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botwstoriesandsuch · 3 years

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Back here with another episode of:

Read Part 1 here!

If you’re on mobile, and tumblr hates this post, follow along on this google doc!

Rules/overview this rewrite in the beginning of Part 1

Alrighty then, so let’s just jump into it!

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Recap! So when we last left off, we had just finished off Act 1 of the story. We’ve used the character introduction segments and the gambit feature as a means to give more life to everyone, without sacrificing too much cutscene time. Allowing us to save and focus the major story details and set up on the more cinematic cutscenes.

I had forgotten, but after Part 1 came out, an anon pointed out that Impa’s character introduction could use some work, and while you don’t need to read it right now to understand the rest of this post, I encourage you to look at it eventually to see the strengths and flaws in the original Impa introduction, and the reasons for my rewrite changes! All you need to know is that eggbot was lying around, deactivated, but when in proximity to the Sheikah Slate, was turned on like other Guardians. Eggbot being activated by the Sheikah Slate is kinda brushed over in the original game? But in my rewrite it’s gonna have some later significance. Also during the Royal Lab cutscene, I want Robbie or Purah to mention how Zelda’s control of the Sheikah Slate is quite exceptional or something. It’s a bit obvious already in Hwaoc, but I need it to be verbally said in a story scene for, again, later significance. Alright that’s it for my added details, moving on now.

After Chapter 1, we moved into the characters accepting the Call to Adventure, whether by the general external reasons of wanting to save the world, and developed a little bit further with more internal related reasons to give nuances and identities to different characters. Revali wishes to prove that his hard work earns him better merit than a sidekick, Urbosa wishes to protect and help Zelda on an emotional level, Mipha wishes to get closer to Link and come back to her family proud, etc etc.

Then, the climax of Act 1 ends with the Yiga ambush, and the characters get a first taste of leaving their areas of comfort, and journeying into the unknown world. Although the gameplay and the successful defeat of the Yiga establishes the Champion team’s strength, our interaction with Rhoam shows us that they still have a ways to go. The momentum into the full story now has a bit of tension and conflict.

So now we crash into the beginning of Act 2, the longest Act in a story, as it’s the part where the....story, happens. Let’s take a look at changes to the Hollows, eggbot mysteries, Zelda character growth, and our first real dip into the character of our antagonist, the Prophet of Doom himself, Astor…

So in the game, Chapter 3 opens on the flank of Death Mountain, our heroes overlooking the view of Korok Forest.

There are a few problems I have with this scene. It’s really stale, there’s no movement, nothing dynamic about it other than the opening shot. They just kinda stand there and say words until Revali’s done ranting and summons Medoh. Also Revali’s dialogue is a bit “much” to say the least, and uh, spoiler alert, he’s gonna be reworked a bit more than the other Champions. Finally, this scene doesn’t have a lot of purpose or substance. Sure, it has some character conflict with Revali and Link and the team, but that’s kinda established already, plus it’s something that I’ve already fleshed out in the last scene with King Rhoam, so it’s a bit redundant. So that leaves this scene serving only as a boring current draw to the Medoh fight and nothing else. This is the opening set up for the Chapter where important story stuff goes down! Needs a lot more substance. So! Here’s my rework.

We open on the sound of running. Link, along with Zelda, Urbosa, Daruk, and Mipha are running upwards on a path by Edlin. They’re chasing a small group of bokoblins and it looks like it’s the end of the fight. Urbosa is more near the back, with Zelda, but Daruk and Mipha both kill a bokoblin, their bodies of the monsters exploding in a cloud of malice upon their demise. When the camera shows each of their kills, the shots are quick, but I want the angle of the camera to be in such a way that the malice evaporates center frame, with Daruk and Mipha being behind the malice. This is because for a split second, it looks like the malice lingers around them like smoke. Huh, I wonder if that’s foreshadowing or something.

Anyhow, Link chases the final red bokoblin uphill, boots pattering against rock. However, we’re now seeing this from a moving, flying, bird’s eye view [quite literally wink wink]

Cut back close to Link, he kills the bokoblins. Stands there for a sec as he sheathes his sword. And then...

“Well I’ll be plucked. You defeated it, eh?”

Reveal Revali flying from above, and he lands in front of Link, but faces away from him. “Who would have thought that some little knight, amongst a group of chosen heroes, would get some action. You must be pretty proud of yourself, hm?” Cue that classic Revali head turn with a glare. Also when Revali says “heroes” I want him to flick his scarf dramatically, while staring at Link’s armour, as if internally he were judging Link on a runway.

Zelda runs up and starts speaking. “Oh Revali, I apologize our meet up with Medoh got a bit delayed. I assume that you’ve already positioned them by now for the attack?”

Revali hums a yes, but doesn’t bother to entertain a more fleshed out answer. Instead, he flicks his wing (as if to say, “come on”) and turns his back to walk up the trail. The others follow.

“I was informed that only the Champions and yourself would be present. What are…” Revali flicks a wing in the direction of Link and eggbot, like a Karen shooing a waiter. “...they, exactly contributing?”

Zelda says some stuff about Link being her bodyguard like: “Well, my father was impressed enough with Link’s actions from the other week that he’s assigned to give me further protection.’ She can say this a bit grumpily, to Link’s ignorance. Daruk can pipe in like “And a good thing too! Always great to have little guy at our backs.” and Mipha can nod sheepishly or something. But their dialogue is cut off by another rude interjection (because hell if Revali wants to listen to more rambling about Link)

“Right, right. And this thing is still around?” Revali gestures to eggbot.

Zelda: “Well, This little one's technological prowess has been quite useful in battle, allowing us to access the rune functions and all. So I figured it’d be a big help should something unexpected happen. Plus...” cute shot of Zelda staring at eggbot, “it just...feels right.” Then the little eggshit can like, chirp happily or make some cute whistle or whatever. Just shove in a bit of that egg fanservice, might as well since I need to better establish its presence for later.

Revali mutters something about “big help,” before gesticulating with his wings as he continues walking up the trial. “Mooore like a big liability should anything happen to your little pet, and one of us be forced to risk our lives just to save it from becoming scrap. Honestly, when it comes to you, and you.” Revali points to both eggbot and Link, “Your presence is an entire waste of time. ‘Backup?’ Help?’ Tsk. Humouring.” Eggbot can make a noise or something while Link just tilts his head. Revali continues: “You’re only here because of a non-existent, fantastical, imaginary hypothetical in which I somehow fail, and I don’t, fail.” When he articulates that last part, he stops walking and does another little head turn/glare, but he still doesn’t bother to fully face him. “I’m sure that your duty will no longer be of importance once your reputation...is nothing but a memory overshadowed by today’s great feats. A forgettable knight, heh heh!”

“Revali,” Urbosa sighs, “How long do you expect us to put up with your showboating and prattle?”

That when Revali finally turns fully to face the group, with a more grim glare. They’ve reached the top of the ledge anyhow, so they’ve stopped walking. This is where the camera can view the Lost Woods in its fullest as it zooms on Revali. Then, that ending is the same as the game with the pan up to Medoh’s presence.

“Fine. I’ve said enough. The time has come to show you what I’m made of. Now witness...Vah Medoh’s divine power!”

So that’s that. Revali is toned down a bit, and his rude remarks have more of a precision as to their point. It’s a bit hard to explain over words alone, but the fact that this scene takes place as the Champions are walking up the trail, means it’s a lot more interesting to look at. (Kinda like the walk and talk premise that you see in The West Wing) Plus, the trail being uphill establishes that hint of power dynamic as Revali is above everyone else. Also there’s just a bit of some botw dialogue connection, not only in just the opening, [Hwaoc Revali vs Botw Revali “Who would have thought” is put in different context based on their development, so it’s a good establishing point to show where this Revali is at in dynamics with Link in comparison to botw, all in just one line rather than in a more longer explanation] but I also scattered a few dramatic irony pieces in there heheh. There’s a lot more reasons why this scene is an improvement [and hopefully to you, it already *feels* better] but I’m not going to explain them until near the end, as its importance is connected to the later scenes of this Chapter.

In fact, that's the overarching change that I’ve made to these cutscenes, I’ve actually connected them and related them to the other scenes. This is the very first introduction to Chapter 3, after all, so it’s important that this introduction serves to be of more significance than “ok here’s the champions, here’s revali, there's medoh. Now go wreck stuff.”

Medoh’s fight is the same, the cutscenes after are mostly the same. Except here, when everyone runs into Korok forest and you see Astor, I want this scene to end not on Astor’s face (because it’s not as significant anymore since we’ve already see Astor in full in Chapter 2 with Urbosa’s stage) but it should end with Astor reaching out a hand towards the camera. The camera angle would be just a bit below Astor. This is because I want the implication to be slightly more clear that he killed those two Yiga underlings to craft the Hollows. It’s a nice little “watch it for the first time it doesn’t mean anything” but watching again it’s like “ohh how did I not notice that” kind of thing.

Then, Hestu’s introduction is roughly the same. I don’t think I really need to rework it too much, since Hestu as a character doesn’t serve anything major to the plot, so it’s fine for it to just be fun and cute. I will however, change just a few pieces of dialogue.

Revali: “Are we even making progress? We could just be going in circles.”

Daruk: “Good point. If only someone could fly above and scout the way.”

Revali: “As though I could see anything through this muck. Honestly, do you even think before you speak?”

Revali!!! Don’t be so rude to Daruk. Like yes it’s a bit funny, but that last part with “do you even think before you speak” is a bit much, because honestly Revali doesn’t really have a reason to hate Daruk. He’s characterized as being rude to Link and those he deems unworthy of respect, but Revali respects Daruk, Mipha, and Urbosa fairly well, considering they were chosen alongside him. So personally, I’d just tweak this to

Daruk: “Good point. If only someone could fly above and scout the way...”

Mipha snickers at this. And Revali mutters more quietly to himself, “As though I could see anything through this muck.” and gives little “hmph!” at Daruk, moving away.

There we go! It still serves it purpose of showing how the Champions are still not completely in sync (which is what I can assume was the original purpose of Revali’s rude comment line) but it’s played a bit more comedic (which makes sense considering this is in the context of Hestu’s introduction) and we get to poke fun at Revali, since just early we had spent so long boosting up his ego. Also Mipha laughing a bit with Daruk while Revali broods adds to that point of them being too busy to see Hestu right behind them.

Another small change, I don’t want Zelda to discover Hestu first. I want eggbot to discover Hestu, maybe they shake their maraca and eggbot notices and gives a little curious whistle. When Zelda notices eggbot not walking with her, she looks right, and that’s when she notices Hestu. It’s almost insignificant, but I really want to establish the eggbot’s presence for this chapter. Especially since this game writes him out of cutscenes a lot.

Final small change. That Hestu scene ends, not with Revali wordlessly shaking his head and following the group after hanging back. But with Mipha actively turning back, saying something like “Come, Revali. We should all stick together. It wouldn’t do for us to get lost.” and then a reply like “As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to mystic swords, magic trees, lucky knights, and walking eggs...I already am.” I’m just trying to keep intact that Nintendo “vibe” of flicking the character stances right in your face, especially since this game's only forms of telling the story are through these less than a minute cutscenes.

OKAY! Gameplay stuff. There are no real mechanic or level design changes to the Battle of Korok Forest, BUT there is one important change that I want to make here.

When the party splits up to take on the bosses in order to get rid of the malice. I think that the Hollows should speak.

Not like full on sentences and stuff (yet) but I think they should mumble and groan and be able to speak a few simple words. Now why do I say this? Well, let’s take a look at how I think we should introduce them.

First off, I think it should be a cutscene. Not just some 2 second animation where the Hollows spawn in. Nonononononono, this needs to be a cutscene, because it needs to be acted, because we need to see the character reactions. Like, if you’re gonna have that cliche “dark evil clone of the protagonists” thing, then you might as well go all out with the angst. In fact, personally, I would have rewritten is as the hollows actually *being* the champions and astor can temporarily control them but then when he sees that fail later in the game that can be his motivator for making the blights to kill them off since they’re no longer of use to him alive or whatever but we’re scrapping that idea because like I've said I want to try to keep the integrity of the original story.

Ok, so you have a character come up to one of the map points, and when they get there it fades into a cutscene. It’s not gonna be super long, but here’s the vision.

Character is in the lost woods, they killed a stalbokoblin or whatever. Just some low tier enemy, and then it dies and becomes that whisp of malice. Great. Character turns to leave, but then they hear something. Like a snicker, or laughter. Cut to this angle from behind the trees, but instead of astor it’s the character you’re playing as.

They go over to investigate, creeping closer with caution, until they see a shadow. The shadow of a small figure, about no higher than Link, with a long, trident weapon.

FWOOSH! An explosion of malice, almost like a fountain behind the character. They turn just in time to block the attack, the Lightscale Trident, but yet...it’s not the Lightscale Trident, because it’s covered in malice. Hollow Mipha is striking from the air, because this is basically her fountain teleportation thing, but malice. Once the character blocks the attack, time slows just a bit so you can see Hollow Mipha’s face, and then cut to the other characters face to give them a reaction. And that’s it.

Then you can pop back into gameplay, but there should be textboxes on the bottom where you can see the character’s surprised reaction like

[Unimportant detail, but if Daruk fights his Hollow self I want his reaction to be like “Woah! I sure look grumpy. I look like I skipped breakfast.” and then his gambit attack is like “eat THIS!” Also Revali can say something about how imitation is a form of flattery]

Through that fight, the Hollows also have like one textbox and a line of Evil™ mumbling and/or laughing once they’re defeated. The laughing is kinda used in a later scene, but it’s never really seen again so I just want that to be more prevalent. You all could probably think of more angsty “evil version of you” lines that are specific to each character, but I’m just thinking stuff like “You...won’t...last” or even just *muttering*. In fact, this is another thing that I want to flesh out with my gambit feature. It not only serves as interaction between whatever two characters you’re playing as, but also as interaction between your antagonists. So if you use a gambit on Kohga, he’ll say something specific about the characters he’s fighting. Same idea with Sooga, or Astor, and now here, the Hollows can say stuff to you.

There’s gonna be someone out there more creative than me out there that can think up some cool dialogue for them, but basically what I want to establish is that we know that these Hollows are made from people’s like, souls? Or life force or whatever you wanna call it. So it wouldn’t be farfetched to give them the ability to speak. Over the course of the game, I want their textboxes/dialogue to be more and more lifelike, like without the pauses or muttering. This is because the entire point of the dialogue is not only to serve that trope of “I’m the evil you I’m gonna say stuff that emotionally impacts you mwahaha” but it also makes them just a bit more menacing in my opinion. Also overall gameplay wise, I think they need to become stronger with the Champions because idk if it was just me, but they were so easy that I just forgot about them.

So! Korok Forest Battle introduces these creepy mumbling Champions, people react and are a bit freaked out, but they eventually clear the malice and we hit the next cutscene.

This is where the shit goes down.

You all probably remember how this scene goes down so I’ll try not to spend too much time explaining it. But here’s my two cents as to why I’m gonna rewrite it a bunch. I think it’s not a good villain reveal.

Like first off, it doesn’t establish Astor as a threat. His memorable action here is the summoning of the Hollows, and while yes, they do beat up Link and that’s very good, it also let’s Link easily beat them and Astor as soon as he gets the Master Sword IN THAT SAME SCENE. There was no time to let the threat of Astor linger, and when we see Link instantly beat him once he gets his Mcguffin, it really hinders the effect of this reveal.

