it out of your face so he could watch your lips descend on his cock over and over. Each time you’d glance at him, the hunger in his eyes made you ache between your hips.

When your lips met the base of his cock–when you felt the tip probe against your throat–Hunter gasped. 

“Fuck, cyare!”

His hand tightened in your hair, pulling your mouth from his length with an unceremonious pop. When you looked up at him, you found his eyes half-lidded with lust, a red haze tinting his tanned cheeks.

“Ride me,” he begged, a rasp in his voice that sent a shiver through your body.

With a wordless nod, you straddled his hips, aching to be filled by him just as he ached to fill you. You lined him up with your opening, only hesitating when you felt his hands settle on your hips. He flashed a smile at you–one you matched with ease.

Then, carefully, you set yourself down on his length. You descended with agonizing patience, until you finally bottomed out against his hips. His cock filled you so perfectly, your walls gripping him as though you might never let him go. Not that he wanted to go anywhere–judging by the way he clung to your hips so hard you worried they might bruise, he seemed content to stay buried inside of you for the rest of time.

“Mm, Hunter…” you breathed. With your hands planted firmly on his shoulders, you started to ride him, whimpering as you moved. “I didn’t think you would feel this good.”

Through his breathless moans, he chuckled.

“You didn’t?” he teased. 

You bit your lip and grinned back at him.

“Is it so hard to believe you could surpass my every fantasy, Sergeant?” you asked.

Hunter smirked. “I guess not…”

Catching you by surprise, Hunter thrusted against your hips as you rode him, nearly knocking the air out of you and filling your eyes with stars.

“But then again, I think you know better than to underestimate me.”

In no time at all, you found yourself limp against Hunter’s chest, face buried in the crook of his neck. His arms held you firmly against him by your waist as he pounded his cock into you over and over, dizzying you with delight. As he fucked you, he pressed his lips to your head, whispering sweet nothings against you between his labored moans.

You’re beautiful.

I’m all yours.

Let me take care of you, cyare.

And take care of you he did. By the time you neared your peak, you lay beneath him, your fingers raking down his toned back. The tension mounted between your hips with every thrust, made worse with his thumb drawing rhythmic circles on your clit.

“Hunter,” you moaned between languid kisses on his neck, “I’m close…”

“Me, too,” he sighed. “Where do you want me, love?”

You gazed intently into his eyes, your forehead on his.

“Inside,” you whispered without a moment’s thought.

With a nod, Hunter’s lips met yours, and he buried himself in you over and over until you could scarcely handle it. Breathless, your chest seized. You grasped onto him, nails digging into his skin as your orgasm overwhelmed you. Waves of ecstasy rippled through your core, your cunt fluttering around Hunter’s cock in such a way that fulfilling your desire was all but an inevitability for him. He filled you with his cum, your name parting from his lips as he met his end.

For all the battles you had endured at his side, you had never once seen Hunter this breathless. He trembled, held up by just his forearms, looking into your eyes with all the love in the galaxy. Only once he’d met you in one last loving kiss did he pull out of you, collapsing at your side and drawing you into his embrace.

The two of you shared in silence once again–though this time, not one filled by an unspoken tension between you. Instead, it was one of understanding, of comfort. A silence shared between two souls who understood one another, finally laid bare after hiding for so long.

Eventually, you smiled, giggling quietly–much to Hunter’s amusement.

“What’s so funny?” he smirked, squeezing your hips playfully.

Looking up at him with bright eyes, you bumped your nose against his.

“Nothing. I just… can’t believe it took us this long,” you confessed.

Hunter chuckled. “Believe me: if I’d known you would react like that, I would’ve worked up the courage to say something a long time ago…”

Rolling your eyes, you draped your arms over Hunter’s shoulders, luring him in for another soft, sweet kiss.

“Well… I’m just happy we’re trying now,” you sighed.

Though you had more to say, a quiet yawn interrupted your thoughts. Hunter helped you beneath the covers, plenty worn out himself. By now, night had fully fallen over Pabu, and the quiet back-and-forth of the tide beckoned both of you to rest.

“I’m happy, too,” Hunter said, voice hushed as his fingers worked soothingly through your hair. “Even if it’s hard to admit… I think we both deserve it.”

With a warm smile, you nestled against Hunter’s chest, adoring the way his body kept you warm and protected from the night air.

“I do, too…” you mumbled, fading fast now. “Good night, Hunter… sweet dreams.”

Hunter smiled, closing his eyes with his lips pressed against your head.

“Yeah… sweet dreams,” he whispered.

AN: Thank you for reading!! I feel like this fic got away from me LOL but nonetheless I hope you enjoyed we love soft Hunter mwah mwah!~~✨✨

#tbb x reader #the bad batch x reader #the bad batch x you #hunter x reader #hunter tbb #tbb hunter x reader #Hunter/Reader #reader insert #reader #W6Fic

[d4ndylionn]

Oh I Swore I’ve Seen You Before… 10,000 years ago.

(Lucifer’s version) or (Your version)?

In which he’s experiencing the day where he fell for his love and to their doom, he’ll always choose the same path, even now.

Warnings - Lucifer’s delusional, nothing spicy of note

Even now, 10,000 years later, Heaven still played him like a joke but whatever this was he kept experiencing, he’d started to think that this was out of Heaven’s control.

He just wanted to visit the secluded place in a park he and his family always had their picnics in, he heard that the trees were blooming once more. He only wanted to sit on that painfully familiar bench for a few minutes to think when he suddenly hid behind a tree and away from your unsuspecting gaze.

What were you doing there? This location was supposedly secret, was it not?

He had just about left before he heard a sob escape your lips.

And it took him back to that one faithful day, in the garden of Eden…

“Are you alright, little lady?”

You were startled out of your sorrow and looked to your right where a stranger had taken a seat next to you. Sure, you didn’t know him but something in his eyes made you feel that you could trust him enough with a secret.

“No, is it not obvious? My boyfriend’s an asshole.”

You tucked your knees to your chest and buried your face there, staring out at nothing in particular as you muttered bitterly.

Oh great, even the story’s playing out the same plot.

Lucifer’s face had its smile but he looked like his head was empty, and it prompted you to look at him funny with a scowl. His heart almost went into cardiac arrest when he saw your face and he cursed his Father above,

Why the fuck did you look like her? Especially when you do that face?

“Hello? Creepy stranger?”

You waved a hand at the now pale (it was nigh impossible for him to look any paler than he did but he did it) guy’s face and you jolted back when he collected himself with a loud fit of coughs,

“Oh! I am so sorry to hear that.”

“No need, I dumped him.”

“What?”

“I’m Y/N. You?”

“I’m Luci-“

…

“I’m Lucas. You’re brave, Lilith.”

“Excuse me?”

#artists on tumblr #hazbin hotel #hazbin x you #hazbin x reader #lucifer morningstar x reader #lucifer x you #hazbin lucifer #sin of pride #dandydrabbles #thedandybookshelf

[onyxbird]

OK, the idea of a soulmate au where you can't look anyone but your soulmate directly in the eyes was not done with me yet.

Leverage version:

Sophie knows all the tricks for faking full eye contact. For a third-party observer, it's nigh-impossible to tell that she's not quite achieving direct eye contact short of using cameras with very good eye-tracking software. Trying to fool a mark into thinking she's their soulmate via “eye contact” is tougher, but on a mark who hasn't met their own soulmate (and thus has never experienced true full eye contact), Sophie still has a pretty good success rate. Every member of the team has been drafted as her fake soulmate on a con at least once. Or, at least, Sophie has tried. Parker failed to pick up on any of the hints Sophie was able to drop without blowing their cover, so Sophie had to switch tactics. Hardison tried valiantly to hold the near-eye-contact, and they pulled off the job, but he was struggling and his resulting nervous blather did not help the illusion at all. Eliot picked up her cues and pulled off the illusion flawlessly… and hated every second of it. The first time they faked prolonged eye contact, he ducked away to Nate's bathroom the second they got in the door, and Sophie (slightly insulted) wondered if he was going to throw up. He didn't, just practically boiled his skin off in the hottest shower he could stand. Nate is by far Sophie's most frequent “soulmate” on the job… None of the rest of the team are entirely sure whether the eye contact is fake or not, and neither Nate nor Sophie is telling.

Parker has never had any interest in making eye contact, and was genuinely unaware that this was a serious thing people actually believe in. (Sure, people talk about finding their “soulmate” through eye contact, but people also talk about summoning Bloody Mary through the bathroom mirror. That doesn't mean it's real.) The first time she looked directly into Hardison's eyes was both accidental and jarring. She averted her eyes and assumed they would never mention this uncomfortable situation again. She was not expecting Hardison to suddenly want to have an intense, excited conversation that was clearly loaded with some meaning she wasn't picking up on, and she definitely wasn't expecting him to do so while trying to eagerly stare into her eyeballs. When Eliot happened to walk in, she latched onto him like a spooked cat, demanding he do something about Hardison; there was something wrong with him, like he's possessed or something; make him stop!

Eliot has habitually avoided even the possibility of eye contact with anyone since he was in high school. (He certainly wasn't trying to lock eyes with people even before that, but, well, he and Aimee had tried once, back when they were young and naive and thought maybe they were meant to be. They weren't.) In his line of work… it was better not to know. There was just no way that would end well. He doesn't have anything against other people finding their soulmates, though. Really. So he's not quite sure why there's such a bite to his words when he snaps at Hardison to knock it off—that “soulmates” is no excuse for trying to look someone in the eye when they don't like it. But he's sure he can feel a headache forming as he's stuck between Parker's “'Soulmates'! Ha! …Oh, come on. You're kidding, right? That's not real” from one side and Hardison's horrified “Oh my god, I'm sorry! Parker, I am so, so sorry—I was just so excited, you know? I didn't realize—” start of what was clearly going to be a long and heartfelt apology on the other.

Hardison thinks soulmates are very romantic, and he's always hoped, you know? He tries not to talk too openly about it—dreaming of finding your soulmate was deemed “girly” and “wussy” by the popular boys at his high school, and he had more than enough targets on his back for bullying as a kid without drawing attention this one. He's always kind of thought he'd probably never find his, if he even had one. He did so much of his socializing with like-minded people online, and you can't make eye contact—not real eye contact—over a webcam. There have been some near misses that made his heart flip (Hell, back during that first Dubenich job, when Eliot had taken out all the Pierson guards and then given him that smug little smirk, for an instant—just for an instant—Hardison had almost thought their eyes met directly. He must have imagined it, too caught up in the incredibly sexy and unexpected display of competence on display in front of him to avoid a split second of daydreaming about what it would feel like to look straight into those incredibly blue eyes. Anyway, it had never happened again, and after working together for so long, they surely would have looked each other in the eyes by now if it were possible.), but no dice. Until now. Parker, though… Even while apologizing (he should have realized to be more careful with Parker), Hardison could barely keep the absolutely giddy smile off his face. There had been no mistaking that, and god when people talked about “getting lost” in their soulmate's eyes… Wow, they weren't kidding!

Nate will expound at length about how the concept of “soulmates” and consequently the act of making eye contact have been exploited and commercialized for all of recorded history, the absence of any scientific evidence that the rare ability to make eye contact with another person actually correlates with any real measures of relationship compatibility rather than being a random biological quirk that has been superstitiously fetishized, and (if the person who brought it up isn't desperately trying to escape the conversation yet) whether the concept soulmates is compatible with Catholic theology. Very few people last long enough through his disparagement of the entire concept to notice that he has skirted around ever actually saying whether or not he's ever made direct eye contact with another person, and even fewer are willing to risk touching off another lengthy tirade to press him on the matter.

Thanks @soulmate-au-bargain-bin for the fun idea!

#soulmate au #soulmate eye contact au #leverage aus #leverage ot3 #leverage #soulmate au bargain bin

[stemmmm]

Stem's Thoughts on Harvest Moon 64

(that other title's too long so i'm cutting it down now)

Harvest Moon 64 opens on a scene of your character walking around the street, speaking to everyone in the village who’s come to the event. You quickly piece together that this event in question is actually your grandfather’s funeral, the same grandfather who’s farm you’re about to take over. This little scene beautifully sets up both the tone of the game, and immediately shows the player that this iteration is far more focused on the story and characters. HM64 tells a story about the lives of many people in a small, dying town. It is a story about life, and it is a story about death.

A short disclaimer before we dig in: I played this game before the idea to write these essays cropped up, and have not replayed it since then, so this will be mostly vibes. I will try to do my research to make sure I’m not straight up lying though. (Also all of the images in this one are from google because I don't have a means of getting images from my N64 other than photographing the tv screen and I'm not doing that.)

What’s new!

HM64, also called Harvest Moon 2 by HMGB2 and nothing else I’ve ever seen, is the direct sequel to HM SNES. It’s not a sequel in the usual way sequels are, where you’re continuing where you left off with the same character, but in that every main character is the descendant of their equivalent in the previous game. It’s not important to the story, in fact if you don’t already know this, you probably wouldn’t notice anything past some similarities. I played this game before I tried out SNES and it still took me a minute, plus having it directly pointed out to me to get it. Maybe I’m oblivious, who knows. 

Gameplay-wise, this iteration is home of a few series firsts: For one, your house can be upgraded to have a kitchen! You can't cook though, only collect recipes. You can also get a greenhouse where you can grow crops year-round. Sheep are introduced as barn animals that produce wool. You receive a fishing rod you can use whenever you want, but as far as I understand, the timing is nigh impossible unless you’re playing on a CRT (I am not, and never managed to catch a single fish). There’s a mine you can access in winter for something to do while you can’t grow crops (there are fall crops, but not winter) where you can find about two key items and garbage otherwise. Tool upgrades are no longer done by magic, but by leveling them up through use! Which I think is very neat and feels very natural, like you’ve just become more proficient with them as a farmer through practice. Characters can now come to visit you on the farm at random times, for either special story events or just to say hi! Your farmer can get sick from working too hard in bad weather, just like your animals, and there’s now medicine for that, just like your animals. And there’s inventory menus that I'll discuss at better length later.

What’s the same is… Most things in a basic sense. You’re on a farm with a dog, planting crops, raising livestock. You can make friends with folks in town by talking to them and giving them gifts. The livestock mechanics, as far as I could see and as far as I’ve been able to understand from online forums, are exactly the same as they were in SNES, the exception being there’s no wild beasts that can kill your animals but they’ll still get sick if they aren’t fenced overnight– and they’re not going to eat any grass unless they’re out overnight anyways.

As for your farm, you’re set up with the usual: a small house, a barn, coop, and fodder silo, a wood bin to store debris cleared off your farm, and a big messy field that you have to clean up before you can properly use it. It starts with three new additions though; a doghouse, a bowl that you can feed your dog with by putting edible items in there, and a mailbox that you’ll occasionally receive letters and notices in! They’re small additions, but very, very charming. The one thing that’s been removed is the toolshed, now replaced by a tiny toolbox by your house.

The world outside your farm is like an enhanced version of the SNES map. Imagine the town and forest now have one or two extra sections tacked onto them, one in the town for some extra housing, and a couple in the forest to let you explore the mountain more and get you deeper into the woods. The mountain still has a cave in it (this time with Harvest Sprites, who have been removed from your farm) and a summit you can climb to for certain events, but it has been upgraded with little wild animals that wander around and can be picked up and shown to people for a few friendship points, if they like the animal. (This applies to your dog too, there’s a well known exploit to max out Karen’s friendship in one day by repeatedly showing it to her in the bar where time is stopped.) The crossroads zone is also expanded by having three new areas you can travel to– the ranch that you buy animals at, a vineyard that’s more of a story-area, and a beach that mostly comes into play for a couple of summer festivals! 

On the visual side, this game is the series’ first venture into the new frontier of 3d graphics… kind of. The artstyle is made of isometric 3D models that are rendered into flat sprites and then projected onto the TV as if that’s not what’s happening. The game even lets you turn your farm around in 3D to face different directions, but it’s locked to only let you play in specific angles. Changing the direction made me forget where everything was and get lost on my own tiny farm, so I never touched that mechanic.

Due to the dramatic artstyle shift– not only being in 3D but also presented at a 45 degree angle, the game becomes a fair bit harder to play than either of its 2D predecessors. The controls are just a little clunky, and the bizarre shape of the N64 controller really doesn’t help. This makes the tedium of farming a little irritating to do, since it requires pretty precise inputs done over and over for every extra thing you’re trying to grow. Fortunately, you're not on the hook to ship everything before 5PM comes around like in SNES, so you get to move a little bit slower. The fickle farming experience also gets a little help from the new inventory menu that can be accessed anywhere and any time. It has multiple inventory slots for both tools and items, each type having a dedicated section so there’s no need to prioritize carrying tools versus turnips. Unfortunately, this actually ends up being a little more cumbersome than useful, as the menu takes a little longer than is comfortable to open and is pretty clunky to use. I mostly avoided it unless I was bringing gifts to people. But the addition of an inventory opens up the opportunity for something else which defines this entire game...

Key items– a set of unique, unsellable items –are most frequently found in random, secret places around the farm and town, and they give you a reason to scour every inch of the place. They can also be given to you by NPCs when you gain relationships with them, which is convenient because their entire purpose is to help you get even better relationships with each of them, and maybe even unlock little stories with characters. For example, there’s a music box you can dig up in your field that can be given to any of the girls for a decently sized relationship bump. There’s also an old weathervane in the shape of a chicken that you can find in the little mine. If you give it to Rick, he’ll tell you that it was a precious thing that belonged to his grandmother as a cute scene to deepen the town’s lore and connect it to the first game. Key items quickly become the most important and sought after things in the game because they act as a vessel to deliver that which the game is all about: stories.

Lots of people in a little town

The narrative premise is exceedingly simple: you need to fix up your grandfather’s ruined farm and make a new life for yourself in this town within a certain amount of time, just like its predecessors. Except, this game is a lot bigger than either of them, and it didn’t fill all the extra space with new things to grow on your farm. In my entry on the SNES game, I mentioned that the introspective style of writing turned the repetitive farming gameplay into something more like meditation on things going on in the town. This game takes that idea and runs with it! The town in this game may only be slightly bigger than it was before, but it has a lot more people in it, and every single one of them has a lot more to say, more to do, more festivals to go to, and more story events to take part in. There's even a new photo album that fills in with images for reaching special events or succeeding at certain festivals! Your given goal may be to successfully revitalize your farm, but that rapidly stops being the reason why you want to play. Farming is only a means to further the narrative of the town.

