#very vague astronaut looking base form and

[catastrophic-crisis]

uh oh sisters *morphs into new vtuber form*

#okay okay this one is more. casual. less of a bit #i say like it's not a phuckin henshin hero type deal #very vague astronaut looking base form and #then honshins (haha get it) into various inspired forms. i will become the (better) ex-aid #anyway i still like fourze's quilted whatever. not my fave or coolest riders design but i like how simple it is #and the fact that it's not just plain spandex under armor #which ofc works in more armored/intricate designs

[gumnut-logic]

Census

After my little hissy fit last night about not being able to write, I spent all day today doing exactly that. 5000 words later and we have this rambling fic. I had to fill in our Census today, so I figured the Tracys could too. It went places I did not expect.

There are a couple of anachronisms in this fic. It is based in 2060 for census reasons, but I mention at least two characters interacting with the Tracys from later seasons. Please ignore and enjoy anyway :D

There are also a couple of vague references to ship, but no real ship, I promise.

Thank you in particular to @katblu42​ and @willow-salix​  and the other members of Thunderfam who kindly checked on on me last night while I was bemoaning my inability to write. Sorry if I was exasperating. I have a degree in that. If it helps, no one gets more annoyed with me than I do ::hugs you lots::

Rambly, mostly brotherly conversations and doesn’t really go anywhere, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

-o-o-o-

How Gordon got there first was no mystery. Virgil was just too damned tired after three rescues in a row and Scott had been tied up with Tracy Industries for most of the day. Grandma could possibly have been on it if she hadn’t been filling in for John who had broken out his exo-suit to yank a couple of free floaters out of the sky.

He was still muttering about idiots and safety. His mood was not improved by the fact Grandma insisted he come down for the night so he could be counted.

Consequently, his muttering also included cursing bureaucracy even though Virgil knew census night was a favourite of the astronaut.

Perhaps Gordon got to the form first because he knew everyone else was tired and grumpy and needed a kick in the pants. Virgil had to admit with a fond thought that his little brother was prone to throwing joke bombs amongst them when the mood was through the floor.

Virgil had no issues wondering why Alan wasn’t the one poking at the form. Their resident teenager wasn’t interested at all.

“Okay, guys. What is our address? What did we put last time?”

Alan didn’t even look up from his game. “Tracy Island.”

Gordon, who was sitting at Dad’s desk, staring at the holographic form, hesitated. “Did Dad register that with the powers that be?”

“What?” Alan really wasn’t paying any attention at all.

Virgil sighed. He was sitting on the couch with one of his uniform boots on his lap attempting to pick out several penetrating objects out of the sole. His last rescue had been a collapsed factory and he was still trying to work out what exactly it was that they made that could penetrate his specialist footwear.

Fortunately, despite multiple incursions, he only had a scratch on his left foot, more an annoyance than anything, but these objects were frustrating and suspicious.

“Dad did all the right things. Tracy Island is the official name now.” The pliers weren’t quite gripping the piece of metal properly. The grip slipped and Virgil swore.

“Now? What was it called before?”

“Deserter’s Rock.” Scott strode in from the kitchen, a coffee in hand, and grimace on his face. His usually perfect hair was scruffy, as if he had been running his hands through it.

Virgil frowned up at him. “You okay?”

His brother took the steps down into the lounge and sighed. “Nothing a holiday won’t fix.” It was Scott’s turn to frown. “What’s with the boot?”

“Deserter’s Rock? Really?”

It was John who answered, very much like Alan, staring into his tablet and barely paying attention. “Really. Three sailors were stuck here for months. Only one survived. That’s why there is a cairn on Tracy Peak.”

“I thought that was a pile of rocks put there by Dad.” Gordon seemed genuinely surprised. “You mean there are two dead guys on the Island?”

“Along with their ghosts, yeah.” John still didn’t look up.

“Ghosts?” Alan did look up at that, eyes wide. “What ghosts?”

“The one’s who keep stealing my Bailey’s ice cream.”

“Oh.” Alan went back to playing his game, his eyes definitely not darting between John and Gordon at all.

“Okay, moving on…so where do I put ‘Tracy Island’ in this thing? It’s not a suburb, state or territory…do we have a postcode?”

“It’s a locality. Shove it in there.” Virgil grit his teeth and yanked hard at the piece of metal embedded in his boot. A grunt and a flex of heavy lifting muscles and…it didn’t move at all. What the hell?

“Okay, whatever.” Gordon half sung ‘Tracy Island, Kermadec Ridge, South Pacific Ocean’ to himself as he entered it into the form. At least he was being specific. Virgil glared at his boot.

“Next. Who gets to be head of household? Oh, the Householder?” A pause in which Virgil poked at his boot, Scott sipped his coffee with closed eyes, Alan killed three zombies with a grin and John sat motionless still staring at his tablet.

“Okay, then. It’s me.” Gordon grinned to himself.

Nobody looked up, but all four other brothers said simultaneously and in chorus. “It’s Grandma.”

Virgil flexed his hand and picked up his pliers again. Peripherally, he watched Gordon’s shoulders drop. Even the Fish couldn’t argue with that.

“Fine. It’s Grandma.” He reached up and touched the box to open that section of the form. “Where is she anyway?”

Virgil tried to get a better grip on another chunk of metal in his boot. “Yoga. Don’t disturb her.” Yoga was Grandma’s mindfulness time and after today, it was well overdue. “Leave her be.”

“I wasn’t going to. Sheesh. So, name. Sally Tracy.” He typed in her name. “Person two?”

“Scott Tracy.” Okay, so Virgil had a bit of a thing about this. His brother deserved acknowledgement for everything he had done.

Gordon glared at him. “And so I guess the rest of us are in age order?”

Virgil flipped his boot over. “Whatever floats your boat, fishboy.” A glance in Scott’s direction and he had to wonder if his brother had fallen asleep, he was that still. The coffee mug in his hand was the only proof of consciousness.

Virgil fought the urge to save it. “Scott, you wanna go to bed?”

“Wha-?” His brother sat up. “I’m fine.” Fortunately, he put the coffee mug down. The chances of Virgil having to treat burns tonight dropped significantly.

“How do you spell ‘Hackenbacker’?”

Virgil did not grace that with an answer as it was obviously a stupid question.

John was apparently on auto as he spouted off the required letters anyway while still staring at his tablet.

Gordon poked at the form in silence for a little while and Virgil wondered what on Earth he was entering. He trusted his brother. This was an official document, after all, but he was still Gordon.

“Okay, guys, I need your information.”

Beside Virgil, Scott ‘woke up’. “What, no questions about Grandma?”

Gordon frowned at his eldest brother. “I’ll have you know that I know our grandmother very well. We have a special kind of relationship.”

Alan snorted.

“What? You got something to say, sprout?” The fish glared at Alan enough to torch him on the spot.

“I’m just saying that after that time with Grandma’s diver’s license, you should know Grandma’s details very well. Her birthdate, her ancestry, her suit measurements…”

A starfish plushie suddenly had a very short career as a ninja star and bounced off Alan’s head. “Shut up, Alan.”

Their little brother only giggled more.

John, still staring at his tablet, raised an eyebrow. “Allie, Grandma baked some cookies yesterday. I think there are still some in the cupboard. Would you like some?”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Alan threw the plushie at his fish brother, missing completely, and went back to playing his game. There was muttering about Gordon making jokes but Alan not being allowed to.

Virgil sighed to himself.

“Scotty, what’s your age? It’s 2060 for reference. Oh, and your gender.”

All signs of sleep fell away and Scott sat up. “Gordon…” It was all warning.

“Hey, I’m just giving you the opportunity to offer an alternative. After all, tonight you look at least fifty-six.”

“I’m thirty-one and you know it.”

Gordon poked at the form. “Thirty-one years young. Got it.”

Scott grunted at him.

“Virg, are we telling the truth this time?”

“Depends on whether you want me to leave you in the ocean next time.” Why the hell couldn’t he get this out of his boot?

“To threat level already, you are grumpy tonight.”

“Gordon…” Virgil echoed Scott from earlier to the note.

“Johnny?”

“No one named ‘Johnny’ lives here.”

Gordon signed. “John Glenn Tracy, how would you like me to record your age?”

“Accurately.”

“Fine.”

“If I say I’m thirty-two, do I get to go higher up on the form?” Alan looked hopeful.

“If you like.” Gordon moved things around on the display.

Virgil gave up. The locality of Tracy Island was destined to be a statistical anomaly anyway. At least it would be an interesting one.

Besides, John would probably hack it later and fix it. The fact he had hardly protested so far was eminent proof of that security factor.

“Scotty, are you the husband or wife of Grandma?”

Scott rubbed his face and didn’t bother to answer, picking up his coffee again and burying his face in it.

Virgil just wished he would go to bed. The man was a zombie.

Gordon took the hint and was quiet for a little while. Virgil went back to tugging on his boot. Maybe he should take this down to his workshop.

The thought of actually working more had his shoulders slumping enough to alert Scott. The concerned and questioning look shot in his direction had Virgil sitting up a little straighter to fend it off.

“John, where should we put your usual place of residence?”

“Here.”

“But you live in space.”

“So do you.”

“Pedantic much?”

“As necessary. Tracy Island is home. Thunderbird Five is merely in our astronomical backyard, not to mention secret.”

Virgil looked up at that. It was a simple statement, but it was good to hear that John still considered Tracy Island home despite his multiple protests over the years.

“Fine. Secret space station wasn’t an option anyway. I could flub it and use Global One but then that would spark all those rumours about you and that captain all over again.”

“Gordon, I can hack your bank accounts.”

“Go for it.”

“I can also hack your fish tanks.”

The aquanaut shot to his feet. “You touch my tanks and you’re dead, spacehead.”

John didn’t react other than to smile just a little.

Their space brother could be a right royal ass when he wanted to be. Virgil sighed. “John, you know the rules.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t break any.”

“You touch my tanks, I’m spicing up your atmosphere on Five. I’m not kidding. I have fart gas resources even you can’t find.” Gordon was still on his feet and actually appeared angry.

John shuddered. “TMI, Gordo. Not interested in your gas capacity, honestly.”

Virgil rolled his eyes. “Calm down, Gords, John’s not doing anything to your fish tanks. He knows the rules, don’t you, John.” He arched a prompting eyebrow at his brother.

“Never said I didn’t.”

Definitely an ass.

“Gordon, calm down. You can put John’s relationship to you in as ‘nemesis’ if it makes you feel better.”

“I can only put in our relationship to Grandma. I wrote favourite grandson in yours.”

It was Virgil’s turn to shrug. “I’m not going to complain. Sit down and finish the form.”

His brother didn’t answer, but he did sit down, albeit still glaring at John.

John had gone back to his tablet, doing who knew the hell what.

Definitely an ass.

Virgil turned back to Gordon. “What’s the next question, Gords?”

The glare switched to Virgil for a second before turning to the form. “Where were we born?”

“Kansas.”

“I know that. What about Grandma, Brains and Kayo?”

“Space.” Alan said it with triumph.

“What?”

“Where John lives. Isn’t that what the question was?” Alan stared between his brothers.

“Go back to sleep, Alan.”

“Grandma was born in Kansas, Brains was born in India, and Kayo was born here.” Scott proved he was still awake by suddenly providing information enough to make Virgil jump.

Gordon poked at the form, but nothing further was said on that front. Everyone knew Kayo was sensitive about her past, and while she wasn’t in the room, she would find out and partially kill anyone responsible.

“Kayo is here tonight, isn’t she?”

Virgil yanked on his boot again, slipped and managed to elbow Scott in the ribs. His brother grunted.

“Oh, shit, sorry. You okay?” He shoved the boot aside and the pliers along with it.

Scott eyed him and rubbed his side. “That answers your question, Gordon. Kayo is on a conference call with Captain Rigby.”

Virgil glared at Scott.

Gordon eyed the both of them. “Is there something you two aren’t telling the class?”

“Shut up, Gordon.” Virgil glared at Scott a moment longer, enough to have his brother’s expression fall into one of concern. Grabbing his boot again, Virgil went back to wrestling with embedded metal. Damned specialised rubber was amazing when it protected him but when its tolerances were overrun, it was a pain to fix. Maybe he should ask Max to give it a yank. “What entertaining religion are you using this time, Gords?” Any attempt to get the conversation off this topic.

Gordon stared at him a moment, obviously still trying to work out what the hell happened there.

Scott was dead later; Virgil was going to make sure of it. Tired or not, he had crossed a line.

A sideways look in his eldest brother’s direction and it was obvious Scott realised that. Okay, maybe he could let it go. It had been a long day and they were all tired.

Probably should go to bed.

He went back to fighting with his boot.

Gordon was still staring but even the fish knew when to shut up apparently, because the next words out of his mouth were entirely religious.

“I’m worshiping Neptune this year.”

Alan frowned. “I thought you said that last time.”

“Dad wouldn’t let me.”

That brought the whole room to a standstill. Last census was ten years ago. Flashback to that time brought everything that had changed into the bright glaring light. The biggest change being Dad’s absence. But even more, ten years ago they were still based in Kansas, IR was in development, but not yet a reality. Alan was only six, Gords eleven and with his body still intact…it was a completely different time. Virgil was still in college and had to fill in his own census form in Denver.

Gordon broke the looming silence with a determined smile. “This time the government gets the truth. Scott bows to the sky gods, Virg worships molemen, Johnny is a god, and Alan is Satan.

“Hey!” It was said by multiple brothers at once.

Only John remained calm. He even had a smile. “In that case, I want bagels every Sunday.”

“You get bagels every Sunday. Virg sends them up all the time.” Alan glared at his space brother – Alan did not like bagels.

John grinned wider. “I’ll take that as proof that I have at least one faithful worshipper.”

“Next time you can get your own bagels.” Virgil glared at his brother.

Gordon snorted. “Yeah, right, you old softie. John could blow up Two and you’d still send him his bagels.”

Virgil found himself glaring at Gordon again. It seemed to be a theme tonight. “Short pier, long walk, Gordon, go for it.”

He got a smirk for that. “Don’t mind if I do. A little night diving is quite spectacular around here.”

Virgil ignored him and went back to his boot…which he had made zero progress on for all the time he had been sitting here, damnit.

“Does Virgil ever ‘need someone to help with or be with him for self-care, body movement, or communication activities’?” Gordon typed into the form. “Before coffee.”

Virgil ignored him some more as Alan took the bait and snickered. “Better watch it, Gords. Won’t be long before ‘before coffee’ time kicks in. Look at him, he’s already brewing.”

The piece of metal in his boot finally shifted a little. Thank goodness.

“Long term health conditions.” Gordon slumped in his seat. “Well, isn’t this cheerful.”

“Just fill it in, Gordon.” Scott’s words were little more than a sigh.

That left a gaping silence. Gordon tapped a lot at the keyboard filling in far too much. More for himself, obviously, but then there was John and his space issues, and they all had been diagnosed with something on the list hanging above their father’s desk.

Except Alan, who could not be left out. Virgil pretended to not be able to read the word ‘zombification’ next to his little brother’s name.

“Schooling? Oh man, John, you can write all the letters after your name. I can never remember them all.”

“Not a problem.” The astronaut poked at his tablet and the hologram in front of Gordon sprouted half the alphabet.

“Really? Did you get a new one?” He stared at John. “When did you get time for that?”

John shrugged. “Made time.”

“What’s this one for?”

“Oceanography.”

“What?”

“You were in the ocean. I didn’t know enough to help. So I fixed the problem.”

Gordon just stared.

Virgil, of course, knew. He had been the one to field John’s version of panic the day he didn’t know enough to help Gordon. John was practical. He saw a problem, he fixed it. Oceanography wasn’t an obvious topic for the starman, but he was a genius and that genius could be applied where he wished it to be.

If Virgil had found himself helping John at a few points that intersected with his specialities along the way, he was just going to take a little comfort from being able to return the favour after years of borrowing his brother’s brains for other topics.

And besides, it had meant he had been able to spend a little extra time with John. Always a good thing.

Despite him being the occasional ass.

Gordon was still staring. “Is that why you bugged me to take you out in Four?”

John shrugged. “Partly. Didn’t mind spending a bit of time with you either. Good experience to familiarise myself with Four as well.”

The stare continued.

“Be careful you don’t catch any flies with your mouth open.”

