#time travel is a cool but weird concept

[sorrowfulrosebud]

Hi! I have a request.

Okay so 1-A bakugou end’s up to the future. Where he sees that he has a family with reader and sees what a simp he will become🫣

And how would future bakugou and reader (+ the kids) react to meeting him.

(You can choose if past bakugou knows reader or not)

I’m sorry if it’s confusing,

It was safe to say that Katsuki was beyond pissed. He was certain that at this point he was never going to fully get your attention, not with that damned Todoroki always swooping in before he can even look your way.

==================================

The cacophony of grunts from the students plundered against the walls of Gym Gamma. It was self-improvement day and Aizawa was NOT letting anyone rest.

“Keep it up class. Those who fail to break some sort of barrier today will receive double homework for a week. I’m looking at you, Kaminari,” Aizawa grinned evilly. You let out a giggle at Kaminari’s audible gulp before Aizawa shot you a glare.

Katsuki was busy increasing the flow of his AP shot; he thought that if he could increase his sweat, he could increase the speed of which the blasts sped out. The poor rock he was blasting was finally on its last legs, all before that IDIOT Kaminari accidentally bumped into him and caused a rockslide, directly above the platform that you were training on.

“Hey, watch!-” he yelled in a panic. He saw fear flash through your eyes as he willed his body to move. Thankfully for you and begrudgingly for him, a smooth glacier of ice barricaded you from being concussed with Bakugou’s debris.

Todoroki hopped his way from his platform to you and placed his hand on your shoulder.

“Are you alright? You aren’t hurt are you?” Todoroki asked, examining your head for injuries. You shook him off you with a nervous smile.

“Thank you for stopping the debris Todo, but I’m fine. It was shock, I’m not hurt,” you reassured him gently. Todoroki gave you another once over before seeing where the damage came had arrived from.

“I would recommend being more careful next time, Bakugou. Someone could have gotten really hurt,” Todoroki gave him a meaningful glare as Katsuki fought every vein pop in his neck at his implications. Kaminari let out a guffaw, before he let out a squeak of terror at the animalistic look on Katsuki’s face.

“Laugh. Again. I. Freakin’. Dare. You,” he strained angrily through gritted teeth.

“O-okay Kaachan!” Kaminari speedily ran away from the threat as Katsuki stared at the back of your head. Well, now he was in a bad mood.

==================================

Katsuki was the first one in the changing room, and the first one out. He trudged his way to the UA dorms so he could shower and forget the whole day. He couldn’t stand the idea of being teased right now, not when he was so careless to the point that you nearly got concussed. Well, that never would have happened if Dunce Face watched where he was going…

Katsuki was torn from his thoughts as he barged past another student.

“Hey, watch where you’re fucking!-”

And just like that, Katsuki fell to the ground.

==================================

It took Katsuki a long time to start stirring from his sleep. It was a gradual process, but somehow he managed to tear the sleep from his body as he was poked and shaken incessantly by someone. Katsuki jumped up immediately in surprise, throwing a blast at his assailant. His assailant was no match for him though, springing back and using their quirk to restrain him.

Katsuki wiggled in his restraints like a wild animal, snapping and snarling.

“What the hell do you want with me you bastards! Let me the hell go or I’ll fucking kill you!” He snarled with purpose. A soft giggle filled his ears. A familiar giggle.

Soft (S/C) skin filtered through his still blurry vision until he saw… you.

You were at least a good 20 years older, some laughter lines he didn’t remember seeing (not that he definitely doesn’t scan you every time you’re close to him), as well as new scars.

Your eyes had aged too, the bags slightly more prominent but you were still you. You had four small children gathered around the bed gawking at the teen. The smallest was in your lap, seemingly frightened of Katsuki.

“Easy there tiger, you just woke up. I found you in the street asleep, so I took you to a hospital to see if you’re okay,” you offered an explanation that only answered some of his questions.

“Who the damned hell are you?? Why the hell am I here?? Argh, damnit! Let me out of these shitty restraints!” He demanded. Your face hardened in an instant as you glared at him.

“Hey, no fucking swearing in front of my children! If you’re going to talk and ask questions, you need to be respectful. You’re frightening my son with your endless shouts, so what’s your name and we can call your parents to come collect you.”

Katsuki let himself be still for a moment, glowering at you before relaxing his pose.

“My name is Katsuki Bakugou. I was hit by a quirk on my way to the UA’s dorms, I fell asleep I think, and the next thing I know is I’m in a hospital bed surrounded by someone who looks like a classmate of mine,” Katsuki growled. Your face grew a look of puzzlement.

“D-did you say… Katsuki Bakugou? As in, explosion quirk, super goal oriented, current number 2 hero?” You questioned him worriedly.

Katsuki gave you a strange look. How the hell would you know about that stuff??

“I’m only a high school student so I can’t be the number two hero yet, but everything else is true. Look, here’s my quirk,” he said as he let off a few sparks. The small children around the bed looked on in awe at the sight as you chewed your nails.

Katsuki looked back up to you and saw your expression.

“Why?” He asked.

You gulped.

“Because I’m married to Katsuki Bakugou.”

==================================

“Baby, I need you to come to the hospital in Kyoto, it’s an emergency! What? No, me and the kids are fine, we-. Hey, I told you we’re okay, but you have to be here as soon as you can. I’ll send you the details. I love you, see you in a bit.” You hung up the phone with an ashen face as you made your way back to your chair. Your children were bombarding Katsuki with questions, all too weird for Katsuki to answer.

“Papa, why are there two of you?”

“Daddy, why don’t you remember us? Did we do something bad?”

“Dad, why do you look so young? Where are all of your cool scars?”

“Alright kids, give the kid some space. We obviously need to get this fixed somehow. How we’re gonna do that is beyond me though,” you massaged your temples with a sigh. You glanced back up to young Katsuki.

“You’re definitely not a clone or something? Not some sort of fanboy who cosplays in his spare time?” You asked him, half joking.

Katsuki snorted.

“No, I don’t cosplay heroes. I beat them in the hero ranks to show them that I’m the best!” He exclaims.

“God, you even sound like my husband. I’m getting more and more convinced that this is some sort of weird time shift,” you stopped speaking as soon as a muscular figure pulls himself through the door. Katsuki physically stills.

It was him, but older.

At first, older Katsuki didn’t give him a look in. He scrambled over to you, kissing you deeply before checking you over for injuries.

“Where are you hurt?? Are you alright?? Speak to me??” He demanded. You carefully push him off you and rub your thumb on his cheek.

“Sweetie, I told you I’m fine. See, even the quadruplets are fine. We have a major problem though, and I don’t know how we’re going to solve it,” you gestured to younger Katsuki. Older Katsuki glares at younger Katsuki before a look for confusion befalls his face.

Katsuki looked… older. His face was more structured, yet still maintained some of his puppy fat. Scars littered his face, the most noticeable a large triangle that went from the middle of his cheek to the underside of his neck. His hair was shorter too, buzzed at the side. He towered over you easily and his pecs looked even bigger than before. Taunt muscles flexed at the threat to his wife and children.

“Can someone explain what the fuck happened?”

“Katsuki, stop fucking swearing!”

==================================

Until he was back to his current time, you had pleaded with your husband to let him stay. Older Katsuki agreed when his babies started pleading too, chubby cheeks wobbling with unshed tears at the idea of their older daddy throwing out their younger daddy.

And for the last few days, he had lived with you and his (?) children. Older Katsuki was mostly at work when he woke up, and he wouldn’t see him unless he stayed up past his bedtime (he could never compromise his sleep).

He spent some time babysitting your children, the quads. The eldest, Akira, was a total carbon copy of him, apart from his hair texture and colour. He was so bold when facing younger Katsuki, asking him questions and hiding his siblings behind him when they properly met.

The second eldest daughter, Aika, was more like you; shy and reserved but very playful all the same. She was a more balanced mixed of the two of you (?).

Your third daughter, Kokoro, was a pain in his ass. She constantly played tricks on Katsuki, taunting him and making mean jokes (all before she was shut down with your stare).

And finally, your littlest quadruplet Keiko, was honestly kinda his favourite in the strangest way; he was so different to his siblings it was unreal. He was the smallest, most sensitive of the bunch. In a way, he reminded him of Deku when they were kids, but with his colour hair.

The morning of the third day, you sat him down with your children at the breakfast table and grilled him a fry up. Each of your children were giggling happily in their high chairs, scrambled eggs and ketchup smeared around each mouth. Katsuki let out a small smile when Keiko offered him a piece of toast from his plate before denying it with a “no thanks squirt, your ma is making me some”.

“Well, good news! I found the person who you described and asked them how long the quirk should last. You should be back to your own time by next week, maybe even earlier if you’re lucky,” you smiled as you flipped the sizzling bacon in the pan.

Katsuki was scarfing the breakfast like there was no tomorrow, up until you said that he should be home sometime by next week.

That’s good, he thought. I really want to know something though, I might as well take advantage of the situation.

He looked up at you, one burning question on his mind.

“I bet you’re wondering how me and … well, I suppose you got together, huh?” You grinned at him.

“How could you tell that’s what I was thinking?” He demanded. You let out a laugh.

“Katsuki hun, I’ve been married to you, er, him for over 15 years. I know all of your little tricks and tells, so don’t even try hiding them,” you offered more bacon to him. He accepted, before you turned your attention to the kids in their high chairs.

“Let me clean up my mucky little pups up first and we’ll talk after I’ve dropped them off at daycare.”

==================================

It was a pleasant day, Katsuki noted. After dropping off the children at the daycare and added cuddles from the babies, you did as you promised and hurried Katsuki to the couch with a photo book.

“See here, this is a photo I took of us at our first date. You were so nervous, your hand kept popping and you had to keep wiping your hand,” you laughed fondly at the memory. Katsuki peered at the photos with a strange feeling lying in his tummy. Is this why he felt so nervous around younger you all of the time?

“Oh! And here, this was our trip with the class to France! I had said something about the croissants being delicious, and you took that as a challenge. I was eating the croissants you made for days,” you let out another laugh as you recounted tales of your relationship.

Katsuki stared at you for a solid 5 seconds. You stared at him back until his face hardened and he turned himself away. You placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Is something the matter hun?” You pried carefully. Damnit, you even knew the right nicknames to make him feel all weak inside.

“Just… why the hell would you go out with someone like me, hah? I’m loud, I’m obnoxious, I can be pretty freakin’ mean, so why? Why would you ever let me have a home with you?! Why would you ever let me grow a family with you?!? Why do you seem so happy, even though there’s a chance I may never come back?!?” He was borderline yelling at the end of his lament, tears threatening to plop onto the pages of the photo album.

You hugged Katsuki tightly, fingers playing with the baby hairs on the nape of his neck, all soft and gentle.

“Katsuki… I have no idea how far you’re into the relationship with younger me, but I’m going to let you in on a secret. I had a crush on you since our first day. I thought you were so strong and handsome, although you had some angst problems. Even after that, I always admired you from afar.

It hasn’t always been easy with you, as I’m sure you’re aware of. You can be loud and mean, and that has caused some rifts in our relationship, but,” you lifted his head up and cleared some tears.

“You’re also dedicated. You found ways to make up for your mistakes, and I always forgave you for them. I wanted a family with you because I love you, er, older Katsuki. We’re so blessed to have the quadruplets, even if they’re little pains sometimes. And yeah, there isn’t a day that goes by when I’m not panicked beyond all belief when you’re at work, but I wouldn’t stop you because it’s your dream.”

Katsuki looked at you. Your eyes held nothing but sincerity as he smoothed his breathing.

“Now come on, let’s go make some spicy noodles. My husband will be back soon.”

==================================

Katsuki helped you diligently in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with renewed vigour. Older Katsuki trudged through the door with a loud grunt, you immediately dropping the pan on the hob to give him a welcome home hug.

“Welcome back baby, how was work? It was nice that Kiri offered to cover your shift,” you rambled happily into his neck. Katsuki let out a barking laugh at your clinginess as he picked you up and kissed you, making you squeal in surprise.

Younger Katsuki stared at your display; is this how you’re going to be in the future? Allowing him to kiss your neck when he comes home from work, cooking his favourite meals, keeping your home in tact?

“Oi, quit starin at my wife you pervert,” older Katsuki barked before you slapped his chest playfully.

“Leave him be, he’s literally you, you big dumb dumb. I’ve been letting him in on some of our dates and stuff so he can seduce younger me into wanting you,” you teased. Both Katsuki’s huffed simultaneously, earning a laugh from you. You wriggled yourself out of his grip and led him to the dining room where the meal you and younger Katsuki created.

You kissed his cheek as you went to fetch him a drink, leaving both Katsuki’s by themselves.

Older Katsuki stared menacingly at his younger self before clearing his throat.

“Listen brat, we need to fuckin’ talk,” he starts, rearranging himself on the chair and nudging the other chair adjacent to him. Younger Katsuki did so with hesitation.