Story events are no longer a reward for reaching the highest heart level with a girl, but instead something that happens naturally in the world as you make better friends with people, or if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The world doesn’t only consist of you living it and things happening to you. Instead, you end up being a fly on the wall to other people’s conversations and life events, and you get to see how those events change the people around you. People will begin to say different things, go different places, live different lives without your input at all– often much better lives, as everyone in the town is pretty deeply troubled, whether they seem like it or not.

There’s an added depth, too. While the characters in this series have always been defined by their conflicts (in the first game, every big cutscene with each girl was exclusively about their major life conflicts), this game takes it further in multiple ways. Characters have conflicts with their families: you as the player have a conflict with your parents who can take you home if you fail to farm well, Lillia and Basil have conflict over their marriage and the fact that Basil leaves for half the year, and Karen’s family situation is…. A lot. Then, there are characters at conflict with things much more nebulous, like the Mayor who tells you that the town is going to die out but he can’t find any way to save it, or like the young boy Kent who wants to be a farmer just like you, but through a series of events is forced to learn that life isn’t so simple, people can’t just do whatever they would like, and it takes very hard work to get to do the things you dream of. And then there are conflicts that aren’t even necessarily conflicts unless they run into your long-term plans.

Instead of only having a bunch of girls in town who exist only as your prospective marriage candidates, there are also five boys in the town who will marry those girls instead of you, if given the chance. Like in SNES, there are 5 levels of hearts that the girls can have for you. Unlike SNES, each one of these hearts has a corresponding event you can have with the girl where there’s a chance of her liking you more afterwards, if you say the right things. In addition to that though, there are just as many events coming from the other side of the story, rival events that trigger if you happen to be good friends with the boys.

My favorite story by far is that of Harris the mailman who falls in love with the librarian, Maria, from just seeing her handwriting on the outside of all the letters that she would write. I frequently saw him in the bar at the end of the day and he would tell me the woes of his love, saying that he just needed to work up the courage to finally speak to her. Then one day, I happened to be outside of the library when he and Maria met face to face and she handed over a letter addressed to him. No longer did he sit in the bar forlorn every night, instead all he would do was excitedly tell me about Maria, and then when I visited the library, Maria would tell me about Harris!

While I’m on the subject of these characters, I think it’s worth going in a little more depth on who these people are past the grandchildren of the characters from the last game. See, you may be familiar with names like Karen and Kai and Gray, etc., etc. from a little recently remade game called Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, which is a modern version of Friends of Mineral Town on the GameBoy Advance, which is a port of Back to Nature on the PlayStation. These are not those characters. At all. While the basic elements of these characters are intact– Popuri is cute and childish, Ann is a workaholic, Maria is shy and a little oblivious –nothing else is the same. They all work different jobs and marry different people than they are paired with in later entries, and in my humble opinion, it all works WAY better in this game, probably because of the fact that these characters were designed for this specific context!

As an example, Popuri’s exasperated mother, Lillia, runs the flower shop and Popuri was named by her father, Basil, who loves plants. She’s childish and sweet and loves flowers, but can also be a complete brat. She eventually marries Gray, Ann’s brother, who lives on the ranch run by his father, Doug, who struggles to understand his children. Gray is an angry young man who seems to have a particular dislike for you, but you don’t learn why until you discover he was a promising young jockey until he got a bad injury and had to give up the sport.

Am I gushing a bit and letting the game design part fall to the wayside? Sure probably, but I can only gush because the game does a brilliant job of making a cast of characters who, while simple on their own, have interconnected lives that come together to give every one of them so much more depth than they would have otherwise. It all builds a narrative, and while narrative design is definitely something different than game design on its own, this game is far more about the narrative so it’s impossible to not focus on.

The problems

The trouble with these events is that I nearly missed the chance to see that letter be exchanged. You have some control over the progression of the events, because you have to be decent friends with the boys in order for them to trigger at all, but unlike the girls who have a handy visual signal of how much they like you, the boys have no such thing, so you can’t really know if a new event is ready to fire off. There’s no way of knowing where or when they’ll happen either unless you look it up, and even then you have to get lucky because sometimes they just don’t trigger when you want them to. I had a lovely moment in my game where I managed to accidentally catch a cold from working too hard in the snow and lost a day to being bedridden, followed by the New Years celebration which takes a day away from you, then followed by Kai and Karen’s wedding– something that I had missed multiple events for and therefore had no idea was coming, which also took a day from me. After that three day chain of no work, I think I was extremely lucky my animals didn’t get sick and die. 

This chain of events led directly to me never speaking to Gray again, even though he was the boy I was most interested in, because I wanted to marry Popuri and there was too much risk of him getting to her before I could. The reason why I didn’t go into more detail about the relationship between those two when I was talking about them earlier is because I straight up don’t know it, I couldn’t risk giving them a chance to get together.

The thing is, even if I hadn’t forced Gray and Popuri’s cutscenes to stop, I still wouldn’t actually know what their relationship is like, because I have not beaten this game. I know what the ending entails and I can reasonably expect I probably would not have gotten an excellent one, but I’m sure it still would have been fine. I stopped playing the game entirely before I even managed to get married. Why? Because I couldn’t get any of Popuri’s heart events to trigger. I had her hearts maxed out and had a blue feather ready to go in my pocket, so I could turn on the game and marry her right away anytime I wanted to. But I wanted to trigger the little events, even if they’re just a couple seconds of some pixels talking to me on a screen. They’re cute. And it made me sad that I couldn’t see them for some imperceptible reason. So I stopped playing and didn’t pick the game back up.

I don’t remember how close I was to the end of the game, I know I was at least in year 2, but I don’t even remember how much longer the game is after that. Probably a good amount. I had definitely gotten most of the events you could get at this point, since multiple other characters had gotten married, and the farming wasn’t something I really enjoyed so I can’t say I wasn’t at least a little bored by this point, but I wasn’t frustrated with the general mechanics of the game. The days were long enough, but not too long, that I had just enough time to go anywhere I wanted and do what I needed before night came. I could still talk to characters and go to festivals and play minigames. But I didn’t want to, because the game wasn’t doing what it seemed like it was supposed to for some arbitrary reason and that frustrated me enough to make me stop. When the fun of a game is found more in experiencing special events rather than anything else, the player feels cheated out of their good time when those events are too hard to find or can be missed outright, and that’s exactly what I experienced.

Parting Thoughts

The ending, according to what I've read, is very similar to the SNES endings, in that you’ll get different results based on all of the different things you’ve done. Whether you’re married, how many crops you shipped, how many animals you have, how well liked you are by the town… I imagine it’s not quite the victory lap that SNES’s ending was with its little cutscenes, since apparently all you get are comments on how well you performed by various people in the town, but it still seems nice and rewarding! At least like more of a reward than whatever the hell GB1 was trying to do. It seems like a perfectly good ending that it would be nice to see myself someday.

Despite all my troubles with this game, I believe HM64 is still the best one out there– at least that I’ve played yet. The events are plentiful and the content is meaty. The repetitive day to day dialogue still has the simple breath of life that SNES did, that manages to make the most out of a small amount. Don’t get me wrong, this game came out in 1999, I’m giving it a lot of praise but the characters still repeat the same line to you every day, and they still freeze in place until you leave the room. It’s revolutionary, but this is comparing it to a game on the literal Super Nintendo. Absolutely pick up this game to try it out, but keep those expectations tempered. That said, I never picked up this game nor knew a thing about it until I was well into my 20’s, but the moment I started playing, it hit me with a wave of nostalgia as if I’d known this game my whole life. At least to me, the look and feel of the game were like coming home to a childhood I never had.

 Will I pick up this game again with the intent to beat it? Maybe! Hard to say for sure when I’m trying to play decades worth of games and write about them at a comprehensive level. What I do know is that this is exactly what I want more farming games to be. It’s a game that has thoughts about life, and about death, both good and bad. And I think this is the perfect context to share those thoughts.

#hm posting #harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon 64 #hm64 #m.txt

[onelinemanytimes]

Taking a Closer Look at Fresh’s Actions

Fresh does a lot of weird stuff, even weirder if you don’t know why he’d make the choices he does. The perception of Fresh amongst fans is all over the place, so knowing Fresh’s character is nigh impossible unless you’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to get ahold of it.

Luckily for you, I have in fact spent a lot of time and effort trying to understand Fresh and learn everything I possibly can about him, and I’m here to try and tackle explaining what the heck Fresh has been up to- because why he would act how he did in these combat scenarios is a delight to analyze.

So let’s get this ball rolling! For clarity, I’m discussing Underverse 0.7 Part One here, analyzing his actions in the animation and how well it suits his character, and this post is part one of multiple. The next part is posted!

Starting with the least surprising action taken by Fresh; 

1: Running away.

This one isn’t too hard to understand no matter how you slice it. Most interpretations of Fresh would have him run away here- but for those who may not know it, it will be explained nonetheless! Especially because he runs away multiple times in the various conflicts, showing that this isn’t just something he was doing because of Error, this is a regular response to any kind of confrontations like these.

Fresh running comes from a variety of places that tie into each other. The most important reason to run is the fact that he wants to live above all else- NOTHING is more important to him than his own life, and any choice that has a real chance of putting his life in danger he will avoid as much as possible. 

So obviously, a fight with Error is a situation he would just leave, especially given he now has everything he wants out of this place. Error is very strong, and Fresh was able to score a good attack because Error was distracted and he had help. Fresh does NOT want to get into a direct fight with Error if he doesn’t have to. So he gets outta there baby!

Fresh has another big reason to run away, however, and this reason ties into why he would choose to run away from Ink as well! That reason is his persona- being a super radical 90s broskie is also important to Fresh, and preserving the perception that he’s a harmless weirdo is a part of that. If people saw him fight, they would know he’s actually pretty powerful and worth being scared of, which is terrible for him!

He needs people not to be afraid of him. He needs people to trust him, or at least he needs them to underestimate him- and he succeeds, wonderfully.

Fresh IS regularly underestimated- you can see this actively in the way that Ink just brushes him off when he initially confronts him with a complaint about the gift. Ink doesn’t see Fresh as very important at that moment, and not a big deal- which at THAT point, is a detriment to Fresh, so Fresh starts to push the idea of the opposite. Getting in Ink’s way (and surprising ink as he does so) and telling Ink he’d show him “who’s really da weakest,” referencing the fact that people see Fresh as weak.

And that they’re wrong to think so.

But that’s getting off topic from his habitual running away! So I will offer a very important piece of insight that’s easy to miss if you don’t stop and consider it yourself, given it’s not stated explicitly.

Fresh DIDN’T run from Ink. He did run from Error in the start, but he did not actually run from Ink. He at best pretended to run from Ink, because he knew he had a reputation- and he knew it would work with his plan. 

How do we know he wasn’t running away? Because if he was running away, he would be gone. Fresh has more than enough ability to get away whenever he wants, if he actually wanted to escape he could have ran off into who knows where in the multiverse and hid via teleportation before Ink had a chance to blink. If he actually wanted to steal the vials, he wouldn’t have shown them to Ink, he just would have left with them.

“Running away” was part of a much larger manipulation of Ink on Fresh’s part.

2: The larger manipulation

You may be less aware of this depending on how big a fan of Fresh you are, but this guy is a liar and a manipulator of the highest order. He enters any situation he can with a fully thought out plan, and acts how he needs to in order to execute that plan. His motives are his own survival, of course, as far as the results he gets, but the method is fun.

He does enjoy having fun. His idea of fun is being successful, especially at other people’s expense, and he enjoys winning so much he’s likely made his persona a game in of itself, that he wins when he convinces people it’s real.

But today he isn’t focused on THAT game. The goal of the game today is to possess Ink, but there’s a catch here. Ink doesn’t have a soul, not traditionally, and Fresh needs to use the energy out of a host’s soul to survive and successfully possess them. Thus the goal of the game is revealed; He needs to make Ink drink as many vials as possible.

You may notice that he missed one! You noticed wrong- He couldn’t let Ink drink the last vial for reasons that I’ll explain in a moment, because I want to go through the first part of the interaction first.

The first thing Fresh has to do is upset Ink, which is VERY easy to do with a few things. Firstly;

Fresh stole Ink’s… inks. The sash- he straight up stole that. It may have fallen off of ink in the battle with Error, but he snatched it and was keeping it hidden on his person for use in his plan directly. Fresh knows that the vials are how Ink functions- he calls it out directly when showing Ink he has them. Look at how shocked Ink is to see him with them- Ink was wholly focused on finding the vials, only to see that Fresh had found them first and was keeping them from him intentionally. 

This is the start of making Ink upset with him, albeit not the first thing Fresh did directly to upset Ink. Fresh also used the “gift” he’d gotten from Ink, the unlimited vial, on Ink. He FORCED Ink to drink it.

This is almost funny! When you see it initially it’s so sudden that you might laugh as a first instinct, because it seems so out of left field. But it’s not. And then you realize Fresh genuinely made him drink it, and you realize when he shows the rest of the vials he knew what he was doing. He was making Ink be effected by something, and it’s important to note that while Fresh knows how the vials WORK, he doesn’t know what each one individually DOES. Especially not the unlimited vial, something that’s never been seen before.

Well, he needs to make Ink upset. And he also needs to find out what this vial even does, and he knows if he shoves the whole thing in Ink’s mouth Ink’ll have a reaction large enough that he can probably guess what it does and react appropriately. Thus this scene, and then the one after where when witnessing the state Ink was in, he makes fun of him.

He calls Ink out on trying to give him a gift clearly not meant for him, and especially trying to get him to drink something that would probably cause him distress if it worked. Making fun of Ink for it, and then revealing the rest of the vials, setting up perfectly for the next part of his plan. He’s underlined how important the vials are for ink, and shown that he has them. Now he needs Ink to feel desperate enough to drink them right now.

Obviously, he can’t just force Ink to drink all the vials like he did the unlimited vial. Ink would never let him pull it off, and he’s not about to try and pin down Ink, protector of the multiverse single handedly to even start attempting that. He needs to convince Ink to drink them himself- which is the next immediate thing he does. 

He tells Ink he’s gonna show him who’s weak, and then “runs,” initiating a chase. He knows Ink will follow him, because Ink is impulsive and upset with him right now, and needs the vials back. That means he can convince Ink to drink them himself.

Fresh starts out the chase poking at Ink’s fears and current concern, remarking “I bet ya’d hate to have nothin’ left.” Turning around to see that Ink is chasing him with a blaster, he can be sure that step one is complete without a doubt, as Ink has indeed decided to chase him, but he has to keep up the illusion of this being a “real” chase. The idea that Ink actually has to catch him and fight- so he pretends to be surprised at Ink being upset and chasing him!

But his smile and shades switching to say “OKAY” betrays the truth for us, only happening as Fresh turns away from Ink. He knows he’s in the clear and just has to keep up appearances long enough for Ink to drink the rest. 

His next comments also betray a secondary goal; Making sure Ink uses as little magic as possible. The plan is to possess ink: He needs Ink to have the maximum amount of power possible when he gets there, so he IMMEDIATELY reprimands Ink for firing off an attack at him. Warning Ink that if he keeps attacking he’ll run out of magic before he gets the vial back, and reminding Ink of the danger of that- Fresh has his vials, if he runs out of magic he’s hosed.

This is also why it’s important that Fresh is being CHASED by Ink, not FIGHTING Ink. He probably could fight Ink, but it’d be inefficient and dangerous. He needs Ink to be taking him seriously enough to drink the vials when getting them back, hence the threat of taking them and disappearing that pushes Ink to make sure he has the power he needs to grab them.

Then, he carefully starts giving Ink back some of the vials. Making it seem to Ink that this game of cat and mouse is going to be one he’ll draw out as long as possible- making it seem more important to Ink that he catches Fresh as soon as possible, otherwise he may actually lose some of the vials.

An interesting thing to note in this screenshot, by the way; Jakei’s attention to detail is astounding. The vials on the sash are in the same order as they are on the tracker- albeit while upside down now it’s reversed. But the order goes Orange, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Pink, etc… And Jakei made sure to have the spots for Green and Yellow empty! Obviously, he’s throwing them out here…

But the slot for Blue is ALSO empty. We saw Fresh holding it earlier- but he didn’t put it back in the sash. He kept it on his person, likely because it’s the vial that’s most full. It’s also worth noting that he tossed out Green and Yellow- he doesn’t know what each colour does, but he DOES know those two are by far the emptiest vials at this point. Tossing them to Ink won’t make him too powerful, it’ll just make him hopeful enough in his success to continue the chase while Fresh continues to make fun of him for it.

He also is aware of Ink having magic at his disposal from the infinite vial from before, because surely if it worked like the other vials it’d work to power him as well. He uses it to his advantage here, calling Ink a liar again (something he saw firsthand upset Ink) and calling into question whether the infinite vial is even worth anything. Pushing the idea that Ink desperately wants the sash back by intentionally making fun of it.

It’s a subtle thing. But by making fun of Ink’s want to get the vials back, he’s introducing that idea to Ink again- that Ink needs the vials, that he absolutely has to catch Fresh ASAP to get them back.

Ink grabs the Sash and rips all the vials away from Fresh after. All but one…

He drinks all the vials he has immediately, as we see on the tracker. But Fresh stops running, which to Ink would be strange. Maybe he thinks he’s lost? But with the amount of confidence Fresh has, that’s clearly not true. Ink’s also definitely aware that Fresh has the Blue vial. But after playing keep away for so long, Fresh does something that absolutely baffles Ink.

He tosses Ink the vial.

This doesn’t make any sense to Ink and it shows. When Ink catches the vial he doesn’t drink it immediately. He looks at Fresh, trying to actually listen to what the other is saying now, trying to understand why in the world Fresh would hand it back to him after keeping it from him very intentionally before now.