Secondly, everyone is just silent during this??? Like, obviously Link doesn’t say anything, but Zelda doesn’t do stuff? Astor just kinda says “kill her!” and thats about it. Zelda never says “who are you?” or “what do you want?” or anything because as far as she’s concerned this is just some random dude, he’s not Yiga or anything. Also Astor never even introduces himself?? Throughout the entire game??? So while we the player know who he is because of his fancy title card, as far as all the characters are concerned he’s just a Mystery Clown.

It’s just super weird how no one asks any questions during this scene like no one acts like a human being with common sense. In fact, one could say that no one asks any questions for this entire game. Things just happen, and happen, and happen, and everyones just kinda chill. And then Zelda just kinda receives 17 flashbacks over the course of two minutes at the end of the game like she’s speedrunning botw memory%. Obviously having an aura of mystery over the course of your game is fine, it’s good to keep questions lingering over the audience’s head. Just so long as you answer them in a satisfactory way later on. Like, that’s not something I need to spell out for you right? If you set up a question, give the audience a good answer. If you set up a mystery, give a cool explanation. If you set up an interesting character you have to give the people a pay off that was worth their investment into them, right? Right? Right? You understand right? Cause as the writer for a story, it’s you’re to explain the significance and importance of why things happen in a creative way. It’s almost as if that’s the entire purpose of storytelling, you know, an explanation of events in a compelling manner. Like please, this is a concept that you are able to grasp right? This isn’t just me right? See that’s how writing works when setting up anything ever, you gotta give an explanation to the choices you make in the plot. You gotta explain why. You gotta explain why. Explain why. Explain why. Explain, why? Explain, why? Why? Why? WHy? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WH

Sorry I got carried away. Anyhow, here’s the rewrite.

Link and Zelda don’t enter the forest at the same time. They run through the wooden tunnel thing, and Link makes a gesture like “go!” while he stays back a bit to hold off some monsters like stal-lizalfos or something. So Zelda runs into the center of Korok Forest.

As far as any of the characters know, this is a safe haven now, this was their destination, so there’s no monsters here, so they’re good. The princess is safe, the Champions are just cleaning up in their respective corners of the forest with the Hollows, and Link is fighting off the monsters by the entrance. So while there is still tension from the battle, Zelda lets out a sigh of relief once she sees the Master Sword.

She approaches it, cautiously, but doesn’t step onto the stone pedestal, still staying a ways back in the grass. “We’re finally here,” she says to herself. “Now we just have to protect the sword, await for the hero to retrieve it, and await for destiny to arrive.” She looks down at the ground, and then at the back of her hand (fuck what hand was the one with the triforce, her left hand? I’m gonna say left hand). So she looks down at the back of her left hand, before letting it fall. She turns away from the Master Sword and to herself she just mutters, “I only wish that I could make as much progress in fulfilling my own role...in making myself to be of actual use, like the others.”

There’s a moment of silence as Zelda wraps her elbows and closes her eyes. Then,

“If that is what you wish,” a sudden voice echos, and Zelda spins around to face it, “Then perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

Cut to Astor, standing in front of the Master Sword, facing Zelda. Roughly where he is shown here, but Zelda is a couple feet away from him, standing on one of those rocks.

Zelda steps back in shock for a moment. “W-Who? Who are you?”

“Me?” He takes one step down the stairs. “Oh, I am just someone, same as you, who wishes to see destiny fulfilled.” Zelda takes another step back, and seeing this, he stops approaching. “Ease your mind, Your Highness. There is no need to be frightened. You may call me, Astor”

Cut to title card on his face, it can be like this, BUT, no malice or glowing magic around him, it’s all still lush green forest, and I don’t want as much focus on his astrolabe. It’s just his face, and he’s giving a warm, yet chilling smile.

Zelda is still stammering. “Y-You...do I……. how did you—”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters now is taking every step towards stopping the Calamity, correct?” Astor starts to take a step towards her again, and this time Zelda doesn’t flinch.

“Y-Yes. Yes of course. But I’m afraid I’m still a bit confused. ...What exactly do you...want?”

Astor doesn’t immediately answer. He steps off the pedestal and starts to circle around Zelda, eyeing her, but still with that creepy smile. “Tell me, Princess, how fares your recent training? Adequate progress, I presume?”

He continues circling around her, still a few feet away. Zelda looks to the ground, defeated. “I’m afraid not. I’ve been trying to aid the researchers with the Guardians and Divine Beasts. But when it comes to this power…” she looks down at her hand again. “...it seems despite my great efforts and restless hours of prayers, they have yet to awaken.”

Using his free hand, Astor places a hand on his chest, tilting his head in a sorry pout. The gesture seems exaggerated. “My...you poor thing. How harrowing this must be for you.” He continues walking, eyeing her as he circles behind. “But, I am certain it is not your fault. You are but a child, after all.”

“I…” Zelda is still staring at the ground in front of her. Astor continues.

“I mean really, have you ever stopped to think about how absurd this all is? A collection of mis-match warriors, demanded to pilot gods. A sword for an unseen hero. The lives of us all, in the hands of one girl. Expected to lead us all, awaken a divine power, and save the world, all before her 17th birthday…”

After a beat, Zelda finally looks up at him, confusion and suspicion back in her eyes. ��What did you say?”

Astor stops walking, he’s back directly in front of the pedestal. The camera is on him center frame, so that when he turns to face Zelda, his figure blocks the sword.

“Now Princess, is that truly what you want? Do you really believe yourself prepared to live up to such a monumental task?” He’s walking directly towards her now, arm outstretched.

“I—” Zelda pauses, before shaking her head. “Of course not, but that doesn’t mean—”

“Yeesss. Precisely! You needn’t not let yourself live like this, like some beggar to the gods, like a failure.” Astor is walking more quickly towards her, and Zelda is stepping back.

Zelda lets out a gasp of fear now, as Astor approaches, there’s a swirl starting to form around the astrolabe in his hand. “I don’t understand! What’s your point, what do you want? Who are you!?”

He stops walking, he’s so much closer now, just a foot or two away from her. “It’s quite simple my dear.” He gives another smile. “I’m a man who wants to live.”

Fwoosh! The air around them is now tinted purple, the astrolabe’s power surrounding them both. Zelda gasps again.

“If we truly wish to see this realm prosper, we must accept the indisputable truth.” Astor reaches out his hand. “You are not worthy of saving this Kingdom. You do not have the power to oppose such an unimaginable enemy! Therefore I shall relieve you of your burden, for the sake of us all. I will steal, your, destiny!”

Astor is seconds away from touching her, before suddenly...the sound of a sword unsheathing.

Astor flies back, crumpling on the steps of the pedestal, he looks up to see Link, sword at the ready. Link had pushed astor back with the pommel of his sword [because no stabbing or blood for our PG Nintendo game] and the motion has cause him to drop his astrolabe, which now lies a few feet in front of him in the grass.

“Link!” Zelda says, relieved. From behind, eggbot also appears. It walks infront of Link and gives a little whistle and does that sassy pointing thing in the direction of Astor, as if telling him off.

Astor frowns when he sees Link, but when he sees eggbot his face morphs into confusion. “You…? But I…” he glances at his astrolabe. Astor gets up to retrieve it and stands.

“It doesn’t matter how you’re here again. You can’t stop this.” Astor summons the Hollows, and they appear in front of him. It was harder to see in the lost woods, but here in the lush grass, its undeniable that the Hollows are draining the plant life around them.

“Kill whoever he is. Fight the Guardian if you must, though I’d prefer it intact. But don’t touch the girl.” He narrows his eyes. “Her thread shall be cut by my hand alone.”

Then it goes into that action sequence. Link is desperately fighting off the Hollows, while also trying to keep eggbot close to protect it. The hollows are laughing, even taunting him, as Astor is just walking calmly forwards towards Zelda, and Link can’t do anything to stop it.

Then it’s roughly the same, Link flies back as his sword breaks. Zelda is kinda helpless. And then just as Astor is about to reach Zelda again, Link cries out, the Master Sword glows. Everyone looks back, confused. Link pulls the sword. Boss fight.

After the fight and after Link defeats Astor, he’ll say something like. “That sword...is too powerful.” and blah blah blah. He looks up at Zelda. “Should you come to your senses, Your Highness,” he hisses the words, “I will delightfully accept an invitation with your company again.” He glares at Link. “Perhaps one day, when we have more time, you will fully come to understand where your arrogance is leading you.” He stands, though clutching his side in pain. “Until then, I shall make certain we meet again.” Link charges him, but he disappears in smoke and malice. End the Korok Forest arc.

Okay so! Why is this scene better? Uhhhhhhhh because it fucking is that’s why. We got 1) A villain introduction that’s more menacing 2) an establishment of character goals, but a mystery of character motivation to keep suspense 3) a more insightful look at different character’s feelings and thoughts 4) a much more interesting interaction with dialogue that raises tension and properly climaxes to the action and 5) the story’s momentum moves forward with ascending action, and new story details that set up later scenes.

I find it absolutely absurd that in the original game, these scenes are not written with more impact. This is the first look into the real mystery and substance that the story has to offer, and the first real look into the prime antagonist’s head. The actions and stakes throughout Act 2 have to properly ascend and rise in order to truly keep the audience engaged. You can’t just rely on mystery alone, you have to make use of character goals.

Reiterating Zelda’s internal struggles means that this can more easily connect and flow into the later segments where she doubts her ability and sees Link and the others grow stronger. In addition, Astor’s presence is a direct foil to Zelda’s arc. You can already see it a bit based on his dialogue, but I will more fully explain the true depths of how his is a direct foil to Zelda further down the line when all the aspects of his character are revealed. It’s almost as pacing the amount of information you give about a character can properly incite your audience to be more invested in the story, hmm. Anyhow, all you need to know for now is that good antagonists have similarities and aligning viewpoints as the protagonist in the beginning of the journey, much more, than you might think.

= = = = =

That is it for now! I can’t believe I had to dedicate an entire section to just one battle. But! That is how the story must go, as I need to flesh out as much as possible in only a few cutscenes without ruining the pacing. Tune in next time for flashbacks, backstory, Yiga husbands, token Zelink hours, aaand perhaps just a bit of Impa simping.

#Hwaoc: The Kip Cut #Part 2 #hwaoc spoilers #long post #hwaoc #age of calamity #hw age of calamity #hyrule warriors age of calamity

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trashassassin · 4 years

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Two Halves of a Whole | 1: Torture (V x Reader)

Wow, at last, I’ve finished a thing! And they said it couldn’t be done, they being me of course. Truth be told, this has been sitting in my google docs, finished and unedited, for way too long. And then I got all ready to post it when I remembered that I hadn’t come up with a name for the series yet and I had to sit on that for a while. It’s a whole mess, as per the usual.

These stories were originally going to be used for Kinktober, but then I accidentally a whole series instead. I originally had this idea planned for a megafic, but this format works out way better for it, imo. It’s going to have a bit of a coherent storyline, but it will be told out of order, so you definitely don’t need to read all of them if you don’t want to. The last one will be the most important in regards to the plot if you actually care about that as opposed to just the “plot” hehe. Anyway, I’m rambling now, so let’s get on with it!

In celebration of the recent announcement of DMC 5 Special Edition, I have begun crafting a series all about Vergil and his twink-y human half finally getting all the love and affection they deserve in life! Here, we are kicking things off right by torturing poor V with sex toys.

Word Count: 1987

Warnings: Sexually Explicit Content, BDSM/Bondage, Strong Language

You weren't sure you would ever grow used to the amount of power you felt in situations such as this. Physically, V was quite a bit larger than you and was more than capable of overpowering you in spite of his slight frame.

And yet, in this instance, he would have allowed you to do anything to him and the thought of it was intoxicating.

You positioned yourself so that you were straddling him, your legs falling to either side of his abdomen, then reached over and gently tugged on the restraints that held his wrists.

"It's not too tight, is it?" you asked.

"No," he replied. "It's fine."

He was already breathless and you hadn't even touched him yet, a fact that filled you with a sense of pride.

You were both still fairly new to this, so you were always careful to check in every once in a while and make sure you hadn't accidentally crossed any boundaries. With the power he had offered you came a great deal of trust and you weren't about to break that.

You smiled at him, a gesture that he returned, then reached down toward the nearby nightstand to pick up today's tool of choice: a small, black vibrating wand.

It was one that you had used on yourself a number of times, so you were already familiar with its settings and which ones you preferred.

Learning V's own unique preferences would be easy. This was evident enough from the few times you'd already been together. He was incredibly expressive, his desires laid plain, whether he wanted them to be or not. It was this, among other things, that made him so ideal for the role you'd put him in.

"Have you ever used anything like this before?" you asked, caressing the wand suggestively with your fingertips as you did.

"You know I haven't," he replied, the smallest hint of a smirk playing on his lips.

"I was just curious. We'll start off on the slower setting then, cause it can be a little intense if you're not used to it."

"I think I can handle it."

You leaned over him once again and whispered in his ear, "then prove it. Don't cum until I say you can."

You sat back upright and the brief flash of uncertainty that passed his face did not escape your notice.

"Hold out your hand," you said.

He did as you asked and you switched on the wand, then lowered it to his palm, which he eyed curiously as it buzzed from the vibrations.

"We'll start off slow," you continued.

You were going to give him a bit of a chance; this was supposed to be fun for you too, after all.

You repositioned yourself so that you would have a better vantage point, coming to sit just at the edge of the bed, then slowly lowered the wand until it pressed against the tip of his cock.

His entire body tense and he gasped.

You pulled the wand away and said, "I told you."

He narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

"Try to focus on your breathing. It'll help you last longer."

You pressed the wand back to his skin and he flinched a bit, but this time, managed to regain his composure for the most part.

Using your free hand to keep his cock steady, you maneuvered the wand up and over the head, then down the shaft where you brought it to rest just above your clasped fingers.

"You're so hard already," you purred. "This is gonna be easy."

You dragged the wand back up at a slow and even pace, and his breath stuttered a bit.

"Does it feel good?" you asked.

"Yes," he replied.

His voice was low and husky, as it always was when he was very aroused, and you found yourself getting a bit distracted by it. This was shaping up to be more of a challenge for you than you’d anticipated.

You brought the wand down again, then followed its upward motion with your hand, using it to stroke up and down his shaft as you used to wand to circle the head.

His back arched and the wand slipped, nearly causing you to drop it.

"Keep still," you scolded.

"No promises," he said.

His voice came out strained, as though he were holding his breath. That wasn't exactly what you had meant when you told him to focus on his breathing, but it amused you how hard he was trying.

"There are a few more settings I can try," you said. "Let me know which one you like best."

You clicked the button on the wand's handle, causing it to switch from the basic vibration setting to one that spun in one direction, paused, then continued in the other direction. You began to run it up and down the underside of his cock and studied his reaction carefully.

He squirmed a bit, but that was all you managed to get.

Perhaps the pauses between the turns were too long. You pressed one of the other buttons and the rotations sped up just a little bit.

His eyes squeezed shut and he clenched his hands, causing the ribbon that held them to visibly tighten.

"How's this one?" you asked.

His lips parted into a smile and he sighed.

"Good," he said.