“I’m fuckin’ tellin’ ya now, if you do anything that wrecks what I have now, I’m gonna come back in time to kick your ass,” he growls lowly.

“I love that damned woman more than anything in this godforesaken planet, as well as my little pack of brats. I would do anything for them, and I’ll be damned if you do anything that fucks that up for me,” he glares at him. Younger Katsuki slowly put two and two together and looked pointedly at the scar on his cheek. Older Katsuki knew where he was looking immediately.

“I, we, got this scar during a villain attack. (Y/N) took the brats to the park after a stupid fucking fight we had, and a villain attacked them out of nowhere. Luckily, I was patrolling there and stopped them from hurting them, so I took the blow in her place. I would do it a million times over for her,” his voice audibly softens whilst talking about you, eyes downcast to the large scar on his cheek.

He touches it almost fondly, as if he was proud of the scare. Knowing Katsuki, he probably was. He looked back up at younger Katsuki, who had a contemplating look.

“So…. Please. Don’t hurt her younger self in any way. I wouldn’t be able to survive without her. If you argue, hold your tongue even if you’re right. Treasure her. Make her feel like she’s the most incredible woman in the damned world, cos she fuckin is,” he finished with a doleful look in his eyes.

“…okay. I’ll, I’ll try,” younger Katsuki promised. Older Katsuki nodded and cleared his throat as you walked into the room. You presented the bottle of beer with a happy grin and a kiss on the cheek and a ruffle of the hair for younger Katsuki.

Fuck, he was smitten.

==================================

“Daddies, watch me!” Aika grunted loudly as she successfully tiptoed from one end of the couch to another. Older Katsuki clapped and whooped in adoration whilst younger Katsuki looked on in pride.

“That’s my little ballerina! You’re gonna be the most graceful dancer ever, pumpkin!” Older Katsuki cheered, sweeping her up on his shoulder and making her squeal.

Kokoro looked on in jealousy with a pout on her face before a brilliant idea struck her. She toddled back to the couch and attempted the exact same feat as her sister, except on the back of the couch.

Keiko sat below her and watched her with a fearful expression.

“Papas, watch me! I can do it better than Aik-AAAAA!” She shrieked as she went to fall on the cushions of the couch, and subsequently Keiko. Keiko let out a scared cry as younger Katsuki swooped in to save him, carrying him in his left arm and catching Kokoro diligently in his right.

Keiko sobbed loudly into Katsuki’s broad shoulder, clinging to him with impressive strength. He nestled in as close as he could, passing Kokoro to his older self as he tried shushing Keiko.

“There there brat, you’re okay. Shhh, it’s okay, I’ve got you,” he murmured softly into his ear. He tried rocking him softly in his arms the same way you did and he was slowly left with a hiccuping, sleepy toddler.

“Damnit Kokoro, this is why I tell you to be careful! Every time you try to show Aika up, you end up hurting someone and yourself. Are you hurt, Keiko?” Older Katsuki asked Keiko. Keiko shook his little head into younger Katsuki’s neck.

Kokoro started tearing up at older Katsuki’s tone and looked down in shame. He visibly softened at his daughter’s tears and wiped them away with his fingers.

“Just be more careful, okay pumpkin?” He said firmly. Kokoro nodded and offered Keiko an apology.

==================================

The next time Katsuki woke up, it was in a hospital bed. Specifically, Recovery Girl’s clinic. The light filtered through the blinds, hitting Katsuki in the face and making him stir.

IV wires and tubes fed into him and made it hell to try to sit up, before he saw a sleeping figure near his knees.

It was younger you.

He nudged you with his knee in order to wake you up. You looked dreadful; massive eye bags, lips nibbled red raw, sniffly pink nose like you hadn’t stopped crying.

“Oh my god, you’re awake! I’ll go get Recovery Girl!” As you moved to get her, Katsuki grabbed your hand.

“W-what…,” his voice felt strange, like it wasn’t his.

“What the damned hell happened?” He croaked out.

Your face saddens as you looked away.

“You seemed really upset after our last training session, so I went after you to find you. You had collapsed just outside of the Height’s Alliance building and you wouldn’t wake up whatsoever,” your voice cracks. Katsuki let out an “oh”.

You gained your composure before looking at Katsuki again.

“So, how do you feel? Is anything hurt? What happened?” You interrogated him. Katsuki rolled his eyes at your pestering before a sly grin crossed his face.

“Why, were ya worried about me?” He teased and watched as your face turned a bright pink. You flapped your hands around in a panic.

“It’s just because you’re my classmate is all! You wouldn’t wake up, and I didn’t want you to stay like this for ages!” You rambled in a worried state. Katsuki let out a gruff laugh before wincing at his voice.

Well, better shoot my shot, he thought.

“Well, I’ll tell ya what. Go out with me this Saturday and I’ll tell ya everything,” he promised.

The pink in your face told him everything that he needed to know.

#bnha x reader #bakugou x reader #bakugou fluff #bakugou x reader fluff #bakugou #kinda angsty? idk #bakuboy is whipped for you #domestic bakugou is one of the best bakugous #domestic bakugou #time travel is a cool but weird concept #hope this makes sense 😭

[draconicace]

alright. ok. alright. the dialogue about a child giving turo/sada a white book actually being about the player is very clever. thanks random tumblr users for saying to take terapagos to the crystal pool

#aiden's monologuing #ailbpokesv #pokemon sv spoilers #pokemon sv dlc spoilers #now. why wouldn't you let me go grab arven right quick. that's his dead parent #ohh time travel weirdness we're in it now #this opens up way more questions though. what is terapagos' power. what is up with the crystals. do the crystals have time powers? #does terastilization have something to do with time? is it just stellar tera that might have to do with time? #area zero's so weird. really wish something more cohesive gets done with it #like i do hope references get made to it in future games #pokemon you can't keep introducing cool world concepts and then abandoning them. looks at the war mentioned in xy.

[violetren]

Been watching The Way Home with my sister and mentally lamenting how straight it is the whole time, because why at this stage in life should I have to watch Chyler Leigh have to play a straight woman? And some fucking how when they finally gave us the level of queer content I had been craving I immediately went "for fucks sake."

And it's insane because I was kinda shipping the characters (the mc Kat and her long lost brother's fiance Susanna). Susanna is a boss as bitch and Kat... Kat has heart and is played by Chyler Leigh (I have problems with Kat that most come down to how the writers have her making the same self realisation over and over instead of letting her learn, but anyways). They are driven and they love fiercely, and they play off each other So Fucking Well in a way that is much more deeply interesting than the 2 male love interests Kat has. I mean shit I do still ship them. There is so much juicy stuff to complicate their relationship it's fun trying to think how they'd either resolve it or burn the world down.

It's just the show did it wrong.

It felt inserted.

They got less (sub)textual build up than Korrasami got back when they were dodging censors in America pre marriage equality kids TV. Then the timing was so weird but like there wasn't really a better time than just after they had rescued Kat's brother aka Susanna's fiance and were hiding out in a basement low-key giving their goodbyes because Kat can't take Susanna home with her.

It had this air around it like "oh we're not really gonna be coming back here much after this season so we'll just drop in the fact that Susanna has no interest in men and have them almost kiss because then we'll finally tick that box for main cast queer rep, and oh wouldn't ya know it we're coming up on the end of season 2, sure would be a shame if we didn't get a season 3 to explore this revelation."

Don't get me wrong Chyler Leigh and Watson Rose absolutely have the chemistry for it to have been a powerful scene. It's just the writing wasn't there to back it up.

What is so fucking annoying about it is that this can be construed lowkey as an equality win.

Finally a TV show has reached the point where putting two attractive women who had a common goal on a screen next to each other meant Romance instead of it needing to be two attractive people of opposite genders.

AND We finally have just barely enough media rep for this to read as sucky compared to other options. Yay!

#chirping wren #this show made me understand the meaning of the word mid on a spiritual level #but is has chyler leigh playing a messy trying to hide her soft wounded heart by being spiky character #and time travel #its that perfect balance of good concept with questionable execution that hooks you in and gets you thinking #and because i am watching with my sister and can't be at her place all the time it means i am only getting an episode a week #as though this were the old days of media consumption #so i am in this weird perfect whirlpool for nurturing fandom #yet haven't gone looking for the show tag yet because idk how much of a following the show has #and am too tired to be one of 5 people talking about this show on the regular and the only 1 on the piece of driftwood that is katXsusanna #idk #maybe its cool #i'll go check after i post this #the way home

[indie-ttrpg-of-the-week]

Trans made TTRPGs

Due to… recent events that I would rather not talk about, today's post is a highlight of different tabletop games made by trans peeps! These games are fantastic in their own right, of course, but you can also know that they were made by incredibly cool and attractive people

(Also, these are flyover descs of the game, they'll get more in-depth singular posts later, this is because I am lazy)

Perfect Draw is a phenomenal card game TTRPG that was funded in less than a day on backerkit, it's incredibly fun and has simple to learn hard to master rules for creating custom cards, go check it out!

Songs for the dusk is fucking good, pardon my language, but it's a damn good post apocalyptic game about building community in a post-capitalist-post-apocalypse-post-whatever world. do yourself a favor and if you only check out one game in this list, check this one out, its a beautiful game.

Flying Circus is set in a WW1 inspired fantasy setting full of witches, weird eldritch fish people (who are chill as hell), cults, dead nobility, and other such things. It's inspired by Porco Rosso primarily but it has other touchstones.

Wanderhome is a game about being cute little guys going on a silly adventure and growing as the seasons change, its GMless and very fun

https://weregazelle.itch.io/armour-astir Armour Astir has been featured in here before but its so damn good I had to post it twice. AA demonstrates a fundamental knowledge of the themes of mech shows in a way that very few other games show, its awesome

Kitchen Knightmares is… more of a LARP but its still really dang cool, its about being a knight serving people in a restaurant, its played using discord so its incredibly accessible

https://grimogre.itch.io/michtim Michtim is a game about being small critters protecting their forest from nasty people who wish to harm it, not via brutal violence (sadly) but via friendship and understanding (which is a good substitute to violence)

ok this technically doesn't count but I'm putting it here anyways cuz its like one of my favorite ttrpgs of all time TSL is a game about baring your heart and dueling away with people who you'll probably kiss 10 minutes later, its very very fanfic-ey and inspired by queer narratives. I put it here because its made by a team, and the expansion has a setting specifically meant to be a trans "allegory", so I'll say it counts, honestly just go check it out its good shit

https://willuhl.itch.io/mystic-lilies

Mystic Lillies is a game inspired by ZUN's Touhou Project about witches dueling powerful foes, each other, and themselves. Mystic Lillies features rapid character creation and a unique diceless form of rolling which instead uses a standard playing card deck.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/141424/nobilis-the-game-of-sovereign-powers-2002-edition I… want to do a more general overview on Jenna K as an important figure in indie RPG design, but for now just know that Nobilis is good

https://temporalhiccup.itch.io/apocalypse-keys Apocalypse Keys is a game inspired by Doom Patrol, Hellboy, X-men, and other comics about monstrousness being an allegory for disenfranchisement. Apocalypse Keys is also here because its published by Evilhat so its very cleaned up and fancy but I love how the second you check out the dev's other stuff you can tell they are a lot more experimental with their stuff, this is not a critique, it is in fact a compliment

Fellowship! I've posted about this game before, but it is again here. Fellowship has a fun concept that it uses very well mostly, its a game about defining your character's culture, and I think that's really really cool

Voidheart Symphony is a really cool game about psychic rebellion in a city that really does not like you, the more you discover for yourself the better

Panic at the Dojo is a phenomenal ttrpg based on what the Brazilian would call "Pancadaria", which basically means, fucking other's people shit up. Character Creation is incredibly open and free, meaning that many character concepts are available

Legacy 2e is a game about controlling an entire faction's choices across time, its very fun

remember to be kind to a trans person today! oh also don't even try to be transphobic in the reblogs or replies, you will be blocked so fast your head will spin

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg community #ttrpg indie #ttrpg #trans creator #trans #trans pride #queer #queer creator #perfect draw #wanderhome #songs for the dusk #flying circus #armour astir #michtim #thirsty sword lesbians #mystic lillies #apocalypse keys #fellowship #ttrpg of the day

[novalizinpeace]

LLOOOOORRREEEEE!!!!

This is even better than Netflix, yes yes.

Also, I kinda wanted to ask. Is there ever a crossbreed in the cartoon world ? Like, I know we already discuss some parents stuff and all, but like- have there ever been an actual hybrid between two species ?

wait for the second part of the kingdom post! I loss the work on it yesterday due the electricity, so that's why the post is ''incomplete'', but i should post the rest in a moment!

About your questions; Play.co actually thought in this! Remember they make toys like PJ and catbee, so the idea of hybrid critters was in the table.

Most specific, the only design that the company officially show up was Dogday and Craftycorn possible child, and they show it in a episode were dogday and catnap were talking about his crush on crafty.

In Catnap's defense, he really want to be the cool uncle.