And then in an instant Fresh is in front of him. Very close. And after having lorded it over Ink this whole time, calling Ink impulsive and foolish and lording himself as being smarter and better at this than Ink is, he reveals his hand.

He’s wanted to possess Ink this whole time. He just needed to use Ink’s impulsivity against him, and he succeeded with flying colours. Ink is also immediately aware of the fact he messed up, reacting in frustration at having been duped like that, which is quickly shut down. Because again, this spotlight is on Fresh, this is HIS success and Ink’s failure, and Fresh is having the time of his life with it. He is having so, so much fun being better than Ink.

Now I mentioned before and you can see it here, so as the last thought to end off this part of the character analysis; Why didn’t Fresh want Ink to drink the blue vial? If you look at only the goal to possess Ink, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Wouldn’t having Ink drink all of them give him more time?

It would! However there’s another bigger plan at play here that makes it worthwhile for Ink to have extra paint when he’s through with him; the fact that Fresh wants to survive.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in Underverse the multiverse is doing pretty rough. The doodlesphere is in shambles, multiple AUs have been directly disrupted, the main timeline itself is under attack right at that instant and it’s getting worse, and Fresh can’t predict everything. He can tell it’s getting worse and worse though- which means he needs something from Ink.

He needs Ink to stop being an antagonist. He needs Ink to save the multiverse because he knows Ink actually can. That means he needs Ink to be emotional when he’s done with him- because while possessing Ink, he’s going to be consuming all the material that Ink had drunk up to that point. So there needs to be a little extra left over for Ink’s sake.

This is why he gives Ink the blue vial in a way that doesn’t prompt Ink to drink it. He’s the hero fighting an antagonist here, but he’s doing it by essentially out-villaining Ink. Forcing Ink’s hand and trying to make him realize he can’t keep playing games with X Gaster, he needs to fix this, and quick. 

Besides, he doesn’t need THAT much time to deal with Error. That’s just icing on top for him.

That’s all I think I can say in this part of my analysis without making this post REALLY stretch too long- so I’ll be making a part two!! Further discussing things like Fresh’s mindset while in this fight, more about his actions while fighting Error, and whatever else I can fit into that post. Look forward to it!!

#fresh #fresh underverse #underverse 0.7 #underverse #ink #truefreshinfo #error #not tagging the other one as the man is just in the screenshot at the start #and not really discussed in this any #I tried not to make this too long #but there was so much to talk about with just this one thing #and I'm not even done talking about it #I am however having fun

[startrekfangirl2233-writes]

'Tis The Damn Season

Javy 'Coyote' Machado x Reader

Description: You've made your closest friends over the past decade as a Naval Aviator. That close friend group only expanded when your best friend fell in love when you were in flight school. Nat and Jake are cute together, you can't deny that. It helps that you get along well with Jake. Sadly, where Jake Seresin goes, so does Javy Machado. You can fly with the man, be the perfect wingman, but when both your feet are on the ground, you can't stand him. You're so sure the feeling is mutual. 48 hours in a car with him teaches you differently. Javy Machado is sweet and funny and you might just be falling in love with him. Or have you been in love with him all along?

Themes: Stuck in the snow, showers, shower-thoughts, hate-to-love, stranded in the snow,

Warnings: Female!Reader This fic is for adults age 18 and older, only! There are some fairly spicy thoughts in this part and 100% spicy happenings in the next part! Please do not read if sexual intimacy is disturbing to you!

Word Count: 3938

Author Note: This is part one of two of Gypsy and Javy's story and was written for @bellaireland1981's Winter RomCom Writing Challenge! I had an absolute blast writing this fic for Trope #17, Stuck Together/Snowed in/Stranded. I hope you all love reading this fic as much as I loved writing it! All my thanks go to @desert-fern who was instrumental as I bounced ideas back and forth for this fic, as well as for beta-reading it for me!

Cross Posted on AO3 Here!

My Masterlist

It was supposed to be the start of a fabulous holiday - supposed to be, being the key words. It’s rare, honestly nigh on impossible for you to end up having vacation leave lined up at the same time as your friends. You’re in the Navy, you’re a pilot; it kind of comes with the territory. But what is the likelihood you’d find yourself stuck in a car in the middle of a Colorado snowstorm with none other than Javy Machado? You’re unsure who you should blame because the universe clearly has it out for you.

Well, it's either the universe or Natasha Fucking Trace. Honestly, between mystic powers controlling everything that has been or will be and Nat, you’d pick her any day. A part of you has some sympathy for her. It can’t be easy dating a guy and knowing your best friend and his can’t stand each other. It’s the truth, too. You can’t remember why or when you started to get angry at the sight of his smiling face. Still, it was probably sometime between when he asked you if you needed a booster seat to see out of the cockpit and when he blitzed you on the first of the many flights you’ve taken with him. 

Why the fuck isn’t he going home to Louisiana? That’s what he usually does. God, if there’s anyone who’d know, it would be you. After all, you’ve been flying with Coyote Machado for the better part of the past decade. Every year, he’d cash in all his leave and fly home. Like clockwork, he’d return after the new year more infuriating than ever. But your knowledge of his behavior doesn’t explain why he’s in Colorado. You were both on an aircraft carrier in the Philippines, for fuck’s sake. There had to have been a transport to Louisiana via the East Coast. But against all odds, the two of you had been on the same transport and flight, hell, even the same bus to the terminal once you landed in Denver.

Now he’s staring at the same board you are, with flickering red signs as flight after flight gets marked as canceled. Including the one you were supposed to be on. It’s just your luck that Tash and Jake are reporting to Norfolk Naval Base right now. It’s just your luck that the only transport you’d been able to get on had landed in San Diego. And it’s just your luck that the cheapest flight you could get had been via Denver in the midst of what has to be the worst snowstorm the region has ever seen. Reception is spotty, but you huddle in a corner, praying to all the gods you don’t believe in that your call connects.

“Tash?” Her voice is grainy and barely audible, but god, if it doesn’t make you want to cry. “I’m in Denver, yeah. There’s a colossal snowstorm blowing in. My flight’s been canceled.”

“I don’t think I’m going to make it in time.”

“I know.”

“I know. I’ve missed you so much. But I don’t see a way for me to get out of here and get there in time?” 

“Yeah, Javy’s here.” You can’t control your eye roll as you say his name. “Yeah, I’ll give him the phone.”

“Yo, Machado. Tash wants to talk to you.” He takes the phone from you like he doesn’t want to touch you, which shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

It’s loud and crowded at the airport, so you can’t hear a word of what he says to Nat. There’s nothing else to do but stand at the window and watch the snow fall and fall and fall. There’s already close to a foot accumulated on the ground, and while you’d been wishing for the snow in the heat and humidity of the ship, you hate it now.

“Here, Gypsy.” You accept the device with a half-smile. “Tash had a pretty good idea, y’know?”

You can’t help raising your eyebrow. Javy swallows, more than a little discomfited at your gimlet gaze. “She suggested we rent a car and drive out to Norfolk together.”

Eighteen hundred miles, and he wants to spend all of that time and distance stuck in a car with you? You scoff, “You couldn’t pay me to do that, Machado.”

“Yeah, I know.” There’s something sad and haunted in his eyes. “I know. Believe me, I do. But this isn’t about you and me. This is about Jake and Nat. They want us there, celebrating Christmas with them. So don’t think about doing this with me. Think about how you’re doing this for them.”

Damn him. Damn him for being right. “How are we going to get a car in this?” People are yelling at the poor airline staff behind the counter, kids are screaming, and Christmas Carols are pouring out of the speakers. It’s chaos - loud, unmitigated chaos.

“You leave that to me. You have your bags?” Before you can think or even respond, he’s cutting a swathe through the crowd, and you’re left standing near two Navy standard-issue duffel bags and your one small rolling suitcase. It takes half an hour before he comes back. In that half an hour, you find you’re glad you’d opted for carry-on bags because the mob at the counter waiting to collect check-in bags descends into an outright fistfight.

Javy’s rumpled, his sweater mussed when he lopes back to you, thankfully with car keys in hand. “I got ’em. We have to head down to the main concourse.”

“Anything to get out of this shitshow.” He chuckles and grabs your bags and his own despite your protests.

The car is old but functioning. It’s tiny, though. It's so small that you’re not sure he’ll fit behind the wheel. It can’t be comfortable when he does end up in the car. It looks like his knees are pressed against his chest, even with the seat pushed back as far as it can go. You’re in the passenger seat because he refused to let you drive, and as expected, you’re surrounded by snow the minute the car leaves the parking garage. Visibility is shit, and it feels like the car is moving at a glacial pace. You’re surprised the roads are open at all, and to add insult to injury, you’re sitting in silence. The radio isn’t working, there is more snow - this time of the feedback variety, ironically - and the car is old, so there is no auxiliary cable or USB cable to connect your phone to. And, well, you’re not a fan of the man you’re stuck in the car with for the next 24 to 36 hours, so the less conversation you have, the better. It’s not even like you can read. You’ve only been on the road for an hour at most when the sun sets. But the roads are still open, and traffic is still moving.

As the minutes turn into an hour on the dark, snow-covered roads, you feel your exhaustion setting in. You’ve never slept well on planes - go figure that ninety percent of the time you’re in a cockpit, you’re flying - but flying commercial somehow makes it work. Strap yourself into a jump seat on a cargo plane, and you’re out like a light. Sleeping on a carrier with planes taking off round the clock and midshipmen screaming outside the door, you’re snoring like a baby. But flying economy? Forget about it. So, besides the few hours of fitful sleep you’d gotten on the cargo plane - because you can’t sleep where Javy Machado can make fun of you - you’ve been awake for nearly 48 hours. Your eyes feel itchy and hot, each blink torturous as you fight exhaustion. The car is so warm, and Javy's silent. Even he can't object if you rest your eyes a little, right?

You wake up to a roar of the word, ‘SHIT’, echoing through the car. You startle, and if you were a cat, you’d be stuck to the upper upholstery, fur ruffled and back arched. A coat covers your lap, the soft, rich wool imbued with spicy cologne. It has to be Javy's coat. When did that get there? The visibility out of the windshield is even worse, if possible, and Coyote’s arms are corded as they clutch the wheel in an iron grip.

“Hey, how long was I out?” He doesn’t even look at you when usually he’d be more than ready to tease you on how you probably have drool on your face.

“Coyote? ‘Yote? Hey?!”

“Javy? What’s going on?” You place your hand on his arm, pretending not to notice how firm and warm it is under the bunched-up sleeves of the soft sweater he’s wearing. “Javy, you’re scaring me. C’mon. Tell me what’s happening. What’s a wingwoman for if she can’t help?”

“We’re somewhere in Kansas, and the snow makes this really hard.” There’s something unreadable in the expression on his face as he snarls at the other, far slower drivers on the road in front of you.

“We should stop for the night then.” 

“No.” He snarls the words at you, and that’s when you know something is wrong. “No, I can keep going.”

“Javy, maybe you can, but I can’t. I need to take a break, hit the head, and stretch my legs.” 

He doesn’t respond, content to make you worry the longer the silence spirals between you like an oppressive living thing. He pulls off the highway when the next exit presents itself. The motel he pulls up to on the side of the road is rough-looking. It’s small and old, but at least it smells clean, or well, at least clean-ish. As luck would have it - because your luck couldn't be any shittier - there’s only one room left for the night. You slap your credit card down on the counter before he can object. He’s Javy Machado. You know what he’s like better than almost anyone else. You may not like him very much, but you can read all of the signs. He’s not the type to let a woman pay for anything, not when he can pay for her. He can take it up with you when he’s not acting weird.

You push him into the shower once you’re in the room, content to just sprawl out on the bed until he’s done. Really, all you're hoping is that the hot water is enough to snap him out of this eerily quiet, angry mood and back to the pain in your ass you're used to. When he steps out, it’s wrapped in one of the motel’s paper-thin towels, and you have to avert your eyes. There’s just a shadow of a smirk on his face as you pass under his arm with all of your clothes bundled up against your chest, trying and failing to avoid making eye contact with all of his wet, glistening muscles. It takes you far too long for your brain to reboot after that sight, and mortification and anger are your companions as you hurriedly strip off your snow-laden clothes.

You’re grumbling the entire time it takes the shower to heat up because it is not fair that Javy Machado looks like that under his uniform. No wonder every girl within a ten-mile radius of base wants to get into his pants. You step into the shower nearly too early, stifling squeals as the too-cold water splatters across your skin. After a few minutes of determined shivering, you finally step under the warming water, coming out in a steady, roaring stream. At least it’s getting hot now, though it’s not as hot as you’d like. You let the spray beat your muscles into submission, relishing the first moment you’ve had by yourself since you left the carrier fleet hours ago. But you’re left in peace only for a few moments. Unbidden, your one-track mind finds its thoughts consumed by Javy Machado again. It starts off with an innocuous thought, “How did a man that large fit into this tiny shower? He could probably see over the curtain rod!” Then you’re wondering if he’s alright. But as your soapy hands trace over your skin, you start to imagine other things. 

You start to imagine water droplets sliding over the ridges of his muscles, skating over defined abs, and collecting in the dip of his collar bones. His hands are big and calloused as they lather soap across his skin and then over yours. Shit! When did you start dreaming of yourself in the shower with Javy Machado? There’s an ache in your pelvis as you clench your thighs together as you dream of how those calloused fingers feel on your skin. You get yanked violently out of the vision when the water goes cold on you. It feels like you’ve been immersed in one of the snowbanks outside. You almost fall as you step out of the shower, but it’s silent. Your face is flushed in the fogged-up mirror, your eyes fever bright as your blood pulses in your veins in the same rhythm as your aching cunt. You inhale and exhale raggedly, trying to get your libido under control. Please let there be a bar near Nat and Jake’s place - please - you need to get fucked so bad that you’re fantasizing about your wingman, of all people, now. 

It’s getting cold in the bathroom as the steam dissipates when you finally pull yourself together and get dressed fast in a bid to escape the cold. But it is still silent outside the bathroom - almost too silent. You expect laughter at the very least when you open the door because your warmest pajamas are covered in dancing penguins. Instead, Javy’s sitting on the bed, staring out the open window at the milling snow, looking for all the world like he’s lost something he’s just found.

It’s cold in the room, the motel’s shitty heating is barely able to combat the frigid snow outside, and he’s not wearing a shirt. But he doesn’t even notice the gooseflesh on the smooth, broad expanse of his back and chest. The cold blue light reflecting off of the snow piling up outside makes the room even colder, casting deep purplish shadows over his face and making the room eerie. You check that the door is latched and bolted before walking back towards Javy. He doesn’t move a muscle when you take his hands in your own. They’re like ice. He doesn’t even seem to care when you put the pillows down and fish one of your warm fleece blankets out of your bag. Bless Nat and Jake for not having a fully set up guest room yet because there’s no way you’re sleeping in this bed using sheets you’re not sure are clean. The blankets you brought are going to be perfect for the night. He doesn’t move or do anything until you intertwine your fingers with his own and tug on his arm's broad, burly expanse. He lists to the side without protest, and now you know something is wrong. Javy's not the type to do anything quietly. He's the type to shit-talk all the way while flirting endlessly. He turns towards you as you tuck the blanket around his big form, and when you move to pull another blanket out, his hand tugs you in until you’re in his arms.

The pinched furrow creasing his brow finally dissipates slightly. Something’s wrong, and you’re not sure what it is. If this helps, you’ll stay where you are. After all, you’ve slept in far more uncomfortable beds with much worse companions. Javy smells incredible, like soap, cologne, and something you can't place. You curl in closer despite yourself, letting him drag the blanket even further up around your shoulders. Everything is muffled around you. All you can hear is your breath and the soothing thud of his heart. It would be easy to curl in and fall asleep, but you can’t until you know your wingman is alright. But he seems content to lie there, brown eyes glittering with emotions you couldn’t read even if you tried. There’s barely any space between the two of you. Every breath you take has your chest brushing against his.

With the howling wind and the tink of snow against the window, you feel like you’re in a dream. Finally, Javy’s eyes close, even if he is still indescribably tense. You can feel it in the arms wrapped around you and in the muscles jumping in his jaw. His eyes fly open when your fingers trace the stressed tendons lightly.

“What’re you doing, Gypsy?” You’re unsure how to respond; instead, you trace your fingers over the furrow in his brow. Maybe your touch will wipe the stress frown away from his usually jovial face?

“You’re being awfully sweet, Gyppie.” You snort at the diminutive form of your already short callsign. “And here, I thought you hated me.”

Your gasp is barely audible, but you’re sure he can hear it anyway. “You never let it affect things between us when we fly, but I know you can’t stand me.”

“I’ve spent over a decade wondering why.” His next exhale is a harsh whoosh of breath. “But you’ve never told me, and right now, I think I know exactly why. It’s just me, isn’t it, Gyp? Just me and everything that I am.”

Your voice feels stuck. Trapped, lost, chained up behind a decade of hatred, hatred which wavers like it’s standing on a stool that may just have had all of its legs cut out from under it. You curl into Javy’s embrace, wrapping your arms around his waist like it’ll show him you feel differently. Because you do. At first, you had hated Javy Machado. You hated his effortless grace, charm, and ability to pick up concepts you’d had to work to understand yourself. But then he’d been persistent, and you’d been thrust into his company by the presence of Nat and Jake. 

That’s when you’d been able to see past the bravado, the mask he put on every day. That’s when you’d fallen headlong into a more profound and long-lasting crush than any relationship you’d found yourself in. But by the time you realized your feelings, he’d picked up on your stand-offish behavior and realized he couldn’t befriend you. Your crush never faded, but it’s evident that Javy had noticed your initial feelings and acted accordingly. But why would he blame everything that happened on himself?

“I know you’re probably wondering why I’m not home for the holidays right now.” What does that have to do with what he was just talking about? “Just chalk it up to another textbook case of me being myself.”

“I can't say I didn't wonder. But it's not my place to poke and pry. Why you're not heading home to Mama Machado is your business.”

“But you can't deny that you're curious, can you?” You shrug as much as you can with your arms wrapped around him.

“Of course you're curious. But how could I have gone home, Gyppie? How?” There's so much pain in his voice as he growls the words out.