The stare became a glare. “We’re talking about this. You and me.”

“Sure.”

Gordon looked like he didn’t know whether to yell at him or run over and hug his brother. Virgil was voting for the latter.

But everything was interrupted by a sudden snore and snort.

Virgil turned to Scott and found his brother startled awake, likely by his own snore.

“Wha-?”

“Scott, you need to go to bed.”

“I’m fine.”

Virgil rolled his eyes. “Do I need to pick you up and carry you?”

“I’m fine.” He waved Virgil away, sat up straighter and attempted to guzzle whatever was left of his probably cold coffee.

“Idiot.”

“What?”

“Go to bed.”

“No. We need to finish the census.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I want to.”

“Why?”

“Can you stop that?”

“Can you go to bed?”

“No!”

“You need sleep.”

“I can manage my own health, thank you, Doctor Virgil.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I am an adult.”

“Sometimes.”

“Virgil!”

Gordon let off a loud snort. “That’s it. I’m putting you two in as married.”

“Gordon!” Both of them, in chorus. It was apparently a theme tonight.

“Well, you both argue like an old married couple, what can I do?”

“You can shut up and move onto the next question.”

Gordon poked his tongue out at Scott, but he didn’t stop grinning and Virgil was forced to hold back a smile himself.

Bratty little fish.

He was still smirking when he said, “Employment.”

“Oh god.” Scott sank back onto the couch and rubbed his face with his hands.

There followed a book’s worth of employment activities.

“Rocket surfing is not an occupation, Gordon.” Virgil sighed.

“Why not? Both Scott and Allie surf rockets.”

“Alan rides a rocket sled and Scott is just trying to give me grey hair.”

“Has he succeeded yet?” Bratty fish.

“None of your business.”

“So is International Rescue paid or unpaid work?” Gordon was frowning at the form.

“Unpaid.”  Scott’s tone was sharp.

“So are we unemployed, employed or self-employed?”

“Self-employed.”

“How much do you earn a year, Scotty?”

Their eldest brother paused as if calculating, but then threw up a hand. “Stuffed if I know.”

John snorted and rattled off a number.

“There isn’t enough space for that many zeros here, John.”

“Give me a moment.”

The display in front of Gordon flickered and each of their names received a variety of numbers…except for Alan.

“Hey, how come I don’t have any earnings?”

“You are a minor.” John spoke calmly, as if speaking to a minor.

“But I do stuff for Tracy Industries, I do.”

“All your income is held in trust, you know that.”

“Then who is paying for all that popcorn I bought this morning?”

Scott sighed. “Don’t worry, you’re not going to bust the bank.”

“We own the bank.”

Scott stared at John. “When did we buy a bank?”

“I bought it for your birthday last year but forgot to give it to you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m writing obscenely rich next to all our names. Oh, except for you, Allie. You’re a pauper.”

“Hey! You suck, Fishbrain.”

“Remember who might need to lend you money in the next couple of years…”

“While Gordon remembers who lent him money in the past, who still helps him with his finances, and who also is the one to fish him out of the ocean after every mission.” Virgil pinned Gordon with his eyes.

Gordon blinked. “You have a point.” A pause as a smile crept over his face. “Who was that again?”

The hologram of the census form wobbled as a lounge cushion flew through it and hit Gordon squarely in the face.

“Right on target. Hmm, I’ve still got it.” Scott blew imaginary smoke off a finger gun.

Unfortunately, Scott may have still had it, but he wasn’t the best marksman on this census form. The cushion rebounded via aquanaut and hit Scott squarely in the face with an oomph.

This forced both Virgil and Alan to come to his defence and for a full ten minutes after that, it was an all-out pillow fight between the brothers. Even John was drawn in as Gordon came up behind him and tried to stuff one down the back of his shirt.

Which wasn’t advisable since his gravity support was still in play. But then John was king of the noogie and immediately grabbed a head full of strawberry blond hair, dragged it down onto the couch beside him and made sure it received the full-on noogie treatment.

Gordon did squawk quite a bit.

An extreme one-on-one joust erupted between Scott and Alan. It was that determined that Virgil had to back out. Alan, being the terrier he was, managed to get Scott on his back on the lounge and sat on him pummelling him with pillows.

Virgil had suspicions that the game was rigged.

In any case, he had to find somewhere else to sit and tinker with his boot.

Eventually, Gordon found his way back to the census form. Scott was still on his back and apparently Alan had decided he preferred that his big brother stay that way by sitting on him and playing his computer game. Scott at least had a remaining cushion under his head, but one foot had taken out a pot plant and the other was hanging over the back of the sofa. His brother really was too tall for lying on the seating arrangements, but he didn’t seem to care.

With a bit of luck he might fall asleep.

“Okay, let’s finish this. How did you get to work today?” Gordon grunted. “This form has no rockets, planes, submarines or space elevators on it.”

“Tick the ‘other’ box and let them work it out.” John let out a yawn.

Virgil eyed him.

John screwed up his face and poked out his tongue.

Wha-“ Virgil blinked.

“Hey, Virg, how many hours did you work last week?”

That distracted him enough to turn to Gordon. “How the hell do I know?”

“You worked them. I bet you know your flight hours.”

“Today’s. Not last week. That was last week.”

“Eos, send Gordon last week’s record?”

The AI chimed in at her father’s request. “Yes, John.”

Another document appeared in front of Gordon. “Wow, that much? Really?”

“The documentation is correct as recorded.” Eos sounded a little miffed. But then she never particularly liked Gordon on the best of days.

His fault, of course.

“Virg, you win, but only by a bit over Scott and that was because he twisted his ankle on Monday.”

“Sprained, you mean.”

“Twisted.” It came from the couch and was strangled by a little brother.

“Sprained. He should have been off for several days, but he’s an idiot.”

“You can’t talk, Mr Bruised-not-cracked.”

“At least I’m not Cracked-not-broken.”

“Sure.”

Scott might have said more but Alan whacked him with a pillow. “You guys are idiots. Gords, John and I are lucky our grey hairs don’t show.” Alan growled. “I’m sixteen, for crying out loud, and I know more about hospitals than I ever wanted to. Look after yourselves, you morons.”

Silence hit the room again.

“Way to go, Allie. You tell ‘em.” Gordon’s words were honest.

Of course, Scott was devastated and immediately questioning all his life choices. Virgil wasn’t far behind, but Scott, in particular had a sensitive spot where Alan was concerned.

“Hey.” He reached out a hand and rested it on their little brother’s arm. “Talk to me, Allie.”

Alan growled again. “I’m fine as long as you two look after yourselves. We kinda need you, you know.”

Scott grabbed his little brother and dragged him down into a hug. “I’m sorry.”

Virgil sat with his boot in his lap needing to grab both his brothers but not wanting to interrupt their moment.

He shouldn’t have worried. A second later Gordon jumped over the back of the couch, landed beside him and grabbed him, dragging him sideways into an oomph of a hug. “Don’t worry, my dear wingman, we still love you even if you are an idiot.”

“Gordon…”

“Admit it, you want a hug.”

“Shut up.”

Gordon didn’t say anything further, but he did squeeze tighter.

“When you get to the questions on whether any of us looked after children, Gordon, tick yes for all of us.” John’s tone was as dry as a desert.

“Will do.” Gordon grinned at him.

Scott actually fell asleep after that. It was about time. Apparently, Alan made a great teddy bear.

Alan grumbled about that for days, but Virgil knew his little brother treasured his relationship with Scott and the fact he fell asleep as well was rather telling.

But that fact pretty much ended the census form filling for that night.

The next morning saw all of them out on an earthquake and it wasn’t until two days later that Gordon realised they hadn’t submitted the form.

Grabbing Scott and Virgil, he ran them through the last of the questions, landing on the definitions of their dwelling.

“How many registered motor vehicles do we have at this dwelling?”

“Er, none? We have no roads.” Virgil frowned at the obvious answer.

“Three rockets, two planes and a submarine don’t count?”

An arched eyebrow. “Does it say anything about planes? Tracy Two and Three are registered in Aotearoa.”

“Aotearoa is not the United States.”

“But they are still registered.”

Scott sighed. “Read the form properly, guys. It says exclude heavy vehicles.”

“Well, that strikes Virg off the list, but your ‘bird’s a pansy.”

That earned Gordon a mocking whack up the back of the head.

“Gords, just write zero. The intent is there.”

“Fine. We have no motor vehicles. Stupid form.” A sigh. “Okay, how many bedrooms do we have?”

Scott answered that one. “Ten.”

“I thought it was twelve.”

“One went to an art studio and the other to a music recording room.”

Gordon glared at Virgil. “Way to take over the house, bro.”

“And how many fish tanks do you have in how many rooms? Not to mention the chunk of vegetable garden we had to sacrifice for Rover’s pond?”

“Leave Rover out of this. That wasn’t his fault.”

Virgil snorted. “Not his.”

“Shut up.”

Scott sighed again. “We have ten bedrooms.” He scanned the rest of the form, which thankfully wasn’t very long. “We own the place outright, and yes, they can archive our information for our grandkids to access. Tick the boxes and get this sent so I can go get some lunch.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Scott growled but Gordon ignored him.

Boxes all ticked, he hit the submit button.

“This form has already been submitted. You may not submit it again.” Underneath was the date of the day before census night. “What the hell? How could we open it if - ” Scott hit his comms. “John!”

John’s hologram flickered up beside the misbehaving census form. “I’m between a hurricane in Bermuda and an avalanche in the Pyrenees. How may I help you?”

“What?!”

“Oh, the census form. Eos submitted that three days ago.” Their space brother was distracted a moment out of pick up range as Scott’s jaw dropped. “Needed to get it done before Gordon got his hands on it. Besides, we can’t guarantee we wouldn’t have been called out anyway, so I got it done beforehand.”

“Then why the hell were we going through the damned thing on census night?”

John blinked. “You had fun, didn’t you? We shared an evening together.”

Virgil joined both his brothers at staring at John.

The astronaut just smirked back at them. “You did a great job, Gordon. Thanks.” The smirk turned into a grin. “Thunderbird Five out.” His hologram disappeared.

Scott’s face curdled. “I’m going to kill him.”

Virgil let his shoulders drop and sighed. “You said that last time he did something like this, and he’s still kicking.”

“I’m soaking his underwear in saltwater.” Gordon had that fire in his eyes that usually preceded a Tracy Island Armageddon.

“Gords…”

“He played me, Virg. He knew what I would do and played me. He thinks I’m predictable!”

“Yeah, but he obviously did it for the right reasons.”

Virgil found himself the target of two glares. “What? You want a group hug or something? C’mere.” And he grabbed the both of them, wrapping his arms around them. “Happy Census Night.”

The grumbling was worth it.

-o-o-o-

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Virgil Tracy #Gordon Tracy #John Tracy #Scott Tracy #Alan Tracy

[oftenderweapons]

White Wine + Spinach & Artichoke Dip + Chef’s Choice!!

Pairing: Seokjin x reader (nicknamed Angel)

Wordcount: 2.2k

Genre: drabble for Bangtan Bistro (details here); smut; established relationship

Rating: 18+

Tonight we’re serving

- White wine: Kim Seokjin

- Spinach and Artichoke Dip: smut

- Chef’s choice (Italian Wedding Soup — “Your waiter accidentally spilled a drink on you and keeps apologising profusely, even though you accepted his apology the first time he said it”)

TRIGGER WARNINGS: roleplay (waiter!Seokjin customer!yn), swearing, alcohol consumption, slightly dommy reader, sort of body shots (?) kinda (?), breast worship, oral sex (female receiving), unprotected oral sex (use dental dams ffs!!!). Serious talk here. Angel does a potentially stupid thing: alcohol, sugars and bacteria (all naturally contained in wine) can seriously upset your vagina (more precisely your pH and the bacteria that keep it healthy). Two important things to do if you happen to be dumb enough to imitate her: 1. Pee afterwards (after masturbating, after oral sex or penetrative sex, that’s good anytime you have some action down there) 2. Wash your vulva (the outside of your intimate parts and NOT the inside) with fresh water and specific soap. Sorry for the sex ed note, but I’m a strong advocate for educational smut. 

On a side note, since the word count is tight and I’m not ready to start some characters with a couple lines, I’ll casually put this into a Seokjin x Angel fic (check out Seokjin’s idol!AU masterlist — sksksk sorry for the self promo 😉)

Crediting my (unfaithful) fiancée @joheunsaram for beta reading (SHE LOCKED HERSELF OUT OF HER OLD BLOG, AND SHE’S BUILDING HER NEW ONE, PLEASE GO TAKE A LOOK SHE OWNS THE MOST ADORABLE JOONIE FIC)

Enjoy 💜✨

Sitting at your dinner table felt especially difficult tonight. Maybe because you were hyper aware of the white silk slip you were wearing, and that you had casually found it on top of your bed inside a refined cardboard box with a sophisticated golden swirl on the lid.

“Wear me to get undressed,” the small note inside read, your guts instantly fluttering at the thought. Seokjin’s handwriting spelled nothing but care and attention to detail. You knew his rushed writing and his careful calligraphy. From this detail alone you could tell he had plans. Elaborated ones.

Sitting at the table, you saw him suddenly emerge from the kitchen, in formal slacks and a white shirt, hair swept back, leaving his gorgeous forehead all there for you to see. “Good evening, miss. I’m pleased to see you have returned to our restaurant. I will be your personal waitperson for your stay. Here to serve all your cravings.” He smiled kindly, trying not to stare at your cleavage, gloriously exposed by the low neckline of the slip. The cream colour looked amazing on you. He was almost sorry for what he was about to do.

“Oh, that’s so kind of you. This restaurant does indeed have the best service.” You looked up at him with a polite smile. “And the cuisine is unrivalled.”

Of course it was. He was the chef. Although he liked playing a role, he didn’t like faking the food. He always looked it up very carefully. He had his cookbooks. And he had received a new one for his birthday. You had a vague idea of who might have gifted it.

“Would you like to try the chef’s special for the night? I am sure you will be absolutely surprised by it. And I mean in a positive way, of course.” He said, standing with his hands behind his back, which made his whole chest look broader. The two loose buttons at the top of his shirt were forming a small, inviting triangle of smooth skin, glistening under the kitchen lights.

“I’d love to try that. I am sure the chef knows what I like. He’ll sweep me off my feet.”

He looked at the floor with a small bow. “You will be entirely pleased, from appetizers to dessert.” He looked at you from under his lashes. “I will make it my personal goal.”

“Then, we shall begin.” Seokjin exited the room before coming back with a small basket of mixed bread, breadsticks and small bites of toasted bread. “I recommend a fresh, bubbly white wine. A lovely Pinot Gris from Neuchâtel. Fresh, well structured, flowery and on the dryer side. It will mix well with the vegetable-based menu of the night.”

You nodded, very interested — actually interested. Seokjin could play any part he wanted with proper research and dedication. He could probably impersonate a surgeon or an astronaut if he put his mind on it.

“Thank you for the detailed recommendation.” You smiled politely, watching as he opened the bottle and poured just one finger of wine in your glass.

You took a sip and nodded in approval. It was really something different. Seokjin had truly opened a new world to you, made up of International cuisines and niche wines, and finding pleasure in something as basic and necessary as eating and drinking. You doubted you could ever go back to your frugal meals after discovering all the tastes and textures he had introduced you to.

Like the Artichoke dip with scrumptious bacon crumbles on top you had eaten for appetizer. And the mushroom ravioli you had for your main course. Now you were staring at your empty glass, feeling slightly sorry at Seokjin, standing beside you and watching you eat. “May I have more wine, please?” You asked, looking at him sweetly.

With a courteous nod, he moved closer, taking hold of the bottle standing in the cooling bucket right beside you.

You didn’t pay much attention as he accidentally lost balance of the bottle and let his arm twist clumsily, the wine spilling on the front of your silk slip.

It was cold. Very. Especially since it had been cooling in iced water for a solid half hour. And it had been chilling in the fridge before that.

Your nipples hardened immediately, almost as quickly as apologies began to bloom from Seokjin’s lips. “I am so sorry, miss. This is unforgivable. I apologise with my whole being, this is unacceptable—”

You hid your smile quickly as you saw him grab a handkerchief and try to fix the damage, getting on his knees and trying to dab the liquid away. “It’s okay, it can happen. You must have been very tired and hungry.” You tried to sound calm, kind and compassionate, while all you wanted to do was grin and undo his belt.