BUT since the series stopped even before the posibility of have a future episode or something like that to show the marketable characters, the idea (and even a whole set of toys called ''Second gen'') were canned in Play.co documents. Amara and Alba had found the concepts and ideas in paper just like the scripts of season 2 (where it was going to be a time travel episode), but the project was just too ambicious, and Play.Co just wanted a easy cow, so the moment the project was too expensive for them, it was all over.

But to answer your questions: Hybrids are possible, but REEEEEEEEEEEALLY weird to be like this, usually the most common ''mix'' are the children getting the colour of the other parent (like with dogday and catnap).

#for one reason the lost media in the tag #a lot of the story of the cartoon was lost due play.com stopping the series #but Amara is working in getting all back #smilingcritterslostmedia #ask #nova say

[koiiiiijiii]

random windbreaker headcanons

tw : no, kinda cute, x reader not included

⊹ Wooin believe in mbti types, if it says that someones mbti type doesn’t match with his, he will believe it.

⊹ Hyok ultimate stand is pokemon. he wants to be pokemon.

⊹ Harry actually dog enjoyer who prefers animals to people bc they are loud and use doping. and dogs don’t use doping. Noah always argues with him bc actually cats are cooler.

⊹ Mahon was super naive person in some ways. like it was enough to say something with straight, serious face and he will believe it.

⊹ Sangho drink water or strong alcohol like whiskey, vodka, soju or something that have degree higher than 30°. nothing else. it always either water or alcohol. and he hates cocktails. if u guy who drinks cocktails u r gay, his honest opinion, i just asked him!!

⊹ Juhwan actually have a shark. there is an app, where you can “buy” a shark and you can see its location. so Juhwan owns two sharks, their names is Bobby and Sam. he was really upset when Bobbys tracker lost and he can’t see his shark anymore :( Bobby was his favorite one

⊹ deep inside Juwon really lonely person, so partly he actually enjoys that he have Vinny’s company and at some, really rare moments actually think about him as his younger brother (then he have a call from his partners from dark business and everything goes back)

⊹ Juwon actually get tied of people really fast, so he doesn’t really have friends, only business partners like Sangho and some people like Umi, who was with him in university

⊹ TJ have tiktok playlist that contains hard brazilian phonk, the ones from epic anime edits, and he listen it in headphones and imagine himself as an anime hero

⊹ Minu was questionable about his preferences. before he met Mia he always spent biggest part of his time with boys from zephyrus and June, and he wasn’t interested in girls around him. he used to think maybe he had a crush on Vinny or June.

⊹ Aria really enjoys history classes and have best marks at this subject.

⊹ Vinny doesn’t understand concept of dating. like you just met random people and start see each other every day and then maybe marry and have kids? are you insane? you just see random person and think “oh u cool, u r my boyfriend/girlfriend now”. he genuinely think people are weird.

⊹ Shelly 100% high fashion enjoyer and maybe even wanted to be a model, but she is not tall enough, so before coming to Korea she was insecure about her height.

⊹ aside from apples Hajun enjoys cucumbers. they are like apples in vegetables world.

⊹ Kaneshiro hates iqos. same with sangho, either normal cigarettes or pipe with tobacco. no third option.

⊹ Jay Jo enjoy Gordon Ramsay shows. especially old “kitchen nightmares” where he travels across US and mock cafe owners.

#[ ~ koi.talks🗣] #windbreaker #windbreaker webtoon #windbreaker x reader #windbreaker headcanon #webtoon #headcanon #jay jo windbreaker #shelly scott wind breaker #wooin sabbath #wooin #hajun joker x reader #joker windbreaker #hyeok kwon sabbath #windbreaker sangho #min u windbreaker #tj windbreaker #juhwan windbreaker #x reader #wooin windbreaker #sangho choi #joker windbreaker x reader #joker x reader #wooin x reader #aria windbreaker #aria choi #vinny hong x reader #juwon ryu

[artful-aries]

Genshin Headcanons: Ways They Show Affection (Dottore, Dehya)

Dottore

​​Affection is not the Doctor’s forte

​​The definition of calm, cool, and collected, he’s not going to just give you a kiss on your cheek or hold you in his arms

​​If anything, you’ll find yourself begging for him to pay some attention to you

​​The man just often gets sucked into his research, almost forgetting about your existence. You’re still special though, if anyone else interrupted his research, they would be dead by now

​​Still, for him to stop his research and actually give you attention, the stars need to align and he needs to be in a good mood

​​On these lucky days, he will gladly hold you hand as he works, or perhaps sit in his lap if it doesn’t impede his research and you promise to not squirm around too much

​​If you are really good and let him finish his research for the day, Dottore will give you the affection that you crave. Kisses, a warm embrace, the whole nine yards. He’s just….a little intense about it

​​Takes the time to tell you how wonderful he thinks your body is, but not in a sexy way

​​The way he talks, it almost sounds like he either thinks you’re the divine among mortals, or a prime candidate for organ harvesting. You still aren’t sure which he leans towards

​​Outside of physical affection, Dottore is thoughtful enough to leave you notes before he heads off to the lab to research. They are simple; telling you to take care of yourself, where you can find him, sending you his regards, nothing poetic but it shows that he does think about you.

​​He gives gifts…in the form of the results of his latest research. Sometimes it genuinely neat things, like brighter, more sustainable magical crystals. Other times, it’s strange amalgamations of things you rather remain blissfully unaware of

​​It’s almost like he’s showing off his abilities, like a cat that brings back a dead mouse for you to praise them for

​​

​​Dehya

​​Her affection is rough, but it comes in abundance

​​She totally gives you noogies on top of your head, plays pranks on you to get you flustered, or straight up manhandles you and flings you into an oasis pool. Having grown up mostly around men her whole life, she doesn’t see anything wrong with this

​​If you complain she will try to be more gentle; she won’t give you noogies anymore, but she won’t stop the pranks. Sorry, she thinks your shocked face is hilarious

​​Physical affection comes naturally to Dehya, she’s always got an arm around you, planting kisses on your cheek if other mercenaries stare at you for too long, etc

​​When the two of you alone, Dehya almost gets nervous about touching you. She wants to so bad, but she psyches herself out, thinking that she might go too far and make you uncomfortable

​​Dehya is a good gift giver too, she secretly saves up money from her jobs to get you nice trinkets and things that she finds in her travels

​​Her fatal flaw is that she is bad about taking you in dates; she spends a lot of quality time with you, but rarely thinks about taking you to any place fancy

​​It’s not that she doesn’t love you enough, the concept just seems a bit weird to her. Why would she take you to a stuffy place when she can spend that time stargazing with you out in the desert?

​​If you insisted she would make a good effort, but you would be able to tell she’s a little on edge and uncomfortable the entire time

​​The best time for Dehya is sitting under the shade of a tree at an oasis, soaking her feet in the water with you as you both laugh about everything and nothing at all

#genshin impact #genshin #genshin imagines #genshin headcanons #genshin x reader #reader insert #genshin imagine #genshin impact headcanons #genshin impact imagine #genshin headcanon #Dottore #dottore x reader #dehya #dehya x reader

[ghouljams]

God i love moon so much. Cowboy soap too. There’s no question to this ask, i just- ah i fucking love those two. Moon is seriously fighting their way to be my favorite darling. Just the concept of them, their dialogue, their behaviors- *chiefs kiss*

Love me some moon n’ soap.

Now give us Birde and Gaz, this is a threat. /j

Hope ur having a good day Ghoul! Always good to read ur blog -Lurk 👁️

Would you settle for 1870z Birdie and Gaz?

You think it’s sort of silly to keep you in the hold overnight, you’re barely drunk and you didn’t hit the gunslinger that hard. You’re sure you’ll hear about it when you see the kids on Monday. Bad gas travels fast in a small town and all that. At least the company is good. You like the deputy well enough, though you’ve only seen him around. Never had much reason to interact with him before tonight.

“I’ve got me a ranger with the prettiest eyes, he’s sure a straight shooter even when he lies, but give him a horse and he’ll race out that door, leavin’ me cryin’ like a penniless whore.”

“Teachers shouldn’t say whore,” Gaz tells you with a smile, you wave a hand at him from behind the iron bars.

“You didn’t like the drinking songs, I’m improvising,” You hum a few more bars, trying to think through your usual catalog. You’re not really an entertainer, but you’ve never had so many complaints about your singing.

“What’s your name again?”

“Kyle,” His smile could light up a cave, you’ve never seen eyes sparkle like that.

“Come in, come in, my love Kyle,” He laughs, you take a moment to enjoy it before continuing, “stay with my this night, you shall have both ale and coal, my fire burning bright.” You hum filling in for the usual guitar. The cell isn’t cold, but there’s a nice chill from the night air. You close your eyes, lean your head back against the wall of the cell. “Well I won’t come in, I can’t come in, I won’t come in at all, there’s a lady ten times fair than you, waitin’ in lord barnets hall-”

“I don’t buy that,” Kyle cuts in, you blink open your eyes to look at him.

“What?”

“I don’t buy it,” He drags his chair closer to the cell.

“Which part?”

“Never seen anyone half as pretty as you, but ten times?” He shakes his head, rests his elbows on his knees as he leans forward, “That’d have to be an act of God.” You let out a breath, jerk your head to the side so you stop looking at his sincerity. Lord this man is making your cheeks hot. You press the back of your hand to your face to try and cool it down.

“D’you flirt with all your prisoners?”

“Only the pretty ones," he sounds far too genuine for you to keep pretending he's joking.

“You think I’m pretty now, you should see me without the drunk and disorderly charge.” You joke.

“I have,” He says, “seen you, I mean. You’re a fuckin’ miracle, like walkin’ sunshine.” See that's just unfair. You aren't supposed to be sweet talked by the man that pulled you out of a bar fight just shy of an hour ago. You'd think that should've scared him off of thinking you're heaven sent.

"You're not supposed to keep thinkin' that after you see me fight," you can't explain the way your voice quiets, or the rush of your pulse in your ears. You think maybe you're embarrassed, weird you don't usually get embarrassed by this sort of thing.

"Probably not, but that isn't gonna stop me," Kyle leans close to the bars of the cell, reaches a hand to brush his knuckles against your cheek, "Don't get shy on me now, Teach, I still wanna know where you got that right hook."

"Birdie," you grab his hand, lace your fingers together, "my friends call me Birdie."

"What do I call you if I don't wanna be friends?" His thumb strokes the back of your hand, his eyes warm as they stare into yours. You hardly notice the bars between you, too focused on his smile, the crease of his cheeks and the little scar under his eye. You wonder how he got that, and if he'd tell you if you asked.

"I don't know," You hum, glancing around the cell, and the sheriff's office, "but I suppose we've got all night to figure it out."

-

Price stares down at you and Gaz asleep in the holding cell. Passed out on the bench and cuddled close as can be. He pinches the bridge of his nose, tries not to be angry at this. He knew Gaz was pining after you but this is just ridiculous.

"Either of you mind explainin' how this happened?" He asks the room at large. Gaz at least has the decency to sit bolt upright at the sound of his voice, knocking your head off his chest and onto the wood seat. He keeps his hands on your hips, protective, to keep you from falling off the bench and onto your ass.

You grumble something and push yourself up onto your hands to wipe the sleep out of your eyes. Price raises his brows and fixes Gaz with his glaring, since he's the only one he has any real control over. You don't even have the decency to look embarrassed, untangling your legs from Gaz's so you can sit properly and soothing your hands over your skirt. You stand and try to scoot past him with a "Sheriff." He scruffy you and drags you back to sit back on the bench.

"Believe I asked you two a question, and I don't like repeatin' myself," he presses.

"Is Goose boarding a gunslinger?" You ask, blatantly trying to change the subject. Price points a finger at you, then brings it to his lips. You shut your mouth quickly. He points at Gaz.

"Broke up a bar fight, met my wife, must've passed out while we were talkin'." He rattles off, you turn to look at him and mouth:

"Wife?" Gaz gives you a small smile and a shrug. You turn to look back at Price and nod. Price sucks in a breath, and lets it out in a hiss before nodding.

"Alright, out, before word gets out and you don't have a class come Monday." You scramble to your feet, and slip past him to get out of the cell. You give Gaz a small wave which he eagerly returns before Price hears the office door open and shut. "Since when are you two chummy?" Price asks when he's sure you're gone.

"Since she nearly knocked Ghost's lights out and I had to carry her back here kickin'." Gaz runs a hand over his head, scratches his neck, a lovesick look in his eye.

"Mean right hook on that one," Price nods. Gaz hums, staring at the door past him. Price rolls his eyes and smacks his shoulder, "Alright, go after her. Can't have you moping around here all day when we've got work that needs doing."

Gaz grins and wastes no time shouldering past him and out into the bright Texas sun.