He goes silent then, a frown creasing his face as his jaw moves under your fingertips. Your gentle touch doesn’t seem to bother him, just like the prickle of his stubble doesn’t bother you. In another world, in another life, could you have been sleeping every night in his arms like this? You’re not sure you deserve it. Javy was right earlier. You’ve been rude ever since the day you met him. Would anything have changed if you’d acted differently? If you’d been shy and withdrawn instead of angry and argumentative? That water’s long since flowed under the bridge. Too much time, too much history, too much animosity. All you can hope to do is listen. For your wingman, that’s the least you can do.

But your little nap in the car hadn’t been of much use. The longer you spend pressed against the human equivalent of a space heater, the sleepier you feel. You have to stay awake. This could be your one chance to go from rivals or enemies or colleagues to friends. Maybe you could even casually ask Javy to grab a beer after the holidays? But the first step to all of that is to stay awake.

His hands slide up until they're cradling the back of your head, pulling your face level to his own.

“You're not falling asleep on me, are you, Gyppie?” You shake your head wordlessly, captivated by how you can feel his breath against your lips, practically taste the mint from his toothpaste, and how you could kiss him if you leaned in just a bit further.

“It's okay if you do. You barely slept on the plane. My problems don't mean a thing in the face of your exhaustion.” Once again, you're speechless. How is he so selfless? How did you not notice before this very moment?

“I'm okay, Javy. Tell me one thing that's bothering you, the most important thing.” Your voice is the barest whisper, a sigh as he maneuvers you closer and traps your feet between his calves.

“Well, your feet are like itty-bitty ice cubes, Gyppie. The fuck did you do? Stick ‘em in a snowbank before you get into bed?” You gasp and growl playfully at him, pushing at his chest until he pulls you in even closer.

“But in all seriousness, you've been wondering why I didn't go home.” His words are expelled on exhales of breath, just as quiet as yours were earlier, spilling out in stops and starts. “I can't go home, Gyppie. My brother's wedding is on Christmas Day. But it's not that I'm against my brother's marriage. It's more like his fiancée is against having me there.”

You can’t believe anyone would go so far as to ban Javy from his brother's wedding just because she didn't want him there. You cup his jaw gently, letting your hand curl around to cradle the back of his in a position mirroring how he's still holding you.

“You want to know the kicker, Gyppie? She was my fiancée first. She dumped me because she couldn't stand the deployments and fell into bed with my brother days after.” 

“What a stupid thing to do.” You're no longer looking into his eyes, focused on his collarbones. “That was a dumb move, and you know it, Machado. She just alienated herself from most of your family. Your Mama first and foremost.”

His laughter has you giggling, too. When your laughter and his finally taper off, you're left to marvel at how much things have changed.

“You want to know the best part?” You hum in response. “The reason why we broke up was because I was already in love with someone else.”

He doesn’t wait for you to ask or even allow you a chance to get past your shock. His hands tip your head up again until you're face to face, and he kisses you, slow and sweet. Your moan takes you by surprise as you try to pull him even closer, letting him imprison you in his embrace.

“Fuck, this Christmas would've been so different if I'd just told you how much I loved you before we left flight school, Gyppie.” 

This time, you tug him in, kissing him slow and sweet until there's molten lava in your veins and there's snow in your mind. It's beginning to feel like a holly jolly Christmas indeed.

I DO NOT CONSENT TO HAVE MY WORK POSTED, TRANSLATED, OR PUBLISHED ON ANY SITES OTHER THAN HERE, ON WATTPAD, OR ON TUMBLR BY ME. IF YOU SEE MY WORKS ANYWHERE OTHER THAN HERE, ON WATTPAD, OR TUMBLR, THEN THEY HAVE BEEN POSTED WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AND I WILL BE WORKING TO TAKE THEM DOWN.

Taglist:

@chaoticassidy @kmc1989 @shanimallina87 @desert-fern @horseshoegirl @dakotakazansky @sarahsmi13s @teacupsandtopgun @footprintsinthesxnd @roosterforme @beyondthesefourwalls @mak-32 @thedroneranger @cherrycola27

#star writes #top gun fanfic #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick fanfic #top gun maverick fanfiction #javy coyote machado x reader #javy machado x reader #coyote x reader #WinterRomComChallenge #'tis the damn season #gypsy x javy #the coyote and his gypsy #coyote x gypsy

[nomsfaultau]

Dark SBI AU where Philza’s human children were replaced by monsters. Start of ficlet is here.

(sorry for repeating a part im new to formatting ficlets)

The Lambs Wolves Wear part 4

Once the truth came out, “Tommy” was the least likely to wear the skin of his child. The shapeshifting demon slipped in and out of forms like water, powerful and sleek. To him, Tommy was nothing more than another form to play with. Discarded like a toy the demon lost interest in, like Tommy wasn't Philza's whole world. "Tommy" only ever wanted the form to manipulate humans, to appear small and vulnerable and precious. Perhaps the shape changer knew it felt like a gut punch every time Philza remembered those soft blue eyes were only a mask for the monster hiding in what used to be his youngest son.

It helped that his true form hadn’t a chance of fitting inside the home. So Philza found himself spending more and more time trapped in doors so as to force “Tommy” to a smaller, more manageable size. At least he’d learned to be more benign near the cattle and hens, though at times he stirred them into a frenzy, sharp teeth laughing at the chaos. Yet more often than not he wore a corrupted version of the real Tommy, clinging onto Philza’s hip. “Tommy” did little to suppress his four demon horns, mangled wings at time materializing to further ensnare Philza. He was often left covered in shallow scratches and a few nip marks. Nothing dangerous, mind, simply a reminder that at any point "Tommy" could rend him limb from limb.

As often as he confined himself to the home now, it had become nigh impossible to tend the fields, though “Technoblade” had taken to it with glee. The undead legions flickered between rows of grain, having declared war on the weeds. It was harder than it used to be with fewer tasks to distract himself with. Philza found himself stripped of work, the monsters stealing it so that he was left with undivided attention for them.

He didn’t know what to do with himself. But the monsters found a use for him. A flap of tattered demon wings and a small earth quake signaled “Tommy’s” return from a long day of terrorizing mortals or whatever it is he did in his free time. The door slammed open, wind rushing in a gale as a terrible eagle ripped through the home, wings smashing things off the walls and tables. Red eyes gleamed as they found Philza sitting before the fireplace, and at once it dove towards him sharply. Midair, the demon enlarged, smoothly converting from a dive to a pounce. A chimera slammed into him full force, knocking the air from Philza’s lungs. Sharp claws pinned him in place as a lion head began to butt against him roughly, goat horns jamming into his soft underbelly.

“What have I said about shapeshifting in the house, “Tommy”?” A deep growl froze Philza in place, bared fangs inches from his face. The chimera circled a few times, then flumphed into his lap, settling in. “You can’t just-“ a wing shot out, slamming across his face in retaliation. Something hot trickled down his lip. Fire glowed in the back of “Tommy’s” mouth as Philza clutched his bleeding nose. It grew brighter and brighter, “Tommy’s” hackles bristling, but Philza stubbornly tended to his injury. At least, till the lion’s maw part in jagged fangs and the fireball in the chimera’s throat threatened to devour him in flame. Philza jolted, and quickly began to pet “Tommy” with shaking hands covered in his own blood.

Bristling fur smoothed, and “Tommy” snuggled in, tearing large rips through the couch and gurgling a thing that couldn’t quite be considered a purr. “You can’t intimidate me every time you want something,” Philza said the moment his voice worked again. Each word tasted like the blood quickly beginning to coat his front.

“Of course I can,” “Tommy” rumbled. “It’s how Hell works.” The viper’s tail wrapped around his ankle, venomous fangs poised above his arteries. “I could say ‘scratch me behind the ears or I’ll poison you’ and you’ll do it.” And so Philza did, after the hiss of a snake nearly buried itself in his flesh. “Tommy” stretched, satisfied, though the viper curled around Philza remained.

“That isn’t how love works, though. If you keep being mean, I might stop loving you.”

Hellish red eyes whipped towards him, shock rounding them. “It can be revoked?” At Philza’s nod, all four of “Tommy’s” ears flattened, a snarl building in his throats. “If you stop loving me I’ll rip you apart.”

“A-and that will just ensure you’ll never get love again.”

The growl died. Confusion twisted the monster’s features, the demon trying to find a way he could threaten Philza without ‘being mean’. Or more aptly, how to weasel out of threat he couldn’t actually fulfill without losing his perceived power. The bafflement only increased exponentially, the demon becoming distraught. “How do I get something if not by force or deception?”

“Love is reciprocal. You have to give it if you want to receive it.” The demon was distrustful of the notion, squinting at Philza as if waiting for the catch. He slowly peeled off the mortal he was crushing, till Philza was face to face with a lion head, demonic eyes piercing him for truth. “That means- that means you can’t hurt me. Or threaten to, either. You have to be nice, like I’ve been to you.”

A giant paw rose, hesitated, then raked across his chest. Philza flinched, pressing back into the couch as much as he could. “Tommy” batted at him over and over, tearing Philza’s shirt and streaking light crimson scratches across his chest. The demon ignored his yelps of pain, his strength unmatched as he pinned the panicking Philza in place. He’d pushed his luck too far, and now he was going to get gutted. He should’ve never tried to set boundaries with a demon. “Stop squirming,” the chimera growled. “You’re making it hard to pet you.”

Philza grit his teeth. Nice. Warm. Fatherly. He bit out a strained smile so he couldn’t scream. “You’re playing too rough, son. You gotta be gentle with me, remember? You’re making me bleed.”

The chimera paused in its attack, frowning. “But blood is how humans bind their vows. You promised to love me, so you must bleed to keep that oath.”

That. Yeah, in retrospect that explained a lot about how cuddling with “Tommy” usually went. Philza had always ended up bruised, nipped fingers and scratch marks. “Humans can keep promises without a blood pact. In fact, that’s how most of them are done.”

“Then how will I force you to uphold it?”

“If you are kind I shall do it of my own volition.”

“Tommy’s” hackles raised. “No you won’t. You would betray me at the first opportunity.”

“Perhaps in hell. Not here.” Philza stroked “Tommy’s” muzzle and slowly began coaxing him to be more gentle. He distrusted Philza’s words, scoffing at them, but seemed willing to try so as to not lose Philza’s affection. Eventually he persuaded the demon to don a weaker, safer form, particularly after the lion head’s nuzzling started trying to bite his arms. A fox curled in his lap, happily purring as Philza ran his fingers through too-hot fur. Occasionally "Tommy" rubbed against him to show affection. Or possibly just to make sure Philza was paying attention to solely him.

“What was Hell like?” Philza asked curiously. Fishing for information was the least dangerous with "Tommy", and given how unintentionally (?) lethal he was that was saying something. But the others were far more conniving in a way the straight-forward demon was not. And Philza needed to figure out how to get his real children back as quick as possible.

The purring stopped abruptly, hackles bristling as the beast grew. Philza braced for an attack that never came. “Tommy” simply looked away from him, resting his head on his paws. “…really, really awful. That’s why I want to stay with you forever.”

Next>

Art for this part

#poor “tommy” #debatably #he's trying his best to figure out this human affection thing #he's kinda just a cat tho. Biting is his form of affection which is very bad for Philza's health #angel duo #angel duo fic #philza #philza minecraft #sbi #dark sbi #sleepy bois inc #tommyinnit #technoblade #wilbur soot #sbi au #dark sbi fanfic #dark sbi fic #sbi fic #sbi angst #sbi fanart #dark sbi fanart #Dsmp au #mcyt #dsmp #mcyt fic #something to nom on #the lambs wolves wear

[nkn0va]

you know the western s/o ask for the investigation team? Could you maybe do that same format for the p5 girls?

Hard deadline of a week for requests, I said. It'll be fine, I said.

Won't be doing Sumi due to how late she joins, making it nigh impossible to have an awakening scene for S/O where she's there and this ask was already exhausting enough as it was. Sorry.

Hope it doesn't get too repetitive having to do this for a total of 8 characters.

-Ann had always stood out for her appearance ever since she moved to Japan. Outside of Shiho not many people had every gone out of her way to talk to her prior to the Phantom Thieves. Having another foreigner around was a huge relief.

-You two very quickly bonded over that fact, and eventually started dating. Though the one thing she kept hidden from you was her being a Phantom Thief. She didn't want you to get involved and be in danger.

-However she suddenly had to cancel a date plan. Normally you wouldn't pry but this was extremely unlike her so you decided to investigate.

-Imagine your surprise though when you end up following her friend group and the next thing you know you're now in front of a big ass castle

-You try to sneak behind them without them realizing but it isn't log until the weird cat looking thing with them snuffs you out. Everyone understandably starts to panic to some degree but Ann has it especially bad.

-Before anything can happen though, you're surrounded by shadows that overheard the commotion, led by...is that Kamoshida in a cape and speedo?

-Being caught off guard and compromised, the thieves are not prepared for the sudden onslaught and are quickly overwhelmed and you get captured by a Shadow.

-Kamoshida, if that even is him, soon starts taunting you about how weak and useless you are, recognizing you from his real world counterpart.

-You'd experienced your own fair share of mistreatment from him in gym class, and after some encouragement from the others you decide you've had enough of his shit. Your head flares up in a sharp, intense pain hearing a voice eerily similar to your own. Your Persona.

-It's unlike anything anyone's ever seen before. The western gunslinger aesthetic standing out from everyone else. Once you awaken, you help turn the tide of battle, albeit the weird cat thing seems rather miffed that now they have to retreat for your sake.

-Soon after some deliberation, you're officially inducted into the team. With the form of your Persona and your similar motivations you fit right in with everyone else, and Ann is relieved that she doesn't have to keep a secret rom you of all people.

-Being Makoto's S/O, it was pretty inevitable that you'd eventually end up on the student council with her. You're basically her right hand person. You end up investigating the Phantom Thieves with her and get taken to see the metaverse as well.

-Both of you are naturally taken aback by what the hell you're witnessing right now, but both of your combined brain power are able to figure out the premise of the metaverse pretty well.

-You're rather quickly stopped by Shadow Kaneshiro, the mafia boss Makoto had gotten in trouble with. Upon the revelation of who he really is and his plans to essentially drown everyone in debt or ice them you two unanimously decide to stop this.

-You awaken your Personas at the same time. The couldn't possibly be any different, a gunslinger and straight up motorcycle but you two are a rather deadly duo, quickly dispatching of the Shadows all by yourselves.

-After the Thieves get over their initial shock and awe they remember that they oughta book it since they were busted right out of the gate by the Palace ruler himself.

-The both of you are exhausted from awakening your Personas but once you recover, you decide in an ironic twist of fate to join the people you were hunting down.

-Kobayakawa can go screw himself, you know now that the Phantom Thieves were doing the right thing.

-You were childhood friends with Futaba, having been there to try and comfort her when her mom died, when she was passed around by neglectful family members, and had tried to visit as much as you could after Sojiro had taken her in.

-You're at first completely unaware that she'd asked the Phantom Thieves to change her heart, but upon seeing a bunch of strangers at Sojiro's house talking about doing so you quickly realize what's going on.

-You quickly make your presence known and assert yourself, making it pretty obvious that you're not gonna back down from helping change her heart if that would help her out.

-It's only a lot of convincing later that they eventually decide to take you along, if only because of how important you are to her. You could be a potential source of good intel.

-Fast forward to hunting down the thief who stole the map, with his speed he managed to confuse and cut you off from the rest of the group and cornered you.

-Alone and about to die, your Persona awakens out of self defense. By the time everyone else spotted it and caught up, you'd eliminated the thief and got the map.

-The gunslinger motif of your Persona is quite the surprise, but pretty fitting for you once they thought about it. Futaba of course is not surprised when she finds out during the fight against cognitive Wakaba. You two had played quite a few western developed video games you were particularly fond of, it's no wonder it would influence the appearance of your Persona along with your heritage.

-While she can't be out there on the field fighting with you, she has found some cheeky ways of improving your performance, basically giving you a personal HUD. You are a dangerous shot now with her assistance.

-Haru met you through both your dads owning wealthy companies and becoming business partners. You moved to Japan for the business along with your dad and met his business partner's daughter.

-You were pretty much her only friend, having been sheltered almost all her life, and eventually you grow close enough to date.

-You followed Haru as she followed along an oddly suspicious looking cat, ending up in the metaverse along with her.

-Morgana, albeit miffed, at least has the decency to guide you along so you two don't die, also being more inclined to do so once he learned your relation to Okumura and after you save his life.

-Haru unfortunately couldn't quite fully awaken her Persona properly, but upon seeing her in danger you could. No harm was going to come to her if you could help it.

-Both of them are in awe of your Persona, though Haru mostly because she'd never properly seen one before. Through powerful gun damage and the massively increased agility it grants you, you're able to dispatch of the immediate threat and get both of them out of there.

-Haru is showering you in praise about how incredible you were back there, especially in comparison to her. She has full confidence in your ability to help in changing her father's heart and turning him back to what he once was.

#persona 5 #persona 5 x reader #ann takamaki #ann takamaki x reader #makoto niijima #makoto niijima x reader #futaba sakura #futaba sakura x reader #haru okumura #haru okumura x reader #headcanon #relationship headcanons #x reader #anon ask #answered

[phantoms-lair]

The Stray

So with the talk of Conan characters in Persona I'm dusting off this thing I wrote a while ago inspired by this post by RedRobin-Detective which crossed my dash while I was playing Persona Strikers and this happened

"You can't tell anyone!" The look on Conan's face was pure desperation.

"I have to." Takagi said grimly.

"I don't care about proper procedure. They may have infiltrated the police! We'll both be killed, along with anyone we might have told."

"I don't care about 'proper procedure'. But I do care about you and others being in danger. And that stops. Now. Even if it means we have to go outside the law to do it."

"What?" This didn't match what he knew about Takagi, not at all. Takagi was bright and eager to please, but with little self confidence and easy to lead around. Takagi did not take charge and he most certainly did not do so by starting with going outside the law. But what could Conan do? He was currently helpless with the knowledge Takagi had now, that the Organization existed.