You held the wand in place for a moment, allowing him to grow used to the sensation, then switched to the next setting.

This one elicited the response you had been hoping for. His hips rose from the bed, forcing you to readjust and a throaty moan escaped his lips in spite of his continued efforts to keep his breath held.

Once he'd returned to his original position, you fell back into your previous rhythm of sliding the wand up and down the length of his cock, your hand following in its wake.

His arms tensed, pulling his restraints taut, and his breath came in uneven pants.

You began to move a little faster, trying your best to keep your pace steady in spite of the unpredictable jerking of his hips.

"Wait!" he gasped. "Slow down."

You contemplated for a moment whether or not you were going to comply with his request, and eventually decided that you were, if only to draw out the experience a bit longer.

You turned the intensity down back to where it had started, then gave a few more lazy strokes before pulling the wand and your hand away.

His cock pulsed a few times in the absence of your touch, forcing a drop of precum to the tip. You were so tempted to reach out and tease him again, but decided against it for the time being.

"You're so close already," you said with an exaggerated frown.

You kept your face lowered so that he would be able to feel the warmth of your breath as you spoke.

"It's not my fault," he said. "You're really good at this."

The breathy tone of his voice coupled with sight of his cock only inches from your face, which pulsed again in desperation for your touch, sent your head spinning.

You suddenly became aware of your own labored breathing and, given the proximity you had so carefully calculated, he was aware of it too.

"I wanna fuck you," he said, followed by a rough sigh. "So bad."

You cocked your head to one side and feigned nonchalance, even though you wanted this just as badly.

"Maybe if you pass my test," you said.

You held up your free hand and, with deliberation, wrapped it just beneath the head of his cock, using your thumb to swirl the precum around the tip as you had imagined doing moments before. This provoked even more, and it began to run down over your fingers.

"This is torture," he groaned, and you couldn't help but smile.

"I know," you said.

You were beginning to feel the same way, but you weren’t about to let him know that.

You ran your hand, which was now quite sticky, up and down the length of his shaft before withdrawing it and using it to hold the wand steady as you switched it back on.

"Ready?" you asked, and he nodded.

You picked up exactly where you left off and he reacted within seconds, his eyes fluttering closed as his head tipped back against the pillow beneath it.

You had to struggle quite a bit to keep your hand in place as he had taken to thrusting into it this time around.

“I told you to stay still,” you said. “You’re only making this harder for yourself.”

“Sorry,” he said.

He slowly lowered himself back onto the bed and did his best to stay there, but you could tell how much he was struggling. His hands were clenched again and his arms were drawn up tight, pulling at the restraints so hard that you were certain there would be a mark on his wrists when you removed them later.

Just as he’d begun to relax again, you turned the intensity up by one, the new setting leaving almost no gap at all between the pulsing vibrations.

He moaned and started to thrust into your hand again but managed to catch himself before you’d even opened your mouth to scold him.

He flushed, both from arousal and from embarrassment, you guessed. You got the impression that he was ashamed of how vocal he got in the throes of passion, a quirk of his that you found quite endearing.

With his hands restrained, his only option was to bite down on his bottom lip, first one side, then the other, but it was no use. Every time you managed to hit a particularly sensitive spot, he cried out again, in spite of his best efforts.

You turned the intensity up one more time and mentally began counting down from thirty before you would allow him his release.

“Almost there,” you encouraged, but you weren’t sure he was still paying attention to what you were saying.

He began shifting from side to side as though he were trying to escape your grasp, but you weren’t about to allow him to do that.

“Slow down,” he gasped, but you’d already made up your mind.

You weren’t going to give him the relief he was looking for this time.

“Just a little bit longer.”

Only a moment after you’d said this, his face contorted in pleasure and the first spurt of cum hit your hand, the rest coating a good majority of his abdomen.

“Stop!” he cried out, and you switched off the wand as his cock continued to pulse wildly between your fingers.

When it finally came to a stop and his breathing began to return to normal, he opened his eyes and looked up at you with a sly smile.

“Well?” he asked.

“Not quite,” you replied.

You’d only managed to make it to twenty-six.

“That was hardly fair,” he said. “Were you even keeping track?”

“I was.”

This was only a partial truth. It was hardly your fault that you’d gotten a bit distracted along the way.

“You did your best,” you said as you stood to undo his restraints. “Let me know when you’re ready to try again.”

His eyes widened.

“With that thing?” he asked, pointing to the wand, which now sat inert where you had once been sitting. “I’m not sure I can handle that again today.”

“I warned you.” You chuckled. “Maybe I’ll try something different.”

Perhaps next time, you would try with your mouth or your hand instead. So many possibilities ran through your mind as you stared down at him and he stared back at you, a contented look on his face.

For now, at least.

As soon as he was ready, you planned to start your unique brand of torture all over again.

#fanfiction #writing #i have to be really careful with these tags #lemon #dmc 5 #dmc 5 v #v #smut

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per-ineptia-ad-astra · 5 years

Text

Star Trek Episode 1.15: Shore Leave

AKA Rabbits and Pistols and Women, Oh My

Our episode begins on the bridge, where Kirk is looking over a pad with a yeoman while awaiting a report from a landing party. He gets a kink in his back, so the yeoman starts giving him a backrub, but since both she and Spock are standing behind Kirk he doesn’t realize who is giving him the backrub. This results in quite possibly one of the most infamous lines in all of Star Trek.

[ID: Kirk sitting in his chair on the bridge, his back being rubbed by a brown-haired yeoman, caught in a moment of realization as he says, “Dig it in there, Mr. Sp--” and sees Spock walking past him.]

As everyone does their best to pretend that didn’t just happen, the yeoman says that Kirk needs sleep. Kirk replies that he gets enough of that from McCoy. Presumably he means that McCoy has been telling him that he needs to sleep, and not that McCoy is somehow giving him sleep, although really, anything’s possible. Spock says McCoy is right—wow, get that one on tape—Kirk and everyone onboard need rest after what they’ve been through the past three months. (Exactly what that is is left to the imagination.) Everyone except Spock, of course. He’s fine. He’s always fine. Evidently Kirk is too tired to bother putting up a fight about this, because he tells Uhura to send the landing party report to his quarters and staggers off the bridge.

We then see said landing party down on the nearby planet, which is so unbelievably lush and green that it has actual trees and grass instead of a soundstage with some foliage stuck on.

[ID: McCoy and Sulu walking down a sunlit grassy lane with trees to the right and tall plants at the edge of a pond to the left.]

McCoy and Sulu are naturally quite awed at this incredible beauty. Sulu says that it has no people and no animals, making it perfect for relaxation. No animals? Wow, that must be a really interesting ecosystem—how did a whole planet evolve with no animal life, while still resembling Earth so closely? The plants would have to have evolved unique mechanisms for reproduction without animal life to help pollinate them, not to mention the effect that no herbivorous consumption would have and—right, sorry. No animals means a good vacation! That’s the important thing. I guess.

Anyway, McCoy thinks the planet is just the place for some relaxation time for the crew, if they can get Kirk to authorize shore leave there. It does seem like a nice place to chill out after a lot of stress, but I question the Starfleet policy of letting crews take shore leave on random newly discovered planets as long as they don’t appear to have sapient native life as determined by some people wandering around on a small portion of it for a few hours. There could be plenty of threats there that they just haven’t uncovered—or, on the flipside, a whole crew full of people beaming down to loiter around could wreck havoc on an alien ecosystem. But, eh, it’s just plants, it’ll be fine.

McCoy comments that “you have to see this place to believe it—it’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland.” Bones, my man, I don’t know what copy of Alice in Wonderland you read, but I don’t remember its primary feature being nice-but-totally-normal-and-physics-obeying parkland.

Sulu stops to get some samples of the plant life, while McCoy wanders off happily, obviously enjoying the chance to just have a nice stroll through nature and chew on a stalk of grass. That is, until he spots something...unexpected.

[ID: A large humanoid white rabbit standing among the foliage, wearing a checked red and yellow shirt, yellow waistcoat, and brown and gray neckcloth, with an umbrella tucked under one arm.]

The rabbit exclaims that he’ll be late and hops (sort off) off through the undergrowth. A moment later a young girl in a blue and white dress runs up and asks McCoy if he’s seen a rabbit around. All poor Bones can do is point mutely in the direction the rabbit went, and the girl gives him a curtsy and runs after the rabbit.

McCoy stands there in abject shock for a moment before managing to bellow for Sulu, who comes running. Despite being only a few yards away, Sulu was evidently too absorbed with horticulture to notice any of what just happened, and there’s now no sign of either rabbit or girl. He asks McCoy what’s wrong, but McCoy can’t seem to find the words, and really, can you blame him?

[ID: McCoy standing by the edge of a pond, holding a grass straw tensely and staring in front of him while Sulu puts a hand on his shoulder and asks, “What is it, doc?”]

“Oh god, this is it. I knew this job was going to drive me insane and it’s FINALLY HAPPENED.”

After the break we get a captain’s log from Kirk talking about how nice this planet they found is. You can tell he’s tired and kind of out of it from the way he rambles a bit, and takes a moment to remember the entire stardate. Despite this, the yeoman currently talking to him in his room notes that he isn’t in any of the shore leave parties. Kirk waves this off and dismisses her, but this does nothing for Kirk’s solitude because she is immediately replaced by Spock.

Kirk asks Spock which shore leave party he wants to go with, but Spock says he’s not interested in going at all. On Vulcan, he says, “to rest is to rest, to cease using energy. To me, it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass using energy instead of saving it.” Well, it would be. Your planet doesn’t have any green grass. The idea of going outside to relax probably would be pretty foreign on Vulcan, which is generally rather lacking in environments that anyone would consider relaxing.

The conversation is interrupted by Uhura paging Kirk to say there’s a call from McCoy. Kirk genially tells her to open a channel, little suspecting what this conversation is going to be about.

McCoy—remarkably calmly—says that either all their sensor probes are defective, or he is. Kirk naturally asks him to explain, leaving McCoy in the unenviable position of having to describe what he just saw. Kirk takes the whole story to be a joke, while Spock stands there rolling his eyes to the heavens. It’s understandable enough; even for people with as many weird experiences as these guys, giant talking rabbits aren’t something you expect to encounter, although I have heard that they appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one.

Kirk figures that this is a trick of McCoy’s to get him to come down to the planet—that he doesn’t think Kirk will come down for shore leave unless he’s baited with a bit of mystery. Which doesn’t sound terribly like McCoy, I have to say. He seems less likely to make up a weird story about a rabbit as part of a cunning plan to lure Kirk into shore leave, and more likely to just physically drag him down to the planet by the ear.

Spock, evidently deciding not to get involved in these weird human things, says that actually he did have something he came here to discuss. He’s checked Dr. McCoy’s log—pre-rabbit sightings—and apparently there’s a crew member aboard who’s being a bit of a problem.

“[He’s] showing signs of stress and fatigue, reaction time down nine to twelve percent, associational reading norm minus three.”

“That’s much too low a rating.”

“He’s becoming irritable and quarrelsome, yet he refuses to take rest and rehabilitation. Now he has that right, but we’ve found--”

“A crewman’s right ends where the safety of the ship begins. Now, that man will go ashore on my orders. What’s his name?”

“James Kirk.”

[ID: 1. Spock looking at Kirk with a look of mock surprise and innocence while saying, “James Kirk.” 2. Kirk stares back at Spock. 3. Spock saying, “Enjoy yourself, Captain,” with a decidedly smug smile. 4. Kirk staring at Spock, now with a GTA-style overlay saying ‘wasted’.]

Weeeeelll, there’s not a whole lot Kirk can do about that devastating takedown except swallow the pill and go take some shore leave already. Spock tells him that they’ve detected no animals, no artifacts, no force fields (? was that a potential problem?), it’s just a nice pleasant green planet. But even as he’s saying this we see, down on said pleasant green planet, a rock by a pond slowly move aside on its own to reveal….A GUN! No, not a phaser—an actual, old-fashioned revolver. Dammit! The NRA got here before us!

Unknowing of the terrible threat looming nearby, a couple of crewmen—a goldshirt woman and a blueshirt man—are investigating some of the plant life. The blueshirt is intent on scanning some ferns, prompting a complaint from the goldshirt that he’s too focused on work, work, work, and not appreciating the natural loveliness all around them. The blueshirt responds that he’s focused on work because they’re working—they’ve got a report to make to the captain and things aren’t going to be nearly so pleasant if it’s not ready on time. Right after he says that, who should beam down but Kirk himself, along with the yeoman. Oh man, speak of the devil. Don’t you hate it when you’re talking about your boss and he immediately materializes out of thin air in front of you?

Luckily for the crewmen—Rodriguez and Teller, Kirk calls them—he’s not here to crack the whip. Told that they’ve finished the survey, he tells them to submit it to Spock and then clock out and enjoy themselves. Incidentally, Kirk calls the goldshirt Teller, but she’s played by the same actress who played Martine last episode. The character was named ‘Mary Teller’ in the script, but once they got on set someone noticed that they had—again, somehow—accidentally cast someone who had already appeared as a named character, and changed her first name to Angela to match Martine...but as you can see, it’s a bit inconsistent. And a bit jarring, if she is the same character, to see her so bright and happy and with budding romantic tension between her and Rodriguez, considering what happened to her last week. It worked out pretty well when they did this with Riley, but this time, not so much.

At any rate, Rodriguez points Kirk over to where Sulu and McCoy were. Kirk and the yeoman head over there, talking a bit about how incredibly beautiful the surroundings are. The amount that this planet gets talked up in the episode initially struck me as a bit odd; don’t get me wrong, it’s quite nice and pretty, but I don’t think I would call it jaw-droppingly, impossibly gorgeous. But then, y’know, I see trees everyday. I can see trees right now just by turning my head about ninety degrees. If I spent the majority of my life in a spaceship, seeing the same gray, florescent-lit surroundings every day, breathing in sterilized air and rarely seeing any space more open than Engineering, I’d probably be awestruck at the first bit of green I saw in months too.

The captain and the yeoman find McCoy some way away, still standing by the pond and brooding over his sanity. Kirk is all ready to set into some teasing about rabbits and the sighting thereof, but while McCoy is still not entirely sure he didn’t hallucinate the whole thing, he’s got at least one thing a bit less easy to dismiss: large footprints in the dirt nearby.

[ID: Kirk kneeling in a dirt track, examining two sets of four-toed footprints.]

Those don’t look a great deal like rabbit tracks, but then, that didn’t look a great deal like an actual rabbit either. Kirk is, reasonably enough, not quite ready to commit to giant talking rabbits yet, but evidently something is going on here, so he calls up to the ship and tells the shore leave parties to stand by and not leave the ship. Right when they were about to disembark, too. You could probably hear the collective groan clear on the other side of the ship.

McCoy expresses some surprise at Kirk suspending the leave, since after all it’s only a giant talking rabbit that came from nowhere, what’s worrying about that? Kirk asks if McCoy can explain this whole business and McCoy has to admit that he can’t, and since neither can Kirk, he’s erring on the side of caution and not bringing the entire crew planetside until they figure out for sure that whatever’s going on isn’t dangerous. It’s probably not dangerous, but then again most people would say a quick checkup for a couple of isolated archaeologists probably wasn’t dangerous. A socially stunted teenage boy probably wasn’t dangerous. Someone beaming up with a bit of glittery space dirt on them probably wasn’t—you get my drift.