#kyle gaz garrick #kyle garrick mw2 #kyle garrick x reader #kyle garrick #gaz x reader #gaz x oc #x oc #oc: birdie #in which birdie gets to sing and Gaz gets the girl hes been watching since he got to town #you know she caught him staring a couple times and brushed it off #oh also birdie punched Ghost for touching Goose #but Price doesnt need to know that #deputy!Gaz #1870s!cowboy #lurk #👁️ anon #i love moon and Soap's dialogue too theyre so fun to write

[taizi]

in the mouth of the world

one piece word count: 1k written for @op-secret-santa 2023 and my giftee was @viktorclawthorne ! viktor, two of your favorite characters are zoro and sanji, and one of your favorite pairings is platonic zolu, so this is what i came up with. i really, really hope you like it !

read on ao3

x

Sanji is in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, hair tied back with one of Usopp’s scrunchies, trying to remember if the raspberry or the pistachio macarons went over better last time. His friends inhaled them all in a matter of minutes, but Sanji can’t recall which ones went first.

In the end, he goes with mango. The fruits are ripe, cheerful orange, and their color pings as appropriate in his mind.

These pastries are finicky at best, and a punishment from god at worst, so leveling the battlefield by removing extra heat and moisture from his workstation is always step one. As a result, the room is very cool, the door propped open to let in the crisp winter air, a fan borrowed from Franky’s workshop whirring away in the corner. 

Zoro and Luffy are in the galley, sitting around the scarred kitchen table—ostensibly to keep Sanji company while he works, but more likely just waiting around to see if they get tossed any scraps. 

As Sanji whips meringue, he finds his attention wandering back to the two of them in time to pick up part of their conversation.

“—be anything,” Luffy is saying, spreading his arms out wide as if to encompass the full scope of just how big the concept is he’s talking about. “There are no rules and it can be as weird or funny as you want! What would you pick?”

Zoro hums, giving it some thought. A stranger might be surprised to learn it, Sanji thinks, given how severe and forbidding their first mate appears at a glance, but he is generally the first to fold when it comes to catering to their captain’s whims. This terror of a swordsman, this nightmare of a pirate, simply follows Luffy’s every step without even looking to see where it might lead, like a no-nonsense Belgian Shepherd plodding along behind a bouncy border collie. 

That’s true for battle and danger as much as it’s true for shenanigans. Zoro is worth millions, is as much a killer and a criminal as any of those other Wanted men his posters are displayed beside, but he isn’t afraid to look silly. Not if it’s Luffy reaching back for him, sunny grin amped up to eleven, calling Zoro, you too! Come with me!

Zoro says, “Time, then.”

Luffy rocks up in his seat, eyes round and impressed, and says, “Time travel? Like the Fruit that Momonosuke’s mom ate, that sends you forward?”

“Mm. But mine would go backwards,” Zoro explains, leaning into the game of make-believe. “It would only work one time and it would start me back at the very beginning.”

Zoro’s birthday was a month ago, and Sanji made a dark chocolate truffle cake infused with enough liqueur that he guiltily baked a lighter version for the younger half of the crew. But Zoro had taken one bite of the boozy dessert and his eyebrows flew up to his hairline. He doesn’t usually go in for sweets, but the bitterness of the chocolate paired with the velvet smoothness of the liqueur seemed to win him over instantly. 

It isn’t in their nature to thank each other openly. From as far back as Thriller Bark, the best things they know about each other are secrets kept from everyone else. But Zoro took a second piece when Robin’s extra hands offered him one, which said much more than any effusive praise would have anyway. 

Just last week, it was Chopper’s birthday, and Sanji whipped up about a hundred triple-strawberry cupcakes, filled with ganache, topped with cloud-like icing and sugared fruit and sprinkles, and it was worth it for the way his little brother’s face went slack with awe when he took in the spread. 

Until Robin and Vivi’s birthdays in February, there are no specialized desserts Sanji needs to prepare. His nakama will sometimes have a craving, and he tends to keep sweet things on deck for those nights when sleep is not forthcoming, for those cloudy days when it’s hard to see the sun waiting for them beyond the storm, but he rarely makes macarons just for fun. 

The timing, the temperature, the moisture, all of it has to be exact, or the shells will crack, or the feet will spread, or they’ll come out hollow. It’s not a hard recipe, it’s just annoying. It’s the last thing he learned from Zeff, because he perfected every other dish on the menu well before he made a halfway decent batch of macarons. 

No one asked for these. Sanji is well-aware that he doesn’t have to be standing here, sacrificing the bulk of his day to this thankless task, but he’s already in it now. The buttercream and mango curd are ready, and the shells are about to go in the oven. 

“A one-time Fruit!” Luffy exclaims. Zoro could have said he would pick a Fruit that would turn his hair a different color every day and Luffy would have sounded equally as fascinated. “You would go all the way back? Do you want to change that much?”

“My Fruit wouldn’t work that way,” Zoro explains simply. “I wouldn’t be able to change anything or the future I was from where I used the Fruit wouldn’t exist, would it? It would have to stay exactly the same for me to get back there.”

Zoro doesn’t want a Fruit—neither does Sanji. They spend half their lives dragging their nakama who are already anchors out of the sea. 

Besides that, Sanji wants to meet All Blue properly the day he finds her. He’s going to swim for hours and hours and barely remember to come up for air. A Fruit would only take from him more than it could ever give. 

And Zoro has never cut corners when it comes to his own strength. But there’s something in his tone that makes Sanji wonder if he’s thought about this before. 

“What if you wanted to, though?” Luffy asks. “Or what if you had the chance to stop something bad before it happened?”

“No changes,” Zoro says adamantly. “No diversions. I would have to live it all over again.”

Sanji remembers all the stories Luffy tells his crew about the trouble he and his brothers got into when they were children. He said there was a pâtisserie in High Town where chefs and bakers created decadent desserts catered only to the nobles. When they snuck around that part of the kingdom, a brightly-colored dessert in the display window there would always catch Ace’s eye.

Once, Sabo and Luffy broke into that pastry shop in the dead of night at the end of December, and made off with as many of those colorful macarons as they could carry. 

“Ace was angry,” Luffy laughed through his retelling. “He told Sabo we were lucky we didn’t get caught and have our hands chopped off. But he hugged me for a long time after he yelled at me. The cookies were for him, you know? For his birthday! You have to have your favorite on your birthday.” Luffy had smiled as if it didn’t hurt at all when he added, “Even back then, Ace was bad at being loved. Sabo said he just needed more practice. He said that’s what Ace had us for.”

“And then at the end,” Zoro says, “when I catch up to the future, and I’m back where I started, I would have more time.”

“How much more time?” Luffy asks.

“Not much,” Zoro admits. “Maybe a few minutes. The time I took to use the Fruit before would be free for me to use differently.”

“You’d relive your whole adventure for a few extra minutes at the end?” their captain says, brow furrowing while he makes sense of it. “Would it be worth it?”

Zoro sits back in his chair, his dark eye fixed on his captain the same way sailors follow Polaris relentlessly across the fathomless sea, and says, “Yes.”

The final baking tray goes into the oven. The macarons will be ready for tomorrow night, for the party they’re going to throw at the close of the year. At midnight, Sanji will cart them out—bright orange, each of them painted with whimsical little whorls of red—and they’ll wish Ace a happy birthday, wherever he is. They’ll wish he was still here to scold his baby brother and eat stolen pastries at midnight with the people who loved him best. They’ll resolve to protect Luffy and enjoy sweets in his name. 

It’ll be a good night. Luffy will be surrounded by his nakama and the open arms of the sea. If the macarons make him remember something sad, he won’t be alone. Luffy—unlike his brothers—is very good at being loved. 

Sanji washes his hands, sets the timer, and then calls over, “Hey, idiots, what do you want for dinner?”

Luffy appears beside him as if summoned by a magic spell, hopping up to sit on the counter before Sanji has a chance to wipe it down, sending up a little cloud of almond flour. 

“Beef!” he declares predictably. 

“That stew you made with red wine that one time,” comes Zoro’s contribution from where he’s still lounging at the table. 

Beef burgundy it is, Sanji thinks, hauling out his biggest soup pot. He nudges Luffy’s knee out of the way so he can close the cabinet door but otherwise leaves the young captain where he is.

“Sanji,” Luffy asks brightly, “if you could have any Devil’s Fruit in the whole world, what would you choose?”

“One that would make me a better swimmer,” Sanji replies without missing a beat, and turns his head to hide his smile when Luffy bursts into loud, ringing peals of laughter. 

But that strange, tricky, highly specific Fruit that Zoro dreamed up—one that would make him relive his life and everything he’s ever done, everything he’s endured, all the pain and fear and joy and breathless wonder, all for the sake of an extra minute at the end—a minute he could use to look up at Polaris one last time and say thanks for taking me with you. You didn’t have to do that. I hope I was everything to you that you were to me—

That wouldn’t be so bad, either. 

#op-secret-santa-2023 #op #opfic #black leg sanji #roronoa zoro #monkey d luffy #my writing #viktorclawthorne #title borrowed from 'cold solace' by anna belle kaufman #just in case u needed a good cry lol

[txttletale]

bundletober #12: greetings from ______

alright technically this counts as 'earlier' than yesterday. tomorrow i swear to fuck i'll put this up at a normal time. and also reblog all of the last couple ridiculously late night bundletobers. but anyway today i'm looking at greetings from ______ by c.r. legge, a clearly wise and intelligent user of the classic 'two initials' naming schema.

so the coolest fucking thing about this game is that it's a map-making / worldbuilding game that can be printed out and folded into the shape of a brochure. how fucking cool is that! what an incredible, inspired use of format. its colours are ugly and weird in a very 70s way, which gives it a wonderfully dated travel brochure feel. A+ for layout.

the game is pretty simple: you start with a 6x6 grid, put each player somewhere on that grid, and then take turns moving to new squares and describing what's there. there's a really ingenious use of space here--the game uses a set of descriptors to prompt you, and while in the one-page version of the game they're all inelegantly piled into a big unappealing square, in the brochure version they surround the map on all sides, outlining the edge of one side of the brochure. it's a really neat touch that pushes the brochure version of the game out of being a format gimmick and into being, imo, the superior version of it.

if i have one criticism of greetings from ______, it's similar to what i said about locum tendons yesterday--that when you use precious space in your single-page rpg's layout to make a table to roll on, that table better be all hits. i see what c.r. was going for, with the table (designed to be rolled on with 2d6) putting less remarkable landmarks on the numbers that are easier to roll. but the job of a table should be to prompt you to say something you might not have otherwise--"a place where people live" is a boring and bizarrely vague result.

i think this table could have leaned heavier into being more evocative and vague or more specific and interesting. it's in an akward middle space between the two. that said, the concept of walking around the map creating things and saying what's there is really good and the layout makes it a real standout. if i ever run this, i'll probably try and narrativize it a bit--this seems like it would be a standout game to play in epistolary format, in-character travels and postcards flying back and forth. honestly something i might consider hacking for the next time i need to worldbuild for a longrunning campaign!

so yeah despite my criticisms i think it's fair to say any game which i'd consider hacking has done something very very right with its design--or at least, very very interesting.

greetings from ______ can be purchased as a digital download through itch.io

#tattletxt #bundletober 2023 #ttrpg

[yanderes-galore]

Silent hill time, so Darling is Silent Hill and meets James. They decide to help each out but it seems like Pyramid Head is fixated on Darling, which makes her terrified (I mean who wouldn't be?) So basically James against Pyramid Head? Since PH is part of James I think that would be kinda hard for Darling. -🐈anon

This has very interesting implications so sure! I am sorry the end is garbage, this was mostly just me exploring the idea since I found it really cool.

Yandere! James Sunderland vs Pyramid Head

Pairing: Romantic - Rivalry

Possible Trigger Warnings: Female Darling, Obsession, Violence, Trauma, Guilt, Manipulation, Delusional behavior, Stalking, Overprotective behavior, Possessive behavior, Attempted murder, Dubious relationship.

A rivalry between James and Pyramid Head creates an interesting dynamic.

Pyramid Head is part of James, a manifestation of his guilt... his tormentor.

Having them both go after you is like two sides of one coin.

James may be calmer, softer, and more caring.

While Pyramid Head is rougher, violent, and possessive.

Everyone finds their way to Silent Hill for one reason or another.

Most of the time to find something or someone.

They have a purpose and reason for being there.

You have your own reasons for going but either way... you meet James.

Silent Hill is filled with all sorts of different monsters created by the trauma of others.

Even the people in the town are paranoid, all there for their own reasons.

When you meet James you're weary of him.

Yet the man appears to be calmer than the rest of the people here.

More confused than anything, actually.

With some minor chat about the town and all the weird stuff happening in it you two convince each other to stick around.

James even asks if you've seen the monsters.

Even though I imagine the monsters are different for everyone, for this concept you also see what James sees.

James is mostly a quiet man when it comes to his past.

You don't even learn about who he set out to look for until later.

All he tells you is he's here for a reason... you reply with the same response.

Something brought you here... maybe it was even fate that you met James?

James is bad at consoling others yet he does try to look after you as you travel together.