He let himself be led on a train, Takagi texting the whole time. There was a brief stop where he got some sushi to go, and then Takagi led him down some small roads to a place called 'Cafe LeBlanc' that Conan was fairly sure would be nigh unfindable if you didn't know it was there.

"Like the guy who wrote the original Lupin?" Conan asked, speaking up for the first time.

Takagi shrugged. "Can't say what the original owner was thinking, but the current one is amused by it."

The cafe was small and cozy. The smell of coffee and curry permeated the air and Conan felt hungry despite himself.

"No outside food allowed," said the man behind the counter, albeit with a smile on his face.

"Awww. No Fatty Tuna for Morgana, then?" Takagi asked with a big grin on his face.

There was a loud yowl and a black and white cat jumped on the counter. "You spoil him," the man said with the same smile.

"And you don't?" Takagi smirked back.

Conan sat there, petting the cat while Takagi talked to the cafe owner like an old friend. What did this have to do with the Organization? Why did Takagi bring him here?

The bell over the door rang an in walked, well, someone Conan hadn't expected in a hole in the wall like this. Takamaki Ann, a fashion designer who worked for Ginko. Conan only knew of her due to the minor scandal a few years back of Campbell-san promoting an openly lesbian woman to be her chief designer.

More people came in. Some Conan recognized (Kitagawa Yuusuke, a well known artist. Niijima Makoto, the most hard and nails Director of Internal Affairs the TMPD had ever seen) others he hadn't, like the blonde man who sat next to Takamaki-san and the red-headed woman who perched on the stool next to him like a gargoyle. And they all knew each other.

"Oh dear, I seem the last one." A woman with short curled hair walked in. "I know Sumire is out of the country and Grampa is out in Kyoto. Unless..." All those gathered turned to the cafe owner, who shrugged.

"I don't know why any of you think I know what goes on in his head."

"Better than we do," the blond man said with a wide grin. "So what's the 411?"

"Our beloved little brother brought in one of his strays, and it's one of the two that don't exist." The red head cackled. "This is going to be good."

Strays? Wait. "What do you mean I don't exist?" Conan asked nervously.

The TV in the corner flickered and a virtual avatar popped up. "You do not. All records of your identity are false and were only created shortly after you appeared at Mouri-san's and began to solve cases for him."

Conan felt his stomach drop. No one was supposed to know that! Why had they pulled up his records before this? After all, they couldn't have in so little time...

"Right, and now you have to settle a bet," Red headed girl leaned in, grinning.

"A bet?" Conan asked weakly.

"Are you Kudo Shinichi?"

The floor dropped beneath him, This was impossible. They couldn't...

"Back off Navi. No scaring the client." The Cafe owner said in a stern voice that had the red head sit back abashedly.

"Why...why would you think I was...." His voice sounded so weak, even to his own ears.

"The timing matches up between your appearance and and his disappearance." Navi said. "And your mannerisms are the same."

"And hours before 'Edogawa Conan' appeared for the first time, a young boy matching your description with similar injuries to the ones you had then claimed to be Kudo Shinichi who'd been assaulted and poisoned." Nijiima pointed out. "Of course at that point no one knew Kudo-kun had vanished and by the time anyone questioned where he was, the little boy in too large clothes that matched the ones Kudo-kun had been wearing that day had long since vanished."

"Or become Edogawa Conan." Blond man said with a grin.

"Our client is Edogawa Conan, and that's how he'd like to be known, regardless of who he might have been in the past. Takagi's voice was uncharacteristically firm and Conan was grateful for it.

He'd completely forgotten the police officers he'd talked to in the first hour after his change, who he'd desperately tried to convince of the truth. And if these people had put it together, who knows who else may have.

"And our target?" The cafe owner asked.

Target???

"A group known as the Black Organization. Involved in blackmail and murder." Takagi glanced at Conan.

"Definitely murder. Bombings, developments of poisons, manipulating organized crime..." He trailed off.

"Confirmed?" The cafe owner looked at Takagi.

"I can confirm what I said and I don't doubt Conan-kun's knowledge."

"Alright. As always, we put it to a vote. The vote must be unanimous. All in favor?"

Everyone raised their hand, even the cat.

"All opposed." Nothing.

The cafe owner smiled at Conan. "You can call me Joker. The Phantom Thieves of Heart taken taken your case."

#The Stray #Detective Conan #Ghost Writing #P5 #Takagi joined the team during Strikers #He was 10 at the time and thus is the beloved younger brother of the group #who can code switch like no ones business #He's also a little salty because he lost the bet on WTF is Edogawa Conan #After the bombing case his bet was on Shinigami

[1moreff-creator]

A Summary of the Levi!Accomplice Theory + How We Got Here (DRDT CH2)

Hey there! So a while ago I made a post about the CH 2 murder method, but I missed some pretty crucial information. You might know me and @thebadjoe had a pretty long thread back and forth talking about the murder, which lead to me reworking a lot of the original theory. However, that thread is extremely long and frankly quite confusing to read, so I thought it would be good to summarize what the final theory actually looks like in a separate post. This was sorta inspired by thebadjoe making a similar post about his own theory (which is Eden working alone, but disguising herself as Arei at one point), which I absolutely recommend you read as it’s probably one of the best DRDT-related posts I’ve seen on Tumblr.

If you’re here simply for a summary of the Levi!Accomplice Eden!Culprit theory, then simply skip to the Closing Argument of this post. You should be able to understand it on its own. However, I think it would also be nice to explain how I reached the conclusions I did, which is what the start of the post will be. Othersie I'm gonna look completely unhinged, and that's not good, I'm only kinda unhinged! If you’re interested, then I hope you enjoy!

CW: Murder, betrayal (Eden!Culprit), hanging (including geometric depictions), suicidal thoughts, one mention of self harm.

(Also, the Ace almost-murder won’t really be touched on much here, but there is a thread where me, venus-is-thinking, accirax and thebadjoe all went crazy trying to explain the blood on the wires. It’s about as difficult to follow as the other one, but eh)

The First Step Into Madness

(This part goes over a bit of the same from my OG post, which is why it sorta ignores other theories. There may be some assumptions made which are not necessarily true under other theories. Feel free to skip this if you read the first post and don’t need a refresher)

It all started when I made the original post where I discussed the murder method. I was left very intrigued after watching DRDT for the first time, so I wanted to see if there was some way to figure out how the murder was carried out, and to see if that pointed to any culprit.

-The first thing to note is that EP 11 cuts off when Charles is about to confront David on something related to the time of death, based on when he cuts in. This would imply the murder did not happen the night of the third day as the characters had assumed. Seeing as Arei was last seen at noon of that third day and I wasn’t aware of disguise theory, I figured the murder actually happened at 7:30 AM the morning of the day of the investigation, which I still believe. The fish could have been simply taken before nighttime and kept in the water jugs.

-What this means is that the culprit had time to set up an elaborate murder mechanism overnight, which is what the rest of the evidence around the crime scene would appear to imply.

-One of the reasons to believe a mechanism was involved is the flickering light of the playground. For a while, I genuinely had no idea how the hell that would happen. Even if there was a secret passage from the Movie Screening Room, proving that in trial would be nigh impossible.

-However, sometimes to solve a mystery, all you gotta do is mash random things together until something sorta looks like it fits. And what was a thing I didn’t know how to place? The ball of clothes.

-The idea here is to attach the rope to the ball of clothes and throw it over the railing, that way you can get the rope to go over there without having to get up there yourself. On the way up, the clothes would hit the light and displace the lightbulb, causing it to flicker.

-But why would you need rope over the railing? Well, if you were interested in creating a pulley system to make something go high into the air, you would need the rope there. And a pulley system is the first thing I thought of when I saw the spinny thing had tape on it, and thus was likely involved. This is what I envisioned.

Note how the rope is first looped between the handlebars to make sure it actually does the thing it’s supposed to. There may be other ways to set up the pulley, but the important thing is, a pulley was likely involved.

-So we got a pulley, but what are we pulleying? Presumably Arei, getting her higher up so her neck could snap instantly when she dropped down. As Veronika stated, her neck wouldn’t have snapped unless she weighed more or she dropped from higher up.

-Unless she weighed more, huh? That’s an interesting thing to specify. How would she weigh more? Unless, there was something which weighed her down.

-One thing which always struck me as odd about the water jugs is how oddly the handles are snapped.

-After thinking about how that could have happened, I realized maybe they had been snapped due to the action of rope. If you tie rope around the handles and pull hard, they would snap just like that.

-And what’s the deal with that? As I said, perhaps Arei was weighed down by something. And here is the answer. Since we know there were two pieces of rope (one found around Arei’s neck and a longer piece under the spinny thing), I believed the jugs were attached to her via rope to weigh her down.

-That way, the culprit could further ensure Arei’s neck would snap once she fell and the pulley system was stopped.

-Because yes, the culprit would need to stop the pulley system from spinning back all the way, otherwise Arei would just fall to the floor. And since her broken neck is the only injury apart from red marks on her wrist, that clearly didn’t happen.

-And my answer for that… was frankly just brute forcing it and stopping it by hand. See, I was sorta coming in after watching a cool video by Ocean Unknown, and I was already kinda thinking Levi was probably the culprit, which is why this feat of strength didn’t seem too insane for me. In retrospect, I may have been underestimating the strength required to do that.

-Anyways, the rest isn’t too hard to figure out. Make the note, ambush Arei when she arrived at the playground, with the ensuing struggle resulting in the scuffed floor, put tape on her wrists, put the noose around her neck, pulley, let her fall a bit and stop her so her neck snaps, prop her up so the murder looks vaguely like a suicide, throw some stuff in the trash, profit. You may have noticed I didn’t talk about the fact Arei doesn’t have her glove in the BDA, because… well, frankly I just hadn’t noticed that at the time. The fish are to confuse the time of death, and the tape was likely taken from the gym and used to have a better grip on the spinny thing as the culprit spun it.

…

The tape was taken from the gym?

The Curious Case of the Tape Thief

(Or: BY GOD IT’S THEBADJOE WITH A STEEL CHAIR! /lh)

So, what you may have noticed is that the method I came up with doesn’t really point to anyone in particular, but there’s a detail I hadn’t noticed when I first made that post. The time the tape was taken.

Thebadjoe had already pointed it out on his blog, and was kind enough to reblog my own post with this information. Turns out, he realized that in Ep 6, at around the time Ace wakes up, the roll of the tape previously on the floor disappears from the background. Which means it was taken by someone who was at the gym at that point.

Now, you might be wondering if maybe that’s just an animation error. After all, it’s not like this is evidence that can be brought up in the trial.

Except, it can be deduced. With lockdown logic. Let’s look at the facts:

-The tape was on the floor after Nico leaves the gym.

-The last people in the gym before the lockdown begun were Teruko, Ace and Eden.

-No one but MonoTV could enter the gym during the lockdown.

-Rose and Teruko are the first people to enter the gym after the lockdown, stated explicitly by MonoTV.

-But by the time Rose and Teruko are there, the tape has disappeared. And there is special attention brought to the fact the tape’s disappeared.

So the tape couldn’t have disappeared during the lockdown (unless MonoTV took it out, but why would it do that), and it can’t have been taken after since Rose and Teruko were the first people there after it ended. Since that roll of tape was still on the floor when Nico left, that means the tape disappeared when only Teruko, Ace and Eden were in the gym.

Teruko couldn’t have taken it, protag privilege.

I’ve seen Ace thrown out as a possibility, but it just doesn’t really work. Teruko was inspecting his body right before he wakes up, and she never has a reason to look away after he wakes up. She never saw him pick up the tape, though, so it seems unlikely he did. Not to mention the lack of blood on the tape when Ace had blood on his hands the whole time, or the general weirdness of him taking the tape and, like, pocketing it in the first place. Why would he do that? If he wanted a weapon, he’d have taken the wire which was nearby, right?

So, the most logical answer is that Eden took the tape. In fact, she gets knocked down to the floor right around the time the tape disappears from the background.

So, now we ask, why did Eden take the tape? The issue is that there really is no reason for her to do that, unless she went down to the second floor specifically with the intention of picking up the tape (and maybe some other stuff). However, she never tells Teruko she wanted to pick up the tape, which combined with the fact she takes it sneakily and without anyone noticing, would suggest she wanted it for nefarious purposes. This is where the Eden!Culprit theory comes from.

There simply is no good answer as to why she took the tape otherwise. Even other theories I’ve seen, which suggest perhaps the killer intentionally used the tape to frame Eden, can’t really explain why Eden would take it without warning in the first place.

Thus, the only issue left is… would Eden really do this? How can the nicest person in the killing game betray a friend like that? Well, it’s not as impossible as you may think.

Of Motivations And Narrative Consequence

(Or: venus and accirax come in clutch)

You may have seen this post by DRDT Tumblr’s dynamic duo of @venus-is-thinking and @accirax circulating around, and I recommend you read it if you want a full exploration of why Eden!Culprit works from a character and narrative standpoint. They explained everything way better than I ever could, so I’m not gonna dwell on it too much and just ask you do your assigned reading if you’re interested.

However, as a short summary of the main points:

-Motive: Eden is a very caring person, who has several people she’d want to return to outside of the killing game. Her family, which she speaks about with Levi in the first scene of the chapter, and possibly even the girl mentioned in her secret. The incident with Arturo could have scared her into taking more drastic action so she could go back to the real world. Note the secret quote on her page is “You can’t go back, no matter how hard you try.” She’s likely not secretly evil or anything. And the fact she kept trying to go against the killing game, but ultimately never achieved anything, could have led to her feeling completely hopeless.

-Why Arei?: Because it was the easiest option, most likely. It was implied in the ep 10 flashback that Eden may not have believed Arei when she claimed she wanted to be friends, and that she may have only realized she genuinely did during the trial. Also worth noting, they’re paired together in the CH 1 recap, which implies they’re at least important to each other’s stories.

-Wouldn’t this just prove Teruko right? And wouldn’t that be narratively redundant?: Oh, yes. It would very explicitly prove Teruko right.

Teruko: Sooner or later that kindness of yours will have you breaking down, until you’re too overwhelmed with grief to be able to act. That’s not how I plan to live.

But the thing is, Teruko has already been proven right this chapter. Even beyond all the scuffles around the secrets, you have Nico, seemingly one of the most harmless people in the killing game, admitting to trying to kill Ace; and you also have David, who almost everyone trusted and viewed as a sort of leader, being revealed as a liar and a manipulative asshole.

(Yes I know both of them are a bit more complex than that but that’s not the point.)

In fact, Teruko was explicitly right about David too. Not to mention, someone killed Arei or J if you’re inclined to believe that, which won’t exactly do wonders for trust in the group.

The point, as venus and accirax pointed out, is to show the audience how Teruko’s life usually is. Full of betrayal and misfortune. This is to set up the theme of fate and change that runs deeply through Teruko’s character, and that I’m not gonna explain here.

And while you could say Teruko doubling down on not trusting anyone would be redundant, you have to consider the rest of the group as well. While they mostly held it together after the first trial with a few exceptions, Eden being the killer, combined with everything else that happened in the chapter, would cause way more damage to the whole group’s sense of trust, leading to a very different atmosphere for chapter 3. So I don’t really think it would be redundant at all.

-What about the handwriting sample?: What about the handwriting sample? The note is in cursive, Eden writes her sample in print.

Obviously it's gonna look different. If anything, the fact she specifically writes in print could be seen as her hiding her cursive handwriting, which looks suspicious to me.

-Why help piece together the note in the first place? And why would she fight back against the idea of Arei committing suicide?: Because she would presumably want to build a narrative that she and Arei were friends, to make people trust her more. I mean, it worked, since people immediately jumped on Arturo when they first heard the full story.

-And more! Again, read the full post for more details.

So… now we circle back. Eden’s probably the killer, but what does that mean for the method?

A Method In Shambles

One of the main issues this brings to the method is Eden’s strength. She’s very weak, as has been established in both the most recent QnA and in the series itself (see: arm-wrestling scene, where Arei specifically excludes Eden for being weak). She wouldn’t be able to pull Arei + water jugs up with the pulley system herself.

…Or maybe she could? But it would be very tight, and I think we’re not supposed to pull out the physics and calculators to figure out it would only be the equivalent of lifting like thirty pounds as accirax implied in one line of this really good post. Point is, it doesn’t look like she could, which is more important imo.

Even then, it would also be really difficult for Eden to prop up the body like we see in the BDA.

Speaking of BDA, that’s another issue. The BDA rule states it takes “three people who did not witness the murder” to see the body before the announcement plays. So how did it play after only Whit, Teruko and Eden had found it? Surely Eden as the killer would count as a witness with the method I established earlier.

But the biggest issue for Eden!Culprit are actually the fish. Because while Eden doesn’t have an alibi for the time of death, she does have an alibi for the time of the fish’s disappearance. Think about it: Nico fed them presumably at around 7:00 PM, since they later see David going down at around 7:30, and 7:00 is likely the time when communal dinner ended as it’s also the time Eden and Hu begun washing the dishes together. We know from Nico the fish were still all there by the time Eden’s alibi with Hu begins.

And that alibi lasts all the way until nighttime, when the relax room locks down for the night. And it doesn’t open again until after the murder was supposedly committed at 7:30 AM. So Eden couldn’t have taken it the morning after.

The fish in particular are an issue for Eden!Culprit, because while everything else is odd, this particular thing makes it impossible for Eden herself to have set up the crime scene as we see it. And unless Ace is lying for no good reason, Arei was still alive the night of the third day, so it likely wasn’t set up by anyone uninvolved in the murder.

In the end, although Eden feels like she should be the culprit, she couldn’t have done everything alone.

…

She couldn’t have done everything… alone.

…

:)

The Rise of the Accomplice

Eden is a very trusting, very sociable person. So if there are things in the crime scene she couldn’t have done alone, is it unbelievable to assume she may have had an accomplice?

Let’s ignore the “who” for now and see if this idea holds up. The accomplice would be in charge of taking the fish out of the relax room during nighttime, a tactic to confuse the time of death and give Eden a fake alibi. They would also be in charge of overpowering Arei when she first arrived at the playground.