“I am wholeheartedly sorry, miss, your poor dress, this is unforgivable.”

You tried to stay within your role as he pressed the kerchief to your arm, drying up the liquid.

“Stop apologising, dear, you’re already forgiven.” You said, looking down at him and noticing how his eyes stayed glued to your nipples. “Or maybe you would prefer earning my forgiveness?”

He nodded, averting his gaze and blushing.

You bit your lip at his rosy cheeks, asking yourself how he could reach such a level of impersonation.

“Maybe you could clean me up.” You suggested, pressing two fingers under his chin and making him look at you. “But it would be such a shame to dry it up when you could get a taste of how fine this wine is— and what a delicacy you have been serving all night.”

He looked at you, wide eyed, almost innocent as you took his hand and made him cup the cold, soaked silk covering your left breast. “Come on, you can take a lick, darling. Don’t hesitate.” You encouraged him, leaning forward, the naked skin just above the neckline meeting his gaze with cool, flowery-scented pearls of wine running down the curve of your breast and slowly soaking your dress.

Not entirely convinced, he shyly let the tip of his tongue peek from his parted lips, giving the tiniest lick to the fabric, acting oblivious to the way your skin sizzled at the thought of being met by his sensual touch.

He gave one more lick, collecting the liquid on the fabric that stuck to your skin and left no room for modesty, exposing even the usually hidden dark spots of your moles.

“You need to suck or you won’t get the real taste.” You said, his lips disappearing into his mouth as he tried to hide a smile. You were glad you still managed to get him out of character every now and then. Though that was rare. He is a professional, after all.

He moved closer to your skin, the wet kerchief plopping to the floor as his hand landed on your knee. You turned toward him, giving him more access as he stood on his knees and licked at the skin over your breastbone, looking into your eyes as the other hand lowered the top of your dress so that he could dip his tongue on the crevasse of your breasts. He slurped up the liquid lewdly, clicking his tongue. “Very fresh. Flowery, as the seller promised it to be. Absolutely delicious.” He grinned. “Perfect to pair off with more delicate meats.” He replied expertly, brow creased in acknowledgement as he explained. “Maybe we could try more delicate cuts.” He hinted before diving for your nipple, sucking it in his mouth from over the fabric, the stark contrast between the cold feel of the fabric and the hot saliva mixing up with the wine. The hand on your knee slid toward your thigh, gripping the soft flesh and spreading your legs open as the other hand came to help.

There was no more hiding at this point.

“Miss?” He called once his hand reached your outer hip, searching for the thong supposed to match the slip.

“Yes, dear?”

“Something’s missing.” He said, giving you a dirty look.

“I guess I’ll be the one who needs to apologise, after all.” You said coquettishly while he licked your other breast, sucking and biting to get as much wine as possible.

You knew there was a low chance of you being bruised or marked the day after — silk is a sturdy fabric after all — but the idea of finding such signs of passion on your skin got you impatient. “Maybe you could have a taste of the finest cut. It must be so frustrating watching people eat the delicacies and leave you there, standing.”

He nodded with a sorry look in his eyes before nuzzling his face against your breasts. “May I, miss?” He requested, so handsome and kind.

“Of course, darling.”

With a breathy chuckle, he parted your legs even farther apart, tugging the skirt up and finding your naked, wet cunt right before his hungry eyes. “A fine cut indeed, miss.”

“All yours to eat,” you purred, the low, sultry tone turning into a light moan as you felt his finger enter you.

“Creamy.” He murmured, drawing circles against your g-spot before lowering his face and taking a quick sniff. “The aromatic complex is overall round and well built.” He destroyed you by simply adding a slow, wide lick, parting from you and clicking his tongue a few times. “Salty… with just the right amount of sour. Deeply inviting. Aphrodisiac to say the least.” He growled between your labia. “I will gladly feast on it, miss.”

You smiled. “All you need to do is get started already.”

He did. He treacherously added one more finger, acting completely casual as he slipped two digits inside you and started teasing your g spot, rubbing it in a way that let you know he intended to make you explode in a matter of five minutes at worst, two at best.

To top it all off, his tongue swirled against your folds, giving neat, flat strokes from your hole to your clit.

You stared at the wine, knowing precisely that you shouldn’t do that, and that you were risking it. Nevertheless, he might call you Angel all he wants but he knew your true nature and you had hidden it for way too long.

With a devilish smirk, you stretched out your arm to the table, grabbing the bottle before holding his head in place, squealing once you felt his fingers go deeper as you scooted your ass forward, leaning back and transforming your torso in an awfully slippery slope.

Seokjin stared as you bunched the slip up, exposing your breasts to the chilly air, rubbing the freezing glass of the bottle against your nipples — one at a time — moaning once Jin started moving his fingers faster inside you.

As he hummed and you felt your edge crumble, you pressed the rim of the bottle to your navel and tipped the bottle downwards, a small rivulet running down all the way to your pelvis, while also getting caught on the crease of your belly and dribbling along your sides. The cold sensation gave you a chill that mixed with the fiery hot flame in your guts and made you lose your mind completely.

Seokjin was completely drowning in the sight and feel and sounds of you. You were giving small breaths that almost turned in whines when you exhaled too hard and too quick, your hips were undulating right against his tongue and his nose was perfectly slotted between your folds and his hand. He felt your high peak, your muscles pulsating as the cold liquid met his tongue, his mouth confidently switching to a sucking motion now that he knew you were turning more sensitive and he had to let your clit go. What he didn’t let go of was your g spot, devotedly worshipped by his soft fingertips while he focused on sipping all the wine away. There was maybe the equivalent of two glasses left inside the bottle, so he let you execute your foolish plan without worry.

Your eyes opened slowly as the wine stopped flowing, his fingers slowing down as your hand met his wrist.

You were ecstatic and aroused at the same time, especially once Jin cleaned his face with the back of his hand, eyes focused on yours.

“My favourite meal.” He murmured, licking his lips, placing his hands around your waist as he got back on his feet, kissing your left nipple, and then your right one on his way up.

“Let me clean up here. Get in the shower.” He murmured gently. “You owe me some apologies, am I right?” He provoked, dangerous warning lining his voice.

You weren’t in control anymore. “Yes, sir.”

#seokjin x reader #seokjin smut #bangtansorciere #thebtswritersclub #thetruthuntoldnet #kim seokjin fanfiction #jin x reader #jin smut

[animaniahq]

Danny Fenton || 24 || Paranormal Investigator || Amity Park

"Actually dad, I want to be an astronaut."

✨ Biography:

Growing up Danny Fenton was a pretty average kid. He wanted to be an astronaut, but his grades weren’t the best. He didn’t have many friends, but he did have Sam and Tucker. The three were the best of friends, though Danny often felt closer to Tucker. Sam was their token goth friend, Tucker was the brains, and Danny was, well, Danny. He never thought of himself as anything special, though his mother always told him otherwise. He had an annoying older sister, Jazz, who always seemed to butt her nose in where it didn’t belong. His dad was very eccentric. Both of his parents were, but his dad was a little insane. Not really in a bad way, just that he was obsessed with ghosts. His parents wanted to rid the world of ghosts while also studying them. The basement of their house was practically a science lab for studying the supernatural and one day Danny and Sam were looking around at his parents’ newly build ‘ghost portal.’ Supposedly it teleported one to the ghost realm but they could never get it to work. After messing around with the portal one day something happened. Danny’s DNA was crossed with ectoplasm and he became a hybrid of a ghost and human. It was strange, because he could kind of turn it on and off. He wasn’t always sure how to control his powers, but he managed. With becoming part ghost though he accidentally released actual ghosts from the portal and into Amity Park. He made a vow though; to rid Amity Park of ghosts and keep the town safe.

He’s been doing it since he was fourteen. A decade later he’s pretty much mastered his ghost powers. Sam and Tucker have been there for him the whole time to support him, as well as keep his ghost powers a secret. His dreams of being an astronaut were abandoned, but he did end up going to school. Until he was kicked out for having poor grades. That didn’t stop him from trying his best though! He may have been a lazy student, but he knew he needed to get his butt in gear to be successful in life. It was difficult somedays as he was pretty much a freak by societal standards, but hey, he manages. Currently, he works for himself and sometimes his parents. He’s deemed himself a paranormal investigator and works mostly with Tucker and Sam. It’s crazy how many people come to him, telling them their house is haunted and such. With the knowledge he’s gained of ghosts over the years he’s pretty much perfected the art of ridding the world of ghosts. The problem is that there’s just so many and he can never seem to catch a break. He’s sure one day things will slow down, but for now he uses his ghost powers to help people while trying to live a somewhat normal life.

✨Personal:

Species: Half-Ghost Sexuality: up to player Pronouns: up to player Favorite Song: up to player Big Three: up to player

✨Connections:

Norman Babcock: He’s probably the only person who can see Danny in his ghost form. It scares Danny that he can and he tries to steer clear of the guy as much as he can. Somehow, though, Norman always seems to pop up.

Shaggy Rogers: Danny thinks the guy is super cool, but for some reason he seems terrified of Danny. He never understood why, maybe Shaggy just has some sort of internal radar that can sense all things ghostly and spooky. Regardless, Danny just tries his best to be friendly to him.

Dipper Pines: The kid asks way too many questions. He’s a huge fan of Danny’s work, but can be a bit overbearing for Danny’s taste. He’s a nice kid and all, but Danny tries to keep his answers vague when talking to him.

Based On: Danny from Danny Phantom Faceclaim: Elliot Fletcher FC Change: Not Allowed Availability: Open

#disney rp #disney rpg #rp #rpg #cartoon rp #cartoon rpg #town rp #town rpg #bio rp #bio rpg #open rp #open rpg #danny phantom #danny fenton #elliot fletcher #20s #male #open #open male

[currentlylurking]

Phic Phight: Still Better Than Google Translate

Danny asks Vlad if he could teach him Russian. It gets… a bit out of control.

(Based on a Phic Phight 2020 prompt by @ecto-american)

(WC: 2389)

Still Better Than Google Translate

Vlad was decidedly impressed when he saw that his next appointment for the day was with Daniel Fenton. Typically, when the boy wanted to challenge Vlad’s latest ‘evil scheme’ he’d burst in and start shouting. This showed some forethought that had absolutely come from his mother’s side of the family.

“Daniel,” he said with a grin. “Please, close the door and have a seat.” Danny did, with a surprising lack of protest. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Danny took a deep breath in. Vlad wondered which of his so-called schemes Danny had uncovered this time.

“Will you teach me Russian?”

That… wasn’t any of them. “Excuse me?”

“Ugh, fine. Will you teach me Russian, please?” Danny huffed, crossing his arms.

Vlad had dreamed of the day Danny would ask him to train him since the boy turned him down that first time. As they grew apart, that dream had seemed more and more unlikely – and yet, here they were.

With one glaring flaw.

“What makes you believe I know Russian?” Vlad asked.

Danny rolled his eyes. “Uh, your name is Vlad and your ghost form looks like it crawled out of Transylvania? It’s not exactly calculus.”

“I believe the term is ‘rocket science.’”

“Whatever. Look,” Danny sighed, and ran a hand down his face. “I tried looking stuff up online, but then there was that whole thing with Technus and the duolingo owl escaping the internet, so that was a bust. I know you know it, and I know you want to teach me other junk, so will you do this one thing, with no strings attached, please?”

“Of course,” Vlad said automatically. “I’m just curious as to why you want to learn Russian.”

“…You have to know English and Russian to be an astronaut.”

Vlad smiled. “Of course. Clear your schedule for Monday after school, and enlist your little friends to handle any ghostly interference. We’ll meet at my mansion.”

“Wait, seriously?” Danny said, standing up. “You’ll do it? And you won’t be weird about it?”

“Of course, Daniel,” Vlad replied. “We’ll consider this a trial run so you can get a feel for my methods, and I can see how you learn best. It’s clearly not in a classroom setting, if your grades are anything to go by.”

“Annnd I am leaving now, goodbye.” Danny said, automatically switching to his ghost form. He floated out of the chair. “See ya, Vlad. You’d better not turn around and attack my dad after this.”

“I would never hurt my biggest political supporter,” Vlad said. “And use the door, Daniel. My assistant saw you come in.”

“Oh. Right.” He returned to his human form and dropped, landing on his feet beside the chair. “…See you Monday?”

“See you Monday, Daniel.” He waved the boy off, and waited until the door was closed.

He had much to prepare – namely, learning Russian.

Despite the weight Danny’s theory held, Vlad was not Russian. He was a third-generation American citizen, with ancestors on both sides of the family who had both come from western Europe, not eastern. His mother, allegedly, had simply been a fan of the name Vlad. Vlad himself was fluent in French and Spanish, due to the copious amount of time he’d had alone after his accident.

He wasn’t sure if he even knew anyone who spoke Russian.

.-.

Vlad had to scour half the Ghost Zone for the ghost he was looking for. Apparently, he’d been released from Walker’s prison and then moved his manor so he wouldn’t be disturbed. It was incredibly inconvenient.

After a few wasted hours, Vlad finally found the manor and invited himself in. The ghost met him in the foyer.

“Hello, Ghostwriter,” Vlad said.

“Get out of my house,” Ghostwriter said.

“There’s no need to be rude,” Vlad said, “I’m simply here in the pursuit of knowledge.”

“Knowledge for what? How to release more tyrants from prison? Get out before I turn you into the side character in an Agatha Christie novel.”

Vlad relented, and took a step back. He wasn’t sure how Ghostwriter knew about his quest for the ring and crown – but now was not the time to ask. “I wanted to ask if you knew of anyone who could teach me Russian.”

“Absolutely not. Go away.”

“Come now. I thought you wanted to spread knowledge.”

“Yes. The knowledge that I don’t want anything to do with hybrids again.” Ghostwriter said, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “If this results in anything of mine being broken, I will report you to the Observants for releasing Pariah. Why did you want to learn Russian? And why did you come to me, instead of any human tutor?”

“Daniel asked me to teach him.” Vlad said, and smiled at the other ghost. He did not smile back. “I had to agree. Our first lesson is on Monday.”

“So, you agreed to teach him a language you don’t know, and your first lesson is in four days.” Ghostwriter said, deadpan. “Impressive. You’re an idiot. You don’t need my help; you need a miracle. Have you tried tracking down a Timekeeper?”

“I don’t have time to chase down a fairy tale,” Vlad replied, and Ghostwriter rolled his eyes.

“Learning a language well enough to teach it in four days is a fairy tale. You’re an idiot.”

“Yes, yes, you’ve made your opinion of me crystal.” Vlad said. “What can you teach me within four days?”

Ghostwriter scoffed. “I won’t be teaching you anything. I don’t like you. I understand that you’re too fancy for words like that, so let me rephrase; I despise you. I find your personality and face revolting.”

“So you have said,” Vlad seethed. “I came here on peaceful terms. I am a very patient man.” Ghostwriter snorted, “but if this continues I will make you regret it.”

His threat was clearly effective, because Ghostwriter dropped the attitude. “You can’t learn a language in four days. That’s not physically possible. I could try and see if I know anyone willing to teach you the basics, but that’ll take a couple of days. I could trap you in a Russian novel and you can learn on the fly?” Vlad scowled. Ghostwriter shrugged. “Otherwise, I think your best bet would be some translator contacts and a lot of lying.”

“I’m not teaching Daniel through google translate.”

Ghostwrite took a long, unnecessary breath in. “These are a ghost invention. They don’t use ‘google translate,’ they use an actually functional language database created and catalogued by the Observants. Just – here.” He pulled a glowing contact case out of his jacket pocket and offered them to Vlad. “Just use these.”

Vlad grinned and took the offered artifact. “Thank you for your time,” he said. He left, feeling rather satisfied with himself.

On the other side of the closed door, Ghostwriter rolled his eyes. “What a dumbass,” he said. He’d have to get another gag gift for his brother now – and, much more urgently, move his manor once again.

.-.

“Megan?”

“Who even is that?”

“Redhead girl, freckles, glasses?” Tucker elaborated. “Kind of cute?”

“Obviously it’s not someone he doesn’t know, Tuck.” Sam said.

“That’s just what he wants us to think,” Tucker said. “What about Wes? That guy probably knows Russian.”