So nobody’s getting their vacation until Kirk gets some answers, but before they can start working on that there’s a sudden explosion of noise—gunshots. Which I don’t expect people from the twenty-third century could readily identify, but it’s obviously a big scary dangerous-sounding noise, so everyone takes off at a run to go see what’s going on.

What’s going on turns out to be...Sulu, standing in a clearing and happily firing off the revolver we saw earlier. Naturally Kirk is all “wtf, Mr. Sulu” and Sulu cheerfully explains that look! it’s a gun! isn’t it cool??? Apparently antique gun collecting is one of Sulu’s many side hobbies, and this one is a really cool old super rare gun that he’s been wanting for ages, which he just happened to find laying under a rock nearby. He seems weirdly unperturbed by a centuries-old Earth weapon—let alone the specific centuries-old Earth weapon that he just happened to want—turning up on a newly discovered, uninhabited and definitely non-Earth planet. Also, apparently Sulu’s interest in guns did not at any point include an accompanying interest in gun safety, since he thought it was a good idea to just start firing the thing off randomly for kicks.

Kirk puts his hand out and gives Sulu a stern “hand over the toy, young man” expression, and Sulu reluctantly gives it up. He tries to explain to Kirk how the gun works, but fails to mention the part about how you really shouldn’t just stick a loaded gun straight into your belt unless you want to shoot yourself in the leg, so naturally Kirk does exactly that.

Well at any rate, that confirms that there’s more going on here than one brief localized hallucination. Speaking of which, Yeoman Barrows suddenly spots more of the strange tracks they saw earlier, running right past them. Kirk orders Sulu to take Barrows and follow the new tracks AND NO MORE SHOOTING THINGS. Meanwhile, he and McCoy are going back to the glade to investigate the original set of tracks. Frankly I’m not sure how useful ‘the glade’ is as a place name on a planet that seems to consist of nothing but glades, but that seems to be what Kirk is going with. As the captain and the doctor head off, we see a strange antennae rise from the rocks and turn towards them.

Kirk and McCoy walk back to The Glade, chatting about how strange and obnoxious this whole situation is—can’t even go down for a spot of fresh air and sunshine without weird shit happening. Still, McCoy says, it could have been worse—Kirk could have been the one who saw the rabbit. At that Kirk laughs and asks McCoy if he’s feeling a bit picked on about all this, and McCoy admits that yeah, just because you know exactly what’s going to happen when you tell someone you saw a giant humanoid talking rabbit doesn’t make it fun.

Kirk says that he knows what it feels like because he got picked on a lot back at the Academy, though presumably not for rabbit-related reasons. Evidently, as he himself freely owns up to, Kirk was not just a serious student but a “positively grim” one, which made him an easy target for inter-student-body trolling. That Kirk was especially studious and strait-laced in his academic years is an aspect of his character that’s consistent throughout TOS (remember Mitchell’s remarks about Kirk being a “stack of books with legs”), but it’s one that seems to be easily forgotten about in favor of the assumption that Kirk must have been a wild, rule-breaking, carefree kind of student more interested in having dorm room hookups than passing tests. I’m just sayin’. Take notes.

At any rate, Kirk relates how there was one particular upperclassman named Finnegan who took special delight in taunting and pranking him—putting soup in his bed or a bucket of water on the top of a door. Which, honestly, as far as college pranks go that’s pretty lacking in creativity, but it clearly got to Kirk as evidenced by the fact that he’s still kinda sore about it some fifteen years later.

In the midst of all this reminiscing, they notice a new set of tracks—young girl tracks. Or, well, not that there’s anything about them that specifically says ‘young girl’, but since McCoy saw a young girl in the vicinity of the rabbit we can make a safe assumption. Kirk decides to split up; he’ll follow the Alice tracks, and McCoy can follow the rabbit tracks. McCoy’s amenable to this.

[ID: McCoy saying, “I got a personal grudge against that rabbit, Jim,” with a broad grin.]

Kirk hasn’t been alone for very long, though, when he hears a voice calling, “Jim!” He turns—and there, leaning against a nearby tree, is a young man wearing a silver shirt and an insufferable expression, accompanied, as all Irish people are legally obligated to be, by cheerful jig music. It is, or appears to be, Finnegan himself, in the flesh and just as fresh and smirking as he was at the Academy-- something he demonstrates by grasping Kirk’s shoulders in a brotherly fashion before walloping him with a punch that sends Kirk head over heels into the grass. As Kirk lays there stunned, Finnegan dances around laughing like a hyena and taunting Kirk to get up and fight back.

Now, Kirk, of course, is no longer an Academy freshman, but a decorated starship captain with ample experience in dealing with highly unusual circumstances and keeping his head in times of stress, so naturally his measured response to this impossible situation is to stay calm and evaluate what could be causing this and how dangerous—only joking, he gets up and charges at Finnegan with clear intent to strangle the bastard. I can’t really blame him, though. They cast Finnegan to perfection; the actor does a really good job at being an annoying little shit.

Before the fight can really get going, though, a sudden noise cuts across the clearing. Not gunshots, this time, but a terrified scream. Kirk immediately takes off in the direction of the sound, leaving Finnegan behind to jeer at Kirk for running from a fight.

As Kirk pelts across the grass he’s joined by McCoy, also running to see what’s going on. The two of them track the noise down to Barrows, sobbing and gasping on the ground next to a tree with her uniform all torn away from the collar on one shoulder, a rare case of the fragility of Starfleet uniforms being a problem for someone other than Kirk. And honestly I’d say Barrows gets a worse deal out of it, since the female crewmembers have so much less uniform to lose in the first place. Poor yeoman doesn’t get an undershirt, either, or, apparently, even a bra with straps.

Barrows says, rather frantically, that she was just walking along when suddenly “he” appeared—a man in a cloak with a jeweled dagger. Kirk asks if she’s sure she’s not imagining all this. That’s pretty damn rich from a man who was fistfighting his inexplicably appearing college rival a couple minutes ago. What, does he think Barrows imagined this so hard it ripped her uniform?

She gets rather rightfully pissed and tells Kirk that no, she did not dream up being attacked, you jerk. McCoy comments that the man she’s describing sounds like Don Juan. Which is quite a leap since all he has to go on is “cloak and jeweled dagger,” which could potentially describe an incredible amount of characters. Hell, that could be Barrows’s D&D character. But no, apparently McCoy got it in one, because Barrows says that actually, as she was walking through the woods, “it was so sort of storybook...I was thinking, all a girl needs is...Don Juan.”

Really? I mean, I don’t mean to judge anyone else’s romantic fantasies. But, well, I could see walking through some beautiful woods and thinking the scene just needed a charming prince or maybe a unicorn or something. Not so much, “gee, it’s so beautiful around here, all a girl needs is to be violently assaulted by a fictional character legendary for being a womanizing sleaze.”

Well, anyway, that was weird. Hey, come to think of it, where’s Sulu? Shouldn’t he be around here somewhere? Barrows says that he ran after the cloaked fellow. Oh dear. New plan: Kirk tells McCoy to stay with Barrows while he goes to look for Sulu. As Kirk runs off, the mysterious aerial appears again, seemingly tracking him, but it goes unnoticed by everyone.

Kirk soon finds himself leaving the trees and meadows and jogging out into a rocky, desert-like area. It’s still pretty out there, though, with some wildflowers growing around, which Kirk stops to admire. Kirk. Kirk, buddy, I like flowers too, but you’ve got a crewman potentially in danger here. Maybe we could enjoy the foliage later.

A moment later, though, Kirk spots something a lot more distracting than a pretty flower: a pretty woman!

[ID: A white woman with blonde hair braided in a ring around her head, wearing a dress which is half white and half black with a pink flower design on the black half, standing in front of a cliffside surrounded by plants.]

Kirk stares in stunned rapture as the woman approaches. This is not just any woman; this is, judging by Kirk’s disbelieving murmur of, “Ruth…?” someone he knows, or knew. Random woman that Kirk knows who we’ve never heard of before? Gee, I wonder what connection he could possibly have to her. I’m going to guess she’s not his aunt.

“It is me, Jim darling, it is Ruth,” the woman says, and moves in to rub against Kirk’s cheek. Well, that’s an upgrade from Finnegan at any rate.

After the break Kirk gives a rather distracted captain’s log: still investigating this weird planet, lost a crewman but found a woman so it evens out. With a last vestige of professionalism he attempts to call McCoy, but the communicator isn’t working. Kirk is exactly as bothered by this as you would expect someone to be whose phone just broke right when they needed to call someone but really didn’t want to.

Anyway, back to more important matters: “How can it really be you, Ruth?” Kirk says it’s been fifteen years, but she hasn’t aged a day. He really seems quite emotional about all this. Kirk’s always courteous to the girls of his past, but he doesn’t usually get this worked up about seeing them again. Ruth must have been someone really special to him.

Sadly, the dreamy romantic atmosphere can only last so long before it gets shattered by reality, in the form of a communicator chirp, specifically. It’s McCoy, wanting to know if Kirk’s having any luck finding Sulu. You know? Sulu? Your crewman that you’re supposed to be looking for? Might be in danger? Remember him? Apparently not, because Kirk only manages a vague “hmm?” and then, when McCoy wants to know what the heck is going on over there, Kirk mumbles that he’s sure Mr. Sulu will be just fine. Maybe he’ll find a woman too! Or another gun. Whatever. He’s fine. It’s fine.

But Kirk just can’t get a break in here, because he promptly gets another call. This time it’s from Rodriguez, reporting that he just saw a flock of birds go overhead. “Don’t you like birds, Mr. Rodriguez?” Kirk asks, so Rodriguez has to remind him of that tiny little detail that there are no birds on this planet. Or at least, there aren’t supposed to be, according to all those scans they took.

Welp, Kirk says, guess those scans were defective, how bout that, funny ol thing, probably not important though...but, for all that he clearly wants to tell Rodriguez to go away so he can get back to Ruth Time, Kirk’s captain instincts are still hanging in there somewhere, so with a sigh he snaps out of it and tells Rodriguez to have all the search parties meet back at The Glade before hanging up. Ruth tells him to go do what he must and that he’ll see her again if he wants to, then walks off back into the desert, leaving Kirk alone among the rocks with only his memories...but just for like, five seconds, because he promptly gets another call.

This time it’s Spock, reporting that they’re getting some strange readings indicating some kind of ‘power field’ down on the planet, and that there’s “a highly sophisticated energy draining our power and increasing, beginning to affect our communications.” How energy can be highly sophisticated is beyond me, honestly (is it wearing a monocle? what?), but you’re the science expert there, Spock. Seems this energy might be coming from beneath the planet’s surface, possibly indicating some kind of industrial activity going on down there.

Well, I think at this point we can definitively say that Something Weird is going on down here. Kirk heads off back to The Glade in pursuit of answers, and as he leaves we see another aerial, sticking up from a rock and twirling attentively in his direction.

Meanwhile, McCoy and Barrows are having a cheerful meander through the woods. Lovely as the woods are, though, Barrows comments that she wouldn’t want to be alone in them. “Why not?” McCoy asks. I dunno, man, because she just got attacked by an armed man with distinctly dishonorable intentions? I think that’d put most people off a stroll through the woods, no matter how nice said woods are.

Barrows hasn’t been dissuaded from the romantic ideal entirely though, and says that in woods like this a lady should be dressed in some fancy fairy-tale princess duds. I was thinking ‘long pants and hiking boots’ myself, but whatever works for you.

McCoy replies that if she was so dressed she’d have “whole armies of Don Juans to fight off...and me, too.” Not sure if “let me just remind you of that scary encounter you just had with a threatening man” is the best approach to flirting, but going by the moment of tender hand-holding they proceed to have, I’d say Barrows is down with it. (Hmm...Bones...Barrows...kind of goes together. In a morbid way, but still.) Still, the whole thing doesn’t feel quite in character for Bones, which might be explained by this plot originally being intended for Kirk (of course) with McCoy swapped in later. Kirk and McCoy are pretty much interchangeable, right? Sure.

Barrows is quickly distracted from the hand-holding when she spots something in the trees nearby: the exact kind of fancy fairy-tale princess clothes that she was just talking about, hanging on some branches. Imagine that. She runs over to the clothes and holds the dress up to herself gleefully, exclaiming, “Look at me, doctor! A lady to be protected and fought over!” When McCoy suggests the clothes would look even better with her in them, Barrows isn’t sure if it’s a great idea, but decides to go for it. Now, uhhh, if Barrows wants to wear a pretty princess dress that’s entirely her prerogative, and I don’t blame her for wanting to change out of that awkwardly ripped uniform, but putting on a set of fancy clothes that mysteriously appeared in the woods? That sounds like an excellent way to get captured by faeries and I would not recommend it.

Barrows goes to change behind some bushes, brazenly ignoring the possibility of being kidnapped by the fair folk, and McCoy is very deliberately Not Peeking when he gets a call from Rodriguez. The communicator has gone all staticy and squawky, though, and McCoy only just makes out the message that they’re supposed to meet back in The Glade before Rodriguez cuts out, and no amount of shouting “ESTEBAN!” into the communicator gets him back. Which is a pity for Rodriguez, because the scene cuts to show us that he and Marteller are in quite the spot of bother: they’re leaning up against a tree, clutching each other, while a tiger prowls about nearby. Yes, a tiger. Not a dude in a tiger suit, or a dog with stripes painted on, or even stock footage of a tiger: an actual, real, 100% bonafide, quite expensive tiger. Rodriguez tries desperately to get ahold of McCoy again without setting off Shere Khan over there, but the communicator doesn’t pick up at all this time.

Blissfully unaware of the tiger trouble, McCoy watches Barrows emerge, all dolled up. Meanwhile, Kirk is talking to Spock and demanding some answers about all this. Spock is hesitant, but Kirk says it’s his job to provide answers. Cut him some slack there, Kirk. It’s pretty hard to come up with a good scientific explanation for giant talking bunnies and magic women. Well, one that doesn’t involve massive intoxicants, at any rate. Speaking of which, Spock wants to know if they’re really sure these haven’t been hallucinations. Kirk rather doubts that, since one of those ‘hallucinations’ clocked him across the jaw. A fair point, although I would also put forth the rather relevant detail that by now we’ve had multiple people seeing the exact same thing, not a common feature of hallucinations.

Spock wants to know if they should maybe beam down an armed landing party, who I’m sure would be terribly effective, but Kirk says no, there hasn’t been any real danger so far, just weirdness (he hasn’t seen that tiger yet). Right as he says that, he looks up and sees a flock of...are those geese? Oh shit, you better send that armed party down after all, Spock, things just got dangerous.

Meanwhile, Sulu (remember him?) is walking through a nearby canyon, probably wondering where the heck everybody is, when the ground behind him opens up like a trapdoor and a samurai jumps out and starts attacking him. Man, we were getting some perfectly good character development for Sulu this episode but now we’re back to “a samurai! because he’s Japanese! get it? get it?”

Sulu pulls his phaser on the samurai, but the phaser doesn’t seem to want to fire, and Sulu’s forced to make a run for it, right into Kirk, who is trying and failing to call McCoy. Sulu warns Kirk about the aggro’d samurai heading towards them—but he’s gone. No samurai to be seen. “Captain, you’ve got to believe me!” Sulu insists, and usually “you’ve got to believe me” is the best way to guarantee that someone will not believe you, but luckily for Sulu Kirk’s seen enough weird shit of his own today that at this point, sure, samurai, why not.