James is a depressed, delusional, and reckless man.

Despite this, James himself shows the softer side of his yandere type.

He genuinely cares for your safety in this town.

Even more so when he hallucinates to the point of seeing you as his wife.

James feels he should protect you from the horrors of this town.

You're a young woman who appears just as confused as he is...

He just wants to... protect you from these demons.

James himself displays his overprotective and caring tendencies as a yandere.

In a way, him protecting you from the monsters of Silent Hill is like him trying to defend you from his inner demons.

He is the type of person for you to run to when you feel threatened.

He's appears harmless... yet not quite.

James is still the person who manifested Pyramid Head.

A beast you meet later in your journey.

Pyramid Head is a manifestation of James' toxic traits.

When you meet the monster it's stalking you and James from the shadows.

James may even say it's been following him.

Pyramid Head is much worse than normal James.

The beast follows you like a hungry animal.

It lumbers towards you at times with strange deep breathing.

Pyramid Head appears to be overly aggressive, possessive, and violent towards James.

It's an executioner, one made to punish the man of his sins.

Towards James, it yearns to hurt and kill.

Towards you... the beast expresses desire.

It's still rough with you but doesn't entirely try to hurt.

The monster grabs at you in desperation when it sees you, it roughly tries to take you for its own desires.

Pyramid Head is a monster created by James... yet James also tries to defend you from it.

It's sad yet oddly poetic.

Despite this you are correct, this pair up would be difficult as you could never fully get away from them.

James keeps you close to him as he feels he has to protect you.

Plus he begins to see you as the wife he lost to his own selfishness.

James is delusional... maybe his wife really did die.

Maybe you're her reincarnation... and he was meant to meet you (as insane as that sounds....)

As James' obsession gets worse, Pyramid Head gets fiercer.

As the two are connected, both obsessions fester the same.

As James begins to fall more in love with you in his delusions... Pyramid Head grows more restless in pursuing you.

Things may get worse and worse until one of two things happen:

James overcomes his inner demons and sticks with you after...

Or you both succumb to Pyramid Head.

The overall idea of this concept is what makes things interesting.

For the most part it is your typical yandere rivalry.

But the fact it's technically James fighting with himself is what's cool.

Part of him wants to cater and pamper you... hoping to heal his inner pain this way.

The other part wants to harm others to keep what he wants... the part that's a monster.

James came to Silent Hill to find his wife... yet in the end he found you to fill that empty void...

Unfortunately this means you're caught in the crossfire of a war between him and the monster he could be if left unchecked.

#yandere silent hill #yandere silent hill 2 #yandere james sunderland #yandere pyramid head

[antianakin]

Maybe it's my personal bias, but a dark Ahsoka trying to get back in to the WBW because the whole mess from Anakin and then never actually processing her feelings, grief, anger etc leading her to thinking she can "fix" everything by "saving" Anakin. Not really thinking of the repercussions.

And have it be that she isn't trying to change the timeline for selfless reasons, but because she wants Anakin back. That misplaced sort of blame that comes when you over idolize someone. It was only Palpatine's fault, she tries to believe, Anakin wouldn't have done this all unprompted.

In trying to get back to the WBW having her actually process her emotions and the events and realize she's putting herself and her former master on pedestals to cope. Gradually working on herself.

Or not. Idk having Ahsoka unhealthily cope with grief in a way almost paralleling Anakin (trying to cheat death for Padme and failing anyway) sounds cool to me. Or maybe I'm just exhausted.

This would certainly make a real cool AU! The one thing making me hesitate is that she explicitly says while in the WBW in Rebels that Ezra can't save his master just like she can't save hers and never shows any real inclination towards trying to use it to save Anakin. So if you went with this concept, you'd have to figure out why she changed her mind on it or you'd just have to pretend like that moment didn't happen.

But in general I think that the idea really works! Like, I wouldn't want her to actually MAKE IT to the WBW or anything, I don't want any weird time travel shenanigans for her to mess with, but I think the idea of her TRYING to get back to it so she can fix Anakin, or fix what she did wrong or something could be a really interesting goal for her to have throughout a season where she's dealing with her Anakin feelings. Especially if we assume she's slightly fucked up from Malachor and its Sith bullshit in addition to her regular emotional struggles.

And in the she has to give it up. Like maybe she finds a way to do it, a way to open one of those doors, but doing so would have some sort of consequence and she has to choose between her selfish desire to "save" Anakin and fix what she believes are her own mistakes, or keeping that particular consequence from happening. Maybe people she's grown close to over the course of the story will be killed or put at risk if she opens the door, and she has to let it go, let ANAKIN go, in order to protect them.

That version of Anakin is gone, he's dead, and the version of him that exists now is clearly unwilling to be saved, at least by her, and all she can do is accept that and move on. Let go of her guilt, let go of her fears, just... let go. MAYBE her choice to leave the Order spurred him down that path, but maybe it didn't. Maybe Anakin made his own choices based on things entirely unrelated to her. Maybe if she'd been there she could've helped him, but maybe she'd have just been killed with all the rest. She'll never know and she has to come to terms with that before she can move forward with her life. She might've left first, but Anakin left her, too, and he took everything else she loved with him when he did.

In an ideal world, this would lead Ahsoka to do a lot of reflecting on her past with Anakin as she tries to figure out how far back she'd have to go to "save" him and she realizes just how dark he already was when she knew him and ultimately realizes that HE WAS DARK WHEN SHE MET HIM. There were things that happened to him, things he'd probably already chosen to DO, long before she'd met him that were already taking him down the path to darkness, things she'll likely never know or understand. But it allows her to see Anakin so much more truthfully than she'd ever done before. No longer does she view Anakin through the rosy lens of childhood hero worship, she can see how often he struggled with his own darkness and the ways it impacted their relationship, the way it's continuing to impact her NOW.

There were good moments, and she'd loved him, but he was dark long before she knew him and that's something she HAS to accept about him if she's ever going to let him go. There were things Anakin did to her that weren't okay, there were things Anakin taught her that were wrong and caused her to start down her own darker path, and until she can recognize that Anakin FAILED HER, she'll never be able to find her way BACK. She'll never be a Jedi until she acknowledges this very important and vital truth about Anakin and her apprenticeship under him. He WASN'T a good master and he WASN'T a good Jedi. He was sometimes a good PERSON, but he'd ultimately decided to leave that behind, too. He wasn't the person she'd thought he was and unless she wants to become him, she has to acknowledge where he made mistakes so she can keep from making the same ones herself.

So yeah, I think this idea has a LOT of merit and could definitely be a very interesting path to take Ahsoka on!

#star wars #ahsoka tano #anakin critical #anakin skywalker critical #anti anakin #anti anakin skywalker #god i hate ahsoka claiming he was a 'good master' in the ahsoka show #i think there is a difference between ahsoka acknowledging he had goodness in him and they had good MOMENTS #and ahsoka acting like he was genuinely a good MASTER #they aren't the same thing nor do they have to be #she DIDN'T know anakin #she DIDN'T understand him #and a lot of what anakin taught her is what has caused her the most pain #anakin's teachings are what ultimately led her on a path away from the jedi #anakin's teachings are what cause a rift between her and the jedi #personally i feel like instead of having ahsoka apparently thinking only negative things about anakin #and then having to decide no actually he was good #i would've had her go the OPPOSITE direction to follow up on her rebels personality #ahsoka REFUSES to accept the truth about anakin and wants to save him because she doesn't think he'd have ever chosen this #not without some kind of mind control #and on that path she has to recognize that actually anakin wasn't that perfect kind master she'd chosen to see him as #anakin had darkness and attachments and he struggled with it A LOT #and it was anakin's failure that left her floundering #and she'll only be a jedi herself when she can see anakin for WHO HE ACTUALLY WAS #he was selfish and he was greedy and he was irresponsible and insensitive and impatient #he was a bad teacher and until she can acknowledge that she'll always be walking a path AWAY from being a jedi

[saltineofswing]

Hello! I'm the person that made the rant post about my dislike on the lack of natural dichotomy of the Pyramids and Traveler since the introduction of the Veil that turned into a whole thing. You mentioned a lack of pulp in your reblog and it's stuck with me since then. I wasn't familiar with the term and did some research on it, but I still don't think I get what it is. I tried looking it up but a lot of articles and videos I could find explain the history of pulp and its influences in modern day sci-fi but not necessarily what it is, especially in a way that would give me context to better understand your reblog. If it's not too much trouble, can you explain a little more what the "pulp" is that destiny is lacking?

I’d be happy to try and give you a little more insight into what I feel are important tenets of pulp as a genre/concept! I decided this might be a good opportunity to talk a little about it generally because I am really feeling its absence generally in the past couple years, so I included some historical backing which you’re probably already familiar with – hope that’s OK.

I did a little digging personally, for some good places to familiarize oneself with the basics of pulp as a concept and/or genre. It was nice to re-affirm some info that I’ve felt secure in holding as true without a ton of evidentiary support, and I also learned some cool new stuff as well! I think a good place to start would be to link to the TV Tropes page about pulp magazines, which does a pretty good job of explaining the origins and foundational aspects of the concept in a way that is easy to digest. It also has a lot of examples available to peruse. I also found this cool article on the golden age of pulps, which is an interesting read.

This got long, so below the cut!

To reiterate, the original ‘pulp’ terminology and vibe comes from early/mid-20th century magazines, which were cheap and easy ways to access genre fiction and action/adventure stories before comics, paperback novels, and TV/movies were really on the scene. Pulp magazines spanned a very wide array of genres, but because of a lack of appreciation for the medium, a majority of pulp magazines and aspects of what I would consider to be pulp as a genre have been allowed to fall into obscurity. There are places where I feel it is particularly obvious, especially the superhero genre (don’t get me started we’ll be here all week) but also in fantasy and science fiction – a term which was, in fact, coined by Hugo Gernsback, an editor for pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

They were cheap to make, cheap to buy, and easy to serialize; they could be really schlocky, crass, and unpolished. They could also be fucking incredible! The Shadow is a good example of an early pulp property with screaming highs and frankly peat-bog lows. Lovecraft published a lot of what is considered to be his ‘best work’ in Weird Tales! Conan the Barbarian, too! They kind of came out of the gate with a somewhat negative connotation associated with ‘low-brow’ forms of literature like dime novels, but where other magazines of the time tended to incorporate non-fiction articles and photography, pulp mags tended to be fiction stories only – short stories, or longer stories split into serialized chapters. Early on, not many of them had art, though with the advent of comic books that changed (you could argue that books like Creepy and Eerie are direct offspring of early pulp mags). Similar to what Weekly Shonen Jump does with manga.

If you think of a genre as a toolbox, pulp is a box full of tools that function fine alone, but excel at assisting the function of other toolboxes. I would almost liken ‘pulp’ to the concept of ‘camp’, which are also two concepts that can and do overlap with a high degree of synergy. Pulp has its own foundational attributes that are distinct from camp – for example, camp is gay relies a lot more on its self-awareness, at being able to wink at the viewer or participant, and telling you ‘yeah, we know it, but isn’t it fun?’ Pulp, on the other hand, is the (no pun intended) straight man counterpart to this aesthetic sensibility; pulp is at its best when it is being completely earnest. The quippy lines and dramatic proclamations are meant to be taken on their face. Nowadays it’s the kind of stuff that memes are made of – ‘That Wizard Came From The Moon’, ‘I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain’, ‘Whether we wanted it or not, we’ve stepped into a war with the Cabal on Mars’. Saying shit that has no explanation with your whole chest. Trying to be cool on purpose, the ultimate cringe move.

Nowadays I think that this kind of thing has mostly died out of modern media, but the counter-motion is still prevalent in mainstream superhero movies. A good example is the ‘Would you have preferred ~YeLlOw SpAnDeX~’ line from the OG X-Men movie. Hey dickhead! The yellow spandex is cool if you, the guy making the movie, believes its cool! Crucially, while a lot of modern superhero stuff is quippy and irreverent, it often uses these tropes in a self-aware or cynical manner – afraid of being earnest, committing the aforementioned cardinal sin of trying to look cool on purpose.

(God damn it, I’m talking about superheroes again. Sorry. Before I get back on task this is why I loved the recent Moon Knight run so much; Jed MacKay is NOT afraid to have the characters say some absolutely batshit thing but it comes off as so, so cool. And yes, a little cheesy.)

And then, where modern sci-fi typically has an ultra-detailed explanation on-hand, I think a lot of early pulp stuff just… didn’t. Ask a sci-fi property for an explanation on, oh I don’t know, ‘where did these super-humanoid sapient machine warriors come from’ and it will likely have a molecule-deep explanation of how those unnamed machine people were created. Ask a fantasy property for an explanation on the same and it might say, ‘no’. It’s not that a pulp-leaning property won’t give you the answer to that question… it just might not have it. The ‘why is it/how is it’ is not as important as the ‘what is it’ and ‘how is it relevant’; a writer had a limited amount of page real estate, as multiple features were typically crammed into a single magazine. Even if a feature was serialized, much like television episodes (before the binge trend), one had to keep information digestible, and not too reliant on a prior or later edition that a reader might never see.