Danny swung his backpack over his shoulder and closed his locker door. “Who the heck is Wes?”

“Yeah, if you don’t know we’re not telling you.” Sam said, deadpan. She took a step back to avoid being hit by Danny’s overfilled backpack. “Seriously, Danny, is your tutor human or ghost?”

Danny gave a vague hum which, really, could have meant a lot of things.

“And he wonders why we’re concerned,” Tucker said dully. “Do I need to break out the boo-merang in case you get kidnapped?”

“…Potentially,” Danny admitted, “but I’m not leaving Amity, so I think it’ll be fine.” He checked his phone, “I have to go, guys, I’m gonna be late.”

“Don’t die,” Sam said.

“Don’t crash Duolingo by releasing an evil owl on us again,” Tucker said.

“No promises!” Danny called, already running out the door.

.-.

Vlad put in the contacts right before Danny phased through his door instead of knocking and managed to avoid jabbing himself in the eye. They got settled on either sides of a table, the spread of paper between them.

“Now,” Vlad said, and opened his own book. Beside the English word, he could see the proper pronouciation. “I thought it’d be beneficial to go over some basic sayings before we delve into the grammar. For example, ‘hello’ is pronounced ‘unbju.’” Ah, apparently the contacts helped with speaking as well. Fascinating.

Danny frowned. “I thought it was, uh,” he cleared his throat, “zdravstvuyte.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Vlad said. “It’s unbju. Repeat after me: unbju.”

Danny did.

Vlad grinned. “Very good.”

He’d have to pay the Ghostwriter back for the contacts – perhaps he could set the ghost up with some human publishers.

.-.

Danny phased through his sister’s door and flopped down on Jazz’s bed.

“Who’s there?” Jazz said, not looking back from her computer. “Oh, Danny? Thank you so much for knocking, come on in –”

“Does Vlad know Russian?”

Jazz looked back with a frown before she turned back to the computer. There were a few clicks. “The internet says no. Just English, French, and Spanish.”

“Ugh,” Danny groaned, putting his hands on his head. “Knew it.”

“Did you ask him to teach you?”

“He agreed,” Danny huffed. “Then what the hell was he telling me? We just spent the past few hours learning stuff like how I introduce myself with ‘yeban’ko maloletnee’ and how Mom’s ‘Baba jaga.’”

“I think that last one’s a type of witch that eats children,” Jazz said, and turned to face him. “That, at least, might be Russian?”

“Survey says: not comforting,” Danny propped himself up on his elbows. “Do you think it’s a ghost thing? Like, some sort of ghost language or whatever?”

“…Huh,” Jazz said, and tapped her chin with an uncapped highlighter. “It could be. But have you heard any other ghosts speaking in a weird language?”

“There was Wulf and Esperanto, and uh… nope. That’s it.” Danny groaned. “I could’ve been learning real Russian, and instead I’m stuck with stuff like ‘Jri govno i zdohni’ and whatever ‘Otlez’ gnida’ means because I’m pretty sure it’s not ‘goodbye.’”

There was a knock on the door. Both siblings automatically fell silent. Jazz looked Danny over, confirming that he was fully human.

“It’s open!” Jazz called.

Surprisingly delicate for a man who’d smashed a chair over a ghost owl less than a week ago, their dad slowly opened the door. “Hey, uh, Danno,” Jack said. “My Russian’s a bit rusty, but you were uh, saying so pretty harsh things there.”

Danny stood up. “You know Russian?”

“Those were Russian?” Jazz asked.

“Russian swears,” Jack said. “You know how your old Grandpa Fenton studied languages, I picked up some from him. Why, Danno? You looking to learn?”

“You need to be fluent in both English and Russian to be an astronaut.” Danny said, “Can you teach me dad, please? I’ll do all my chores on time and get home an hour before curfew every night!”

Jack laughed and clapped Danny on the back. He nearly fell over. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Danny-boy! I’ll have to brush up, but I’ll see what I can do. And hey! If you decide you don’t want to be a spaceman, it’s great for catching ghosts!”

Danny heard a distant, ominous hoot and had to disagree.

.-.

Vlad jabbed his thumb into his eye. Durak neschastnyi, he thought, which was a horrible sign. It meant this was spreading.

He’d tried to pull the contacts out after the lesson was finished. When he’d had difficulty, he’d decided it wasn’t a major issue. He’d had an important video conference, which halfway through this cursed artifact had ruined his business deal. Now, he couldn’t get it out. Contacts were supposed to be removable! When he found Ghostwriter… oh, nu vse, tebe pizda.

His wall exploded. Danny had returned.

“You taught me the wrong Russian!” Danny said, and threw his hands in the air. “Dude, what gives? I came to you nicely, why’d you have to – why is your hand in your eye?”

“Past’ zabej, padla jebanaja,” Vlad growled, whatever that meant.

“Rude.” Danny said. “Dude, I already know you don’t know Russian. Turns out my dad does, though.”

Jack? That Balvan? “Poydi k chertu,” Vlad said.

“Yeah, yeah, bless you. Anyway, if you want to learn and need a study buddy, then I’m willing to pretend that this,” he gestured to Vlad, “didn’t happen. Also stop with the eye thing dude, that’s weird.”

“Otlez’ gnida,” Vlad growled.

“Yeah, yeah, ‘goodbye’ to you too. I’ll go.” He held up his hands, “Once you say something in English. Like a cheesecake swear or something. I get it’s another language and all but dude, this is weirding me out.”

Vlad huffed, and grabbed a piece of paper. He scribbled a simple message on it – Find Ghostwriter.

Danny took it and raised an eyebrow. “Uh,” He turned it back to Vlad. He’d written in English, and somehow it had ended up in the Russian alphabet.

“Ti menia dostal,” Vlad growled.

“Yeah, now I’m kind of worried.” He waved a hand in Vlad’s face. “Hey, Vlad? You understand me, right?” Vlad smacked it away. “I think that’s a yes. Is this a ghost thing? Nod if it’s a ghost thing.”

Vlad nodded.

“…A normal ghost thing or –” Vlad shook his head. “Oh. Yikes. Well, have fun with that!” He started to fly out the hole he’d left in the wall – Vlad grabbed him by the ankle.

Ghostwriter was a zjulik and he would pay!

.-.

Ghostwriter sat down with a nice book on his sofa, a steaming hot cup of coffee beside him. Today was a good day. Plus, he really liked the location his lair was in now – it was close enough to Undergrowth’s garden that he could get fresh beans! Really, today was a very good day.

And then his door was kicked in.

“Ghostwriter!” Phantom yelled.

“Popal!” Plasmius screamed.

Ghostwriter took a sip of his coffee and set his book down. “Ah,” he said, “shit.”

***

Prompt: Astronauts have to know English and Russian. In hopes of getting ahead of the game, Danny asks Vlad if he could teach him Russian.

No, I don’t know how I got this from that either. I’ll reblog this in a second with a link to where I got all the russian swears from, so feel free to dig through that.

#Danny Phantom #currently talking #things i write #Phic Phight 2020 #Phic Phight #My favourite character is this is the Duolingo Owl #no I will not elaborate #Good Parents emotionally damaged people so have whatever the hell THIS is as tax

[tsarisfanfiction]

Pulse VI

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rating: Teen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Angst Characters: Gordon Tracy, Scott Tracy

Part 6 of my entry for @gumnut-logic‘s SensorySunday: Touch. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

This one kinda reads like it could be the end... but it isn’t.  Not quite.  All medical stuff in here is vaguely researched, based on my own osteology knowledge (I have a masters degree in human bones so I like to think I have some idea what I’m talking about), and also some good old-fashioned “it’s set 40 years in the future so let’s handwave and call it medical advances”.  Mostly the latter.

Gordon hated hospitals. He hated the overwhelming whiteness of everything, the inescapable stench of disinfectants, the memories that stirred up whenever he was inside one for too long.  But for all that he hated it, for all that his memories were fighting to get to the front of his mind, he couldn’t leave, not now.

When it had been him here, trapped in a hospital bed with an unco-operative body and uncertain future, Scott had stayed.  Scott had been there through it all, determined to help him in any way possible and horrified at the mere suggestion that he leave – abandon – his brother to this whitewashed hell.  Now, the roles were reversed, and no matter what was brewing in his head, Gordon would sooner be back in that bed himself than abandon his big brother.

Scott always had a presence to him.  Already tall, if more Gordon’s litheness than Virgil’s tank, Scott could command a room effortlessly, and Gordon had got used to that, used to lounging in Scott’s shadow because it was nice there.  Other people complained about siblings stealing the limelight, of always finding themselves second-best.  Gordon got that, had felt the same way once upon a time until he realised he could find his own limelight whenever he wanted – Scott certainly hadn’t shadowed the gold medal that had pride of place in his room.  He understood better now, knew that Scott would never stifle him, and with no parents the security of his biggest brother filled a hole that would have otherwise stayed open and raw.

The man laying in the hospital bed didn’t seem any bigger than Gordon himself.  He was still unconscious, had been ever since they’d moved him onto a stretcher to the sound of agonised screams, but after an emergency surgery and anaesthetic no-one was overly concerned about that.  He had no head injuries, a stroke of good luck amongst everything else and sleep was a good aid for healing; while he was sleeping, he wasn’t hurting – although the cannula supplying a strong dose of morphine was no doubt also helping that one.

Still, unconscious or not, Gordon insisted on holding his hand.  No-one else questioned it, not that there was anyone else around too question it.  Virgil and Kayo, while far better off than their eldest brother, had been confined to Tracy Island for the time being.  Neither were pleased about it, but not even Kayo was brave enough to oppose Grandma when she declared that they were to stay put for now.

Gordon wasn’t stupid – he knew that not even Grandma would have been able to enforce her rules on Virgil if his older brother wasn’t convinced that Scott was still in good hands. Just because none of them spoke about his accident much didn’t mean none of them remembered it.  For all his medical prowess, Virgil wasn’t the brother best suited to handling Scott once he woke up.  That was Gordon, miracle Tracy, never walk again Olympic Champion.  Virgil’s reluctance obedience to Grandma’s demands made it clear that he was all too aware of that.

Alan had kept himself together remarkably well up until the topic of how they were going to get everyone – and everything home.  After finding Scott and Kayo, helping Scott through a panic attack, and everything else he’d faced down in the rubble of a building, it was the idea that he was best-suited to pilot Thunderbird One home that pushed him too far.

They’d ended up all piling into Thunderbird Two, with Gordon at the helm while Kayo big-sistered the tearful youngest and Virgil hovered over the motionless eldest.  EOS had taken responsibility for the other two Thunderbirds on the scene, returning them straight to base as Thunderbird Two stopped off at their usual hospital – why oh why did they need a usual hospital as well as Grandma, Virgil, and their hospital-grade infirmary on Tracy Island – in New Zealand on the way home.  John was down from space, although Gordon hadn’t seen or spoken to him yet. With Scott out of action, it fell to the second-eldest and, more importantly, Alan’s partner in space, to comfort the distraught teenage astronaut.

So Gordon was here alone, fidgeting lightly with Scott’s calloused fingers as he waited for his big brother to wake up.  The room looked just as he remembered it – he didn’t know if it was the room, if Scott was lying in the very same bed he’d spent too many long, dark months, but it looked it.  Gordon was careful not to look around too much, not to check the view out of the window to see if it was identical to what memories he had of the hospital. Many, particularly the earliest ones, had been repressed, squashed into a corner of his mind to never see the light of day again, but many was not all, and Gordon remembered enough.  If he let himself think about them, there’d be another Tracy panic attack, and that was the last thing any of them needed. So he didn’t, carefully watching his eldest brother instead.

With his focus almost entirely on his brother, it was immediately obvious when Scott woke, blue eyes blinking up blearily at the (white, too white) ceiling.  He should call for a nurse, hit the call button and inform them that their patient was awake, but Gordon stayed his hand and waited.  This… this was personal.  He already knew the diagnosis, had heard it from faceless doctors and forced himself through all the medical jargon he’d hoped to never hear again. Scott would take it better from him than some unfamiliar nurse with genuine-sounding but rehearsed lines.

Like Virgil, unhappily back on Tracy Island with a broken arm and Grandma’s soup for company, Gordon hoped Scott would trust that he knew what he was saying.  That he understood.  Normally, that wouldn’t be a hope, it would be fact, but in circumstances like these, nothing was for sure.

“Hey there, bro,” he said quietly, lightly squeezing Scott’s hand to get his attention when blue eyes cleared and he judged him to be aware enough of his surroundings.

“Gordon?”  Those same blue eyes focused on him, and Scott frowned lightly.  He didn’t ask what had happened, but that wasn’t Scott’s thing.

“The one and only,” he confirmed, a small grin forming on his face.  He let it, determined not to be all doom and gloom while Scott filtered through his memories, putting the pieces of the puzzle together in the way that made him a fantastic commander to work out what had happened and why he was in a hospital.  It didn’t take long, and Gordon squeezed his hand again the moment he saw his eyes widen in fear.

“My legs-” Scott started, face rapidly paling, and Gordon pulled himself closer so that he was in Scott’s line of sight.

“You’re on the good stuff,” he said firmly.  “I doubt you can feel much of anything right now.”

That got Scott’s attention fixed on him, although the colour didn’t come back.  With wide eyes and pale skin, he looked much younger, but Gordon refused to let that bother him.  Back injuries were bad, and he knew Scott remembered much more about his own hospitalisation than he did.  It didn’t take a genius to see that was compounding the already instinctive fear of losing sensation in his lower body.

He’d take a leaf out of Alan’s book and collapse on another big brother later – Virgil would no doubt be available; John would have his hands full with Alan for some time – but right now Scott needed him, and Gordon wouldn’t, couldn’t, let him down.

“I’m not as strong as you,” Scott said, and to anyone else that might be a non-sequester, but Gordon was fairly sure he could follow the jump.  He was already thinking of the worst, already remembering when Gordon had got the fateful news from the doctors.  Gordon wouldn’t be surprised to find out that that had been playing through his mind right from the start, maybe even had a hand in the panic attack Alan had been left to field alone.

Not if you talk like that, was on the tip of his tongue, a retort honed by years of verbal sparring with brothers, older and younger.  But contrary to popular belief, Gordon did think before he spoke, and he knew without a doubt that a lightly scolding retort was the last thing Scott wanted or needed right now.

“I didn’t think I was strong enough, either,” he said instead.  Scott knew that – had been the one there for most of his breakdowns, when he shouted and screamed and cursed the world, or curled up into a metaphorical ball of depression (would have done it literally, if his inability to do so hadn’t been the whole reason for it in the first place) – but right now Gordon suspected he needed a reminder.  “You’re not alone, Scott.  You stayed with me when it was me stuck in that bed, and I’m going to stay with you now.”

If he was hoping for a quip back – I’d hope so, too – it didn’t happen.  It was too soon, the whole situation too raw, for that.  But Gordon wasn’t done.

“However, I have some not so bad news for you,” he continued.  He couldn’t call it good news, when there was nothing good about the whole thing, but it was far, far, better than anything he’d been told when it was him laying immobile in a bed.  “You don’t get the dubious honour of nasty doctors coming in and telling you you’ll never walk again.”

“What?” Scott demanded. “But- my back?  My legs?”

Gordon squeezed his hand again, sitting back in his chair to get comfortable again – or as best he could.  How Scott had managed to stay in the things for so long once upon a time, Gordon didn’t know.

“Let me start from the top,” he said, once he was settled and Scott was looking at him with burning curiosity – and hope.  A spark in those sky blue eyes that hadn’t been there even two minutes ago.  It was a spark Gordon knew would see him through. He had faith in Scott, even if Scott didn’t have faith in himself right now.  “Somehow, you didn’t break your back.  At least, not completely.  Your fifth lumbar vertebrae took some damage, which is going to take time and probably another surgery to heal-”

“Another?” Scott interrupted.  “How many have I had?”

“Just the one, so far,” Gordon assured him.  “They had to remove some of the chips that came off before they caused any more damage than you’re already dealing with.  That went fine, by the way, and they were also able to confirm that your spinal cord hasn’t taken any damage, so depending on how well your vertebrae heals up there should be little to no lasting complications in the long term.”

Relief warred with confusion on Scott’s face and Gordon fell silent, sensing a question.  Thankfully, Scott didn’t need further encouragement to ask the obvious thing.