Sulu reports that he got a call from Rodriguez telling him to meet back at The Glade, but the communicators were acting up, and now it seems his phaser is out too. Kirk tests his, but it’s also dead. Great, now we don’t have any way to fight off the geese.

While they’ll mulling over this latest development, something appears up on a nearby outcropping of rock—the familiar human-shaped swirl of light of someone being transported. It appears to be Spock, but instead of the usual smooth materialization, he fades in and out several times before finally making it all the way. Just your periodic reminder that traveling through transporter is kind of terrifying.

Kirk wants to know what the heck, man, did he not just say to not send anyone else down? Spock says he had to come down because ship-to-planet communications are now completely out, and the mysterious power field is soaking up energy so quickly that he calculated that if they hurried they could just about get one person transported down before that went out too. Naturally he sent himself; I mean, he’s only the first officer, who better to risk sending through a shaky transporter beam? At any rate, that was the last of the transporter juice, so they’re all stuck down there now with no contact with the ship. The shuttles are conspicuously unmentioned by anyone—but then, if the energy-eating field is that strong, flying a shuttle into it probably wouldn’t end real well.

Back in The Glade, McCoy and Barrows have arrived (and McCoy has found another stalk of grass to chew on), but no one else is there yet. At least it doesn’t look like anyone is there yet, but McCoy thinks he hears something or someone moving around nearby. That makes Barrows nervous, but McCoy says her brave knight will protect her.

Over in the desert, Kirk, Spock and Sulu hear the tiger approaching, along with the ominous background music. They spread out to find the source of the noise, but there’s another problem in The Glade: a knight in black armor on a horse, charging towards McCoy and Barrows with lance at the ready. Barrows freaks, but McCoy is done with this shit. First a talking rabbit, then magic guns, and now this nonsense? He’s not having it. These damn things are all just hallucinations, and he’s going to prove it...by standing directly in front of the knight.

Under some circumstances, that might have been the correct option. Unfortunately for McCoy, these are not those circumstances, and Kirk and Spock come into The Glade (having, apparently, missed the tiger completely) just in time to watch their friend get hit in the chest by a very much not imaginary lance. The knight turns towards Kirk and Spock next; Spock tries to fire his phaser at it, but of course, the phasers aren’t working. Luckily Kirk still has that gun he confiscated from Sulu—which has somehow not gone off throughout any of these adventures--and it’s working just fine, fine enough to shoot the knight right off his horse. Dang, Kirk is a good shot with that thing, considering he’s never so much as encountered one before.

Everyone rushes over to McCoy, lying lifeless in the grass. That’s right, McCoy is dead. Oh god! McCoy! We hardly knew ye! Oh, I can’t believe this has happened. And so early on in the show, too. What a tragedy.

[ID: McCoy laying prone on the grass with a small bloody hole in his chest, while Kirk, Spock, and Barrows in her princess clothes kneel around him.]

Not that I have experience with these things but that seems to be a remarkably small and clean wound for a lance to the chest.

In shocked grief, Spock, Kirk and Barrows kneel around the body of their fallen comrade. Barrows is especially emotional, sobbing that it’s all her fault, until Kirk grabs her by the shoulders and sternly tells her to get a grip. I suppose he needs everyone to have a clear head since they’re still in a crisis situation but it seems a wee bit harsh. Poor Barrows. She’s had a really bad day. Although not as bad as McCoy’s day, I guess.

Sulu calls Kirk over to the body of the fallen knight, laying in the grass some way away. As soon as Kirk gets there it’s easy to see what got Sulu’s attention: underneath the visor of his helmet, the knight’s face is plasticky and clearly artificial (although the eyes are just a little unnervingly realistic).

[ID: A headshot of a knight laying on the grass with his helmet visor opened, showing the face of a white man with brown hair but with a flat, artificial sheen.]

“It couldn’t be alive,” Kirk muses. Kirk, don’t be mean to the stuntmen.

Spock comes over to scan the body—luckily his tricorder is still working (don’t ask why). He says that the knight is indeed not a corpse but a “mechanical contrivance” which has the same cell structure as all the plants around them. Which means that not only this knight, but everything on the planet has been manufactured. Oh my god. We’re in WESTWORLD.

So a mysterious black knight just appeared out of the blue, ran down poor McCoy, then got shot and turned out to be fake all along. Okay. Sure. To be honest, you could stick that sequence of events in the Arthurian canon and it wouldn’t stand out much.

Suddenly, just to add to all the weirdness, an airplane flies overhead. Somewhere else, Rodriguez and Marteller are watching it with astonishment. Rodriguez asks if Marteller remembers “the early wars and funny air vehicles they used” that he was telling her about. One wonders how that conversation came about. Was it before or after the tiger?

Anyway, Rodriguez brings this up because that, of course, is one of those very same airplanes he mentioned. Marteller asks if it can hurt them, and Rodriguez says it can’t unless it makes a strafing run. Naturally, the plane immediately makes a strafing run. The two run off, barely avoiding the hail of bullets, and escape into some nearby undergrowth, where Marteller falls over. Rodriguez kneels down, concerned, calling her name, but she doesn’t respond. I have no idea whether she tripped, fainted, or was shot and is now dead. It’s really not clear.

Back in The Glade, something weird (sorry, something else weird) has happened while everyone was distracted by the plane: McCoy’s body has vanished, along with the fake knight. Well, that’s great.

Spock has a hypothesis. He asks Kirk what he was thinking of right before he saw the people he mentioned. Kirk thinks back and says that he was thinking about being in the Academy and his youth and all that, and then Finnegan showed up. And speak of the devil—there he is again, Finnegan himself. Kirk demands Finnegan give him some answers about what’s been happening to them, but Finnegan just laughs and runs away.

Kirk’s not going to stand for that. He’s had a bad enough day—verbally outfoxed by Spock, had a potential bit of lovely shore leave turn into a massive headache, one of his best friends is dead, and now this horrible little bastard is having a laugh at him. There’s only one thing to do—track down Finnegan and take out some aggression on him. He tells Spock to take Sulu and find McCoy’s body—and just, uh, leave Barrows somewhere, I guess—while he goes after Finnegan. Spock is a little taken aback by this sudden turn of events, but Kirk has run off before he has a chance to argue.

The chase takes Kirk back out to the desert. Finnegan keeps popping up in the distance, moving from place to place so quickly and inexplicably that it seems like he’s teleporting. All this time Finnegan’s peppy jig motif is playing, which is suitable enough for the immediate situation but a bit disconcertingly cheerful considering one of our beloved main cast members died and had his body stolen like two minutes ago.

Finally, Kirk tracks Finnegan down to a small ledge and once again demands that Finnegan give him some answers. Finnegan’s response to this is to jump off the ledge, onto Kirk. So begins a long fight scene in the desert dust. Kirk gives it a good show, but Finnegan seems indomitable. He knocks Kirk flat and then stands over him, taunting Kirk about how Kirk went and got old while Finnegan is still a twenty-year-old college student in fine fighting form. Well...a twenty-year-old in fine fighting form, at any rate. He’s got way too much energy to be a college student.

Despite being Super Old, Kirk gets back up and continues the fight. This time he’s the one who knocks Finnegan down, and Finnegan promptly starts moaning about how he can’t feel his leg and Kirk has broken his back. This is, of course, a trick, and as soon as he gets the chance he flips Kirk over onto his back. Somehow, between landing on the ground and getting a close-up, Kirk manages to rip his shirt clean off most of his torso.

[ID: 1. Kirk landing on his back in the dirt while Finnegan begins to get up from the ground nearby. 2. Kirk laying flat on his back, bruised, with his shirt torn off one shoulder almost to his stomach.]

how did you even do that

He lays there, seemingly unconscious, and Finnegan starts laughing about how Kirk can sleep now, sleep as much as he wants, sleep forever and forever. Oh. Uh. That got creepy.

Luckily for Kirk, a commercial break happens, and by the time it’s over, he’s recovered somewhat. He gets up and says, once again, that he wants answers. Finnegan tells him to earn them and throws dirt in his face, and they start going at it. Again. Seriously, this fight lasts for a long time.

Eventually, they come to a halt, both disheveled, bleeding, and covered in dirt. “Kinda makes up for things, huh, Jim?” Finnegan asks. I don’t know if the “things” are Finnegan’s bullying back in the day or everything that’s gone wrong today—or maybe both. Hard to say, because when Kirk questions him yet again, Finnegan says, “I never answer questions from plebes,” causing Kirk, clearly at his breaking point now, to bellow “I’M...NOT...A PLEBE!” as only William Shatner could.

Kirk asks Finnegan why the hell he’s here, magically still a cadet just hanging out on a supposedly uninhabited planet, which is pretty weird, y’know. Finnegan says he’s “being exactly what you expect me to be.” Which is more information than Finnegan’s provided so far, but not enough to dissuade Kirk from getting back up and finally giving Finnegan a right good sock on the jaw.

As he stands there catching his breath, Spock suddenly appears and asks if Kirk enjoyed his fight. Well, I say suddenly. It seems suddenly, but honestly he could have been standing there for the past ten minutes playing a trumpet and wearing light-up sneakers and I doubt Kirk would have noticed during that fight.

Kirk admits that yeah, actually, he did enjoy that. He’s been wanting to beat up Finnegan for years now and he finally got the chance and damn, it felt good. Spock says that this all fits into his theory: that these things and people are showing up because the Enterprise crew were thinking about them. You don’t say? I’m kind of amazed it took them this long to realize that, honestly. I mean, if something becomes relevant soon after I happened to be thinking about it I immediately notice it because that kind of thing strikes you as odd, right? And if something literally appeared in front of me right after I mentioned it, I think my immediate instinct would be to ask for something else just to see what would happen, which in this case would rather give the game away.

Anyway, Spock says that they must all control their thoughts, which is definitely a thing humans can do under pressure. He thinks that everything is being manufactured below ground and placed above via a system of secret tunnels, kind of like Disneyland. Then he starts talking about the tiger Rodriguez encountered—and said tiger immediately shows up nearby. Great job controlling your thoughts, Spock!

Apparently, Shatner wanted Kirk to wrestle this tiger, but basic sense prevailed and he was talked out of it. I wonder how that conversation went. “I gotta fight the tiger! It’s what this Kirk guy’s all about! I know, I’ve studied him!”

Luckily Kirk and Spock make their getaway without anyone having to fight the tiger. As they run back to The Glade, the airplane returns for another strafing run, so they have to outrun that too. Then, because I guess this is the part where all the previous bosses return and you have to fight them again, the samurai appears as well, but Kirk and Spock don’t have any time for that so they just push him over and keep going without even slowing down.

Back in The Glade, Barrows is in her uniform again and sadly hanging up the princess clothes on some branches. Her ripped collar seems to now be on the other side. Man, there’s just magic clothes all over this episode. And just to make Barrows’s day even worse, a leering mustachioed man appears in the brush behind her—Don Juan, one presumes. Man, somebody had a really weird idea of what women fantasize about.

Barrows screams and Sulu and Rodriguez rush over to rescue her—Sulu seems to be hoping that just kind of waving his hands around in the air will do the trick. Before yet another fight scene can break out, Kirk and Spock show up and tell everyone to stop this nonsense, at which point Don Juan just kind of obligingly leaves.

Kirk tells everyone to stand at attention and to not breathe or think. I hope he has some kind of plan beyond that because that is not a sustainable course of action. I mean, that’s how you get a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Or just some passed-out crew. Incidentally, Rodriguez is here, but Marteller is nowhere to be seen. What happened to her? Is she dead? Did he just leave her laying in the woods somewhere? I have no idea, because she never gets mentioned again.

So the crew lines up and tries desperately not to think about tigers or samurai or vintage guns or airplanes or Don Juan or fancy princess clothes or talking rabbits or old flames or college rivals or anything else, and while they’re doing this an old man in blue robes suddenly appears.

[ID: Kirk, still bruised with a badly torn shirt, looking in surprise at a kindly-looking white man with white hair, wearing a blue robe with gold leaf embroideries on the chest and cuffs.]

Dangit! Which one of you was thinking of an old man in blue robes?

The man, who seems to know everyone’s names, introduces himself as the caretaker of the planet. He apologizes for all their troubles and says that ‘they’ only realized just now that the Enterprise crew didn’t understand what was going on—that everything that happened was only meant to amuse and entertain them. On this planet, you can imagine any kind of experience you want, and it’ll happen. Spock calls it an amusement park, and then explains to everyone else that that’s ‘an old Earth term’ for a place where people went to have fun experiences. Wait, does that mean that amusement parks don’t exist anymore? Why not? When did we lose our amusement park capabilities? Man, I don’t know about this future, guys.

The Caretaker says Spock has got it right—this is basically one giant amusement park. The whole planet, in fact, was constructed for the Caretaker’s people to come and play. Sulu expresses surprise at the idea that a species that seems to be so advanced would still play games, but Kirk says that on the contrary, the more advanced the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play, and the Caretaker agrees. Okay, cool planet, guys, but have you considered maybe, I dunno, putting up some signs or warning buoys or something so random space travelers who don’t know what the place is about don’t stumble upon it and have a really bad day?

Speaking of having bad days, Kirk might have his answers now, but he’s not exactly happy about his best friend and CMO getting killed by what was more or less a rogue audio-animatronic. But then who should call out but the CMO himself, who comes strolling over, looking decidedly not dead. Also he has a couple scantily-clad women with him for some reason.

[ID: McCoy saying, “Possibly because no one has died, Jim,” as he stands in front of the pond arm-in-arm with two women wearing fluffy bikinis, feathers in their hair, and what looks like a feather boa wrapped around one leg; one woman is in pink and the other in yellow.]

McCoy says he was taken below ground for ‘repairs’ and that there’s a huge factory complex down there that can make absolutely anything. They even fixed his shirt! So McCoy is fine, and we can call off the mourning, what a relief. Phew. Really had me worried there.

Barrows, though, seems less than amused by the fuzzy girls and asks what’s up with that. McCoy mutters something about a cabaret he visited that had these chorus girls and, well, here they are. Really? That’s what you were thinking about, after being brought back from the dead by an advanced alien civilization in an underground factory? A cabaret you went to once? These people have weird priorities.

This is one part of the episode that strikes me as interesting because it’s quite different from how I would expect a more modern sci-fi story to handle it. The idea of a planet-sized super-advanced alien theme park that can generate whatever you’re thinking about is in itself not a story idea I’d be surprised to encounter today. But the idea that all these creations are mechanical replicas built in a giant underground factory kind of is. You’d expect a race as advanced as that to be using, I dunno, holograms or telepathic projections or just something that’s straight-up never explained. I mean, even by the time of TNG we have regular humans using holodecks, which do everything this planet can do with just hard light or whatever. It’s a sort of linear thought process, I think, which shows up more than once in Star Trek and plenty of other sci-fi, wherein the idea of super-advanced alien/future tech is expressed as “okay think of what we can do right now, and then imagine it could be done faster and better.” Rather than taking a sideways step to imagine some completely new technology, it’s basically “well we have factories that can produce artificial things, so the advanced aliens must have bigger factories that can quickly produce more lifelike artificial things.” Of course, all sci-fi is going to have that to some extent because it’s impossible to completely extricate our imaginations from our current understanding of the world. But sometimes it’s especially obvious.