After pinning her down, wrapping her wrists with tape and possibly her legs too if needed (there were two pieces of tape in the trash, when strictly speaking you would only need one for the wrists. Arei has long socks, so marks wouldn’t be visible on her legs), the accomplice would also be in charge of lifting up Arei into the sky. The exact logistics of how the accomplice would go about this are a bit awkward (they would probably have to run quite fast to the spinny thing so Arei doesn’t get a chance to stand up and try something), but I don’t think it’s outright impossible.

Now, here’s where the trick comes in. Since Eden was the one who likely planned the murder (she had been preparing since Night 2, after all), the goal would be to make her the blackened. Here’s how I think that would be done.

The accomplice would hand off the spinny thing to Eden once Arei was high up enough, and Eden would be the one to let go off the carousel so Arei’s neck breaks. But how does it stop?

Well, you remember the second, shorter piece of rope, which I had originally said would be for the water jugs? Instead of that, they would use it as a stopper rope. The idea is to attach one end to the swing set near the spinny thing, but leave the other end by itself. Then, once Arei was high in the air, one of the two culprits (let’s say Eden) would tie the unused end to the spinny thing. That way, when they let Arei fall, the shorter rope would tense before she went all the way to the floor (you can make sure this happens by using a lot of the rope on the knot on the swing set), and stop the carousel abruptly mid fall. This is what would cause Arei’s neck to snap.

(Ignore the text)

This means the water jugs would need to be attached to Arei in some other way. Possibly by making the noose in such a way that you have rope to spare and you can put the jugs there?

Looks a bit wonky, but I think it can work! Or, at least, Eden could conceivably think it would help, which is all that’s technically necessary.

If you’re not convinced, there could also be a third, extremely short piece of rope being kept in Eden’s fanny pack which was used to put the jugs at Arei’s feet. I don’t quite like this answer too much, since it relies on evidence we don’t have (Russel’s Teapot and all that), but it’s there.

——————————————————————————————————

Surprise! Alternative Method Bonanza!

So you remember how thebadjoe has a really good theory on the murder which is Eden!Solo? That means he has a different method for the murder mechanism itself, as Eden sort of can’t do my method herself.

And I am gonna steal it! Like a thief!

Essentially, if you’re not convinced by the hanging method, you can instead copy and paste joe’s method to my accomplice theory, with a few modifications.

Joe’s method takes my idea of a stopper rope, but instead of attaching one end to the swing set, it’s attached to Arei’s neck. The pulley system is instead used to pull up only the water jugs, the rope attached to their handles, which Eden should be able to do herself. The idea is that, after pulling the water jugs up and attaching the shorter rope to Arei’s neck, when you let them fall, if Arei’s neck is secured in place, when the stopper tenses, it will snap her neck.

Now, in his method that involves knocking out Arei with turpentine (long story) and securing her with tape, but with the accomplice idea, and since I don’t think Eden has turpentine, it may be better for the accomplice to just hold down Arei’s body themself. Though that runs into the issue of “why put tape on her wrists then”, which isn’t a method with joe’s original method and rather an issue of translation to the accomplice idea.

Because of that, and because there’s a particular thing I’ll talk about in a moment, I think my method is still slightly more plausible for the accomplice idea, which is why I won’t bring this up again, but I did want to point out that it’s technically a possibility.

——————————————————————————————————

Any other changes? Yes, actually.

-You remember the starch on the ball of clothes? Well, joe suggested it may come from the enriched formula used in the relax room, as starch is often used to stimulate plant growth or something along those lines. Meaning the clothes spent a night inside the relax room. I agree with this, as I have no idea why starch would be there otherwise.

The question now is when the clothes spent the night. It can’t be Night 3, as Arei died before the relax room opened again at 8:00 AmM. So it would have to be in the second night. And where was Eden that night?

Eden: I noticed you didn’t take any of your new clothes, so I was going to deliver them to you!

Ah, right. On the second floor. In the dress-up room. Totally not suspicious behavior.

Basically, I think Eden went to the second floor to put the clothes in the relax room and pick up the tape, but once nighttime begun, she realized Ace was still in the gym, and decided to wait it out so as to not be spotted in a suspicious place. Unfortunately for her, Ace was busy getting murdered by Nico, so she ended up getting caught by Teruko, and had to course correct.

But why would she need the ball of clothes? Couldn’t she have just grabbed, like, anything else to throw over the railing?

Well… yeah, but. It may have been hard for her to find anything more convenient than the ball of clothes. I’ve seen the roll of tape suggested, but the rope may not have been able to fit through the hole in the middle. Maybe yes, maybe no, depending on what’s most convenient for your theory. That’s not sarcasm, it’s just that there’s no good way of checking how big the hole is.

Throwing a ball of clothes would be a lot easier than throwing a lot of other things. Maybe it’s a bit weird, but I don’t find it completely unbelievable that Eden considered it the best option.

-To make the whole ordeal easier, it would be best to make sure the “noose” end of the longer rope dangles from the railing over the seesaw, closer to the entrance, so they don’t have to move Arei around too much. They could easily do this by just throwing the ball of clothes around a couple of times.

-The BDA is an issue, since the accomplice would also be a “witness” and thus not count. But this can be solved quite simply. For one, there could be a loophole where if Eden just looks away when Arei’s neck breaks, then she’s not a “witness” and she counts. If that sounds too stupid, there’s another answer. To make absolutely sure Eden would be counted as the blackened, the accomplice would leave the room entirely while Eden holds Arei up in the air. That way, the moment they enter again, they would see the corpse without being a “witness” to the murder, and so they count. Add to the accomplice/Eden the view of Whit and Teruko, and you have the three you need for the BDA.

-That’s also my answer to why Eden shouts “Teruko, wait!” right before Teruko opens the door to the playground. Logically, she knew the BDA would play, which is why she didn’t act nervous when Teruko first offered to search in a group of three, but she second-guessed herself right before they got there. I’m sure we’ve all had an experience like that before, where logically we know one thing will happen, but we still get nervous right before the thing happens because we’re worried it might go wrong.

-The Achilles Heel of this theory is the missing bowling glove from Arei’s left hand. I have exactly one explanation for it, and it’s kinda stupid. Essentially, I believe the accomplice took the glove for themselves, to reveal it during the trial if people start accusing Eden. The idea would be that showing people that glove should hopefully get them to vote for the accomplice without thinking about it too much, but since Eden is the real blackened, they would lose and Eden would escape.

Imagine a big reveal, with a little animation like David’s “guilty as charged”, where the accomplice takes out the glove from their pocket and they say “I killed Arei” or something. That’s kinda what I’m envisioning.

So… that’s basically the method. And now, we have to answer the age old question:

but, like, why though

And this, this is the question that makes me believe the accomplice idea more than any other. Because it gives a proper reason for why the method had to be so complicated.

See, there is one fundamental contradiction in the evidence we see, one which has to be solved in some way. Arei’s wrists were bound, but given the rest of the evidence, there was a mechanism involved in her murder.

Why is that an issue? Because if you bind her wrists, then there is no reason not to just kill her in a much easier, simpler way. And there’s no reason to bind her wrists after killing her, either. So why would the killer go through all this trouble?

demodraws0606 (not sure they’d want to be tagged) suggested in this post, under Levi!Culprit, that maybe Levi was trying to frame Eden, and to do that, he had to make sure the BDA wouldn’t rule her out. And while that’s a really good post and a pretty interesting idea, the main issue with the plan of framing Eden in general are the fish. Levi maybe wouldn’t know for sure whether or not Eden would have an alibi, but just in case, it would be much safer to just fill the water jugs with water from a sink or something. The fish could only ever exclude Eden, never incriminate her.

Joe’s method assumes Eden simply used a complex method to distance herself from the murder in a way. Working on mechanisms would calm her as a clockmaker, so she feels more comfortable with murder if she can do it with a mechanism. This is cool, and while I personally think it’s a bit underwhelming, it could work. But it only works if Eden!Solo works, and then you have to explain the fish again. Joe says David brought them there, but, I don’t agree. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, obviously, just that I personally don’t see it given what we have. I think David genuinely thinks Arei committed suicide because of him.

David: Of course. Of course this would happen.

So, yeah.

And because the why is so hard to explain, I think it’s important to explain it. And wouldn’t you guess it, my method does explain it.

It goes back to the origin of the accomplice idea. Eden couldn’t have done this on her own.

Let’s be clear; an accomplice is a huge leap in logic. One that I feel comfortable making given everything, but one which would take the characters a while to figure out. One which they may reject in principle. There’s no benefit for an accomplice after all, right?

I’ll address that in a moment, but let’s get back to the main point. Eden couldn’t have done this on her own, and because of that, the method in itself is an alibi for her.

Think about it. Because she is clearly not strong enough to lift Arei up into the air (or at least, that’s what it looks like), what happens if someone starts pointing fingers at Eden? Well, all she has to do to absolve herself is insist they speak about the method, and guide them in the general direction of the right answer. Once they start thinking the murderer would need to be strong enough to pull Arei + water jugs up into the air, they would instantly dismiss Eden as a possibility, until the idea of an accomplice is revisited.

This is, by the way, why I think the Hanging Method works better than the Neck Stopper Method under Accomplice Theory-

(ok the nomenclature is starting to get out of hand)

-, because it requires more strength to use the pulley.

But the point is the same. This method actually provides an explanation to why a mechanism was necessary when Arei’s wrists were bound. It was to give Eden a defense.

And that’s also where the fish come in. Because the most straightforward explanation for why the fish would be there would be that the killer would want to confuse the time of death. But why? The time the fish were taken is the same time frame the characters currently believe the murder happened at, so the alibis don’t change. If the killer wanted to give themselves an alibi for the supposed time of death, they would need to have an alibi for the time the fish were taken. But if they have an alibi for the time the fish were taken, they couldn’t have taken the fish!

Provided Nico is telling the truth about the fish, but I really don’t see why they’d be lying. I really doubt they’re the killer.

Thus, unless the fish somehow got there through a third party entirely (which I find unlikely, as Veronika had an alibi and no one else would really want to hide that they found a dead body for a night), it’s very possible the accomplice brought the fish to give the real killer an alibi.

So, that’s the big reason I have for believing there was an accomplice. It’s the best explanation for the fish and the motivation behind the creation of a mechanism I can find, but of course, that’s my opinion. There’s a bit more to it actually, but before we get there, we have to ask:

OMG, Who Did This?!

What we know about the accomplice for now is that they must not have an alibi for the time the fish were taken. This leaves us with Ace, Nico, Rose, Arei, Levi, and David. We can also add Hu to the list, as her only alibi is Eden, and, well.

Out of hand, I'm gonna eliminate Nico, Ace and David, as I really don't think their characters fit the accomplice idea at all, I hope you can forgive me.

I gave Arei a fair bit of thought, since narratively I could see it working, but I just don’t think it’s physically possible. One of the things which got me to believe there was an accomplice was that it would be really difficult for Eden to string up Arei’s corpse herself, and Arei wouldn’t be able to help with that on account of being dead.

So, then there three.

Was it Rose?

An interesting possibility. She was the first one to suggest looking in the trash, which helps Eden build the narrative she and Arei were friends, and she was one of the people who suggested voting for David on Ep 11, claiming she didn’t want the trial to go on any longer. However, that’s pretty circumstantial, and I don’t think there’s much else connecting her to the crime. I also don’t know how much stronger she is than Eden, but that’s neither here nor there. Overall, a possible candidate, but not extremely plausible.

Was it Hu?

Hey, have you ever thought about how weird it was that Hu and Eden never spoke during the conversation Teruko, Charles, Whit and David had right before David went to the relax room on night three? They were supposed to be cleaning up after dinner at that point, according to their alibi, so what gives?

Well, frankly, I just think they weren’t in the kitchen, but probably just cleaning in the cafeteria itself. But maybe Hu and Eden are lying!

Hu could work as an accomplice, given her caring nature and the fact she probably has the “hopeless child” secret, meaning she’s attempted suicide. Thus, she may be willing to throw away her life for Eden’s, which is the biggest obstacle for the accomplice idea.

Her secret quote could allude to it. “I want to pay for what I’ve done. But even then, I still want to live.” The issue there is… well, that could be referring to quite literally anything else, so.

I consider Hu the second likeliest candidate for accomplice because of all that, but… frankly, I still don’t see it. The way she acts during the trial doesn’t suggest she’s doing anything of the sort, and there are reasons she wouldn’t want anyone to get away with murder. Mainly everyone else’s lives. Also, she has even less arm strength than Rose, seeing as she lost at arm wrestling with her.

There’s probably more discussion to be had regarding Hu as an accomplice, but frankly, I don’t think it’s necessary for now. Because there is one person who fits the bill much better than Hu, and has much deeper connections to both Eden and the murder.

You read the title of the post. You know who I think the accomplice is. Let’s go.

Yeah, it’s Levi

(How’s that for a callback?)

Levi is probably the most widely believed culprit theory, and for good reason. He acts very suspiciously all throughout the investigation and the trial. He is the first to call up MonoTV to start voting after David’s reveal, he throws accusations quite liberally, his profile states he dislikes unpredictable people like Arei, the ball of clothes and even the missing glove being involved connects him to the method through his talent…

The main thing is the secret motive. Not only did Levi receive Arei’s, without the context Arei gave David and Teruko in the playground, it is widely speculated that Arei received Levi’s secret through sheer process of elimination. Won’t get into it here, many people have already talked about it, so just trust me bro.

Not to mention the whole “good person” fiasco. Essentially, Ch 2 has the title “All That Glitters”, with the secret title “A Good Person”. Clearly, put together you get “Not All That Glitters Is Gold” -> “Not All That Glitters Is A Good Person.”

And as far as I can tell, there are only a few people who have been referred to using the specific words “good person” in this chapter:

-Teruko: She dissuades Whit from calling her a good person because she’ll feel bad when she’s not.

-David: Hu calls him a good person right before his Ep 11 heel turn.

EDIT: I misremebered, the line is actually "good friend." Ah, oops.

-Eden: Levi calls her a good person in the beginning of the chapter.

-Arei: Says she will prove to Eden she can be a good person.

-Levi: Eden calls him a good person at the beginning of the chapter.

Hopefully I didn’t miss any.

You’ll notice the common thread is plot relevance in CH 2. Teruko’s the protag, David pushed the plot forward by getting people to reveal their secrets and also had his heel turn (EDIT: But he wasn't called a good person so), Eden has been a huge part of the chapter and she might be the killer, and Arei is the victim.

The outlier is Levi, which would suggest he’ll come to be plot relevant soon enough. I don’t think just getting his secret revealed would be enough to put him up there in importance with the most influential people in the entire chapter, so he’s probably heavily involved in the murder. And since I don’t think he’s the killer, accomplice it is, baby.

There is even a particular moment we can point to as the moment Levi may have given up on the group as a whole.

Levi: Why do I even bother?

Right after Ace refuses his help after almost getting murdered. And Eden’s right there.

Finally, his secret quote is “I always believed that a person is defined by their actions alone. But maybe that’s just a poor excuse for my heartlessness.” That’s interesting, because in this context, it could be he never believed Arei wanted to change, as her previous actions contradicted the words she said to Eden. But maybe that’s a poor excuse for his heartlessness, as Arei did want to change.

There’s more I could bring up, like the fun fact Levi’s profile states he likes suckers (candy) and Eden’s states she likes sweet things (that’s insanely circumstantial and confirmation bias-y, but sure I’ll bring it up), but I think venus and accirax may be wanting to make a narrative defense of the Levi!Accomplice theory, so I’ll leave it to them, since they’ll probably do better than I could. Lord knows they did better on Eden than me.

Not gonna lie I’m kinda making this so they can just link back here instead of the insanity train the original thread was-

Final Issues

No theory is perfect, and this one isn’t an exception. While I think the theory mostly covers all the evidence in the scene quite satisfactorily, the explanations for the BDA, the glove and the shape of the scuffed floor (but how do you explain that shape) are a bit shaky. There’s also a few awkward moments of timing and character’s actions, like the whole Ace almost-murder situation being sorta awkward with Eden’s presence in the second floor, and in particular that Arei apparently spent almost an entire day inside her room. That’s sorta gonna be an issue for everyone unless you believe Ace is lying about the day her conversation with David happened, which… okay, isn’t as insane as it sounds, read joe’s theory, but I still consider a bigger leap than simply assuming Arei took a real long nap.

And of course, as much as I’ve ignored it, it’s still insanely risky for Eden to work with an accomplice, and we have to assume Levi was willing to die and get everyone else killed just to get Eden out of there. I’ll try my best to explain how I think that could happen in the Closing Argument.

However, it’s all in all, in my opinion, not too bad. Everything is pretty physically plausible, there are narrative justifications for practically everything, and the few inconsistencies aren’t too large or obnoxious for me to consider damning. I’m still open to other theories, of course, but for now, this is the thing I believe.

-

So, now that we’ve established how I arrived at my conclusions, it’s time for what everyone’s been waiting for!

Closing Argument

Keep in mind character motivations and especially unseen dialogue could vary quite a lot. The main thing to take away is the actual method, everything else is sorta flavor text. This… really is a lot longer than it has any right to be. I kinda got carried away trying to show how I think the characters would act. Sorry.

I’ll mark with “>” the parts which are mostly just for spice, “~” the actually important parts, and just for fun I’ll add predictions to how the end of the trial will go with “+”.

I am extremely sorry if I mischaracterize anyone. I’m not good at writing dialogue, but I think it’s worth trying to give a better impression of what’s going on in my head.

(Days start counting after the start of CH 2)

Second Day, Afternoon

~Eden wanted to return home.

>Of course she did! Everyone did, in the killing game. She kept trying to look for ways to end it completely, and while she hadn’t found a good solution yet, she’d surely find it soon enough!

>But for now, they had to keep strong! And fight against the motive! David had suggested talking to the people whose secrets they’d all received so they could share it and ease tensions, and Eden thought it was a great idea! She went up to Arturo, and told him what she’d received about him.

>…

>She almost died.

>That was the only thing running through her mind as Arei got Arturo away. Eden had almost died, and if it weren’t for Arei, she most likely would have. A small desperation began to grow in her heart, longing to get out, get out, get out-

>Arei tried to talk to her, apologize for the things she’d said in the playground… but Eden couldn’t believe her.