“If my back’s not broken and my spinal cord is fine, why couldn’t I – can’t I – feel my legs?”

“Because your body’s response to things where they shouldn’t be is to swell up, and that swelling put pressure on your nerves,” Gordon assured him.  “It’ll take a while to go back to normal because typically it’s squishing the important ones that control your legs, and longer for the nerves to repair themselves from being squished up, so you are going to be stuck in bed or in…” Gordon still hated it, still refused to have anything to do with it, although as long as he wasn’t the one using it maybe he could face it, “that thing for a while, and then there’s all the PT from the inevitable lack of use for a while, but unless something goes wrong with the surgery, you should be okay.”

Scott didn’t respond, and Gordon abandoned his uncomfortable chair in favour of perching on the edge of the bed, reaching over so that he was holding both his hands.

“Scott?”  Sometimes, silence was good.  Right now, silence was not good.  He wanted to know Scott had heard and understood what he’d said. Needed to know.

“I’m… not paralysed?” his big brother asked slowly, shakily, as though he couldn’t quite believe it. Gordon couldn’t blame him; good news on the medical front from the outset was a rarity for the Tracys. Usually it was bad news which they promptly decided wasn’t going to win.

Privately, he shared Scott’s concern that it seemed too good to be true.

“Not as it stands,” he assured him out loud, unable to stop himself from grinning.  What was the point, anyway?  Even if Gordon couldn’t really qualify you’ll be bed-bound and then wheelchair-bound for a couple of months as good, it was still better than any of them had feared and expected when they’d found out Scott couldn’t feel his legs.  “That doesn’t mean the next few months are going to be easy, because they won’t” – PT was its own brand of hell after extended forced bedrest – “but I’m here for you – we’re all here for you – and you’re going to get through this.”

Finally, he got a small smile from Scott.

“Shouldn’t a doctor be telling me all this?” he queried, and Gordon shrugged unapologetically.

“I’ll let them know you’re awake in a minute,” he said, leaving I thought you’d rather hear this from me unsaid.

“In that case, Nurse Gordon, please go and call a doctor,” Scott retorted, and Gordon heard the underlying gratitude loud and clear, even as he protested that he was at least a Doctor, thank you very much, to a noise that could almost have been a chuckle from his big brother.

You’re right.  Thank you.

Part 7

#sensorysunday #sensorysunday2020 #thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds are go fanfiction #tsari writes fanfiction #gordon tracy #scott tracy #virgil tracy #alan tracy #john tracy #kayo kyrano #grandma tracy #eos #pulse

[salty-dracon]

Some thoughts on The Caligula Effect 2

So I joke about this game getting a second remake to my friends online and the next moment I learn THIS was announced during the Japanese Nintendo Direct. Let me spill out my thoughts to spark discussion as well as provide a record to myself if this game actually does get localized.

Everything is under the cut!

My thoughts on Overdose were that it has a fantastic world... and that’s it. Out of the game’s cast, there were maybe four characters I liked, and the rest had moments that made me lose all sympathy for them. I recall it was common for some Let’s Players to like the villains better than the protagonists, and I’d agree on that front. I actually think the anime is the best iteration of this game’s story, changing up the formula enough to provide a really solid characterization arc to everyone. But Overdose suffers from poor writing issues (killing Eiji offscreen in the best ending was one of the worst decisions they made), rough handling of certain topics, boring and monotonous dungeons, and 500 social links you’re never going to do. I’m incredibly critical of this game, and I’d never recommend it to someone without a LOT of disclaimers, but somehow I still love it.

Already this game looks CRAZY good visually. It doesn’t look like a reskinned Vita game anymore, with something a little more reminiscent of say, the Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth games. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t still implement its fantastic character art, which still show up next to the speech bubbles. (At least the models have moving jaws. That’s important.)

Here’s to really hoping this game won’t be another Caligula 1 reskin, because uh... the game is about a protagonist who realizes that the world is a virtual one created by a Vocaloid who won’t let anyone out and joins up with a group of teenagers who also want to get out despite the fact that their real world lives were horrible so that they can set things right and they call themselves the Go-Home club (and also a Vocaloid gives them weapons made out of black stuff) but the people that are stopping them are basically the servants and guardians of the Vocaloid keeping them trapped in, who also happen to be humans who can’t return to the real world because their real world lives were so horrible, and so they have to fight because the Vocaloid won’t let them out otherwise. I mean, of course it won’t be a reskin, but I’m surprised at just how much of the original story they kept.

As for things they absolutely did NOT keep, DAMN this game looks dark! I was once remarking to a friend about how Caligula’s story would appeal better to me specifically if they’d gone with a religious pressure rather than idol stan theme, and they appear to have really pulled through with that religious pressure. I just realized, while writing this, that the image I showed off above actually has an image of an angel in the stained glass window being worshiped by fans with glow sticks. Furthermore, there’s a gothic cathedral-like altar, a halo behind Regret’s head, and this whole exchange looks like it takes place in a church. While I’m not religious myself, I can talk a lot about church architecture (see: my Fire Force livetweet) and I’m interested to see how this game handles it.

Not only that, most of the character designs seem darker and very different from the original game’s. Take a look at this game’s idol goddess:

Is μ going through an emo phase? I wouldn’t blame her lol. I think she still has a fantastic design that is in equal parts dreary and beautiful, while perfectly matching the color scheme of the new game.

And what a color scheme it is! The world of Caligula 1 had a gorgeous white, black, pink, brown, and gray color scheme framing bold pops of color in the form of flowers. Caligula 2 changes things up by making black the primary color framing everything else. The pops of color are so much bolder, too, from Noto’s bright yellow sweatshirt to basically everything χ is wearing. Do these changes reflect the story’s potential darker tone too? Or are they representative of something else?

We don’t know too much about the characters, but Caligula 2 looks like it’s giving them different weapons. It looks like the protagonists wield double knives instead of double shotguns. As for the other weapons, I see shortswords, katanas, chains, pistols (much smaller than Shogo’s), canes, and Qiyana’s ohmlatl from League of Legends. Definitely a shift from the original game’s weapons. I wonder if they’ll make a comeback? That giant gun was unique to say the least.

The Obbligato (I think?) are this game’s Ostinato Musicians. Italian for “obliged”, they are the ones who defend Regret from any threats. The one shown off most in the trailer is this guy who looks like the 1010 dudes from No Straight Roads. Man, he really looks like Shadow Knife in that image up there...

Also we get a, um, clown astronaut and a crazy high school yandere. Just to name a few. Definitely not the first time I’ve beat up a clown in a video game. Pretty unique as far as villains go, though. I hope this game has its own villain route, where you learn more about them. I’d really like that.

Social links! Looks like you rank up social links the same way you do in the original game. Do you want to make this character spill out all their trauma? Are you SURE about that, despite there being no negative consequences to you, the player? Awesome. Get ready to be sad.

The battle system is, from what I’ve read, similar, but not the same, as the battle system in Overdose. I’m not going to give too many details on that. They still seem to be time-based with combo chains, but they’re pretty vague. Looks like you still get to unleash crazy special attacks against your enemies. And they in turn can unleash crazy special attacks against you.

I absolutely want to see a. better characters and b. better overall writing. In my opinion these were the two weakest points of Caligula 1. Despite the protagonists’ tragedies, some of the little things they did made me sort of hate them. I did not like how everyone in the original Go-Home Club used Kotaro (who you learn is FOURTEEN!) as a verbal punching bag despite him being one of the kindest characters in the club. As for better overall writing, I stated before that I preferred the anime’s interpretation of events, because I thought they were in a better order overall. Besides killing Eiji offscreen, I hated how they wrote μ to be such a monumentally stupid character (I often point to Persona 5 Royal on how to write a villain like her well) and their, in my opinion, poor handling of certain topics like fatphobia. And though the character episodes sort of redeem them, it’s like... not really? The way I described it to a friend was that while the moral of Caligula 1′s story may have been “We live in a society and everyone’s dealing with their own hardships, but you can’t run away from them forever and you can at least be sympathetic to those facing them”, the character interactions end up dumbing it down to “We live in a society”.

Also an anime adaptation would be really sick. The anime just had so much better writing.

As for what I’m really curious about:

1. Who is Regret and how is she related to μ and Aria? We already know she’s a Virtuadoll like them, but if I recall correctly μ and Aria had some more concreteness to their backstories. Specifically, the human characters remember them existing as vocal synthesizer programs before they became the rules of Mobius. Regret’s backstory is that she just kind of showed up one day. Does she have different origins from μ and Aria? By the same merit, who is χ and how is she related to Regret, μ, and Aria? We know that χ opposes Regret and gives the Go-Home club the power to fight back against her, kind of like what Aria did in Caligula 1, but was she a co-creator of Redo like Aria was, or was her role completely different? The fact that she isn’t a little sparkle like Aria was (as a result of losing all of her power) indicates that their roles might be a little different.

2. What relationship does Redo have to Mobius? We know Mobius was created because Aria and μ wanted a place for humans to live without the sorrows they experienced in the real world. However, eventually μ was manipulated by everyone’s negative emotions and Thorn’s actions. This caused her to prevent anyone from leaving, and also the plot of the first game. Is Redo a second, improved iteration of Mobius, or a completely new virtual space? Were the goals behind its creation the same as in the first game? Or was there another force at work? Is Regret trying to copy μ or improve on her work? Or is she doing what μ did independently? I don’t think there’s enough information to predict the answer to this, but from what I’ve seen, there are a lot of similarities between the two worlds, from the high school to the end goal. However, there are some differences in tone. Mobius was a place to escape suffering, while Redo is being marketed as a place to escape regret. Redo also has a more religious bend than the idol theme of the first game.

3. What other links do the first and second games have to each other? People have been theorizing that Marie Mizuguchi/Wicked from the first game may return as Marie Amabuki (I think) in the second due to them having the same VA. There’s obviously the shared artstyle, symbolism, Catharsis Effect, glitchy NPC faces, and general setting. I also suspect that this game takes place after the events of Caligula 1. Not much I can say about this right now, but I wonder how everything joins up. Or if it even matters that they do. I haven’t seen too much on whether or not this game is being marketed as a standalone or a sequel, or if you even need to play Caligula 1 to enjoy Caligula 2.

Conclusion: While the Caligula series isn’t one I’d recommend to everyone, for the way it handles a number of sensitive topics, I will still be checking out Caligula 2 if it comes to the West. Though very little has been revealed thus far, so far I’m interested in the religious iconography used as well as the darker tone and colors presented in the game. As well as the characters, who have more varied and interesting designs including super unique weapons. I’m a bit disappointed that the plot, as it has been revealed, is an exact copy of Caligula 1′s plot, right down to the names of the protagonists’ faction. I was hoping for a bigger evolution to the story, but considering so little has been revealed in the first place, this may be a bit of a preemptive judgement.

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed my discussion of what I’ve learned so far.

#the caligula effect #caligula

[stay4stray]

Map for Broken Compass and the Stray Kids Timeline

Recently, Stray Kids have been displaying a lot of performances with literary and/or cinematic themes - often 2 in one (Dead Poet’s society, Game of Thrones).  In the Intro to Levanter video, Chan mentioned inspiration from a book and also a poem, and of course we have the Road Not Taken, referencing Frost’s poem (oh and of course Kung Fu Panda!).  I think these are hints for us, that their MVs have similar allusions - namely, they allude quite a bit to Maze Runner.  After realizing this I did some more research and found that someone else had reached this conclusion long before I did, so watch their video here!  This really makes me want to reread the whole Maze Runner series ‘cause it’s been a while but that’s irrelevant.  Obviously I’m slow catching onto this so I’m not really gonna argue for this as its argument is already established, lucky me!  But understanding this allusion does help with how I’ve come to understand the SKZ storyline through the Map for Broken Compass that was recently released.

The main connections to Maze Runner that I’m concerned with:

dystopia

man vs. society; themes of manipulation

the plot set up as a series of trials, hidden one illusion inside of another (maaaaAAtryoshka? 👀 I kid I think)

the very beginning of the Maze Runner movie has extremely strong parallels to the Hellevator MV)

Note: This isn’t to say that the SKZ storyline is the same as Maze Runner!  It very obviously isn’t, in my opinion.  The villains seem completely different and the overall conflict is likely different (in MR if I remember correctly the overall issue was that the world had suffered from solar flares so it ended up being an environmental conflict?).  I don’t know what the overall conflict of the SKZ storyline is just yet but from Miroh they seem to be setting up a rich vs. poor conflict... Though that might not be the overall issue, just like how MR has multiple layers.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s go back to the Map.  At 3 am two nights ago, I made a super chaotic post about how I think it’s meant to be read, so check that out for details if need be but the main idea is that the motifs from different MVs and the way they reappear in different eras and places on the map is how we can find our chronology.

So in the map image above I’ve labeled various things.  The numbers are the motifs, in no real order, but vaguely in order of their visual placement on the map.  Some have letters, a and b, which are when motifs repeat on the map.  The circles draw attention to some things that I think are likely important but am personally still very confused about.  And then I’ve added some translated lyrics that I think are important to the storyline.

I don’t think Hellevator is the start of the timeline.  I think, like MR, it’s the start of the timeline the boys’ remember.  At that point, I think they’ve already entered their first “trial” or “illusion” - that being, they’ve been given a place to live “happily,” but they’re isolated from anyone except themselves.  The reason they haven’t left is because their way out is labeled Hellevator - in other words, they’re convinced to stay through a combination of contentedness and fear.  However, when they eventually leave, they end up in a field of flowers, which doesn’t exactly scream “Hell,” does it?

In my opinion, My Pace and I am YOU are directly connected and in that order - they almost have to be, based on the MVs, I think.  I believe My Pace is the start of the timeline as we know it - I think it is where the conflict between the boys and society starts, as the boys decide to do their own thing, go their own speed.  This is further confirmed when Jisung takes down the camera in I am YOU, which may be the significance fo the broken camera that I’ve circled in red on the map - even though it’s by the My Pace tunnel, it’s not actually broken until I am YOU!

Similarly, Miroh seems to lead to Side Effects/Yellow Wood based on the MVs.  What’s confusing is there’s a possibility that Side Effects actually happened more than once - that the part where the kids get on the bus did actually happen, but somehow they eventually ended up at the same crossroads and took the other path.  On the map, the elevator connects the two of them, which leads me to believe that Hellevator leads directly to I am NOT/District 9.  

Based on motifs, namely the shopping cart and the couch (both of which are in both IAY and the Hellevator MVs btw), Hellevator is up next.  Notably, the Hellevator motifs are placed near the District 9 bus, so we could reasonably say that I am NOT comes next, based on that as well as the elevator.  I mentioned before that their hideout in Hellevator is a place meant to make them complacent, which is supported by the fact that some of their things, the shopping cart and the couch, were taken from their initial I am YOU hideout.  It reminds me of when you move a pet from one place to another and keep their toys with them so that the new place still feels like home.

Based on the 1.5 moon motif, though, Yellow Wood is up next!  Either that, or Yellow Wood came before I am YOU, which I don’t think is the case.  My thought is, Side Effects represents choosing to blend with society or choosing to rebel, so perhaps at one point they chose to go with society, but they eventually realized they were unable to fit in and rebelled, ending up at Hellevator in the end either way.  That’s also why I think the I am NOT part of the map has the Side Effects drone - it’s another point at which they had to make that choice between society and freedom.

From Hellevator, as I’ve mentioned, we go to I am NOT, video-wise this means the I am NOT trailer and the District 9 MV.  From there, we have the bottle of flowers and the field of purple flowers from Hellevator replicated near Levanter... which we can’t say too much about until tomorrow!  But it should lead to Miroh based on the eagle motif and the walkie talkie motif there-- which, people have probably said this already, but the eagle itself likely represents SKZ while the lion represents society (think Young Wings for the eagle and for the lion, it’s attached to things like the City Jungle and the bus driven by the Miroh dude so that checks out imo for more than one reason).  My suspicion is that the use of so many previous motifs in Astronaut represents Hyunjin getting lost and having to remember the way back to where the rest of the group is... This could mean literally having lost his memory or it could be a more figurative form of losing his way.