McCoy, seeing Barrows’s expression, turns the fuzzy girls loose to go pester the rest of the crew. Kirk is curious about the Caretaker’s species, but the Caretaker gently says that he doesn’t think humans are ready to understand them yet. But Uhura calls Kirk to say that ship power and communications are back on, and the Caretaker says that the crew is free to take their shore leave on the planet if they want. Well, that’s nice of them. Not everyone would share their planet-sized amusement park with total strangers.

So Kirk tells the shore leave parties to start beaming down. Spock says that he’s had quite enough excitement and is going to go back and hold the fort on the ship, and Kirk almost overrules him and says that he’ll go instead because as the captain he’s not allowed to have fun. But then he sees Ruth approaching in the distance and decides that, you know what, he’ll stay after all. Personally it seems to me that knowing that the long-lost love you were smooching was actually a plastic simulacrum of them would kind of take the joy out of it, but hey, what do I know about these things. I just hope they explain the ‘anything you think of will immediately appear’ situation to everyone before they come down, or any crewmembers with an anxiety disorder are going to get a nasty surprise.

Some time later, everyone returns to the ship, looking quite refreshed and happy. As Kirk, McCoy, Sulu and Barrows come onto the bridge, Spock asks if they enjoyed their shore leave, and they all agree that they did, very much. “Most illogical,” Spock comments. I don’t know what exactly he finds illogical about that, but then that pretty much is Spock’s fall-back way of expressing disapproval regardless of how much sense it makes.

So everyone laughs, and they fly off, and we have a nice happy ending. The filming of Shore Leave itself was rather less happy. The original script was written by Theodore Sturgeon, but Roddenberry thought it contained too much fantasy, so he handed it off to Gene L. Coon for a rewrite—but in some sitcom-worthy misunderstanding, Coon somehow thought that Roddenberry wanted more fantasy. So Roddenberry himself wound up re-rewriting the script, but at that point they were so out of time that he was writing it while the episode was being filmed. I have no idea exactly what levels of ‘fantasy’ were involved in either version of the script that Roddenberry disliked so much. Unicorns? Werewolves? Women characters not getting harassed by mustachioed stalkers for no real reason? Who knows.

The script also called for an elephant along with the tiger, and an elephant was actually hired and brought to set, but various shooting difficulties meant that it never wound up getting filmed. No word on whether Shatner wanted to wrestle the elephant too.

You may also have noticed Kirk suddenly has a new yeoman seemingly replacing Rand. By this point, Rand had been written out of the series; Balance of Terror was the last episode she would appear in (in filming order, The Conscience of the King was the last episode Grace Lee Whitney worked on). Exactly why the decision was made to write Rand out so unceremoniously is not really clear to me, and there seem to be lot of differing viewpoints on it; one thing that is clear is that it was a huge blow to poor Whitney, who was abruptly dismissed from the show through no fault of her own. To be honest, I don’t personally think that Rand was written especially well most of the time, but I think that she could have been written well, which is what makes it such a shame that she was removed from the show without getting the chance to get any real character development. Within the show itself, there’s no reason given for Rand just being gone one day (people just appear and disappear at random on this ship), though I’m sure the EU has that covered. Personally I just hope she found a ship that was a lot less stressful to be a woman on. We’ll miss ya, Rand!

TREK TROPE TALLY: We’ve got one crewmember death, followed by one crewmember un-death, plus one truly incredible case of a Uniform Unformed with Kirk’s shirt magically destroying itself between shots. Next time we’ll finally see some shuttle action in The Galileo Seven.

#star trek #star trek TOS #star trek TOS season one #1.15 Shore Leave

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holocron-inthe-restrictedsection · 5 years

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Okay it's a lot but: 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, and 19 for Lethaa and Naras? (Feel free to substitute/add any questions you'd like to answer!) 🌺💕

Yesssssss I was so excited to get this! Thanks, Mercedes! 💛

So, this got reeaaaally long and rambly. My bad. I just have a lot of thoughts about these two, and I’m excited to share. Click “keep reading” to see my response!

(also, sorry if it formats weirdly - I copy-pasted from a word doc, and tumblr mobile doesn’t like that for some reason)

Ask me questions about creating my OCs!

1. What was the first element of your OC that you remember considering (name, appearance, backstory, etc.)?

For Lethaa, it was her name and position. For Naras, it was the descriptor “the Togruta senator’s wife”

They popped into my head at about the same time. I created them to be throwaway characters in a short story I wrote called “Shall We Dance” (I may someday go back to it and add a few chapters. No promises). There was some dialogue between Anakin and Obi-Wan about different controversial viewpoints in the Senate, and I just needed a senator or two to mention in passing. –

“But these are some of the most outspoken public figures in the Republic. Take Senator Lethaa Daal.” [Obi-Wan] flashed a smile in the direction of the Togruta senator and her wife as they passed. The women returned the smile and made their way arm-in-arm into the grand hall. “She has been very scornful regarding the Senate’s tendency to dedicate resources to systems that are strategic to military movements, as opposed to who needs it most.”

It might have ended there, but I received feedback from a few different readers saying how they appreciated the mention of Senator Daal’s wife. There seemed to be an interest, so I sat on the idea of them for a while.

2. Did you design them with any other characters/OCs from their universe in mind?

Since Lethaa was fully fleshed out first, I made Naras with Lethaa in mind. I knew I wanted her to have her own objectives and life – she couldn’t continue to just be “Lethaa’s wife”. So I tried to give her a profession that was critical in its own way, which is why I went with healing, so that their “importance” (for lack of a better word) was equal to each other.

I guess Lethaa was partially created in response the frustrating politics of the galactic senators. They all make their alliances, play the game to get the upper hand, all while gaining very little ground. I wanted to make a character that found the subtly of politics maddening, and wasn’t afraid to get in someone’s face and tell them exactly why their policies or views were dumb or harmful. I wanted to make someone who could be aggressive without calling into question their moral alignment.

And while it’s not a character, I really really wanted to design or add to a culture that doesn’t get explored much in the Star Wars universe. I took what elements I could find about Togruta culture from Wookipedia, but it was rather lacking, so I made up the rest. I already loved Togruta designs, and wanted characters that could interact within their own culture.

3. How did you choose their name? (Added this because it was Relevant)

If my memory is right, Lethaa Daal’s name came from combining a few names I found on the Togruta name generator (which I HIGHLY recommend btw). I decided to keep it after I finished her design because the first name reminded me of “lethal”, and by that point I knew that was a good descriptor of her. ‘Daal’ came about because I tend to put way too many A’s in my togruta names, and I was for some reason thinking about Roald Dahl at that time, but I also found that I liked how it could be mispronounced as “doll”. I was highly amused by the idea of a “lethal doll” – woe unto anyone who looked at Lethaa and only acknowledged her for her beauty.

Naras Tyn came about because lots of my female ocs tend to have names that end in A or E (IE/I/Y, etc), and I didn’t want to do it again. I wanted a short last name, and I just liked how “Tyn” sounded – it was concise and melodic. ‘Naras’ I think also came from the name generator. I remember being bummed when I realized it sounded so similar to Barriss and Maris (already existing characters), but by that time I was attached. Her first name just sounds calming, and it just sounded right imagining Lethaa calling for her.

11. Did you know what the OC’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation?

Heck yes I did. There really wasn’t any hesitation. The thought process went: Senator –> Togruta Senator –> female Togruta Senator –> has a spouse –> a wife, cuz why not. And that was that.

12. What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

Everything.

Lol, jk. I mean, as much fun as I have with all the colors and markings of the two, my own drawing ability is kinda limited in terms of body positions. So some things I’d love to draw (Lethaa vs. the rancor, Naras on a medical mercy mission during the Clone Wars, etc.) are taking a long time for me to sketch out. It can be frustrating, but it’s a work in progress.

And writing is hard too. The story ideas in my head play out as nice little movies. Getting it all down on paper while conveying emotion without overloading, describing setting, and making it engaging – that’s all trickier.

But overall, the most difficult thing is trying to figure out what exactly I’m going to do! I have other OCs I want content for, and canon characters I want to explore – and then I have to decide between drawing and writing. There’s not enough hours in the day for me to draw and write everything I want, so I have to pick and choose.

13. How far past the canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story, if at all?

Still a work in progress. I jump from one event to the next without writing it in chronological order. I’ve started their story before the start of the Clone Wars, sometime between episodes I and II. Might write some earlier snippets about their childhoods (though they didn’t meet until they were adults).

I’ve got some ideas for what they do during the Empire era (some of which was influenced by one of the Star Wars D&D games I play), but I haven’t written any of that out yet. I do know they live to see the fall of the Empire, and the emergence of the New Republic. They pass away peacefully of old age on Shili.

19. What is your favorite fact a fun fact about your OC?

I had to change this from “favorite” to “fun” because I like everything about them and I’m still developing them. So I thought I might drop a little trivia that I haven’t managed to work into any stories or art yet.

Lethaa was on a hunting trip with her father – Barin – and a few others in her twenties. After her cousin killed their prey, Barin asked her to prepare the meat for dinner. She did her best with it but waaaaaaay overcooked it, and when Barin asked about it, she said, “I… never actually learned how to cook meat.”

Bewildered, Barin said, “But we’ve been on dozens of hunting trips! How could I have never taught you??”

And Lethaa’s just like, “I was the one to kill the prey on most of those trips.”

And Barin and the others can’t help but laugh, because according to tradition, the one who kills the prey while hunting in a group is served the first piece, but never is the one to prepare it. So it makes complete sense that she never had to cook it, because she was always served the first dish. Her cousin actually liked his meat overdone, though, so he was perfectly fine with his meal.

Also, I just came up with this so I have no idea of the context, but there is a 100% chance that there was an instance or two where Lethaa – tall Amazonian though she is – couldn’t reach something. Unable to climb to retrieve it and without a stepstool, muttering darkly, she would disconnected her prosthetic arm and used it as an extender to pull it towards her.

Naras can fall asleep anywhere. Even before she became a physician/healer, she had the uncanny ability to close her eyes and be asleep within minutes. Lying down, standing while braced against something, sitting, lounging between skyfaring silks (she’d gotten bored waiting for her Gatalentian friend to come back from the holocall he’d had to take). No nap is too short – she wakes feeling rested even if it’s only been five minutes. She wakes easily, fully alert.

Naras sings and hums to her plants and patients. It’s not uncommon to walk into her clinic and hear her singing a folk song or a current hit. She definitely encourages sing-alongs anytime nervous children are brought in, and at night broadcasts spiritual songs important to Togruta culture over the PA system – at a very quiet volume, of course. Naras has a garden at home – a singfruit tree surrounded by flowers and bushes, some of which are not native to Shili – and the plants routinely get hummed and sung at as she tends to them. Lethaa loves waking up in the morning to hear her wife’s singing voice drifting in from an open window.

Thank you again so much for the ask!! This was a lot of fun!Also, I really do appreciate your interest in my OCs (especially these two). It means a lot to me 🌺🌷

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taenamseok · 6 years

Text

The Case of Her Heart

Masterlist

A/N: Hello everyone! Welcome to the beginning of The Case of Her Heart. A quick summary. This is a Sherlock based au, but not everything is the same as Sherlock. Whenever I do an au based on something I will change things to make it my own. Now many of you may think that the roles in this should be Namjoon as Sherlock and Y/N as the Watson character, but I don’t feel that way. I feel it would be more interesting with Namjoon as Watson and Y/N as Sherlock. These will be long chapters, the first chapter being the shortest. Due to the long chapters I’ll only be posting once a week to make sure I provide the best content possible while writing other stuff too. Well, enough of my rambling. Enjoy!

Pairing: Namjoon x Reader

Summary: A damaged man that just wants to feel alive again. A detective who doesn't understand people's emotions. Can they work together to bring down a criminal mastermind?

Chapter One

"How are you doing, Mr. Kim? Has anything changed since our last meeting?" Dr. Brighton asked, her eyes flicking up from her notepad. The man sat cross-legged in the chair, his fingers anxiously dancing across the arm of the chair. The far away look in his eyes, as he's had for years. "Um," he licks his lips, "no, not really." He replies. "Have you been out of the house at all?" The doctor asks, scribbling on the notepad. "Not much, I don't like being around too many people, you know?" The man says. "And the nightmares?" She asks, looking up at him. "Um, still, still there. I don't sleep much." He sighs, yawning at the thought. The doctor nods, writing down the information.

"Doc, we've been over the same things over and over again for months. I'm not going to improve." The man sighs, rubbing his temples. "That's because you don't listen to my advice, Mr. Kim. You're too stubborn, and its tearing you apart. Now, I'll tell you again. I want you to get out of the house, meet people. You hole yourself up in your flat because you're afraid of people, or what might happen to them. I want you to go outside, to the park or a cafe or something. Also, write down what happens to you. Keep a journal. It'll give you something to confide in, your true feelings."

Mumbles and camera flashes flood the room, all eyes focused on the panel of law enforcement members. "Are you ready, sir?" Sargent Jones asked quickly. The man nodded, closing his eyes as he prepped for the bombardment of questions he was about to endure. "May I have everyone's attention please!" Jones spoke into the microphone, the crowd growing silent. "Detective Inspector Park will now answer questions pertaining to the recent disappearances of James Willington, Marcus Baker, and Lilly Cunningham." She said, taking the seat next to Decective Inspector Park. A wave of hands shot through the air, all waving and wishing to have theirs picked. "Um, you there, row 3 seat 7." Inspector Park said. The man rose from his seat, notepad in hand.

"Detective Inspector, is it true that these disappearances might be linked somehow?" The man asked. "Its a possibility, but it's not very likely since they were all very different people, with different lifestyles, ages, and in different areas and cities. We are investigating it a bit but our main focus right now is finding the persons in question." Inspector Park spoke coolly, have done this too many times to be proud of. As Inspector Park finishes his sentence, a chime of every cell phone in the room sounds, including his own. He sighs, pulling the device put of his pocket and reading the text on the screen.

"Um, Inspector, this says they're connected." The same man says. Everyone looks at each other quizzically, and Inspector Park's jaw tightens. "Everyone, please ignore the message, it's not known for sure that the disappearances are connected. Why don't we get back to the questions?" Jones says quickly. "Yes, please." Inspector Park sighs. "You there, row 1, seat 3." The woman stands up.

"Inspector, do you think any of us are in danger?" The woman asks. "No, I can assure you that we have our on high alert throughout the city. This case should be solved soon, we have our best detectives working very hard." Inspector Park assures the nervous woman. Another wave of ringtones echoes through the room, everyone taking their phones out to check. "It just says 'Wrong' Detective Inspector." The woman gasps. Inspector Park groans, rubbing his temples.

"Tell her to stop, she's ruining this." Jones spits in his ear. "Don't you think if I knew I'd have done it already?" He sighs. His phone pings again, a message popping up on the screen. "You know where to find me. I'll be waiting." "That's it. This is over. If we continue she will too." Inspector Park sighs, standing up and walking out of the room, leaving Sargent Jones to deal with the angry reporters.