>Arei had shouted in her face that Min’s death was her fault. Even if it was, to say it like that… Eden wanted to cry just thinking about the things Arei had said. Eden may have been nice, but she wasn’t naive. Someone like that could never be a good person.

>Still, a part of Eden wanted to give Arei the benefit of the doubt. So, she hugged her, told her how much it meant, and went on her merry way.

>But those doubts had firmly planted themselves in Eden’s mind. What if Arei was just manipulating her? What if Arturo attacked her again? Would someone as weak as her even be able to stand up to the killing game, when she couldn’t stand up against some bullies?

>Slowly, the gears in her mind started to turn. An idea was brewing, an idea which scared Eden to even think about, but one she was desperate enough to entertain.

>There was a way for her to end the killing game. By winning it.

>I mean what? No! Eden would never kill anyone! …

>But if she were to, hypothetically speaking, how would she go about it?

>By the second night, she didn’t know all the details, but she was going on autopilot, her body moving practically without her thinking. Just like she used to get lost in her work while making clocks, she was now beginning to get lost in the preparations for a murder.

>An accomplice, she would need an accomplice, if she wanted to do it. Probably something with the rope in the storage room, she was good with mechanisms. Maybe the railings on the playground, a pulley system… she needed a way to get the rope up there, and a way to secure the grip of her accomplice on the carousel.

>Hypothetically, of course.

Second Day, Almost Nighttime - Nighttime

~She went to the second floor, grabbed some of Hu’s and Teruko’s old clothes, and put them in the relaxation room to cover them in starch. She wanted to make a ball of clothes, it was the best way to get the rope over the railings.

~She also needed tape from the gym, the roll people used to replace the grippy tape on the pull-up bar when it got too sweaty.

~Slight issue: nighttime had begun, and there were still a few noises in the gym. Eden didn’t want to be caught doing anything too suspicious, so she decided to wait out until the noises stopped.

~Slightly bigger issue: Teruko arrived at the second floor, spotted her, and now Eden needed a cover story. She just told her she was looking for Hu’s and Teruko’s new clothes, sure, that works.

>Eden told Teruko her and Arei had made up, and asked if she wanted to pry. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure why she’d done that. If Teruko had heard the story of what Arei had said, she would just tell Eden what the uglier parts of her psyche were already telling her. That Arei was lying, trying to manipulate her. But maybe she wanted the confirmation, to justify to herself why she was thinking the thoughts which were running through her head.

(It’s almost tragic, really. If only Teruko had pried, maybe Eden would have learnt of Arei’s breakdown, and everything would have ended there)

~The two decided to head back to the first floor, and Eden figured she would just take the tape tomorrow-

~Oh shit, Ace got murdered.

>Seeing that convinced Eden. The killing game was too dangerous, when even the seemingly harmless Nico was able to do something so brutal to one of the strongest participants physically speaking. She had to get out, and now. She couldn’t disappoint her family, her friends, and her.

>So, she resolved to do something about it right after-

>Oh, hey, Ace wasn’t dead! That was… good. Even if he knocked Eden down to the floor when he woke.

~… And while she’s on the floor, she may as well pick up the tape she had come to retrieve.

~[Cue Ace running to kill Nico scene]

>Wow. Tensions were… really high. Ace had collapsed, and even then Teruko had just walked away as if nothing had happened.

>But Eden was more curious about something Levi had said. “Why do I even bother?” What had he meant by that? She decided to speak with him.

>…

>Levi had lost all hope.

>There was just no way to reason with the people of the killing game. All of them were erratic, nonsensical, unpredictable people. And he loathed unpredictability in people.

>None of them wanted to accept help when it was offered. None of them knew what the hell to do about anything, but refused to just be nice and patient with each other. Practically speaking, pretty much the only normal person around was-

>Oh, Eden wanted to talk to him. Sure, he could do that.

>Eden was checking in after the whole Ace fiasco. How nice of her.

>But after chatting for a while, Eden directed the conversation towards an encounter she’d had with Arei. She explained what the bowler had told her, looking for advice. She asked if Levi would believe Arei, seeking confirmation on whether or not she really could be trying to get better. And Levi...

>Levi was pissed.

>Because it was such an obvious lie. Such a horrendous attempt of manipulation. To try and take advantage of someone as nice as Eden, truly despicable.

>Eden seemed taken aback at his intensity, asking why he was so certain. Levi debated internally for a moment, before deciding Eden deserved the whole truth.

>"Blackmail, rumors, lying, stealing, slander. You did everything you could to ruin your sisters' lives." That was Arei's secret, the one Levi received.

>Eden looked horrified when Levi told her, and it seemed she agreed with what Levi was already thinking. After all, they both loved their family a lot, even if Levi had been disowned. Someone like Arei, who would do something so horrible to their own family, couldn't possibly be a good person. If Arei did all that to her own sisters, who's to say she wouldn't do the same to Eden?

(In retrospect, Levi would always regret jumping to conclusions. After it was all over, he would try to explain. “I always believed that a person is defined by their actions alone. But maybe that’s just a poor excuse for my heartlessness.”)

>And in all that anger, and hopelesness, and desperation... Eden revealed an idea. A very strange, almost outlandish idea. To help her out of the killing game.

>Levi wasn't a fool. He had seen how the group had handled the first trial. Eventually, someone was going to get away with murder, and that would be how the killing game would end. It was predestined.

>And if someone was going to win, it may as well be the kindest person in the group.

~He agreed.

Third Day, Noon

>Everyone was yelling, and Arei's stomach was twisting.

>Nico had tried to murder Ace. They hadn't outright admitted it, but Levi's and Ace's accounts were enough to get her to believe it.

>But she wasn't thinking so much about the incident itself, as much as she was thinking about what had caused it. The secrets. David's plan was backfiring massively...

>Except, maybe it wasn't. As she saw everyone arguing, the secret she had seen Whit receive flashed in her mind. David's secret. "You exist to manipulate others. Everyone else exists to be taken advantage of."

>Was he really that evil? Was he really trying to instigate a murder? Was anything he had ever said even true?

>Had he lied to her, too?

>...

>She didn't feel like speaking much that day. She'd rather go to her room, and contemplate. Maybe sleep for a while. Maybe lie in her bed, and maybe cry a bit.

>She didn't leave her room until it was time for dinner.

Third Day, Afternoon

>Ace was fucking pissed.

>Of course he was, he'd almost been murdered! By Nico of all fucking people! And now he couldn't even look the fucking gym without getting nervous, like the motherfucker would show up any time and finish the job!

>But it's not like that was gonna stop him from exercising. He wasn't a fucking coward, he wasn't afraid of Nico. (Or at least, he told himself that). So he'd train anyways! He'd raced on horses he was terrified of his whole life, a little exercise was nothing!

>Still, to his chagrin, he couldn't help but feel nervous whenever he heard any noises in the rest of the floor. Even the very light noise of the elevator felt like thunder in his ears. So when someone came down and started speaking, Ace couldn't help but overhear.

>Yet, the conversation was interesting. Arei was saying David had lied about his secret? This was worth hearing.

>Ace snuck in closer and listened in. Apparently David's secret was that he was a manipulative bastard, the dick. He had gone quiet when he heard that, too, so it must have been true.

>"David! Say something!"

>David went quiet for a bit, and then... Ace got bored.

>So what? David was an asshole, big deal. Breaking news, everyone! Every single participant in the killing game sucks dick and balls! Who could have seen that coming?! It wasn't anything Ace didn't already know. So he left. He didn't really feel like listening to David try to lie his way out of that. He just went back to the gym and stopped paying attention.

>Meanwhile, the conversation went on.

[THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN MOSTLY FOR FUN. I HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING HOW THIS CONVERSATION ACTUALLY WENT]

CW FOR AGGRESSIVE CONFRONTATION

>David was fucked.

>"I... I don't know what to say to that" David managed, covering his eyes with his hand. "It's... well... How do I put this?"

>"Just tell me, please. Did you lie to me?"

>"..." David sighed. A small, sad chuckle rose from his chest. "Yes. I'm sorry"

>"..."

>"I apologize for the false hope, Arei, but... people can't change" David continued. His head was firing off alarm bells, years of deception warning him not to continue, but he ignored them. "I have seen so many try. I have seen so many fail. In the end, there's no avoiding it. If you could improve yourself to be a better person, all that means is that you were a better person to begin with..."

>Arei fought back tears. "You're wrong"

>David had to stop himself from laughing in her face, but he couldn't help a sharp exhale. He would probably stop there, but... he had lied for so long, he almost wanted to speak what he actually believed for once. "No, I'm not. I'm the Ultimate Inspirational Speaker, Arei. If people could change, I would be the first to see it"

>"That's not- You can't be serious. Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it can't happen!" Arei snapped.

>"Is that so?" David raised his voice, and glared at Arei. He smiled nervously. "Then tell me, Arei. Do you think I can change? That I can become better? Look at what I've done. I've lied for years, and now Ace has a permanent scar on his neck from the murder I almost caused!" He put a hand to his chest. He shouldn't be doing this, he shouldn't, but, but- "Do you really think people like me, like us, can ever be good?! If you do, then you're a bigger idiot than I thought"

>He didn't mean that. He didn't mean that. He didn't mean that. Why was he saying it?

>Arei snarled at him, her face growing red in anger. "You...." She took a breath, and her gaze grew defiant. "I'll prove you wrong. You're the idiot here. I will become good. I promised Eden I-"

>"Well, Xander promised he'd be my friend, and look where he is now!" he almost shouted. Why was he even thinking of him now? "Don't you see it? You're lying to yourself. That's the only thing to come from my speeches. Lies. And now you're repeating a degraded version, like it's gonna be any more true just because it's coming from your mouth!" He needed to stop. He- "Are you that arrogant, or did your sisters cause you permanent brain damage?!" What the fuck was he doing?!

>"..." Arei looked horrified, and angry.

>"You don't even believe it yourself, you hypochrite!" Stop! He smirked even wider. "Otherwise, why don't you go talk to your sisters, and get them to change?" She looked so sad, why was David doing this? He had to- He couldn't- It felt good to let it out- He felt horrible- Stop- He laughed. "Oh, right! You can't! Because you're a monster and destroyed their lives! And you, won't, change"

>"You-!" Arei shouted, and rushed forward to push him. Her heart clearly wasn't in it, but David retaliated and pushed her back.

>"Out of my way!" he snarled, and began walking out of the room. He couldn't- he wasn't thinking straight, he needed- he needed air, he needed out. Arei almost slipped into the pond, or maybe she did? David couln't tell anymore. His mind was a fucking mess and his only coherent thoughts were screaming at him to leave.

>Meanwhile, Arei was left alone, and hurt. She shouldn’t listen to an asshole like David, she knew that, but, but still…

>She didn’t have much of an appetite anymore. Maybe she’d just go back to bed.

CW OVER

~Later, Levi would arrive at the relaxation room to fill up two water jugs, making sure to get the fish. At the same time, Eden was discussing ways to end the killing game with Hu, securing an alibi for the time of the fish’s disappearance.

Third Day, Nighttime

~Levi and Eden met back up at the playground, and the preparations began. The materials they were working with included two pieces of rope (one longer, one shorter), the ball of sticky clothes Eden had prepared the night before, the tape Eden had taken from the gym, and the water jugs with the water and fish Levi had gathered.

~First step, with the tape from the gym, they covered the bars of the carousel, to have a better grip when they used the mechanism.

~Then, they grabbed the longer rope and put part of it through a few of the handlebars of the carousel, before tying one end to one of the handlebars.

~After that, they tied the other end to the ball of clothes, and Levi used his strength to throw it up above the railings. In doing so, he accidentally hit one of the lights with the clothes, displacing the lightbulb and causing it to flicker. Once it fell, he also threw it up to the railing in the middle, so the unused end of the longer rope would end up around where the seesaw was.

~Meanwhile, Eden tied one end of the shorter rope to the swing set near the carousel, leaving the other end unused for now.

~After removing the ball of clothes, they fashioned the untied end of the longer rope into an odd-looking “double noose”, with one of the nooses, the one closer to the end of the rope, tied around the handles of the water jugs.

~With all the preparations in place, they took the ball of clothes to the dress-up room, and Levi went to sleep. Eden wrote the note Arei would receive, telling her to meet in the playground at 7:30. Then she went to sleep as well.

Fourth Day, Morning

>Arturo was a fucking asshole, Arei decided from the moment she saw the note.

~Obviously Arei followed it, because she was trying to be friends with Eden.

>And as suspicious as the note was, there was no way Eden would betray her, right? If she did…

>…

>Well, Arei didn’t really want to think about it.

>She arrived at the playground, and… why was there so much rope around? Eden was standing near it, contemplating… a noose?

>Oh god.

>Arei didn’t even think. She rushed in and tried to stop Eden from doing-

~Levi, who had been hidden besides the door, attacked. He ambushed Arei from behind, and used his weight to pin her to the floor. Arei screamed and struggled, scuffing the floor around her, but she obviously wasn’t able to do anything to fight off Levi.

[Oh great more dialogue]

CW for emotional confrontation, feelings of betrayal and suicidal ideation.

>”What the fuck are you doing?! Eden, get him off me!”

>Eden looked downcast, her expression somber. She was evidently lost in thought. “I’m sorry it has to be this way”

>Arei didn’t get it.

~Levi grabbed Arei’s hands, and roughly pulled out her glove to better get the tape around her wrists. This was to make sure she didn’t struggle too much after the process began.

>”Hey! Eden! What’s going on?! I thought we were friends!”

>”As if. We’re not that naive” Levi spat from behind her, and she could practically feel that murderous edge he always used when threatening Ace.

>”Huh?! What are you talking about, you-?!”

>”I’m sorry, Arei. I just can’t believe you” Eden spoke softly, fidgeting with her hands. She grabbed the noose, which weirdly had- wait. “I know you’re lying to me. You don’t have to keep pretending you like me”

>…

>Arei’s entire world crumbled in that moment.

>”H-Huh?! Wait, I- I never lied to you! I want- I wanted to be friends-!”

>”Don’t lie” Levi snarled. “We know what your secret is. What you’ve done to your sisters. I can’t believe you. You know, actions define people, and you have been nothing but terrible your whole life”

>Eden bent down to put the noose around Arei’s neck. Because of course, of course it was a fucking noose. Eden hesitated, however.

>”Don’t fall for her crocodile tears, Eden” Levi warned. Oh, Arei was crying? News to her.

>”R-Right” Eden said, putting the noose around Arei’s neck. Eden then positioned herself to pin Arei down herself as Levi stepped off and went towards the carousel.

>”Eden, please… please don’t listen to him! Don’t be scared of him! I’ll beat him up for you, just-!”

>”I’m not- I’m not scared of Levi” Eden frowned.

>”But- But, he’s a murderer without remorse!” Levi stopped in his tracks. “That’s his secret, Eden! I received it! Do you really want to help someone like that?!”

>Eden seemed to hesitate for a moment, but shook her head, and looked at Arei with glassy eyes, smiling nervously. “I mean… I- I can’t really judge him for that. I… I was the one who came up with this idea, you know”

>…

>Huh.

>So there really was no point, then.

>David didn’t believe in her. Eden didn’t believe in her. Fucking Eden. And now, even the nicest person in the entire killing game had decided Arei deserved to die.

>…

>Arei stopped struggling after that.

CW OVER, mostly. There’s still references to suicide after this point.

(God I really hope I’m not horrendously mischaracterizing these people)

~Levi begun to spin the carousel, which worked as a pulley that started dragging Arei up. As he spun it, he likely had to adjust it slightly so it wouldn’t slide off the wrong way, hence why he needed to be able to better grip all the handlebars instead of putting tape on just one. [I don’t know if that made sense]

~As the rope started pulling up, Eden stepped aside and ran over to the carousel.

~Levi stopped spinning it once Arei was high enough, and Eden attached the unused end of the shorter rope to the carousel.

~Eden grabbed hold of the carousel, and Levi ran out of the room.

~Now, neither of them had thought of asking MonoTV how to determine the blackened in the case of an accomplice being in play, so they took all the steps necessary to make sure Eden would be the blackened.

~She was the one to put the rope around Arei’s neck, she had been the one to come up with the murder plan, and she was the last person holding her up. Levi running out of the room was extra insurance: how could he be the blackened if he wasn’t even a witness to the crime? However, the final trick would ensure Eden would get the title of blackened.

~Eden let go of the carousel, and gravity made it spin as Arei fell. It spun for only a little bit, however, as the shorter rope soon fully tensed, and stopped the carousel in its tracks. Because of the height Arei fell, as well as the extra weight from the water jugs, her neck snapped in the moment the shorter rope tensed. At the same time, the handles from the water jugs snapped, and they fell to the floor.

~With this, it could be argued the act which caused Arei’s death was the letting go of the carousel, for which Levi wasn’t even present, meaning Eden was indubitably the blackened.

~And when it was all said and done, there was one fact which stood. Because of the strength the mechanism had required, Eden could not have possibly done it all alone. Unless the class somehow figured out she had an accomplice, just the strength necessary for the act would rule her out, give her an alibi. That is the reason behind the complexity of the murder.

~After that, Levi came into the room, fulfilling another nice benefit. Because he hadn’t technically witnessed the murder, he counted as a “body discoverer” for BDA purposes.

~The last step was setting up the scene as we saw it. The fish they spread around would confuse the time of death and give Eden an alibi, and hanging Arei from the swing set would make people initially believe she had committed suicide. Levi had to be the one to do that, as Eden was too weak and short, adding an extra layer of misdirection.

~”What if I just take her glove?” Levi asked.

>”Eh?”

>”I could take her glove, and then if someone spots me with it, they’ll vote me out and you’ll win” Levi explained.

>”That’s… kinda silly, isn’t it?”

>”…”

>”…”

>”…”

>”… Okay, sure”

>”Very well” Levi nodded sagely. Eden remained very confused.

~They took the longer tape and hid it under the carousel, then threw the tape which had been on Arei’s wrists and the jugs in the trash, as well as the note after ripping it up a bit.

~With that, they left to go see the supposed announcement of the motives.