Explanations tended to be in service of an emotional beat, or to a theme, versus as a grounding agent to immerse a reader in the world. For the record I don’t necessarily think of either method as being better or worse, and heavy worldbuilding can still utilize pulp as a veneer or filter to engage audience expectations in different ways. Pulp stuff relies a lot on suspension of disbelief without utilizing a rigid lore-based framework to – though, you know, your story/setting still has to have its own internal logical consistency.

(I feel that it is important to note, as a partial consequence of the time period in which these magazines were being made, and when pulp fiction was most heavily consumed, xenophobia and racism are also heavily present in pulp works. I think everybody knows at this point about how much Lovecraft sucked but it’s a valuable example of how a lot of ‘fear of the unknown’ in that time was transliterated into ‘fear of the different’, in general but especially relating to genre fiction. If you decide to explore material in this genre, in this time period, be forewarned! Some of it was pretty glaring!)

So, let me tie some of this stuff to my previous statements about Destiny. I think that Destiny is an excellent example of how pulp tropes, aesthetic, and genre conventions can be used to enhance and streamline a setting… and how stripping too much pulp away can have a detrimental impact on the depth of a narrative.

The original narrative and worldbuilding of Destiny drew very heavily on pulp aesthetics to create a foundation, both in its appearance and its lore. The ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ was a period of time in the mid-20th century that sort of transitioned sci-fi out of pulp magazines and into its own thing, but the foundational structure of science fiction at this time was still heavily pulp-influenced. I think this is very well-represented by the portrayal of Venus as a ‘garden’ (jungle) world, very lush and with sulfurous and sometimes acidic rains. Before advancements in astronomical technology went and fucked everything up for us writers, Venus’s opaque cloud-covered atmosphere was impenetrable enough that there could be anything under there – and a popular portrayal of Venus was a muggy, humid, rain-heavy world that sometimes also included lush jungles. In Bradbury’s short story The Long Rain (WHICH ran in Planet Stories, a pulp mag, by the way!) this portrayal is a central obstacle to the narrative; it’s also used in Heinlein’s novel Space Cadet.

The color scheme that Destiny uses for Venus also matches a common color scheme for Venus in this era – see this cover for Fantastic Adventures. Visually, I think that this comparison between the postcard that went out with the D1 limited/collector’s edition and this Planet Stories cover for The Golden Amazons of Venus demonstrates the influence, at least regarding terrain and biome.

In fact, I think that you can see from this Eververse postcard – which could have been peeled off of any era-appropriate paperback novel – that the influence goes bone-deep. Destiny even refers to humanity’s halcyon age as ‘The Golden Age’.

(Below: Is this image from Destiny dev, or a science fiction paperback from the 60s? Who knows! I know. It’s Destiny.)

In the modern era of Destiny storytelling, though the visual elements of the universe remain largely rigid relative to this early framework, the pulp underpinning of the narrative has been largely left behind. The original game’s story, and the stories of subsequent DLCs, felt very pulp-inspired – this ranged from ‘sort of effective’, like in House of Wolves, to ‘game-savingly effective’, like in The Taken King. Pulp lends itself to straightforward conceptual executions, and brisk narratives, because of its roots as short-form literature. The narrative of D1 was simple and to the point; Light good, Dark bad, humanity is in the shit, think you can kill a god? The surrounding world scaffold was rich but not deep. As I like to say, sometimes a river can be wide but shallow. This is not a commentary on its quality – something can be good but not complex, and IMO, sophistication is not necessarily synonymous with complexity. Destiny managed to pull off a trick that many high-quality pulp stories employ: it made the river look deeper than it was. This is the whole reason that Lovecraft’s oeuvre has the staying power it has: other writers got to play in the space because it felt very deep, even though the stories themselves were fairly straightforward.

I also don’t mean to say or accidentally imply that ‘morally grey storytelling cannot exist within pulp stories’, because that would probably get me torn apart; that’s just not the kind of straightforward foundation that the original Destiny was built on. ‘It is what you see, but what you see could be anything’, you know? The problem that began to muddy the waters in the Destiny narrative is that they started to say, ‘You know, actually, it ISN’T what you see’.

Tentpole narrative additions to the Destiny 2 game employ varying levels of pulp. As I said in the other post, the Hive have a potent pulp influence built into their foundational coding, and so subsequent portrayals of the Hive as a main antagonist have higher degrees of pulp genre naturally present in the narrative – it’s hard to separate the two of them. Shadowkeep and The Dark Below draw strongly on the ‘sword and sorcery’ convention, a subgenre of fantasy that is a heavy (perhaps 1:1) blend of fantasy and pulp; think Conan, or Elric of Melniboné (who, hey! Showed up in a novella feature, in an issue of Science Fantasy magazine, named… THE DREAMING CITY). The Witch Queen leaned away from pure sword and sorcery and more towards noir/detective pulp – though, I think, TWQ is a good example of the pulp slippage in its narrative, resulting in some more bland moments and things that feel ham-fisted in a bad way. Part of it, I think, is the need to make these expansions ‘long’ and complicated without making the player feel like they’re slogging; in a more pulp-forward TWQ narrative, the reveal that Savathûn is actually NOT evil-aligned and is a potential ally would come much earlier in the story, and the central mystery would be MORE about ‘what the fuck is she trying to do/prevent’, leading to the Witness reveal as the centerpiece of the finale and the ‘solution’ to the central mystery.

The decision to start retroactively appending more complex connections between disparate pieces of content naturally leads to a reduction of pulp prominence, in my opinion. If you imagine Destiny as a vessel that is mainly full of three component liquids – Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Pulp – you can say that adding more of one genre pushes out another to make room. You can always pour more of one genre in to re-balance, but in response to increasing levels of sci-fi the narrative seems reticent to reintroduce pulp back into the mix, instead favoring fantasy. But another problem is that once you take it out, Pulp is really hard to put back; once you solidify and unionize world-lore, every subsequent retcon risks diluting and destabilizing that world-lore until a) nobody cares about it anymore and b) it stops being mutable at all, and becomes sludge.

The lore behind the existence of the Exo was originally very pulp, with no real explanations given for exactly what they were and where they came from, and how they attained sapience. Early hints that Cayde and a few other Exo having once been human didn’t preclude other Exo from having other origins – for example, implications that Exo war-frames eventually achieved sapience as a result of the ‘Deep Stone Crypt’, and that they were originally simple AI-equipped warriors designed and overseen by Rasputin to minimize human casualties. This early mystique around the origins of the Exo is classically pulp: we don’t need to know how the hyper-advanced robots were made, we just need to know what they are, why they are relevant to the story. It allows You, The Player, to engage with it at whatever level you want. In a game where You, The Player, are also being asked to step into the role of You, The Protagonist, this is beneficial to engagement for people (like me!) who like to think too much about the backstory of the your-name-here protagonist on-screen. It is also beneficial to not distracting the player with conflicting information, or accidentally contradicting previously-established lore.

Enter Big-Head Bray. The Beyond Light-era explanation of why Exo were created and how they were made is a retroactive nuclear strike on the Exo lore; it strips away a lot of flexibility and thematic richness from the concept of the Exo, shoehorns them into a single narrow use case, and directly conflicts with early-game Exo lore implying their connections to Rasputin (which they then had to go back and hastily shoehorn back in later) or existence as war machines for the Collapse. If D1 lore is wide but shallow, the D2 lore is narrow but deep. Just because something has a lot of ‘depth’, I.E. many layers to traverse before you reach foundational bedrock, it doesn’t make it good.

Same thing with the Fallen. Season of Plunder felt to me like an attempt to reintroduce pulp genre back into the setting, but it fell flat because of two reasons: it didn’t really want to be pulp, and it was more concerned with its tethers to the science-fantasy exterior world than it was with creating its own cohesive narrative. Why was Mithrax doing evil pirate shit when he was young? Because he comes from a race of fucking evil space pirates! It Does Not Need To Be More Complex Than That! But the exculpation of pulp from the D2 narrative means that if Mithrax doesn’t have a good enough reason, WRT the larger narrative, it would be a glaringly obvious plot hole. By Plunder, Destiny had already undertaken the task of filling out the Eliksni lore with sympathetic science-fantasy excuses for why they were trying to exterminate humankind – the more earnest, pulp-forward explanation would just be that desperate, hurt, suffering people will do desperate things, hurt people, and may perpetuate the cycle of suffering.

Oy. There’s a lot you COULD get into. How the Destiny macro-narrative seems to be decaying the rigidity of good and evil in its original lore vs. how the micro-narrative is obsessed with trying to recapture that good/evil dichotomy in order to give players a reason to like the main characters. How the determination to connect and explain everything has resulted in a general flattening of the background lore, and the subsequent trivialization of many things the game included in earlier iterations of the narrative/lore. How the narrative has basically nothing to do with the Vex because they wrote themselves into a corner by trying to explain them too much while simultaneously not altering the foundational lore of the race, meaning there were too many things they can no longer do without retconning again.

Overall, I guess I will just end by saying that many of the things that Destiny is CURRENTLY doing, feels like the game is straining to rip the part of it out which proudly asks its audience not to think too hard about sweeping, dramatic statements that built a lot of the things people love about the game’s setting and narrative… and in doing so, is just ripping itself to pieces.

#More lore! MORE LORE! #dinklebot sitcom #northbot sitcom #destiny 2 #Pulp genre #Genre discussion #Sorry this got so long! I’m not used to writing this kind of big essay #it may not be super coherent but whaddya gonna do

[everybody-loves-purdy]

Alright alright so, I can't remember what made me think of this but it was probably something like "hmm, Rock and Midnight are weird and mysterious characters... what if they were married?" And thus, this au was born. Midnight is a powerful spirit able to reincarnate herself into different animals while keeping her memories. In her first life she was a black cat who had the most unusual cloudy blue eyes that seemed to sparkle with the light of the stars. Cats from her time joked that she stared at the stars so much that they just stayed there.

And Rock was a strange traveler whose appearance changed everytime he came back. I'm talking pelt colour and small voice changes, but everyone knew it was still him. No one knew how or why he was like that, he was just the camp's cryptid. Midnight loved him as much as she loved the stars, and would frequently travel with him. One day, they came back with a kit named Rising Moon.

I love the idea that Midnight would look at Jayfeather and fondly go "oh, you remind me of my grandson!"

I also just have this idea that if someone asked Rock if he still loved her he would be like, "what? No, it's been over a hundred years, you'll get sick of each other eventually." And as much as I like it, I also like the idea of Midnight visiting him in his cave in the spirit world once in a while to make sure he's ok. They may not be as close as they once were, but they still have some love for each other, y'know?

This is so cool I love this concept

#loonaorluna #au

[palidoozy-art]

Me and my group started a one-shot in Pathfinder 2E that might honestly transition to a full-fledged campaign. But because my work is never finished, I decided that for this campaign I'd try a "theme" of old jRPGs.

The tokens are heavily based off of Octopath Traveler's, and the portraits are heavily based off of the original Final Fantasy 7.

More of me rambling under the cut.

One of our players had a birthday and couldn't really make the session, so while they were absent my players wanted to try out more of Pathfinder 2e. I wanted to play more of Kjosev, so we decided we'd have a campaign set waaay the fuck back in time.

Almost 200 years ago in our weird CoS/homebrew world, there was an eclipse (caused by the Lord of Twilight Woods/Serafim) that lasted for an entire year. The world went from essentially quasi-industrial/advanced to early medieval, and roughly 75% of the population was killed off. When my players want to create new countries or races, one of the first things I ask them is "how did they survive the Eclipse?" -- because that's how impactful it was.

... so we decided: hey, wouldn't it be cool if we ran something set there? So that's how it started.

It'll also be one of the first time I get to be a full-fledged player in 3+ years, as Ellerian's player will be taking the reins and DMing (the concept interests him a lot). The Eclipse hasn't happened yet, and I don't know when it will. He's told me "I want you guys to fall in love with the world first, then I want to take that away."

The characters, from their portraits, left to right, top to bottom;

Calim (Chaotic Good Summoner) - A blind first quarter elunin (rabbitfolk/viera from my previous post) who can only 'see' through his summon, a shadow drake. He's a college dropout and constantly cracks jokes about being blind. Didn't even know he was a summoner until he finally managed to pull out an eidolon to save a slave girl.

Juno (Lawful Good Fighter) - A genderless waning gibbous elunin who serves as a member of the Night Watch. They take their job extremely seriously. The party hasn't gotten a chance to meet them much, sadly, but hopefully will get more interaction in the future.

Kjosev (Neutral Good Druid) - A dusk elf druid that I've rambled about extensively, but he's a druid of Twilight Woods. A former wizard and seer, he lost his ability to cast arcane spells after being tortured and paralyzed in parts of his hands. He adapted to druidic magic after isolating himself in the Woods. Left to try to warn people of a great calamity. He doesn't know what, specifically, is going to happen, just that it'll be bad.