The warm air felt nice, the leaves in the trees rustling. He walked slowly on the path, finally taking Dr. Brighton's advice and getting out of his dusty flat and getting fresh air. He had his earbuds in, still preferring his music over the sound of others in the park. He pauses as he feels a hand on his shoulder. He turns quickly, putting his hands up defensively, ready to take on his assailant. He sees a somewhat familiar face, pulling his earbuds out and hanging them around his neck to greet the man.

"Woah, Namjoon. It's been a while, I hope you still recognize me." The man chuckles. "Of course, Jackson, how good I forget?" Namjoon smiles, meeting the man's hand in a handshake. The two men sit down on a bench nearby, an awkward silence falling between them. "So, how've you been? It's been a few years." Jackson breaks the silence. "Um, alright, I guess." Namjoon nods, fiddling his thumbs in his lap.

"Namjoon, you know, it wasn't your fault. You know that, right?" Jackson asks, placing a comforting hand on Namjoon's shoulder. He nods quickly, sniffling at the memory. "I still could've helped more, you know?" He croaks. "You can't beat yourself over this, man. It's not your fault." Jackson says softly. Namjoon straightens up, falling back into his stoic demeanor.

"So, how's Kyungmin?" Jackson asks, leaning back against the bench. "Um, I'm not sure, exactly, I haven't talked to her in a while." Namjoon laughs nervously. "Ah, well she has always been a handful, I have no doubt its difficult to keep tabs on her." Jackson chuckles. "Yeah." Namjoon replies, falling back into an uncomfortable silence.

"How's your living situation if you don't mind me asking. You in a good place?" Jackson asks. "Um, it's alright. Not great, but alright. It's enough for me. I don't have people over so it doesn't matter that it's small. Why?" Namjoon answers, looking at Jackson questioningly. Jackson smiles. "I have someone I want you to meet. I think you two would get along quite well. Come on."

"Hoseok! What happened to that body?" The young woman asks, tucking her hair behind her ear as her eyes lowered to look into the microscope again. "Well, you definitely beat the hell out of him, I'll give you that, but no bruises." Hoseok said from across the table. The woman sighs through grit teeth. "Okay." She replies simply. "That was quite an interesting sight though, seeing you beat a dead body with a riding crop. I pray that you're not into BDSM, your partner would probably end up on my table." Hoseok chuckled. The woman looked up at him, her eyebrow cocked. "Uh, nevermind, forgot for a minute you don't know anything about sexual stuff." He sighs. "That's because I have no use for it right now. There's much more to do than be pleasured." She shakes her head. "Well, if you ever change your mind, you know where to find me." Hoseok smirks, winking at her. "Didn't you say the same thing to the receptionist this morning?" She asks coolly, causing his eyes to widen. He ducks out of the room in embarrassment, running into two men in the hallway.

Namjoon and Jackson enter the room, the woman not looking up. The moment Namjoon laid eyes on her, he was captivated by her beauty. The way way her hair was tucked neatly behind her ear, her nimble fingers adjusting the knobs on the microscope, her teeth clamped onto her bottom lip in concentration. "Ah, Jackson, what a surprise." She said, looking up at the men. Her eyes gleamed in the florescent lighting as she looked between them. "Namjoon, this is Min Y/N. Y/N, this is Namjoon, and old friend of mine." Jackson says, pointing between the two of you. "Um, it's a pleasure to uh, meet you." Namjoon stuttered, bowing slightly.

"Hello. So, what time will you be prepared?" She asks nonchalantly. Namjoon stands there, looking over at Jackson, whose eyes are on him. He realizes Y/N's eyes are on him too, and he raises an eyebrow. "Me?" He asks. "Yes, you. What time will you be ready to look at the flat?" She asks, completely confusing him. "Um, I'm sorry, flat? What flat?" He stutters. "Well, I told Jackson this morning that no one would ever want to live with me, then he shows up hours later with ex-military with severe PTSD." She says, looking back into the microscope. Namjoon is taken aback, looking between Jackson and Y/N, a smirk painted onto Jackson's face.

"You told her about me, didn't you?" Namjoon asks. Jackson shakes his head. "Then how does she know all of that?" "Well, the ex-military part is because you both are very young and Jackson doesn't have too many friends, and he's never mentioned a Namjoon. So, you must have known each other for a while, but not been in the same unit. You met in bootcamp, right?" Y/N asks. Namjoon nods slowly. "So what were you? Your hands are fairly nimble. Doctor, right?" She asks, looking up at him. "Um, yeah, that's right." Namjoon replies.

"You keep to yourself. Theres no outline of a phone in your pocket so either you don't have one or you keep it at home, having no need to use one while you're out. Also, you still seem fairly comfortable without it. If you were just forgetful you'd be twitchy without it, which means you don't actually use it. The PTSD part, you jump at the slightest sudden sound. You've jumped three times since being here and all I've done is set down petri dishes." "She's good, isn't she? Be careful though, she can be a real bitch sometimes." Jackson chuckles. Y/N doesn't reply to the comment.

"That's, amazing. How do you know all of that when you've just met me?" Namjoon asks, putting his hands in his pockets. Y/N sets another dish down, and Namjoon involuntarily jumped slightly. Y/N raised her head, looking at him as if to make a point. "Alright, I get it. That's really amazing." Namjoon smiles, surprised that such a beautiful woman is so intelligent. Y/N raises her eyebrows quickly. "Well I've always been smarter than average, my whole family actually." She says, passing Namjoon to grab her coat. "So, meet me at 221B Baker Street, 3 o'clock. Please, don't be late, I hate waiting on people." She says quickly. "See you around, Jackson." She waves while exiting the room, her heels clicking on the tile. Namjoon stands there, completely baffled. "Um, what just happened?" He asks, chuckling in disbelief. "You, my friend, are about to have one hell of an adventure." Jackson smirks.

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weird-aunt-writing · 6 years

Text

Parasite pt. 2 (Orion x MC)

Book: Starship Promise

Pairing: Orion x MC (Juliette)

Word Count: 1591

Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4

Eventually I come to again and I try to sit up but my hand flies up to hold my head when it immediately starts throbbing in pain. “Oww…” I whine quietly and then I notice Dr. Hensen look over at me from across the room.

“Take it easy Ms. Adams, you fell pretty hard,” she instructs as she comes over with pain medicine and a glass of water in hand.

I graciously accept the water and the medicine and then sit there for a few minutes longer, waiting for the thrubbing to subside. Once it does I feel it get replaced by the gentle hum of the ship flying through space. “How long have I been out? Did we leave that colony? Are you coming with us? Where are we going?” a hundred questions suddenly fight to be spoken and the doctor quiets me with a soft chuckle and raises her hand in a stop motion.

“You’ve only been asleep for a few hours. After you fainted I told the rest of your crew what I suspected, minus the captain of course,” she begins explaining. “Mr. Molniya was more than skeptical, but Ms. Nova agreed and I think that was enough to at least convince him to try. Mr. Silva thought the whole idea was ‘pretty cool’.”

Her features screwed up in an expression of exactly what she thought of Jaxon’s estimation of the situation.

“Regardless they all agreed I should remain on board until the situation is resolved, even if just to keep an eye on Mr. Akatsuki and make sure the creature doesn’t begin to harm his body,” she answered, and then ran through a quick set of questions and tests to see if I was okay after my fall too.

“So..did you just leave your patients behind?” I ask after she’s finished, hoping it doesn’t sound rude. I didn’t know much about health care but taking off on a starship while you had patients waiting on a colony seemed like a bad idea.

She chuckled again and shook her head at me. “I’m a contracted, private healthcare provider. Meaning being hired by starship captains to care for their crew is my usual job. This just happens to be a rather....unusual crew in an unusual situation.”

I nod quietly, mulling over the new information until another questions surfaces. “How did we get Orion to agree to this?”

“Well obviously he knows that he’s lost some memories, since each member of the crew has supported your story and, well, the calendar usually doesn’t lie,” she answers with a grin. “The rest of your crew convinced him that Antares had more information on this creature and that to get his memories back we’ll need their research. So, either Orion is really just experiencing amnesia and agrees or…”

“Or?” I ask curiously.

The doctor then sits down in a chair across from me, and her expression takes a very somber turn. “I believe it is more likely that the creature simply wants to be able to destroy these weapons you used against it, and whatever information they may have. If that’s the case we will need to be very careful once we are on his brother’s ship.”

I nod slowly, the pieces of what she’s suggesting coming together in my head. Orion will have to be under watch constantly while we’re on Antares’s ship to make sure that he...that it didn’t get its hands on anything risky.

“Now, I know you just woke up but I suggest you get something to eat and try to get some sleep, we’ll be entering the night cycle soon and you and I will have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”

I nod again and stand, about to leave the room, when suddenly I turn back and throw my arms around the doctor. “Thank you, I don’t know if any other doctor would have just jumped in with us on this. I’m so glad you’re here,” I tell her, and then release her from the hug, my face slightly flushed knowing that I just hugged an almost complete stranger. Something about her presence was just comforting enough to make her feel like I’ve known her all my life.

Dr. Hensen’s soft expression when I step back seems to say that she didn’t mind at least, “of course dear. You might not remember me but I worked on your colony many years ago. Your parents and I become good friends, I’m more than happy to help their daughter.”

Or well, maybe I just actually had known her for a long time.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you Dr. Hensen!” I say, suddenly feeling very guilty.

“It’s alright, you were quite a bit younger. I’m happy to see you grew up to be such a remarkable young woman,” she answers softly, a true smile on her face. “Now shoo, I’m too far gone for beauty sleep but you still need it.” “Yes ma’am!” I answer with a grin and a mock salute.

I leave the room and my happy mood quickly falls as I realize I automatically headed for mine and Orion’s room. I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by trying to share the same bed, but I wouldn’t kick him out either. Instead, I redirected towards the lounge and found one of our well-worn couches to curl up on for the night.

After a long couple of hours of staring at the ceiling, tormented by my own thoughts, I finally managed to fall asleep.

I wake up sometime later with a blanket draped over me and a pillow under my head, and I briefly wonder how they got there. The darkness of the room tells me we’re still in the ship’s night cycle and as my eyes adjust to the low lighting I see a burly shape sitting in the chair across from me, their head resting on their hand but not quite looking asleep.

“Atlas?” I call out quietly, and the shape lifts their head enough for me to confirm that it is him.

“Hey...you looked cold and uncomfortable so…” he says and nods his head towards the blanket laying over me. Ah, so that’s where it came from.

I nod my thanks and close my eyes to try and fall back asleep again. No one speaks for a few long minutes, but I don’t think either of us actually sleep, until I break the silence again. “Do think it’s true?”

“The Doc’s theory?” Atlas asks as he lifts his head to look at me again. He stares at me for a long while before he sighs and his feature melt into an expression of the exhaustion I’m sure we’re both feeling. “I don’t know kid. The idea that the Cap’s...infected by this thing is probably the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard.”

Atlas is quiet again so long after that I think he’s going to leave it there until he adds, “but ever since you brought your happy little rear onto this ship it’s been one strange son-of-a-gun after another. Plus the Doc’s got the degree to back it up. So we’re sure as hell gonna try whatever idea she cooks up.”

Comforted by Atlas’s words I let my eyes close and finally drift back to sleep.

“Hey kid, we’re here.”

I’m woken to Atlas’s voice calling over the intercom in the lounge and it takes me a minute to realize what “here” means. The massive Empire ship taking up the full view of the window in the room cleared that up right quick for me.

I give myself a quick sniff and decide on a change of clothes before meeting with Antares. This outfit was on day 3 and I wasn’t in the market to give anyone any more ammunition against me.

Although I personally believed that your fiance forgetting who you are was a pretty good excuse for not keeping up appearances.

Without thinking I make my way to our-- to Orion’s room and walk in without knocking first. The door slides open to reveal Orion still in his underwear and I don’t think much of it until he hastily moves to cover himself and then I slap both hands over my eyes.

“I’m sorry! I- I wasn’t even thinking! Oh god!” I ramble, my face burning hot with shame. For all intents and purposes Orion just had a total stranger walk in on him half naked. That thought just made me even sadder in addition to the embarrassment. “I just came to get a clean change of clothes.”

“Ahem...it’s- it’s alright. By all means,” Orion clears his throat loudly before answering. When I slowly bring my hands down from my face I see he’s already quickly dressed himself, and I feel another pang of guilt at the uncomfortable expression he wears. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he adds and carefully steps past me out of the room.

I wanted so badly to be supportive through all this, even if it was only temporary, but if I keep accidentally forcing myself on him...

If this is real and Orion has to get to know me all over again...would he come to like me now? Or am I always going to be the awkward, forgotten memory?

That thought makes me truly breakdown. I find the whale Orion gave me for our first Valentine’s day and sink to the floor with it in my arms, letting the soft plush absorb my tears while I shake with sobs.

#starship promise #orion akatsuki #orion x mc #orion akatsuki x mc #lorelei hensen #parasite #lovestruck #the last section made me cry #also i loved writing that interaction between Atlas and MC #my writing

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blackleg5932 · 7 years

Text

Continued from here, for @pilawforhire

While Sanji’s patience was running low and the stress of the day catching up to him, Law seemed like a new person after his stupid shower. Still a jerk, that was just a personality trait, but calmer than before, almost eerily so.

After Sanji’s outburst, Law remained quiet for a while, it was better than another fight and yet it was also frustrating to be ignored. Sanji was about to just wave him off when Law opened his mouth to admit that he had not been on his best behaviour but he still retained his higher-than-though attitude.

Sanji raised an eyebrow at Law’s explanation of being justified in his dislikes concerning food. His reasoning did not really resonate with the cook, it didn’t matter why you did not like a certain food, if you exclude something from your diet you were technically a picky eater. But Sanji kept his mouth shut, mostly though because Law did not give him a chance to reply or even answer his questions that seemed to turn out more rhetorical anyways.

Sanji really did not mind that people would or could not eat certain foods, he had to account for allergies, intolerances, religious and ethic restrictions as well and could easily adjust a recipe or a whole menu to the specific diet of a person. It was the fact that his skill and dedication kept being doubted by someone that should know him which drove him crazy, Sanji was nothing but devoted to his cooking. It was his life.

When Law put a protective arm in front of his plate as if Sanji would just snatch it away from him, the cook was inclined to forgive him a little bit for at least showing a bit of appreciation for his food even if he couldn’t voice it.

Satisfied and with the conversation seemingly finished, Sanji resumed eating, his appetite now restored. Law’s mobile phone was buzzing and he interrupted his eating to type something on the device, Sanji ignored it and instead enjoyed his meal.

Sanji only looked back up when Law started talking again, questioning with a suspicious tone if Sanji really didn’t want his help. He frowned at the question but his jaw actually dropped, when Law announced that he was free that night - Sanji had been sure that he had had something scheduled before - and that they would take the kitty to the vet, this very evening. Blinking and gaping, Sanji tried to follow Law’s rambling about sharing bills, looking up vets that were open at this hour and wondering aloud what supplies to get after the medical examination. He was even thinking about getting toys. And there was a thrown-in compliment about the food, too.

Sanji dropped his fork on the plate. “What?” Law did not repeat himself, aware that he had heard and understood every single word. Sanji was thinking, Law was not usually your good Samaritan type, but despite being a jerk in general he also wasn’t a total bastard all of the time. This was tricky, Sanji did not want to owe Law anything but then again for the kitty this would be the best solution.

Turning around in his chair, Sanji threw a glance to the small critter over where it had eaten its food and was now lying curled up on the floor, probably all tired out after the initial stress.