Anyway, from Miroh we end up at Yellow Wood, based on the elevator on the map as well as the MVs, and this time it’s more literal than the previous encounters with YW - this time they chose a path and throw away the key, never looking back.  They won’t go back to Yellow Wood again because they’ve made their final decision to truly rebel, there’s no going back (which I think may be why Hyunjin was so stressed in SE).

We find ourselves once again at the Levanter part of the map, with the eagle representing running from Miroh’s City Jungle.  And that’s pretty much all I’ve got, at least until tomorrow!

I will say that I think it’s possible that SKZ infiltrates society a few times before fully rebelling, in order to free more people like themselves and build up their forces.  I think something similar happened in Maze Runner as well.  A part of me wonders if SKZ plays themselves, but also other like them in a sort of metaphorical way (if that makes sense?).

It’s also possible that someone else helped them escape from District 9 - the drone that broke in that Chan found, for example.  Where did it come from?  It could have been their past selves, who anticipated their being stuck with wiped memories!  It could also have been other “stray kids” who’ve already escaped.  Maybe it’s I.N’s “twin?”

Okay yeah I think I’m really going off the rails here so I’m gonna wrap up really quick with one final section here!

Things I don’t know what to do with:

keys - my suspicion is that they are part of yet another illusion set up by society (meaning, society wants them to think that the keys will help them escape but it’s all just another trick/trial), and that’s why SKZ has discarded some of them - for example, taking down Miroh will probably not grant full freedom, because freedom is outside of the map, so maybe they discarded the key to return there.

marbles - I’m guessing they have to do with memories somehow but thus far they have only showed up in Astronaut so it’s really hard to see patterns with these just yet.

elevators - I mentioned that they might show direct connections between MVs, but I’m very uncertain about this, actually.

“ghost” I.N who stayed behind in Astronaut - though I will note that he seemed to have a clone or a twin or something in District 9 so that could explain how one I.N went with SKZ and another stayed behind?

#stray kids #skz #stray kids theories #levanter #clé: levanter #hellevator #district 9 #my pace #i am not #i am you #i am who #miroh #clé 1: miroh #clé 2: yellow wood #side effects #the road not taken #yellow wood #kpop theory #kpop #bang chan #lee minho #kim woojin #lee know #han jisung #han #seo changbin #i.n #yang jeongin #hwang hyunjin #kim seungmin

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 21 January 2019

Quick Bits:

Aquaman #44 continues “Unspoken Water” from Kelly Sue DeConnick, Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques, Sunny Gho, and Clayton Cowles. This story feels a lot like some of the ‘80s DC reimaginings that came on the heels of Crisis on Infinite Earths, playing with the mythology in a new way while approaching the narrative from oblique angles. Definitely an interesting revelation about the people on the island. Rocha, Henriques, and Gho are probably doing some of the best art of their careers.

| Published by DC Comics

Avengers #13 gives us the origin of the 1 million BC Iron Fist from Jason Aaron, Andrea Sorrentino, Justin Ponsor, Erick Arciniega, and Cory Petit. The artwork from Sorrentino, Ponsor, and Arciniega is gorgeous, capturing some of the feel that David Aja brought to K’un-Lun in The Immortal Iron Fist.

| Published by Marvel

Batman #63 continues to attempt to break your brain as “Knightmares” continues with Mikel Janín and Jordie Bellaire joining Tom King and Clayton Cowles for the fun. This one gives another possible explanation for what’s going on as John Constantine warns Bruce and Selina of what’s going to happen in their domestic bliss.

| Published by DC Comics

Blossoms 666 #1 is kind of a slow-burn opener, intent on easing the reader into the surprises of this type of horror, which somewhat works against the back cover blurb and solicitation copy, but eh. Still, some great character work from Cullen Bunn building Cheryl and Jason. And the artwork from Lauren Braga and Matt Herms is perfect.

| Published by Archie Comics / Archie Horror

Cover #5 kind of sets us up for a conclusion next issue. Kind of. It’s more character building, anecdotes from comics conventions, and exploration of the art form through various means that has elevated the series from the beginning from Brian Michael Bendis, David Mack, Michael Avon Oeming, Zu Orzu, and Carlos Mangual. The Ninja Sword comic sequences this issue are particularly great.

| Published by DC Comics / Jinxworld

The Curse of Brimstone Annual #1 offers three stories, one focusing on Brimstone and two fleshing out adversaries Detritus and Wandering Jack. Great art throughout from Mike Perkins, Neil Edwards, John Stanisci, Denys Cowan, Donald Hudson, and Rain Beredo.

| Published by DC Comics

Crypt of Shadows #1 is one of the one-shot revivals of old titles for Marvel’s 80th anniversary from Al Ewing, Garry Brown, Stephen Green, Djibril Morissette-Pham, Chris O’Halloran, and Travis Lanham. It’s pretty great, presenting two short stories embedded in a framing narrative, reminiscent of the old horror anthologies.

| Published by Marvel

Die!Die!Die! #7 is more balls to the wall action and insanity from Robert Kirkman, Scott Gimple, Chris Burnham, Nathan Fairbairn, and Rus Wooton. It’s the battle between Lipshitz and Barnaby that has been building for a while now and, well, it’s violent, bloody, and brutal as you’d expect. Also, cats.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Freedom Fighters #2 is mostly some vague teasers of things to come and one giant, flashy fight sequence, but it’s an entertaining fight sequence. The art from Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, and Adriano Lucas really get to do the heavy lifting in this story and it shines.

| Published by DC Comics

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #2 proves that the first issue wasn’t a fluke, with Tom Taylor, Juann Cabal, Nolan Woodard, and Travis Lanham providing another highly entertaining, very funny, beautifully illustrated story. Taylor captures Peter’s voice incredibly well.

| Published by Marvel

Go-Bots #3 jumps a bit in the narrative, with a team of astronauts aboard Spay-C discovering Gobotron, where a decidedly authoritarian Leader-1 is taking some draconian measures to keep the Guardians in line, while still fending off Cy-Kill and his minions. Tom Scioli keeps us off-balance a bit for what’s going on and it adds a nice tension to the story. Also, the locking mechanism for the prison cell is a nice touch of nostalgia.

| Published by IDW

Guardians of the Galaxy #1 is a great debut from Donny Cates, Geoff Shaw, Marte Gracia, and Cory Petit, setting up a new post-Infinity Wars Marvel cosmic standard. There’s a good deal of action and humour through this as Thanos’ wake leads to many of the cosmic “heroes” pledging a path to an odd bloodbath--with a large amount of Earth-based heroes as possible targets--and a heist of his body by the Black Order (who’ve also stolen Knowhere) before anything can get underway. This is probably one of the stranger “gathering of the team” stories, but it gets it out of the way in a fascinating manner to hit the ground running next issue. The art from Shaw and Gracia is suitably epic.

| Published by Marvel

Hardcore #2 has some very nice art from Alessandro Vitti and Adriano Lucas, as Drake finds he has his hands full with both Markus trying to fully take over the Hardcore program and the criminal organization he was trying to take down being on to him. Both trying to kill him. Lots of entertaining action in this one.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Hellboy and the BPRD: 1956 #3 brings up some interesting history questions for the Bureau and certain locations we already know about, as Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson’s script continues to dovetail some already existing knowledge of history.

| Published by Dark Horse

High Heaven #5 conclude season one of this series as well, leaving David exactly where he wished to be, but finding out it’s not necessarily what it’s cracked up to be. Tom Peyer, Greg Scott, Andy Troy, and Rob Steen have really been delivering a bitingly funny take on the afterlife here. Also another fun Hashtag: Danger short from Peyer and Chris Giarrusso. I’m glad that this one is going to be graduating to its own feature for Ahoy’s second wave of books. And the issue is rounded out by the usual prose stories and text pieces.

| Published by Ahoy

Immortal Hulk #12 is a tough one. Even as Hulk travels deeper into the heart of Hell and Al Ewing continues to wax philosophical in the narration about the nature of evil and the concept of the devil or an opposite to god in comparative religions, we get a hard look at Bruce’s upbringing and the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father. It’s a difficult read as his father tries to justify his abusive actions, but it’s one hell of a character study. Great guest art on the flashbacks from Eric Nguyen to complement the main story’s art from regulars Joe Bennett and Ruy José, with colours from Paul Mounts. It’s astonishing the heights that this run is hitting, one of the best Marvel is publishing.

| Published by Marvel

Justice League #16 concludes “Escape from Hawkworld” from Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Jim Cheung, Stephen Segovia, Mark Morales, Tomeu Morey, Wil Quintana, and Tom Napolitano. It’s very much a lore dump, with the Martian Keep telling J’onn about the multiverse before and of Perpetua, along with some interesting and complicated other revelations, but it’s rather interesting.

| Published by DC Comics

Livewire #2 sees Amanda captured, beaten, and mutilated by mercenary bigots at the behest of the US government to figure out a new way to control and neuter psiots. It’s always interesting that these people think they’re doing the “right thing” to justify their genocide. Very impressive artwork from Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín as always. Allén and Martín‘s choices for layouts, colours, even panel-styles lead to some very interesting visual storytelling.

| Published by Valiant

Low Road West #5 concludes the series, but leaves enough doors open for more somewhere down the line. This has been a very strange series, starting as a kind of post-America future and then tossing in some alternate reality weird western body horror stuff out there. All throughout with some inventive and unique artwork from Flaviano and Miquel Muerto.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Man Without Fear #4 presents us with the bedside manner of Kingpin from Jed MacKay, Paolo Villanelli, Andres Mossa, and Clayton Cowles. I really like Villanelli’s art here, which seems to be channelling the spirit of Chris Samnee.

| Published by Marvel

Naomi #1 is an incredibly beautiful comic. Jamal Campbell has really gone out of his way to craft a gorgeous first issue, perfectly balancing the ordinary, everyday people of Port Oswego, Oregon and the disruption caused by the superheroics of Superman bouncing through in a battle with Mongul. Brian Michael Bendis, David F. Walker, Campbell, and Josh Reed have something interesting here, working at the fringes of the DC Universe from the perspective of ordinary people, and ordinary people not living in a Metropolis or Gotham at that.

| Published by DC Comics / Wonder Comics

Oliver #1 is an amazing debut from Gary Whitta, Darick Robertson, Diego Rodriguez, and Simon Bowland. It’s worth it alone just for Robertson and Rodriguez’s extremely beautiful, detailed artwork, bringing to life a bombed out, desolate London in stunning detail, but then the story hooks you. There’s a mystery to Oliver’s identity and lineage that pulls you in and the development of a society of an unwanted class of disposable clone soldiers is very compelling.

| Published by Image

Pearl #6 is a very interesting conclusion to the first arc from Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Gaydos, and Joshua Reed. Great bits of comedy throughout what is otherwise a fairly heavy issue. Stunning artwork from Michael Gaydos.

| Published by DC Comics / Jinxworld

Quincredible #3 continues to build the world around Quin, as well as showing him learning through action, and finding out the complications of living in a fairly tight knit community where everyone knows everyone. The predicament that Rodney Barnes, Selina Espiritu, Kelly Fitzpatrick, and Tom Napolitano leave us in is compelling and really develops well through the narrative.

| Published by Lion Forge / Roar / Catalyst Prime

The Spider King: Frostbite continues Hrolf’s adventures, now trying to cleanse the world of any remaining alien presence, in this one shot. The main story is a fun tale taking on another brand of infected creatures from the mini-series team of Josh Vann, Simon D’Armini, Adrian Bloch, and Chas! Pangburn. There’s also a back-up starring Sigrid taking no bullshit from Vann, Pangburn, and art by Daniel Irizarri.

| Published by IDW

Superior Spider-Man #2 is essentially an issue-long fight between Terrax and Octavius, but it’s rather entertaining, from Christos Gage, Mike Hawthorne, Wade von Grawbadger, Victor Olazaba, Jordie Bellaire, and Clayton Cowles. The artwork is incredible throughout and there are some humorous cameos.

| Published by Marvel

Teen Titans #26 is the first of this series I’ve picked up, largely since in a few months it will be crossing over with Deathstroke, and it’s not bad. It seems intertwined with Red Hood (another title I’m not reading), but all of the necessary information seems to be being provided in the story, giving no problems with narrative flow. Adam Glass adds some very nice humour in the dialogue that keeps things snappy. The art from Bernard Chang and Marcelo Maiolo also nicely captures a youthful vibe.

| Published by DC Comics

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #90 begins to pick up the pieces from the EPF’s assault on Burnow Island, as well as weaving in the bits and pieces from the recent macro-series, as the Turtles and the Mutanimals hold a wake for Slash. Great art from Michael Dialynas and Ronda Pattison.

| Published by IDW

X-O Manowar #23 begins “Hero” from Matt Kindt, Tomás Giorello, Diego Rodriguez, and Dave Sharpe. It’s largely set-up,--bringing back the bounty hunters who assaulted Aric previously, showing off Kate’s new ship in action against said bounty hunters, and then Aric wondering how he pees in the suit--, but it’s damn entertaining. Also, Giorello and Rodriguez practically put on a clinic for visual storytelling.

| Published by Valiant

Other Highlights: American Carnage #3, The Avant-Guards #1, The Beauty #26, Buffy the Vampire Slayer #1, Cloak & Dagger: Negative Exposure #2, DuckTales #17, Exorsisters #4, GI Joe: A Real American Hero - Silent Option #3, Grumble #3, Jim Henson’s Beneath the Dark Crystal #6, Kaijumax: Season 4 #4, Lightstep #3, Lucifer #4, Mars Attacks #4, Monstress #19, Outcast #38, Regression #15, Rise of the TMNT #4, Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell #3, Shuri #4, StarCraft: Soldiers #1, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Terra Incognita #6, Star Wars #60, Sukeban Turbo #3, War is Hell #1, The Witcher: Of Flesh & Flame #2

Recommended Collections: Battlepug Compugdium, Black Panther - Book 6: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda Pt. 1, Cosmic Ghost Rider: Baby Thanos Must Die, Coyotes - Volume 2, Daredevil - Volume 8: The Death of Daredevil, Jughead: The Hunger - Volume 2, Marvel Two-in-One - Volume 2: Next of Kin, Polar - Volume 1: Came from the Cold, The Problem of Susan & Other Stories, Proxima Centauri, X-O Manowar - Volume 6: Agent

d. emerson eddy did not eat the last piece of cherry pie. It was the cats, they’re trying to frame him.