Genrik (Lawful Evil Summoner) - A dusk elf who was a former teacher. He's a dusk elven supremacist, calling humans 'hairless apes' and insisting that the dusk elf kingdom will rise again. Eventually. It won't, but he seems pretty sure of himself. He only escaped the destruction by stealing a fiend (to enslave, of course) and fleeing when the armies came. He assumes everyone knows him (they don't).

So far they are extremely fun, and I am excited about it. The style also saves me a lot of time as we can just, uh. Borrow sprites from Octopath and other jRPGs.

#palidoozy arts #artists on tumblr #d&d #d&d art #ttrpg #pathfinder #look i literally don't know if i should tag this both as d&d and pathfinder #because the world involves both game systems #so fuck it it goes as both #there's also a chance we may switch to 5e again midway through depending on the group feel

[morganski-19]

I Don't Know Which Way's Home

Chapter 3: Awkward Fumblings

ao3 link, Part 1, Part 2

September 1985

Julie sits on one of the picnic benches in the community area of the trailer park. She has one of her many notebooks open to a page she’s been working on for weeks. It’s a pencil drawing of the short story she wrote a few weeks ago. An empty field with serene trees and clear skies. The perfect background for the forefront of her story, if she could just figure out how to draw it. 

One of the trailer doors slams and a girl around her age goes around her trailer, heading to the gate with a small food tray. Her name is Max, Julie thinks. She and her mom moved into the trailer down the street from her a month or two ago. 

She shuts her notebook, the ideas of how to depict the scene she was drawing not coming to her anyway. It’s weird how the scenes created in her mind can get twisted when she tries drawing them on paper. 

When Max is walking back to her trailer, now with an empty tray of food, Julie walks up to her. 

“Hey,” she says, interrupting Max’s movement. “I’m Julie, I live two trailers down from you.”

“Cool,” Max replies with a cold glare. “I’m Max.”

“Were you feeding your dog?” Julie was never good at making friends, she doesn’t even know why she’s talking to Max at all. But she knows everyone else in the trailer park and they’re either too old to be friends with or too young. There’s just something about Max that she thinks might click. 

Max rolls her eyes slightly. Julie can’t tell if she’s annoyed with her or something else. “Yeah, he’s out back behind that fence.”

“Oh, I’ve seen him a few times. Wondered when he showed up.” They stand there awkwardly for a moment, Julie slightly swaying with the book held in front of her. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Max says with an attitude that means she probably didn’t mean it. 

Julie gives her a tight-lipped smile before walking back to her trailer. 

She doesn’t talk to Max for a few more weeks. She sees her a lot, just from sitting out on park benches and sometimes at school. But she doesn’t go up to talk to her again, Max clearly didn’t like it the first time. Doesn’t blame her. She caught her at a bad time, probably, and that made her not want to talk to Julie again. It just happens sometimes, most of the time. 

The trailer door slams shut again after a screaming match Julie could hear between Max and her mom. Mainly Max screaming, but about what Julie doesn’t know. After living in a trailer park for so long, she got used to shutting out the noise of the other trailers. They all have the thinnest walls known to man and sound travels fast, but it’s better for everyone if they learn to tune it out. 

It’s bad enough living in a small town where everyone seems to know everything, they don’t need to be hearing what’s going on inside everyone else’s homes. 

Julie expects Max to go behind her trailer to where her dog sits behind the gate. That’s where she normally goes after slamming the door shut. But instead, the table creaks as Max sits across from her on the other bench. 

“What are you doing,” she asks bluntly. 

“Drawing a scene from one of my stories. I can’t seem to get the tone right.” Julie erases the people she had drawn in the foreground, they weren’t right. 

Max nods, looking unsure of why she’s even here. After their last interaction, Julie can’t help but ask the same question. “What is the tone supposed to be?”

“Tense. The story is about a family that seems normal to the reader, but there’s something off that they just can’t place. Until it ends and you find out that the dad was never actually addressed properly because he was a ghost the whole time.”

“Spoilers much,” Max jokes. It’s surprising, but not unwelcome. “That’s a cool concept though.”

“Thanks,” Julie puts her pencil down, deciding to try and figure out how to fix it later. 

“Did you hear anything before, when I was yelling at my mom?” Max blurts out, eyes darting away when asking the question. 

Julie shakes her head. “I try not to listen to what happens in other people’s trailers. You end up hearing things you regret. Like, a lot of sex.”

That makes Max snort. “I get what you mean.” There’s a comfortable silence that falls over them this time, like they bridged a gap that Julie hasn’t ever really before. “Could you show me your drawing, maybe I can help you figure out what to do.”

“Sure,” Julie shrugs. 

. . . 

“What the hell are you doing here, dingus,” Robin scolds him as he walks through the door of Family Video, head throbbing. “You said you had a migraine, get out of here.”

Steve winces when he fully opens his eyes to the bad fluorescents. “I called out last week for an obvious fake sickness, Keith won’t let me do it again, even if it’s real.”

“You look like you can barely stand, Steve. Go home. Actually, no, I’m calling Eddie to come pick you up.”

He waves her off. “No, no. It’s fine. I just need to drink some water and take more painkillers. I’m at the end of my last dose. And I drove over here just fine.”

Robin glares at him, her jaw clenched. “Fine. But if I see you pushing yourself too far across the limit, I am calling Eddie and helping him push you into his car to take you home.”

“I’ll be fine, Rob, promise.” He unscrews the cap of his water bottle and swallows two more pills. 

“And I’m turning off some of the lights, I don’t care.” Robin walks to the light switches by the break room and flips the switch where every other light turns off. Steve hates to admit it, but it did give him a little bit of relief. 

Compared to his other migraines, today’s ranks at about a three. He was able to get out of bed and stand, so that automatically puts it underneath an eighth. And when he takes his pain meds on time and makes sure to stay hydrated, he can make it through one six-hour shift. He probably would have called out if it was any longer, but he can do it today. 

And luckily for him, Thursdays tend to be slow so he’s able to lean on the counter for the majority of his shift while rewinding tapes. A tedious job that Keith would yell at him for not also doing returns while they were rewinding, but he left an hour ago so Steve could do what he wanted. Within reason. 

Halfway through his shift, there is a slight crowd of people as the school day ends always bringing in a few kids on their way home from school. The excess noise from the groups of teens makes Steve’s head throb more, or at least makes him notice it more. He takes a few deep breaths in between customers, trying to keep a less pissed-off face on. It might not work but he tries. 

As the crowd weans down, someone comes up to the counter, dropping a tape on it getting Steve’s attention. 

“Hey, Steve,” a familiar voice he can’t place says. “Don’t take this the wrong way but you look like shit.”

When he lifts his head, he sees Julie, staring at him with more concern than she probably wants to. They haven’t talked since last week when she showed up at his house. Not like he didn’t want to. But he didn’t have a number or an address to go to and waiting to see if he could catch her after school sounded creepy. So, he was waiting for her to come to him, but she didn’t, not yet. Maybe now he could say something, apologize for not trying to get her to stay more. 

“Hey,” he says, perking up a bit. “How are you?”

She shrugs. “As good as I can be. Uh, this might be insanely overdue. I was finally going through some of my old stuff and guess I never returned it.” She slides the tape across the counter. 

Steve picks it up, scans it, and immediately gets rid of the late fees. “You’re good.”

“What,” Julie looks at him confused. “I know I’ve had that tape for at least three weeks, there should be late fees.”

“For most people yeah, but the joys of knowing someone who is willing to cheat the system is no late fees.”

“And risk his job just to let the kids walk over him,” Robin interrupts, coming behind the counter. “Not you, the other kids,” she turns to Steve. “Go take your break, I got it.”

“There still a rush, Rob-.”

“And I can see you struggling from across the store. Go. Take. Your. Break. You absolute dingus.”

Julie looks at them confused. “I know I said you look like shit but are you ok?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he brushes off. 

“No, he’s not. He should be home but he’s an idiot who decided it was a good idea to come to work with a migraine.”

Steve rolls his eyes as he goes to grab his lunch from the break room. “I’m going to eat in my car, be back in fifteen.”

“Hey,” Julie calls out to him when he leaves the building. “I don’t mean to take up your break, but I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I know you didn’t mean for last week to go like that. It wasn’t fair for me to lash out like that.”

“It’s ok. I’m sorry you couldn’t stay longer.” He sits on the hood of his car, motioning for her to sit next to him.

She does. “Me too. I really hate it at that house.”

“You know you’re not like banned from coming over. I mean you don’t if you don’t want to. But as long as you don’t stay the night and don’t break curfew, Hop said it was ok for you to come over.”

She takes a moment to think about it. “I think I would like that.”

“I would too. I always wanted a sibling,” he adds on, trying to show her that he cares. 

“I did too,” Julie smiles. “I’ll let you get back to your break, hope your head feels better.”

“Thanks. See you around.”

Steve eats his sandwich from his car, taking a moment to lie in the back seat, throwing an arm over his eyes to try and give them a break from the light. When he gets back into the store, it’s a bit better, but still there. It’s one of the many life adjustments he’s had to go through after four years of going through the same thing over and over again, but he’s slowly getting used to it. 

“I saw you talking to Julie on your break, you two good?”

“I think so, she said that she might come over sometimes.”

Robin smiles. “That’s good. She seemed like a good kid. We talked a little bit when you were having your absurdly long talk with Eddie and even though she was kind of reserved, I could tell. Like she just gave me that impression, both in the night before and in that morning. What’s wrong you’re giving me that look when you feel stupid asking a question.”

“I haven’t made a friend under normal circumstances in years, Rob. How do I even go about this?” Steve asks, suddenly hit with the realization that he knows so little about her.

“I don’t know, things. I mean I know you said you didn’t get to talk that much when she was there the last time, so maybe just use what you learned last time and go from there. Also, if you think these are normal circumstances then I hate to break it to you, but it is not. Bond over your shitty father. Get the awkward getting-to-know phase out of the way. Something”

Steve shrugs. “Maybe.”

. . . 

Julie knocks on the door of the Harrington house for the second time in her life, but this time she is supposed to. At least she hopes. All her life she’s felt that wherever her father fucked off, she would never be accepted. Especially when she learned the circumstances of how she came to be, there would be no chance. She half expected that when her case workers finally located her father, he would give up the rights so fast and stick her in the system for two more years until she ages out.

Which in the grand scheme of things, wouldn’t be the worst since she can leave in a few years. But she would do anything to get out of that house and can’t imagine that the next one would be any better.

But there was a small glimpse of hope that she couldn’t help but start to believe in. Steve genuinely seemed interested in knowing her, interested in trying to have some sort of relationship. And he wanted to try too.

It wasn’t surprising really, he was the only family she had that actually seemed interested at all. Someone she didn’t even know about until a month ago, and never met until the previous week. But in the short amount of time that they actually talked, she just had a feeling that this might work out.

“Give him some credit,” Chief Hopper said to her before dropping her off at the foster home. “There was nothing he could do to stop me from bringing you back. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your life because God knows that teenagers never listen to me, but just give it some thought.”

As Steve opens the door and invites her back into his house, she can’t help but think that what he told her was right. She wasn’t mad at Steve, and she should give them both a real chance to do something before jumping to conclusions. Both of them deserved that.

“So,” Steve starts, leading her to the living room. “This is going to sound really stupid.”

“Why do I not like the sound of that?”

He snorts. “I don’t really either, but it’s all I got. We don’t know that much about each other, so I figured we could speed run some of those really stupid icebreakers just to get it out there.”

“To get the awkward stuff out of the way and start to find things in common. I get it.”

“Yep, exactly,” he nods. “So, things about me. I just turned twenty back in August. I’m not in college and don’t plan to be. I work at the video store, as you saw. My favorite color is green, I told you some of my hobbies. And that’s all I got right now.”

“Very interesting information,” She says sarcastically. “My turn, I guess. I’m sixteen, my birthday is in January if you didn’t catch that already. Uhm. I don’t have a job, but I wouldn’t mind getting an after-school one soon to start saving up early. I would like to go to college sometime, but I’m not sure if that would be entirely in the cards right now. My favorite color is blue. And like I said, my hobbies are writing and drawing, but I also like to read a good bit too.”

“What do you want to major in, if you did go to college? Do you know yet?”

“Writing, I think. I’ve been doing it for a while now and I really like it, and English is my favorite subject so I definitely want to do something with literature.”

“That’s really cool. I wasn’t the greatest in school, I tried to pay attention but a lot of the subjects just were hard for me. But I always did the best in history for some reason. Or gym if we’re counting that as a real subject.”

Julie laughs. “Wow, you really were a jock.”

“I like sports and for a time, it was the only thing I thought I was good at.”

“And now? What else are you good at?”

Steve sinks back into the couch, taking a second to think. “I like to think I’m a good cook. I’ve been alone really since high school, so I learned how to cook. Probably not the best in the world, but I like doing it, and it’s fun.”