He turned back to Law, gaze piercing the older man as if he could see through his sudden mood swing and discover a hidden motive behind the generous offer. “Well,...uhm...that would be great, thanks.” He was still a bit perplexed but Law just resumed eating. “I have some small savings that I could use to pay you back anything you’ll have to spend in advance.” Law just hummed in response.

“We’ll need to get some food, probably gotta ask the vet what’s best for a kitten this age.” Sanji’s brain was starting to make a list of things needed for the small animal. “And a litter box, definitely don’t want cat piss everywhere though I doubt we’ll get around that, it’ll probably need to get trained to use it first....” He did not know how much it would cost but Sanji would take his bank card with him in case he needed to withdraw some money. He kept thinking out loud between bites, with Law just listening while eating.

They finished dinner and Law postponed the dishwashing to later, for once Sanji did not mind. He was told to get ready and wordlessly complied, grabbing the tired kitten and carrying it to his room in his arms. It was so tiny and without squirming fit perfectly into the crook of his elbow. In his room Sanji was looking for some kind of transportation box or anything close to it. He could not carry a carton on the bike and a mere bag was also too dangerous.

In the end Sanji used his old backpack. It was sturdy and roomy and he left the zipper open a bit, pinning it in place so that the kitty could not open it any further to slip out. Grabbing his phone, keys, wallet and jacket, Sanji left his room to meet Law at the door. He had been waiting as it seemed and was now throwing a helmet at Sanji, who grabbed it out of the air.

Leaving the apartment, they walked to where Law had parked his bike. Sanji put the backpack on so that it should rather be called a frontpack, looking like a real tool, but he wanted the bag to sit in his lap, safe between his and Law’s body, and where he could easily have it in sight in case the cat would try anything. With his passenger helmet on, Sanji took his seat behind Law, scooting a bit closer so that he could comfortably put his hands on his side.

The roads were still wet from the day’s heavy rain, currently at least no water was falling from the sky. Law wasn’t exactly driving slowly but Sanji still felt safe with the man. He avoided big puddles and kept at a speed where the tires had a good grip at the tarmat. There was something liberating about riding on a bike, the wind pushing against their bodies, creeping into the crevices of Sanji’s jacket, he shuddered a bit. The cook had no problem matching Law’s balance, it did not take long to reach the vet.

Thanks to Law announcing their visit beforehand per call their waiting time was minimal. Inside the examination room, Sanji unpacked the kitty, a bit ashamed at this crude method of transportation, and immediately explained how he had found the cat a few hours earlier.

The cat, a bit more awake again thanks to yet another new and probably scary environment, did not put up too much resistance when the vet examined it. Law was standing somewhere close to a wall, out of the way, he had wanted to stay in the waiting room area but Sanji had dragged his ass along. He wanted to make sure that Law would hear everything the doctor said in case it was a bit of information overload for Sanji. So far the vet had not been too wordy, just announcing which vaccinations he needed to give the animal and stuff like that.

Sanji was looking at the poor little thing with pity in his eyes as he remembered something. “Uh, could you tell us what sex it has? I....did not have the chance to check it myself.” He wanted to facepalm himself for asking such a dumb question but the doc did not seem to be fazed by it at all, apparently it was not the most stupid thing to ask.

The man had the patience of a saint. Sanji was sure that the vet already knew the sex from his examination of the animal but for him and Law he made a show of picking the cat up and showing its genitals to them like a proof to his announcement.

Really, Sanji would have taken his word for it, it would have been enough and been a little less awkward. This way it almost felt as if Law and Sanji were fathers eagerly awaiting the reveal of their child’s sex. Sanji exchanged glances with his roommate, almost expecting him to have a name ready to give the cat.

#pilawforhire #✕ kitten rescue squad [plot]#long post for ts #[WE NEED TO SHORTEN THIS IT GETS LONGER EVERYTIME LMAO]#[but also 90% is just me repeating everything from sanji's POV]#[I'll leave the reveal of the kitties sex to you!]

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sunriseinorbit · 7 years

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Title: What You Are In The Dark Fandom: Haikyuu!! Pairings: Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi Words: 2157 Summary: Late nights aren’t anything new. Read on AO3

This is the fic I wrote for @yankasmiles for the @tsukyamgiftexchange! Enjoy!~

Lil note: Okay it’s time for a super embarrassing confession and I hope this isn’t too weird but here we go. So when I first got the message in my inbox like “you will be making a gift for: yankasmiles” I kind of panicked. I saved this as “oh no oh no oh no” in my google docs. I’m a huge fan (I typed fuge han at first lmao) of yours and I admire you so much, both as an artist/general content creator and as a person, and I was really nervous writing this because I’m like “omg what if it’s actually good and Yanka likes it and we start talking and we’re kinda friends??!?!!” because yeah I’m a very shy bean. I just want to talk tsukyam with you because you’re the actual Tsukyam Queen and I’m rambling now but I hope this isn’t too awkward and I really hope you like this!! Happy holidays and happy 2017!!!

Also, thanks to @violet-boy for betaing! You deserve the world <3

The poster is neat and organized, just the way Kei likes it. All the outlining is done, the title’s written at the top in purple pen in a simple but interesting script filled with loops and swirls - thanks to Tadashi, of course; Kei’s never been artsy enough for anything like that - and the pictures are laid out in columns, waiting to be glued down. It isn’t anywhere near finished, sure, but it looks good for what it is. And it’ll get done before tomorrow morning. Somehow.

“Hey, Tadashi?” he asks.

“Yeah?” Tadashi asks back, interrupting himself with a yawn. Kei feels bad about not starting to work earlier. Now Tadashi’s tired and they still have plenty of work to do.

“Did you finish the captions?”

“Yeah, I’m printing them out right now.” Tadashi quickly types something out on his computer. “We just need to glue them onto the poster and we’re done.”

“Good.” Kei looks down at the pictures on the poster paper already. The captions are going to fit just fine. “You can go to bed if you want, I can finish.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Tadashi laughs as the printer buzzes to life. “And you’re sitting on my bed.”

“I can move.” Kei shrugs.

“It’s okay, really.” Tadashi turns on his desk light and shuts his laptop before he turns around in his chair. “I’ll cut out the captions and you can glue them on.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

Tadashi stands up and walks over to the printer. He waits for all the captions to print before he picks them up, carrying them back to his desk and setting them down. “Are we doing borders?”

“We have them on the pictures, so I guess we have to.” Kei eyes the stack of blue construction paper next to him on the bed. “Do you want to cut those out, too?”

“I probably should.” Tadashi sits down again with a sigh.

“All right.” Kei grabs the stack of paper and holds it out to Tadashi, who takes it and puts it on the desk next to the captions.

He yawns again. “What time is it?”

Kei looks at the alarm clock on Tadashi’s bedside table. “11:42.”

“I thought it was later.”

“Hm.”

They fall silent again as Tadashi starts cutting the captions out. The reason they’re up this late at all is half-procrastination, half-things-that-can’t-be-helped. The project was assigned two weeks ago, but between practice and Kei being at training camp for a week, they haven’t had much time to work, and they’ve spent most of it not working. So here they are.

The poster is their final project in English. Everyone in their class had to pair up and choose a topic to make a poster on that had something to do with a country that had English as an official language. There’s a lot to cover with a topic like NASA, but it’s better than a test.

Doesn’t mean it’s any less work, though.

“I’m done with half of everything,” Tadashi drawls. He never goes to bed later than eleven unless he has to, and now he seems sleepier than ever.

“Okay, thanks.” Kei turns around and takes the stack of white and blue pieces of paper and starts matching them to the pictures. He doesn’t want to start gluing anything down until he’s sure it’s right; it’ll save him a lot of trouble later.

He starts with the caption about the moon landing. He at least knows where that goes. He sets the blue border down first and the white caption on top of it before he gets off the bed and onto the floor. That’ll probably be easier.

Next is the Hubble Telescope. That’s one of the words he can pick out right off the bat. He puts it in its place and smooths it out before moving on to the International Space Station. He’s pleased to find that everything is going much faster than he thought it would. After the three captions are set, he starts gluing them down. He has to redo the Hubble one a few times, since he keeps gluing it down crooked, but he can afford that. The glue isn’t dry yet.

“Hey, Tadashi, do you have the other three captions?” he asks.

There’s no response. Come to think of it, the cutting sound has stopped, too.

“Tadashi?”

Still nothing.

Kei makes his way up to his feet, looking at the time before he turns around. 12:07. He’s starting to feel a little sleepy himself, and he’s used to staying up later than this. He’s not sure why.

When he turns around, he’s greeted with the image of Tadashi fast asleep at his desk. His head is resting on top of one arm next to the stack of fully-cut captions, which in turn is sitting right next to the stack of fully-cut borders. He looks slightly uncomfortable, but he doesn’t seem to care. He’s never let any weird terrain get in the way of getting to sleep before.

Kei isn’t exactly sure what to do. He could grab everything off the desk and glue it down and get everything done, but by doing that he’s risking waking Tadashi up, which is something he really doesn’t want to do if he can help it.

But Tadashi can sleep through pretty much anything, and it’s Kei’s duty to finish the project. So he grabs both stacks of papers in one hand and sits down on the floor again, matching each caption up with its corresponding picture before gluing it down. It doesn't take him that long to finish, but he still lets out a relieved breath when everything’s stuck on, briefly admiring his and Tadashi’s handiwork. It doesn’t look particularly beautiful or anything like that, but it looks like a slightly-better-than-average three-quarters-of-the-way-finished high school English project. He can live with that.

He gently moves the poster closer to the wall so no one steps on it, making sure that nothing on it moves while he's sliding it over. After checking to see that everything’s still intact, he walks back over to the desk, where Tadashi’s still asleep. He looks like he could easily spend the whole night here without getting anywhere close to waking up again.

But falling asleep at a desk is something that Kei knows from personal experience only produces neck cramps and regret, and he really doesn't want Tadashi to wake up in the morning with any kind of pain after he was already up so late. There has to be something he can do.

He realizes what that something is once he spots the wheels on the bottom of the chair rolling back away from the desk. It's happening so slowly that it's barely noticeable, but the chair's moving.

Taking three slow steps on his tiptoes, Kei sneaks over to the desk. His heart pounds in his chest and he wonders if this is even a remotely good idea. Whatever. It's too late to stop now.

He reaches out and grabs the back of the chair, one hand before the other. As soon as he has a strong enough grip on it, he starts pulling back. It’s agonizingly slow, no faster than the chair was moving before, but if he doesn’t want to wake Tadashi up, he can’t go any faster.

When the chair’s far enough away from the desk, Tadashi’s head slides off the end of the desk and he stirs for a second but doesn’t wake up. He leans back, head resting against the back of the chair, which makes things slightly harder on Kei’s end, but he doesn’t really mind.

Kei finally stops to take a breath when the chair is right next to Tadashi’s bed, and even then, he can’t quite figure out what to do next. He wants to get Tadashi from the chair to the bed somehow, but he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to do that. Should he just pick him up and carry him over? Pick up the chair and dump him out onto the bed and hope for the best? Neither of those seem like things he would do, but desperate times call for desperate measures and Tadashi isn’t that heavy, right?

“...Huh?”

Before Kei can even make a move, Tadashi’s already waking up, and he looks ridiculously cute doing it. He blinks his eyes open slowly, eyebrows scrunched together as he looks up into Kei’s eyes. “...What’s going on?”

“You fell asleep at your desk.”

Tadashi’s eyes widen for a split second before he sighs. “Did I?”

Kei nods. “I finished the poster, though. You did more than enough work and I didn't want to wake you up.”

“Yeah, but I feel bad about it now.” Tadashi frowns.

“There wasn’t a lot left to do.”

“...Then what were you doing?”

Kei can feel his cheeks turning bright red. He can’t say what he was doing, that’s stupid, but he can’t exactly lie either. He’s never been able to lie to Tadashi at all, certainly not well. “Well, I was -” He couldn’t say it like that. “I was going to -” He couldn’t say it like that either. “I was about to -” Damn it.

Tadashi laughs, the quiet really-tired-sounding but really-adorable laugh when it's too late to give it everything. “Got it.”

“I - was actually rolling your chair back and..." Kei trails off. Why did he even try? Even telling the truth isn't working for him.

"You don't have to to tell me if you don't -"

"This is stupid but I was rolling your chair over here because I thought you looked uncomfortable and I was going to try to carry you back to your bed or something even though I'm definitely not strong enough for that -"

"Wait, what?" Tadashi smiles in disbelief, and the look in his eyes says that he's clearly judging Kei at least a little. Dammit, he's already embarrassed enough as is. He actually rambled about something, and now he's being judged for it. Not fair.

"Yes, now can we change the subject?"

"That's so sweet!" Tadashi gushes.

"Really?"

"Yes." Tadashi sits up and stretches his arms up above his head before crawling over the gap between the chair and the bed. He doesn't even touch the floor. "Come on."

"What?" Kei blinks.

With a tiny, slightly-sleepy smirk, Tadashi wraps his arms around Kei's waist and pulls him onto the bed until they're lying right next to each other. They're looking right into each other's eyes when Tadashi giggles, still hugging him. "I said, come on."

Well, Kei knew this would turn into a cuddle session eventually.

"How dare you take advantage of me like that?" He whispers.

The moonlight sparkles in Tadashi's eyes as he smiles, subtly letting go. "What are you talking about?"

He tilts his head up and presses a quick, tired kiss to Kei's lips and lets it linger, leaving Kei with no choice but to reciprocate for the short time it lasts. It's soft and simple; their lips barely touch and they're both about to fall asleep anyway. Kei's still glad to find out that he's in the perfect position to smell the strawberry-scented shampoo in Tadashi's hair.

After a few seconds, Tadashi doesn't pull away but rather falls out of the kiss, letting his head rest on the pillow. He sighs contentedly, closing his eyes with a smile as he rolls onto his back. Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately, in this case - there isn't enough room for Kei to do the same.

"Don't move," Tadashi whispers, the only sound in the room this late at night.

"I won't," Kei whispers back. The next second, he feels a pair of thin arms wrap themselves around his torso as Tadashi snuggles in closer, resting his head on top of one of Kei's arms and essentially pinning it down. "May I ask why now?"

"You're warm," Tadashi murmurs, his voice muffled up by the fabric of Kei's shirt.

"We're lying on top of three blankets."

"It's not the same." Tadashi stops for a few seconds, like he doesn't want to say any more on the subject before he starts talking again. "If you don't like it -"

"No, I like it." Kei means that part, he really does. He's just not good at talking, especially past midnight. He takes the arm that isn't pinned down and wraps it around Tadashi's shoulder. For emphasis.

"Good." Tadashi already sounds like he's falling asleep again. "The alarm's set, right?"

"7:05."

"Perfect." He gets even closer, his voice dropping down to a whisper. "'Night."

"Goodnight," Kei whispers back before closing his eyes and drifting off, out like a light in under a minute. Sure, he's not going to get as much sleep as he wants to, and the pictures on the poster are probably a little crooked since he glued them on in the dark, but that's okay.

He’ll definitely sleep better this way.

#haikyuu!!#fanfic #tsukkiyama #tsukyamgiftexchange2016 #han originals #i'm posting a fic on this blog what??#this is such a great start to my fic year honestly i'm so glad

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