#This Week in Comics

[mothphobos]

finally decided to put together a main hc post for the boys

sung

a cyclops! his eye is iridescent, so it’s a different color depending on the angle, but it looks blue from most angles

pointy ears

otherwise visually indistinguishable from a human 

his species starts as a fourth dimensional being without physical form but as they get older they can decide to take physical form if they want 

the decision to take physical form is permanent, they can’t shift back or shift into something else 

some Shit happened to make it so that he needs to be in the vicinity of the prismatic core to stay alive 

i think i’m leaning towards him having embedded it in his chest but i haven’t fully decided 

mostly bc the image of him just keeping it in a fuckin pocket when not in armor is hilarious 

in terms of neat powers and whatnot 

his species can travel short distances in time, but he can’t anymore bc of the same Shit from before (with the exception of outside forces like time crystals) 

can sense other life forms within the nearby area

can get sick but works through it quickly and most stuff can’t actually kill him

recovers insanely fast from injuries, and only serious wounds leave scars

a good dude! really fuckin old and has seen some shit but still an optimist and has a lot of faith in the good in the universe 

to be frank, adhd like a motherfucker 

more clued in to earth culture than it looks like, he just forgets/ignores a lot of it if it's not vital (i.e. won’t endanger anyone)

meouch

just a straight up dude with a lion head and tail 

real tough nails that tend to grow a bit pointy but no actual claws by cat standards 

really fast at recovering, both from wounds and illnesses 

is an only child and was raised by his mom

of the rest of his family, only knew his maternal grandmother

side note: his grandma is cool as fuck. absolutely cooler than him 

got into smuggling funk in his late teens/early twenties 

funk in that context is definitely smth more substantial than the music, and is produced by the music under certain conditions with the right instruments

funk is harmless to most species, but, yknow. 

worked his way up to being a commander in a space funk smuggling guild of sorts 

phobos’ planet was the meeting place with a client and there was an issue with containment upon production, and that’s p much how that happened

has to be careful when space traveling bc occasionally he will be recognized and at that point there’s a fifty fifty chance of things going badly

the best pilot of the bunch! also just generally good with vehicles, picks up how to operate things pretty quickly

not really a mechanic, but is good at finding quick fixes on ships until they can get to someone with more professional skill

still an asshole, but a decent dude where it matters 

gets himself into shit occasionally but is decent about patching things back up 

Loves Ladies 

the most clued in about earth culture, but only because it has a lot of similarities to his home planet and he spends the most time out doing stuff

phobos

MOTH MAN 

a luna moth, basically 

species stuff

bipedal with one pair of arms and a pair of functional wings

weird mouth setup! they’ve got proboscises which are what they use the most, but they’ve also got a pair of actual jaws more suited to solid food that are just hidden by Fluff most of the time

pitch based language made up of hums and buzzing noises 

technically diurnal, but their planet has much lower light than earth’s and similar planets 

his mother was the elected ruler of his people, his father was a botanist, and he also had an older brother 

he got the title of lord through relation and working to earn it

was working on a satellite above the planet with a couple astronauts when the funkpocalypse occured

in rushing to get back to the planet, his suit/equipment got caught on something and kept him there long enough that he only got back for the aftermath, so he wasn’t affected by the funk at all 

wings were damaged badly enough in the fallout that he can no longer fly 

was trying to go after meouch when sung found them 

he’d successfully found meouch but his injuries from debris and such were slowing him down immensely 

he’s still working through the tail end of mourning, but has forgiven meouch and has gotten to be good friends with him 

started learning sign language a few weeks after joining up with the rest of the band

just as much of a dweeb as sung, he just has a better filter and doesn’t immediately voice most of his dumbass thoughts 

an all around pleasant dude!

has a definite mischievous asshole streak though 

low tolerance for bullshit 

the quietest, even disregarding the vow of silence 

i wish i had a better way to describe it but enjoys a very tumblr brand of nonsensical and/or vaguely ominous humor 

the least knowledgeable about earth culture but manages to squeak by in a lot of situations through sheer luck and politeness

havve

was human before becoming a cyborg

most of his internal workings have been replaced, but aside from that, everything above his waist (torso, arms, head) is more or less intact

still has a functional digestive system! doesn’t need to use it to stay alive though

in terms of energy, does have a battery but it’s an outrageously long-lived one, he can go about a week without needing to charge

his charging ports are in the soles of his feet and charge through contact with a docking panel sung made him 

he’s also got a plug in one that he can hook up an extension cable to should he need to, though 

after sung (by a lot), he’s the oldest 

prefers to wear his armor most of the time, but can remove it if he chooses 

from the future but fucky time travel landed the crew he was previously a part of in the mesozoic era where they turned on him, nearly killed him, and promptly left him for dead

has a loyalty towards sung from being saved by him but that’s about it

or, it at least started as just loyalty, nothing more, but has grown to sort of actually value sung + meouch + phobos’ company

still doesn’t dwell on it much, though 

not one for feelings, at all 

does have them, but they’ve been fucked with enough that they’re not exactly all there anymore 

has a general disdain for most life forms, but has a soft spot for animals 

will not intentionally harm children or animals most of the time

Likes Knives but isn’t allowed around them on planets

has a very ominous sense of humor that actually meshes p well with phobos’

is actually decently clued in about earth culture, just could not give less of a fuck

#twrp #PLEASE ask me about shit #this was so much fun to come up with #moth noises #also i am SO sorry the formatting is fucky

[phanarchy-blog]

Love, I Promise To

Genre: It’s not fluffy enough to be fluff but not angst enough to be angst

Rating: G

Words: 1.1k

Summary: Dan is about to become the first YouTuber to be sent into space. He has a gift for Phil before he leaves.

Author’s Notes: This is written in two hours before bed with no edits based on a vague space prompt (courtesy of @quiffedphil for that btw, it’s the backbone to the story!) and trying to work in dialogue prompts as well. It’s by no means my best work, but I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Read on AO3!

It was the last night before blast off, which was not the technical term and if he was being honest, Phil hadn’t bothered to learn the technical term at all. He had other things to worry about.

He laid awake in the twilit bedroom, feeling the chill cross his back as Dan made his final turn, pulling the duvet nearly all the way off as he completed the cocoon. They were face to face again, and Phil memorized the fine lines pressed into Dan’s cheek, the blushy red patch appearing at his chin even in his sleep.

Dan needed to be sleeping, and it was a miracle he managed to fall asleep at all. Phil reminded himself not to take it personally. He couldn’t help but let his mind drift over all of the events that led to this night.

Dan never set out to be the first YouTuber to go to space. Phil giggled under his breath just thinking about it, letting out a breathy huff that clouded the air around him. Dan really couldn’t get out of this one if he wanted to.

It started with Google, as all things do, wanting to connect their biggest social media platform with their newest endeavor of private space exploration, in order to get the word out. It was a sweet deal, really. A free trip to space in the first private launch ever to the International Space Station, then Dan would vlog about it, Google would promote them with commercials all around the world, and Dan would get his ad revenue. That was likely to skyrocket as high as he was going.

Problems came up when they told him that this trip, being the first ever, would have to include lots of actual astronauts and scientists, and he couldn’t just stay for two weeks and go home.

Dan would be living on the ISS for nine months.

Phil, after a rigorous health and safety check, was not invited. He would never get past his motion sickness enough to make it through anti-gravity. Google decided they only needed one anyway. If Phil was being honest with himself, he thought Google liked the drama too, of separating Dan and Phil. Despite everything, they decided that it was not an opportunity that could be turned down.

Besides, Dan and Phil could make it through anything. Right?

This, of course, is when Dan began to stir again. He furrowed his eyebrows in confusion and blinked, bleary-eyed at Phil in the darkness.

“So are you gonna be a butterfly or a moth when you come out of that cocoon?” Phil asked.

The question was much too long, too complex for someone still half dreaming.

“Wha-?” Dan asked back, nuzzling closer to the pillow that his head drowned in.

“You’ve stolen all the blankets,” Phil mock-complained.

“I have not,” he said, spreading the four inches of loose fabric across Phil’s body, genuinely believing in the moment that it was enough. “Besides, you’re taking up too much of the bed. You’re banished.”

“You can’t banish me! This is my bed too!” Phil feigned offense, because he always does, and any level of familiarity was a comfort.

Dan pulled his brows together even closer, considering Phil’s argument as well as he could, before rolling back around to face the window. He pressed his back to Phil’s chest and looked out into the stars.

“Did you know the moon is falling?” he murmured.

“Hmm?” Phil answered, grounding himself with the scent of Dan’s shampoo. He’d be adopting the brand very shortly, he decided, given how closely scent is tied with memory.

“That’s what they told me in the class,” he continued. “The moon is falling towards the Earth, always. It’s just also moving so quickly the other way that it doesn’t get pulled in.”

Under other circumstances, Phil might prod him to explain this further, but their 3am minds wouldn’t be able to communicate well enough either way. Instead, he just nodded along, kissing Dan’s neck and wrapping his arms tighter around his body.

“That’s what I’m gonna be doing too.”

Phil understood enough. Even from space, Dan would be pulled to him by gravity. It was only natural, just like all the other laws of the universe.

Somehow, Phil drifted off to the steady rhythm of Dan’s breathing.

They were awoken much too soon by the blaring alarm clock, which to this day shouted, “Rise and shine motherfucker, it’s a brand new day!”

Dan startled at his own voice, as usual. He’d never quite gotten used to it. He woke up quickly in his realization. He had just an hour left until they were expected at the site, and they had yet to truly say their goodbyes.

Dan rolled out of bed and slipped on his trousers, the ones they designated for him to wear into his suit.

“Phil!” he poked. “I have something for you.”

Phil was tempted to huddle into the warmth Dan left behind on the bed, to shut out the world and pretend this morning never needed to happen. He was a bit more tempted to see what gift Dan could possibly have planned.

“What’s that?” he questioned, rolling slowly to the side and begrudgingly working his feet into the legs of his black skinny jeans. He rubbed the gunk out of his eyes.

Dan met him, fully dressed by the side of the bed. He kept his eyes low, adjusting to the level of light. The sky was not quite black anymore, but sun rise still only loomed in the distance.

Phil squinted at the figure Dan held in his hands, the form only just ringing a bell somewhere in the depths of his mind.

“Please, save this for me.” Dan’s voice was shaky. “You gave it to me a long time ago, and I need you to take it back for now.”

The recognition flooded him.

“It’s the god damn Tonberry,” Phil laughed. It was cheesy, and corny, and perfect. And very Dan. “I can’t believe you still have that,” he smiled.

“Of course I still have it, Phil. I have everything you’ve ever given me.”

“I doubt that very much!” Phil teased. “I can list about five gifts that mysteriously went missing during our move to the duplex.”

“We don’t really have time for this argument, Phil,” Dan said, and it brought them back to reality.

“You’re right, you’re right. Sorry.” Phil didn’t know what else to say. He’d done elaborate declarations before, and while they were nice, it wasn’t their style. It was so much easier to say how he felt when it wasn’t goodbye.

“I’ll come back for you, Love.” Dan guided his forehead to Phil’s in the dim moonlight. He pressed them together firmly, eyes shut tight against the morning.

“I know you will, Dan. I know.”

As always, commentary is much appreciated! I hope you enjoyed it! I based it around this song as well, so give it a listen! There is much potential to have a sequel based on another song by them later, so let me know if you’d like to read that too!

#phanfiction #phanfic

[hadarlaskey]

The Midnight Sky

There are some songs whose widespread, apparently unabashed popularity is irrefutable and yet impossible to explain. You know the ones – everyone seems to know the words, or at the very least can hum part of the tune, even though there’s no logical reason why this particular song has become lodged in the public consciousness.

Case in point: ‘Sweet Caroline’ is routinely chanted at baseball games and boxing matches and is a staple of talent contests and karaoke bars everywhere. It has featured in dozens of adverts, films and television shows, and at the time of writing has racked up well over 300 million streams on Spotify. It is to pop music what Nigel Farage is to British politics: maddeningly immovable.

In George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, this ubiquitous soft rock anthem is sung in earnest by a group of astronauts who have been tasked with saving humanity – a sure sign that we are all, in fact, doomed. If the prospect of Neil Diamond taking up residency in outer space is enough to make you want to scream into the void, then consider yourself warned: that inauspicious needle drop is by no means the only flat note in the film.

Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 novel ‘Good Morning, Midnight’, The Midnight Sky is yet another entry into the Sad Dad Space Movie canon, a vague thematic composite of Ad Astra, High Life, Interstellar, Prometheus and the grandaddy of the genre, 2001: A Space Odyssey. On a basic script level, however, the film it has most in common with is Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, in that it too doesn’t quite land its lofty emotional payoff.

The year is 2049, and a post-apocalyptic premise is established in the opening frames by a title card that places us “three weeks after the event”. An unspecified ecological disaster has cut off Clooney’s grizzly astronomer, Augustine, from the rest of civilisation – but as he prepares to hunker down in an abandoned Arctic outpost, he discovers that a small girl has been left behind, and so is now his responsibility and his alone.

Evidently parenthood is not second nature to Augustine; he’s more concerned with delivering an urgent message to the aforementioned astronauts, who are speeding across the universe on a deep-space research vessel. On board are David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chandler and Felicity Jones, whose real-life baby bump (she was three months pregnant when filming began) is exploited to raise the dramatic stakes. Added to this, Jones’ Sully, though clearly highly skilled, is the only crew member whose acumen is repeatedly (albeit semi-jokingly) challenged by her male colleagues. Not exactly a giant leap for female STEM characters, then.

If you haven’t already guessed, this is a film about connection, about how the fundamental human impulse to form bonds with one another is so powerful that it can transcend time and space. Through a handful of expositional flashbacks we learn that Augustine (played in these sequences by recent Star Trek alumnus Ethan Peck, who’s hardly a dead ringer for Clooney but does manage to pull off an uncanny vocal impression) is brilliant and charming but not much of a people person. He’s too wrapped up in his work, the irony being that his commitment to giving life hope negates it from his own existence.

Netflix reportedly furnished Clooney’s artistic vision to the tune of $100m, but the result is remarkably cheap-looking, from the CGI-rendered exterior shots of the space station to one especially ropey earthbound action scene in which Augustine inadvertently ploughs a snowmobile through a sheet of ice. Part of the problem is that we’ve seen it all before, only done better. It doesn’t help that it sometimes feels like two different screenplays were filmed: a survival thriller in which a lone man skulks around a frozen dystopia; and a space drama centred around an ill-fated mission.

If there’s a degree of intrigue surrounding the devastating events – both personal and environmental – that have brought Augustine and the astronauts to this point, the film is more unequivocal (read: heavy-handed) in its message. But on top of Alexandre Desplat’s maudlin score, which constantly tells us how we’re supposed to feel, the script trades in clichés and artificial catharsis, offering scant insight into the far-reaching existential questions it poses. Hands, touching hands, reaching out, falling short.

ANTICIPATION. Clooney’s track record as a director is patchy. 3

ENJOYMENT. A pretty dismal Sad Dad Space Movie. 2

IN RETROSPECT. Shine on you crazy Diamond. 2

Directed by George Clooney

Starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo

The post The Midnight Sky appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/reviews/the-midnight-sky/

#movie

[true-halloween-tales]

2017: #3-GUIDE TO THE OUTER LIMITS

There is nothing wrong with your television set.  Do not attempt to adjust the picture.  We are controlling transmission.  If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume.  If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper.  We will control the horizontal.  We will control the vertical.  We can roll the image, make it flutter.  We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity.  For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.  We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set.  You are about to participate in a great adventure.  You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to – The Outer Limits.                – Prologue to The Outer Limits.

In the late 1980’s I would often get home from work around 1 am.  I would turn on my old, small, ancient, black and white, tv that had separate VHF and UHF dials and a partially broken antenna.  To get the tv to produce any sort of recognizable image, a misshapen rock had to be balanced on one dial exactly the right way - and presto - the tv worked!  And what I saw was a black and white older tv program with enormous tension, gripping drama, good music, and scary aliens.  I became mesmerized by this series and tried to watch all of the episodes (see 2016: #3-BLOODY MESMERISM).  The aliens’ designs were very creative, and the suspenseful series had intense cinematography, often with a dose of film noir or even German Expressionism.  This excessively eerie series was The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits is an hour long science fiction/horror/fantasy anthology series that aired for two seasons, from 1963-65 comprising forty-nine episodes.  It is very much classified with The Twilight Zone.  There are a number of black and white, horror/science-fiction anthology tv series like The Twilight Zone: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, Thriller with Boris Karloff, and The Outer Limits.  These series all had a narrator such as Rod Serling who often said something that sounded special, imparting some wisdom.  The Outer Limits had no regular cast members at all, but Vic Perrin provided the Control Voice heard in each episode.  His opening and closing remarks sound much more profound and humanistic than what was said on these other series.  The Outer Limits was created by Leslie Stevens who directed William Shatner in the 1966 horror film, Incubus, that was filmed using the artificial language of Esperanto.  Stevens originally wanted The Outer Limits to be titled, Please Stand By.  The producer of the series was Joseph Stefano who was also the screenwriter for Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Stephen King has described The Outer Limits as “the best program of its type ever to run on network TV.”

In addition to having excellent creatures, effects, and cinematography, The Outer Limits also included quite a few stars.  Batman’s Adam West made an appearance as an astronaut on Mars.  Eddie Albert battled growling tumbleweeds in one episode, and Martin Landau appears in two episodes.  Cliff Robertson contacted glowing aliens, and timid Donald Pleasance used his psionic powers on people.  David McCallum’s fat head swelled up, and Simon Oakland from The Night Stalker turned into a bird alien (see 2015: #5-GUIDE TO THE NIGHT STALKER).  Lou Grant’s Ed Asner and Ted Knight both popped up as did Russell Johnson, the Professor from Gilligan’ Island.  Robert Culp appeared in three episodes, one about evil, alien, scheming, zombie-making, greasy black rocks.  Even Richard Dawson from Family Feud somehow managed to appear in an episode.  