“What do you mean by really alone?” She asks. “I’m sorry, you don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to. I was just curious.”

He laughs, like what he just said wasn’t incredibly sad. “I forget that not everyone knows. My dad always went on a lot of business trips, but for the first few years since I was born, my mom stayed home. Then she found out about his cheating, and went with him. After that there were nannies, none stayed for more than a few years, my mom always found something about them that pissed her off. When I started high school, she stopped hiring them. Both of them agreed that I was old enough to be home alone.”

Not like she’s too shocked, but to hear that her suspicions were right about Steve’s parents never being home hurts. She can’t imagine what it was like living in a home where the two people who are supposed to take care of you are never there.

“When did your mom find out about the cheating?” She’s hit with the sudden thought that it might have been around the time she was born, and she couldn’t help but ask.

“I was four, maybe five.” It takes him a second, but his eyes widen, and he sits forward, mouth agape. “Holy shit.”

“That’s probably not a coincidence, is it?”

He runs a hand through his hair. “It would be insane if it was. I thought she wouldn’t have known, that he kept it from her too. She must have found out somehow.”

Guilt hits her. He lived an empty life because of her.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. It’s his fault, always was. He cheated on my mom constantly. On the rare chance that they were home, the screaming matches were intense. She knew of them, of course she knew about you.”

“I’m still sorry. You didn’t deserve to be left alone because your dad is a piece of shit.”

He huffs. “I’m sorry too.”

“How did you meet Robin? I never got to ask the other day.” She changes the subject to something different, hoping that it will bring them out of the weird mood that they landed in. 

“We worked at the same summer job. Scoops Ahoy, the ice cream place that was in the mall before it burned down. The one with the really terrible sailor outfits.”

Julie winces. “I remember those. They were pretty bad. And Eddie, when did you become friends.”

“Spring break, during all of the craziness that happened.”

She nods her head, letting him ask a question about her before they just start talking. It’s weird but nice at the same time. They strangely get along well and the conversations, while slowing at some points, keep picking back up. It’s feels natural, like it’s not forced. 

But then five o’clock hits and she has to head back to the foster home. He offers to drive her, and she accepts, loading her bike into the back of the car. The car ride isn’t awkward, even if they don’t talk the whole time. It’s comfortable, it’s safe. 

In the short amount of time that she’s known Steve, she can tell that he’s safe to be around. It’s just the feeling she gets from him. She’d be lying if she said it wasn’t surprising, but it’s not unwelcome. 

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Steve says, rustling in his trunk when he helps get out her bike. “I wanted to give you this,”

She takes the box. “A walkie-talkie?”

“Yeah. I use them to talk to the kids I look after and their range is like unbelievably far. So I figured you could use it to talk to me, if you wanted. Or to shoot a warning that you’re coming over. Just something.”

It’s weird, but she accepts it. “Ok, thanks.”

“Yeah no problem,” he shrugs. “I’ll see you around.”

. . . 

When Steve doesn't know how to feel about something, he tends to just not feel anything about it. Like this whole situation about his father, he doesn’t know how to feel about it. 

His father is a cheater and has been for pretty much Steve’s entire existence. There was no secret about that. He’s made his own opinions about that a long time ago, and just shuffled it all to the part of his mind that he doesn’t like to think about too much. Because it hurts too much to think about it all, so he’d rather not. 

But the truth about it was that Steve was used to how his dad was. He was used to the way he treated Steve. How there were barely any phone calls unless he did something that would affect his dad’s image. No birthday or holiday calls, barely even making an appearance during Christmas or Thanksgiving anymore. Just an empty house that was never really lived in enough to even have memories created, let alone any semblance of a life. 

It was just Steve, and he was fine with that. As long as he was the only person that got hurt. 

Even that logic was flawed as his mom has been hurt for years. But that was different, she was an adult. And even though Steve knows that there would be no way that his mom could leave without her reputation being ruined, she still has some responsibility for how he was treated. He never blamed her, but she wasn’t without blame. 

So Steve didn’t care that he was hurt, as long as he was the only child of Richard Harrington that was. And for the majority of his life, that was true. Except it wasn’t. 

And Steve had no idea how to feel about that. 

When Steve wakes up the day after Julie came over again, it’s like all of the hurt that he has tried so hard not to feel has come back to the surface. All of the hurt that he’s become numb to has festered enough to make his skin crawl again. The hurt that would make him want to act out and seek attention from people who never really cared about him, but he wanted them to. 

He stares at his ceiling, thinking about all of the times that he’s woken up just like this. Empty house, bare walls, not a soul other than himself to talk to. More mornings than anyone should have been able to experience. Where it happens enough that the numbers get so large there’s no point in counting them anymore. 

Steve knows that there are people out there that care about him. Knows that there are people that love him. His friends and the family he’s made through the past experiences of his life loved him and he loved them. But the fact that he had to make a family outside of his own just to be loved the way he wanted hurt. 

Parents are supposed to love their kids. At least that’s what it feels like. From what Steve’s observed through his friends and even in his job, families are supposed to love each other. Fathers are supposed to be there to play catch in the yard, moms are supposed to be there to provide a hug that cures all tears. They are supposed to be home, not shove their kids off on someone else. 

It took a long time for Steve to realize that his family was broken and he couldn’t fix it. That one more party wouldn’t get his dad to notice him, for his mom to come home. Making the team got him a phone call because it looked good on them, not because they were proud of him. Getting rejected from college hurt their image, so they cared. Their son refusing to get a job other than part-time at a video store hurt their image, so they cared. There was a scar on his neck that looked suspicious enough that it made people talk, even if it wasn’t true, but it hurt their image, so they cared. 

Not one time did they ever come to visit him during his many hospital stays. Not once did they even send a card. The birthday gifts stopped after the Beemer, and even then it was rare. They didn’t care about him, just what he could do for them. 

Steve was just so tired of acting how people who didn’t even really care about him wanted him to. So he wasn’t going to anymore. 

He gets up and ready, heading straight to his car without a second thought. Driving with a half-baked plan that is made out of a sense of rebellion and just generally wanting something. Steve wants something with someone for the first time in a long time, and he’s tired of holding himself back from it. Even if his dad would hate it, he’s stopped caring that he would. 

“Steve,” Eddie asks confused when he opens the door. “Everything ok?”

Steve nods, letting himself in. “Yep, everything’s fine. Great even.”

“You sure?” Eddie looks at him with a concerned face. “You seem really jittery.”

He is feeling a bit shaky but that’s not going to stop him. “I’m done doing things just because I think it will get my dad’s approval.”

“I thought you already were, but continue. This is good.”

“So I’m going to things that I want, even if I know my dad will hate it. I’m not going to hold myself back anymore.”

“Good, you shouldn’t.”

Steve walks up to him. “I’m going to do what I want, because I want it without thinking of what could happen if he finds out. He acts without thinking of me, why should I act with him in mind.”

“I really like where this is going, Steve, but you are still scaring me a little.”

He lightly grabs the sides of Eddie’s face, a shocked noise slipping out when he does so. “I’m going to do what I want to.”

Before Eddie gets the chance to say anything else, Steve kisses him. Harder than he should of but he doesn’t care. He’s wanted this for far longer than he’s realized and isn’t going to let that voice in the back of his head tell him that it’s wrong anymore. He already canceled their previous plans because of that, he isn’t going to do that again. 

After the shock, Eddie kisses him back, leaning into Steve’s touch and wrapping his arms around him, pulling Steve in closer. 

. . . 

Julie’s least favorite class is probably gym class. A bunch of kids wearing the same clothes, all of which have shorts that are way too short, playing some dumb sport that her teacher deemed important for them to learn. The only good part about the class is that it’s not co-ed, she can’t imagine the comments that would be made about her if the guys were in the class. 

But she has to do it, so she goes out to the gym, the cold air hitting her as she exits the locker room, clutching her middle and just begging it’s something easy today. She notices a girl in a wheelchair by the bleachers, another girl with short hair sitting next to her animately talking about something. It’s Max, Julie realizes. She hasn’t seen her in school since last year, or at all really. 

Not that they were ever really friends. They talked a few times, but never enough to form something real. And after a while, Max came outside in general less and less, always looking like something else was taking over her mind. Julie wanted to reach out and ask if she was ok, but never felt like it was her place to do so. 

And then something big over spring break happened that no one had a good explanation for, and Julie didn’t see Max again for a long time. 

“Do they really make you come to gym class if you can’t participate?” Julie asks, walking over to Max and her friend. 

Max’s eyes are slightly clouded over and she looks at Julie like she can tell that she’s there, but can’t see it. “Yeah, it’s pretty stupid.” Her friend leans over to tell Max who it is, a face of recognition forming. “Julie this is my friend Jane, she just moved back to Hawkins from California.”

“Nice to meet you. Odd to hear someone moving here instead of away.”

“We are happier here,” Jane supplies, speaking with certainty in her voice. 

“I thought you moved too. I haven’t heard anyone drive to your trailer in a few weeks. Thought you might have gotten out of that shit-hole.”

Julie clams up, debating whether or not to tell her. But she’d rather not get emotional in the middle of gym class. “I moved to a place on Cherry Street, that’s probably why.” 

Their conversation is cut short when the teacher calls everyone to the center of the gym to go over the rules. Her mind is everywhere but the gym. Racing thoughts of what could have happened to Max to cause her to be in a wheelchair and possibly blinded, from what she could tell. Only landing at the same spot all of her thoughts seem to end up for the last few weeks. 

She thought that maybe there would be a time when she could think of her mom without almost breaking down, but she couldn’t. It seems that every time someone mentions anything about her, all she can think about is the fact that she’s dead. That Julie is left alone without her mom, forever. 

All she wants is to remember her mom without crying for once. Think of the happy memories with that sadness old people seem to get when talking about their friends. A form of silent sadness that doesn’t cause her to want to rip her heart out. She seems to continuously wake up with sore, red eyes and a pain she has no way of stopping. 

. . . 

July 1986

A few different cars pull up in front of the Mayfield’s trailer, a bunch of kids around her age pouring out and going up the door. All of them cheering when it opens. She recognizes a few of them from her classes. They must have been Max’s friends. 

She hasn’t seen Max since spring break. The only answer that her mom could ever get from asking neighbors was that she was severely injured from the earthquakes and was hospitalized. For months, apparently. 

Max came home last week in a wheelchair. Some people had come over to help build a ramp to the trailer a few days before and showed up again when Max came home. She wanted to go over and say that she was happy to see her back, but it felt wrong for some reason. 

Julie doesn’t know a lot about earthquakes, but she knows that they don’t happen in the middle of America, let alone Indiana. And they don’t happen in the way that it happened here. The cracks in the ground weren’t on any fault lines, or near them at all. And for all of them to start from one location and hit city hall, wasn’t normal. 

Nothing that happened over spring break was normal. She had seen the same bunch of kids running around the trailer park a few days before the quake. And the string of murders that Eddie Munson was wrongfully accused of happened days before the quake. 

None of it made any sense, and Julie had no way of knowing what really happened. Some said this town was possessed by the devil, but that was evangelical Christian panic shit that claimed a board game was demonic. There was something wrong with Hawkins, and Julie wanted to know. But sometimes questions never get answered, and she had to accept that. 

Part 4

Tag list(let me know if you want to be added or removed): @homoerotictangerine, @mugloversonly, @thesuninyaface, @imyelenasexual, @anaibis, @ilovecupcakesandtea, @brainsteddielyrotted, @jackiemonroe5512, @eddie-munsons-missing-nipple, @goodolefashionedloverboi, @cinnamon-mushroomabomination, @lolawonsstuff, @writingandmushroomdragons, @stevesbipanic, @sierra-violet, @steddie-as-they-go, @dauntlessdiva, @mousedetective, @the-daydreamer-in-the-corner, @zombiethingy, @connected-dots-st-reblogger, @that-agender-from-pluto, @allyricas, @cheddartreets, @devondespresso, @crypticcorvidinacottage, @queenie-ofthe-void @chronicpainstevetruther, @cheddartreets, @theupsidedownrealestateagent, @acidbubblegummie, @sirsnacksalot, @l0st-strawberry, @helpimstuckposting, @strawberry-starss, @freddykicksasses, @italianwhore1, @i-threw-my-name-out-the-window, @rageagainsttheapathy, @nuggies4life, @ape31, @whimsicalwitchm, @chrissycunninghamfanblog, @michellegilligan, @hippielittlemetalhead, @bridget-malfoy-stilinski-hale, @jaytriesstuff, @confused-stripes, @faeb1tch42069, @marklee-blackmore, @hel-spawn, @genderless-spoon, @mamafaithful, @estrellami-1, @starryeyedpoet17 @i-amthepizzaman

#stranger things #steddie #steve harrington #robin buckley #eddie munson #max mayfield #original female character #julie lawson #secret sibling au #stranger things fic #fanfic #steddie fic