Investigation

>Pretending to be surprised at Arei’s absence wasn’t as hard as Eden thought it would be. Just make a horrified face and say nothing, easy!

>Eden knew the BDA would still play if just Whit and Teruko discovered the body, which is why she wasn’t nervous when Teruko first asked her and Whit to go search for Arei together. Still, she second guessed herself just as Teruko swung the door open, because she would be in big trouble if the BDA didn’t play. Thankfully for her, it did, as Levi had already “discovered” it before. Honestly, it was pretty good luck (and bad luck on Teruko’s part) that Eden got to be part of the “discovery group.”

>On the side, David looks at how the body was positioned, and instantly knew what had happened. “Of course. Of course this would happen” he muttered. Arei killed herself because of him. What a monster he was.

~After pretending to be sad about Arei’s death for a moment, Eden offered to investigate with “braincell haver” Teruko, but got shut down. So instead, she joined Rose and Whit as they put together the note in the trash, to make sure they got it right. It was an important part of the plan, after all.

>Levi just went to look at the secrets because he didn’t really have to do anything specific.

Trial

>When people begun discussing the possibility of Arei helping her killer, Levi thought it would be a good way to misdirect the cast, so he started pushing the idea. Though with the slight freudian slip of saying Arei may have been her own “accomplice.”

>On the side, David held his tongue. Once MonoTV revealed the condition to be the blackened was that you were “someone alive who we can blame for her death”, any doubt dissipated in his mind. He had caused her to commit suicide, he could be blamed for her death. And he was the blackened, then.

>However, Eden needed to go against the idea of suicide, because she was supposed to sell the idea they had been friends once the note was revealed.

>When that happened, they had agreed Levi would push on the idea that Eden was the killer a bit, to “force” her to explain the note she wanted to explain anyways.

>Levi also added he’d protect Eden no matter what, but Eden responds “Don’t say stuff like that.” To the others, that was because Eden was worried Levi would end up like Arei. To Eden and Levi, it was a subtle way of saying ‘shut up and don’t link us together!’

~Eden explained the note, making sure to act like she was very distraught by the situation and genuinely believed Arei had wanted to change.

~She also provided a “handwriting sample” to look more innocent, but she intentionally wrote it in print instead of cursive to separate it from the note. Somehow, no one noticed.

>Meanwhile, David was starting to break down. She really had been trying to change, but the naive idiot had believed in David. And nothing good happens to those who believe in him.

>What a reprehensible killer indeed.

>But David’s breakdown was having an impact on Eden, who begun to think that maybe, just maybe, she had been wrong about Arei.

>She was in too deep, though. She needed to continue. She couldn’t turn back the clock now.

>When David is accused of everything, he decides he might as well enjoy the last of his life, of his killing game. He breaks down the same way he did when Arei confronted him, becoming insulting and dismissive to prevent any vulnerability from showing through. The words he said, he believed for the most part, but the smile on his face as he said them was perhaps his biggest lie yet.

>In other news, that’s pretty convenient for the murder duo! If they can just get David voted out, then…

~But that wouldn’t happen. Not if Teruko and Charles had something to say about it.

Chapter 2, Part 2

[This is just for fun]

+Charles realized the trick of the time of death, and the cast decided to start speaking of the murder method.

+After a bit of discussion (where Eden was surprisingly helpful!), they realized the murder would require inordinate strength, and they start pointing the finger at Levi.

+The secrets are revealed then, as some have realized what most of the remaining ones were. David deduced Hu must have the “hopeless child” secret, Teruko deduced Veronika must have the “self-harm” secret, Veronika in turn figured Teruko must have the “dead family” secret (that wasn’t hers, but it still applied to her life, so they didn’t question it too much. David bit his tongue), and… well, they somehow realize the “poison” secret must be Min’s.

+As Levi’s secret is narrowed down, he finally admits.

+He takes the glove from his pocket, and dramatically confesses: “I… I killed Arei”

+All going according to plan!

+The voting time is almost about to happen, but Veronika pipes in. She wants to talk about the Ace case for some reason, and while Teruko tries to deny her, the horror fanatic throws the luckster’s own words against her. “The more cases we solve, the better we’ll be at solving them in the future!”

+Reluctantly, Nico starts speaking about what they did. It was… an odd sequence, but it wasn’t too wild.

+Except, Rose pointed out something odd. What happened to the tape?

+Nico says it was still on the floor when they left. Rose says it’s impossible. Eden’s getting nervous.

+And Teruko goes dead quiet, as she runs the math again in her head.

+The lockdown… the lockdown meant no one should have been able to take the tape during nighttime… MonoTV claimed it wasn’t the one to take it… and she knew neither Ace or herself had taken it… so… It must have been taken by…

+”Teruko?” someone asked, but she wasn’t listening. It was clear now…

+She couldn’t resist the maniacal laughter that escaped her, as the adrenaline of realizing how close they’d gotten to dying (scratch that, she wouldn’t have died, but the others might have), and she realized she was right. She couldn’t trust anyone.

+The others looked at her in concern, but she just explained the simple truth.

+It was chaos. No one wanted to believe it. But the more they thought about it, more questions arose. Why would Levi make such a complex mechanism, when he could have just killed Arei in a much simpler way?

+Whit had an idea. He asked Levi which direction Arturo had ran after leaving the infirmary. And Levi answered wrong. He hadn’t listened on the conversation, then. It would be impossible for him to write the note. Charles further verified by asking Levi and Eden to spell “responsible”. Levi spelt it right, Eden spelt it wrong. “Responsibel”, the same misspelling as the note.

+There was a scrum debate, people went crazy, but in the end. They arrived at the answer, and voted for Eden.

+It was right.

+They asked for further clarification and Eden admitted everything which had led to her decision.

+”I feel terrible. Arei really was… I should have believed her. But- But, at that point, when I finally realized the truth, it was too late” Eden explained. “I wish I hadn’t done it, I want to go back… but time only moves forward. You can’t go back, no matter how hard you try”

+She hugged Teruko one last time, pleading she wouldn’t close herself off even further. But Teruko wasn’t having it. She asked MonoTV she was using a MonoCredit to get Eden away from her.

+And MonoTV obliged, starting the execution right that moment. [Credit for the idea to venus and accirax]

~This was the truth. A tragic misunderstanding, a horrible mistake. Call it whatever you want, one thing remains the same. The blackened of the case, who committed the crime with the help of Levi Fontana, the Ultimate Personal Stylist, was none other than Eden Tobisa, the Ultimate Clockmaker!

…

And right before dying, Eden reveals the name of the girl she had kissed was Mai Akasaki-

Conclusion

Yeah, this was longer than it really had to be, but I had fun writing it. This will probably be the last post I make about this case, at least until CH 2 Part 2 comes out. Hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading, hope time only brings you good things! Take care!

#drdt #danganronpa despair time #fanganronpa #drdt theory #eden tobisa #levi fontana #arei nageishi #drdt spoilers

[deusvervewrites]

luminary: How does Izuku do in the sports festival

Um. Whoops.

After careful consideration of the abilities of the students in 1-A and 1-B, the canonical entrance exam, and the hypothetical abilities of the Aldera Squad following Midoriya's advice, I believe that Uraraka, Mineta, and Tsuburaba would not have made the cutoff into the Hero Course.

In 1-A, I am replacing them with the girl who can control water and the girl who can control wind, under the assumption that with training they'd be on par with basic waterbending and airbending. In 1-B I have replaced him with the girl who can turn into fire, under the assumption that she can turn part or all of herself into fire and not just her hands.

That leaves five of them in Gen-Ed where I am certain they would befriend Uraraka. This AU wouldn't go full Gen Ed Sweep but Midoriya would be interested in helping out his friends who didn't quite make it, and that now includes Uraraka.

With that established, I can now discuss the actual event.

Midoriya is simply too fast for an Obstacle Race to matter. That entire event has to be changed. Hmm... what about a version of King of the Hill where players have to stay within a specific, shrinking area? That would handle the mass elimination event while still challenging someone as fast as Midoriya. Additionally, this event would work out great for four of the five Aldera Squad kids that are in Gen Ed (smoke boy, hair girl, rock boy, stronk boy).

Cavalry Battle teams would be different. Todoroki's team would probably be the same, but Midoriya would stick with his friends. There's enough that Uraraka would probably be on a different team, and Midoriya would be a horse to exploit his speed. Let's pair him with the Wind Girl; that'll be a busted combo. add Smoke Boy as another horse and the Hair Girl as the rider they're incredibly fast, flying team, that'll be nigh-impossible to catch.

Uraraka can use a similar strategy by pairing up with the fire girl, Grab their telekinetic friend as the rider and can take headbands at a distance. Assuming that someone from this friend group won first in the previous event, they would point Hatsume towards this team, since Midoriya's strategy has no room for her.

That gives us enough room for one more team. With Fire Girl in 1-B, there's less chance of them following Monoma's plan and honestly those teams were so suboptimal anyway.

Alas, of the three remaining Aldera Kids I find to be noteworthy, two have Quirks that are redundant with the established cast (that being the guy who can buff himself up and the guy who can cover himself in rocks), so I might send them to a different Hero School entirely for peace of mind. That leaves only the Water Girl unassigned

Regardless, the final team is probably still Bakugou's.

Lemme quickly randomize a tournament bracket

Tournament Preliminaries:

The Tournament Round gets things off to an interesting start. Bakugou faces Hair Girl, and assuming she can produce more hair as a restraint like similar anime characters, it'd be a close fight, but Bakugou's Quirk counters her decently well.

Second round is Midoriya against Fire Girl, who happens to be one of the few people who can counter him by simply being fire. Though I feel Midoriya would likely win because of his analytical mind.

Yaoyorozu faces off against Todoroki next and wins, but only thanks to her training against Fire Girl and Water Girl with Midoriya--and Todoroki dropped his guard after the big ice attack.

Hatsume forfeits after her presentation, so Sero moves on

Smoke Boy beats Kaminari when Kaminari TKOs himself.

Iida beats Telekinesis Girl.

Wind Girl beats Kirishima--he's too straightforward to counter her effectively at this point.

Ashido vs Uraraka would be much closer if Ashido knew what Uraraka could do. Yeet.

Tournament Quarterfinals:

Midoriya beats Bakugou; Bakugou puts up a good fight because he knows Midoriya, but, well, Light Powers.

Yaoyorozu beats Sero.

Smoke Boy is hard to hit, but he's still working on his offense while Iida has more training in that department, so Iida wins.

Wind Girl is a hard counter to Uraraka. At least they're friends

Tournament Semifinals:

Yaoyorozu can't beat Midoriya (she takes too long to think at this point) but her clever use of a mirror at the start nearly clinches the match for her.

Iida is used to running into the wind, but Wind Girl can fly, so... sorry Iida.

Finals:

Midoriya vs Wind Girl. Midoriya should win this one pretty handily, but her flying makes it tricky for him.

#asks #luminary au

[many-but-one]

Hi,

Quick question* regarding polyfragmentation. What do you consider polyfrag? I know that 100+ alter count isn't what makes a system polyfragmented, but as a system with a load of fragments, do these fragments "count" when doing an alter count? We seem to have only around 10ish "main guys", (alters "distinct enough" (not sure on the vocab) to give me a name) but some pretty complex splitting patterns, i think, (a pair of twins, "just some guy tm" repeated, at least 2 "subsystems" (can you have a subsystem with only fragments? I think that's the situation, but I'm not sure) ) and as mentioned before a bunch of fragments (80+ according to a gatekeeper, separated into what I think are subsystems based on trauma "type"). One of those "subsystems" seem to work like a "build-a-bear/potato-head", where a bunch of different frags come together depending on the situation and then split back up again, which seems to be a polyfrag thing, from what I've read? But we usually feel a little stupid when we say "Oh we're polyfrag..ish...???", and then there's the, "well then, how many alters do you have?" "...10.."

Could you write a bit about polyfragmentation, and what the continuum between DID and Pf-DID/C-DID kinda looks like?

Thank you!

*that was not a "quick" question, sorry bout that, and the excessive parenthesis usage.

So, what I understand about polyfragmentation is that it's less about the alter count (100+ alters is just more common) and more about the structure of the system and how the system formed over time. You don't need to go through RAMCOA to be a polyfrag system, either. Here's what I've gathered is "required" for a polyfrag system:

large alter count (yes, fragments count into the alter count, but some systems choose not to consider them since they aren't "whole" however, they are still alters in their own right despite the fragmentation). However, what a system defines as a high alter count to "qualify" for polyfragmentation varies. I've met systems who would "count" as polyfrag who only have about 60 parts and fragments, but they meet a lot of the criteria for polyfrag so they use the label. I've also met polyfrag systems who are so fragmented they cannot even come up with a proper number to describe how fragmented they are, well into the thousands. Those higher number polyfrag systems (like us) also often have frequent fusions and splits that make it difficult to keep an accurate headcount, and most of our fragments have no name or appearance that can be understood. They still count into the headcount, but keeping track of them is nigh impossible. Which is why we just toss out "over 1k+" because that's about as good as it's gonna get for us. We likely have much more than even that but we have no true way of keeping an accurate count and our primary gatekeeper doesn't want us to anyway.

abuse typically starts before the age of five and is integrated into your daily life. More often, the earlier the abuse started and the more integrated into daily life it is, the more your brain has to rely on dissociation as a coping skill and the more often your brain will split alters for any type of situation or stressor. This is most obvious if the trauma began in your pre-verbal years, as you wouldn't have the words to describe what was happening to you or the understanding of what was happening to you, so your brain's FIRST line of defense is dissociation rather than trying to wrap your head around it or speak about it in some way. "Integrated into daily life" means trauma is happening every day or extremely often, and often in multiple aspects of your life. Such as being bullied at school, being abused at home, and having poor interpersonal relationships with people outside of both home and school. This leaves nowhere safe for the child to turn to but their own mind. So a child doesn't need to be tortured endlessly day in and day out to become polyfrag, it's just a more common way for polyfragmentation to occur due to the severity of the abuse and the manipulation that often comes with child torture.

presence of subsystems. Not all systems with subsystems are C-DID, but if they exhibit multiple other signs of polyfragmentation and also have subsystems, then it's likely they are polyfrag. Subsystems are much more commonly seen in C-DID systems. And yes, a subsystem can be primarily fragments and often are. Systems with alter counts that are quite high (60+) will not usually have 60+ alters that are whole and fully formed. More likely they'll have something like what you've got going on, 10-15 "fuller" parts and a whole slew of fragments. In our system (an HC-DID system) we actually don't have that many "full" parts, and all parts except for perhaps two or three who appear to be "full" are actually subsystems (alter in alter types), essentially a part full of fragments to create the illusion of a more full and well-rounded alter. Kind of like a bunch of little guys under a trenchcoat to create the illusion of one guy. I'm pretty sure Aridam (our highest level, primary gatekeeper), Dorian (our former host who is an ANP who holds no trauma), and maybe one of our early life caretakers are the only three that aren't alter-in-alter subsystems who seem to have a "fuller" or more well-rounded personality. Though I may eat my words later.

presence of ANEPs. These are "Apparently Normal Emotional Parts" and these are parts who are traumatized like an EP would be but are also functional in everyday life. Almost all of our host team alters are ANEPs, and from what I've gathered, they're very often "alter in alter" subsystems in both our system and other systems we've encountered. Because they are traumatized but often emotionally detached from the trauma, or have the ability to just not think about it too hard in order to function in everyday life. However, the emotions tied to the trauma have to go *somewhere* and that's usually either held in another alter in the system or held within a fragment in their alter-in-alter subsystem.

complex splitting patterns. The user @multiple-myselves made a post a while back talking about how they and other polyfrag folks have labeled different splitting patterns. They also talk a lot about things that are often seen in polyfragmentation, so if you're needing more answers, I suggest heading over there. They have a lot of good information about the subject. To quote the part of the post that talks about complex splitting patterns (which we only have a screenshot of, unfortunately, as searching tags on tumblr is a pain and a half), some examples of splitting patterns include: "fractal splitting, (parts that split in two and those parts split into two and so on or in a similar pattern), iterative splits (part splits into a fragment that develops into a fuller part and then splits again), splitting multiple parts at once, etc." For us, splitting patterns also include: splitting multiple versions of the same guy (almost like having a "base" that a split starts from. We have so many guys with white hair and blue eyes it's ridiculous, and that's because the "white haired blue eyed boy" is a template that our brain keeps handy. Same with the "black haired blue eyed boy"), splitting a new fragment for a very particular purpose and when that purpose is over, that fragment re-fuses into the part it split from (depending on how long that purpose lasted, this part could have elaborated a bit, which will then make the fused part at the end fundamentally different than when before the split occurred), and for our system some parts are programmed to split a certain number of parts every single time they split, usually a number that's significant to that part's trauma so I won't share the number for our safety.

As for your last question, I'm going to be honest, I only know the experiences of a polyfrag system since I am a polyfrag system. However, from what I can gather, DID systems are not without fragments, but usually the number of fragments won't exceed the number of "fuller" parts, or won't reach an extremely high number. Polyfragmented systems also seem to have an easier time with co-consciousness or having more than just two parts fronting (oftentimes, we can have up to three to five parts fronting or in co-con with a primary fronter at the same time, but that's also because most of those extra folks are fragments. Our communication has gotten to such a point that we can kind of "build a fronter" for a given situation that is needed based on what fragments are able to handle that situation the best. i.e. Marrow is very chill and emotionally level, Gmork is very not chill or emotionally level but very motivated and has high energy levels, and Dire is very well-organized, so having the three of them as a fronting team to get daily life tasks completed like applying for jobs or cleaning an area or feeding the body is a very good fronting "team." In that same vein, Vivek and Vasile are a great fronting team when social situations arise because Vivek is highly social and good at making friends, but he tends to overspend on the body's energy levels, so having Vasile in co-front keeps Vivek's energy in check and also keeps us from being too impulsive. Vivek is very impulsive and while Vasile can be, he's much less so. Dire often helps in these situations as well.)

I hope that this helped to answer your question.

#did osdd #did alters #dissociative identity disorder #manybutone #did system #cdid #polyfrag #polyfragmentation #asks #answered asks #anon ask #anon #advice