Episodes were written by by science fiction authors such as Harlan Ellison and Clifford Simak.  The best episodes of the series were written by Jospeh Stefano.  He left the series after the first season, and the series did not survive beyond season two.  Many of the best episodes of The Outer Limits are also quite strange.  “It Crawled Out of the Woodwork” is about a ball of dust that takes over a corporation.  Since full episode guides can be found online, a focus on the best episodes may be useful.  “Nightmare” has some of the most unforgettable aliens, the Ebonites, who are apparently involved in a war against humanity, and one of their prisoners is a frantic Martin Sheen.  “Keeper of the Purple Twilight” is about tall, scary aliens pursuing one of their own to Earth.  “Controlled Experiment” is the only comedy episode of the series and one of my favorites; it was intended to be a pilot for a new tv series.  It is about Martians secretly on Earth trying to understand why humans commit murder by using a time machine.  “Controlled Experiment” stars Archie Bunker’s Carrol O’Connor, Space 1999’s Barry Morse, and Star Trek’s Grace Lee Whitney, (aka Yeoman Rand).  German electronic musician, Pete Namlook, was a fan of The Outer Limits and included samples from the series in his albums; he sampled “Controlled Experiment” for his album, Miles Apart.  “Don’t Open Until Doomsday” is about a horrifying monster in a box that sucks others into its timeless realm.  “The Zanti Misfits” is considered by TV Guide to be one of the one-hundred best episodes of television.  It is about a criminal, Bruce Dern, who encounters small, irate, intelligent, insect-like criminals in their tiny UFO.  “A Feasibility Study” is perhaps the best and most frightening episode of the series, similar in plot to The Mist and with scary aliens.  If you watch any episodes of The Outer Limits, watch “A Feasibility Study.”  

There is a strong connection between The Outer Limits and the original Star Trek series.  This may be true because Gene Roddenberry often visited the The Outer Limits studios.  One of the best episodes of The Outer Limits, “Fun and Games,” is about advanced aliens who kidnap other aliens to fight it out to the death for their entertainment; this was later a plot for an episode of Star Trek.  William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and James Doohan (aka Scotty) all appear in separate episodes of The Outer Limits.  Vic Perrin, the Control Voice, appeared or provided voice work in three Star Trek episodes.  Alien design, props, and special effects were also borrowed for Star Trek from The Outer Limits.  The exact alien prop of the Horta from Star Trek’s “Devil in the Dark” first appeared in The Outer Limits’ episode, “The Probe.”  Even the most iconic Star Trek special effect of the transporter, the sparkling vanishing effect, originated from The Outer Limits’ “The Mutant.”

In the 1980’s and 90’s, horror/science fiction tv series became popular again.  The Darkroom was introduced by James Coburn wearing all black.  Monsters featured exactly that in each half-hour episode.  Tales From the Darkside was soon replaced by Tales From the Crypt.  A new The Twilight Zone series emerged.  It was only a matter of time until The Outer Limits was revived in 1995 in the form of a new, color tv series that ran until 2002.  It was not nearly as good as the original series, and the new series ran for a hundred and fifty-four episodes over seven seasons.  A few episodes were remade such as “Nightmare,” “A Feasibility Study” and “I, Robot.”  Episodes included such stars as Mark Hamill and various new Star Trek actors such as Marina Sirtis, Rene Auberjonis, Robert Picardo, and Doug Jones from Star Trek: Discovery.  “Dark Matters” is probably the best episode of the new series, and focuses on a starless void filled with marooned spacecraft and the ghosts of aliens.  I adapted that plot for a Dungeons & Dragons adventure (see 2015: #12-THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES 4: THE FAR REALM – THE ILLITHID DREADNAUGHT, PART 2).  

Since Joseph Stefano was the main force behind The Outer Limits stranger monsters, what became of him?  Years after The Outer Limits, he was the writer of “Skin of Evil” for Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The episode featured Armus, a frightening monster that was an amalgamation of evil from an alien species that looked like a hulking, vaguely humanoid black pudding.  Armus shockingly killed Tasha Yar, a main character in the series.  Stefano wrote for The Swamp Thing tv series and he wrote two episodes for the new The Outer Limits series.  He wrote the remade episodes of “Nightmare” and “A Feasibility Study.”  His final big project was writing the screenplay for the 1998 Psycho remake film by Gus van Sant.  

If you don’t have time to watch a horror film, watch The Outer Limits.  The atmosphere the series creates is perfect for the month of Halloween.  The entire series is available in a DVD box set that is reasonable in price.  There is a soundtrack cd, action figures, and Halloween masks for sale based on aliens from the series.  Go and experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the Outer Limits!

#the outer limits #star trek #true halloween tales #Halloween #joseph stefano

[astridianmayfly]

So You Want to Go to Gravity Falls [4/?]

ELISHA DIDN’T HAVE THE FAINTEST IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON.

She vaguely remembered Thomas saying something about how, “they were going to limit their electronic use,” on their getaway (after she had witnessed him putting a game into his backpack!) but wasn’t really sure to what extent “no electronics” was put to use. So Thomas and his friends could possibly be chased by gnomes or attacked by a horde of imps, and she’d have absolutely no idea whatsoever.

She was invited to come on their trip, of course; her fiance wouldn’t ever have been so rude as to not, but she had politely declined. It was for the best, she supposed; while she was comfortable with Thomas’ group of college friends, this particular get-together was drawn on the lines of a reunion. She would have felt awkward and intrusive to accept his invitation.

And it wasn’t like she didn’t have anything to do, really! It’s just, well, August was an awfully boring month. And she would have called up her girlfriends to hang out, but Lilah was in Paris with her family, Jessica was also travelling, and Caren had to study for their M-CAT exam….

That was how Elisha found herself walking to the post office.

She could very well just request her post electronically, but she convinced herself it would be worth her while to get out of the house and stretch her legs a bit, take a stroll through town…

When she reached the small building, she came to the realization that she had never actually been inside before. Was there even anything inside besides the robots that did the transportation and packaging?

No time for doubts now. She was already here.

Hesitantly, she grabbed the brass door handle (how obsolete!) and walked inside the tiny building. She was immediately questioned by a small robot if she would like anything to be sent or wrapped. She declined.

Declining was something she was doing a lot of these days.

Observing her surroundings proved her wrong about the office. She found it to be more.. modern than expected. With its busy robots and elves at work in the office gave it a welcoming, workshop- like feel. She walked tentatively to wait in the line for her mail, marked by a small, rusty sign indicating where it was.

There was one other person in line, who had glanced at her when she walked in. She gave them a tentative smile before standing in line behind them.

But damnit. She felt awkward now. And why did they keep glancing back and staring at her? Did she have something on her face??

To break the ice (and stop the weird staring) she stuck her hand out and offered it to the waiting person. They stared at her hand as if they had never seen one before.

“Hi! I’m Elisha Mckenzie!”

Why did she say her full name, that was the stupidest thing she could’ve done, for all she knew this person could be a cultist-

“Ohh. Are you Thomas’ fiance?” Her cheeks flushed immediately when she realized the creepiness of her inquiry.

Elisha’s instincts were screaming. She was teetering between saying the more polite, How on earth do you know my name and my fiance? Or the blunt, What the actual fuck? None of these questions actually exited her mouth. Instead she said something along the lines of, “How- what- are-’

“Okay, look,” The girl hurriedly went on to explain her strange accusation, and Elisha didn’t care if she was interrupted, as long as she could hear her. “I’m friends- well, sort of friends, I mean- I knew Thomas from college, you know demonology? Anyway, I’mnotstalkingyouIpromise, just you know, Tyrone hangs out with me on date night and so I kinda know you? Indirectly, though?” There was a faint tinge of red on her cheeks from her bubbly explanation.

“Oh. Tyrone. That explains a lot. Sorry for jumping to conclusions. What’s your name?”

“I’m Elisabeth. Elisabeth Adams,” the girl said. Her hand flew up. Elisha thought that she would offer to shake it, but instead, her hand held a card.

“My card. In case you need something to be exorcised, killed or abolished. Helping with problematic demons is what I do. Or you know, when Tyrone gets particularly annoying.”

“Thanks, I’ll, uh, call you if I need you?”

The girl nodded, still a bit flustered. “Sure. See you around, I guess.”

Elisha walked out of the office, forgetting to take her mail. But she couldn’t help but feel but lighter than from before she stepped in.

She almost closed the door before opening it again to ask Elisabeth a question.

“Oh hey, just wondering, are you and Tyrone a thing? I mean, you said something about a ‘date night,’ so-”

Judging from the girl’s exhasparated expression, she could easily tell that the answer was no.

----

ELISABETH HAD PLENTY OF FRIENDS.

She was NOT lonely.

Still. After meeting that girl, she couldn't help but feel that she’d made a friend.

Maybe Elisha would call her later.

----

You have two options.

You aren’t going like them.

Fine. I'll tell you.

Your soul is being ripped from you. And well, me, because I own it. After this is done- I'm probably going to have a power fissure.

I’ll get to the point. Sorry.

I can take your life, in exchange for your soul to be returned to you. I’ll still own it, but your soul will be working and whole. You will reincarnate. You will live again.

But yes. You will die.

This is the only way.

I don't want it to be like this, either, Mabel!

Mabel is no one. Don't worry about who she is. I'm sorry I called you

I called you that… for reasons. They aren't important. My prime concern is saving your life.

Am I mad?

Oh, that's a funny question.

See you soon, Mizar.

Don't worry about him. From him, they’ll be HELL TO PAY for what he’s do-

    I have to do it now

HE’S destRoyIng yoUR soUL

Please- stop this-

DON’t yoU GEt iT

YoU’Re KILLinG heR

AnD Me

G    Oo   D

By e

-S U  P   E    R     N      O       V        A-

-I'm so sorry

----

RADIO INTERCEPT FROM NASA DATABASE

ADMINISTRATOR: Jenkins, Dale

ASTRONAUT: Gray, Lucy

TIME: 23:01:04, 05, 06...

-Houston, we have a problem.

-That’s never a good sign. What seems to be the issue?

-And that’s not a very professional way to answer the space phone, Jenkins. Be careful there.

-Yeah, yeah. Well you don’t exactly seem like the type to have a real problem if you’re bothering to waste time ridiculing my professionalism.

-Fair enough.

-The, issue, Gray?

-Right. Not a huge matter. Just wanted to inform base that twin Mizar has gone nova. It’s not in our path. Just thought I should tell nasa. Wondering if hydrogen might possibly affect our reactors.

-...Did you just say that Mizar went nova?

-I know it’s weird. It happened all at once, too. Base should be getting hold of explosion in T minus three seconds.

-I guess that explains why Hode is practically screaming next to me. Satellite readings must’ve just come in. Will keep crew posted on effect of the rogue star to the shuttle.

-Roger tha-

-What the?

-What’s wrong? Are the gases problematic?

-Not to you.

-That sounds ominous. What’s going on down there?

-The gases...they’re moving..

-Where? Where are they moving?

-A little patch of Oregon..Hang on, checking Hode’s system…

-And?

-Oh come on.

-Hurry it up. The suspense is going to kill me faster than the lack of oxygen up here.

-Goddamnit. It’s in Gravity Freaking Falls… of all the places-

-What are they doing?

-I’m not sure exactly. But from Hode’s summarizing… Nothing good.

-What’s he saying?

-That the gases from the star’s explosion are mingling with magic. Of demonic origin. And forming a barrier around the falls. No one can get in or out.

-....

-The people. They’re trapped.

----

-MiCor5eva has joined-

MiCor5eva: Hi everybody!!!!!!!!!!!

Reidorread: The next time you use that many exclamation points in a sentence is the moment I will kill you.

MiCor5eva: That’s my little ray of sunshine.

Reidorread: Please just change your username before you get beat up. Please.

42frank24: Can I get an Amen?

___Dope___: nah son, MiCor for LIFE!

___Dope___: Hey MiCor, can I get a virtual high five pretty plz

MiCor5eva: *high-five*

___Dope___: So, let’s get on with like the real stuff

Reidorread: Not Twin Souls. Please.

___Dope___: No I’m being for real tho

___Dope___: Did u hear about that thing happening in Oregon

___Dope___: Like Mizar just eXPLODed!! And basically the gases are kinda heading for the falls lol

___Dope___: That town gets too much shit XD

Reidorread: lmao im there now

___Dope___: damn r u really???

Reidorread: It’s kinda sketchy, there’s this bubble headed right for us

Reidorread: IT’s like rainbow haha

Reidorread: Wait fuck

Reidorread: SHiT IM FUCKeD SomeOne THe THINGS SWALLOWINg PEOPLE SOMEONE HELp aklefhklsdahfas

MiCor5eva: Are you OK?

-Reidorread has left-

___Dope___: What just happened?

----

THOMAS WAS CHASING A HORDE OF GNOMES.

His story will be heard later. Of how this crazy thing happened.

There are several things that Thomas knows about what is going on:

Gnomes live in packs.

They have currently captured Eduardo.

Unfortunately, he does not know many things. And not knowing could be a fatal mistake.

The things he does not know:

He is on the barrier of Gravity Falls.

There is a unknown magic source in the epicenter of the city.

The magic is blooming. And it is forming a barrier.

This barrier ensures no one can enter.

Or leave.

Inside the bubble lies the mindscape of demonic origin.

It is still blooming.

He is headed right towards it.

He is now in the bubble’s grasp.

He may never escape.

#transcendence au #taufic #thomas strange #dipper pines #shit just got real #let the angst commence #This is only the beginning of the conflict sorry #gravity falls

[ciathyzareposts]

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

[profoundcherryblossomdragon-blog]

Travel Writers Share Their Fave Travel Quotes.

With that in mind, I chose to intend and also highlight a number of the greatest brand-new( emergency room) trip blog sites available that I found this year. If you would like to experience an essential part of activities past, Dwarf Barrier is actually a strong start, as this was exhibited at the Gallery from Modern Craft in New York Metropolitan area back in 2013. Telltale Gamings has actually taken a wonderful niche for on its own by supplying narrative-driven activities based upon our favored comics, movies, and TELEVISION shows. Certainly, the genuine exciting begins when making use of these earphones to see online videos, as well as more so when listening to music. No SIM discovery, as well as the loss from system connection, are actually issues that a lot of consumers have actually encountered, particularly because the update to Android 4.4.2 Kitkat. Set in simplistic-yet-beautiful alien landscapes, this fashionable video game will definitely possess you wrecking your human brain as you aim to determine how to direct each astronaut to their color-coded leave within the designated time. Then you might really want to go for the totally free lite model of Trip Journal, if you're a personal style of individual. Updates to GTA 5 Online Funny Moments could instantly incorporate additional capacities within each team. Furthermore, you could share your travel expertises in real time or post all of them to the cloud to discuss one more time or view. Ironically, the Need 820 in fact possesses a much higher megapixel count compared to the main HTC One M8 That said, there is actually additional to a great camera experience compared to the megapixel matter. Just before even boarding your plane bound for your trip place, it is actually consistently even more efficient to plan every thing. Also, a variety from high-value video games have actually stemmed from it, including Halo, Phone call from Task, Field of battle, Serendipity, and also a lot of others. This battery/mains-powered Apple docker is chunky yet still little enough for trip. The cartoonish players and two-on-two dunk-fests are actually still alive, as are silly additions like the large head setting, and also it is actually all equally as fast and fun as you bear in mind. This is alluring to neglect this trip important with the perspective that young people performs your side." This tip is a dangerous misconception, having said that, as a crash or sickness in an international nation can easily affect any person, despite age. Huge, deep-seated activities are still reasonably unusual on Android, however you can easily add another to the checklist along with The Ensign Legend This Viking-inspired tactical RPG offers you management from over 25 different characters throughout 7 other classes as you battle your technique with lovely hand pulled atmospheres and also make decisions both details from battle which have an effect on the tale. Certainly this means providing Google a ton of private records, but the utility is really high and also helps make the sometimes disorderly nature from travel far more positive. Along with the news that the Gamings along with Gold plan will certainly be actually coming to Xbox One, an Xbox Live Gold profile can easily currently potentially internet consumers 4 free of charge video games a month. A Journal from Alzheimer's Illness research study released earlier this year presented that eating walnuts as aspect of a Mediterranean diet plan is actually linked with protection off brain operating decline that attends aging. Lastly, the master from travel association continues to be Google Now Merely ensure that all your bookings enter your Gmail and you have actually flipped on Google.com Now's functionalities to look for essential details. As far as Super Mario-esque side-scrolling activities go, Chameleon Run is among the outright greatest on Android. Telltale Video games have actually launched a variety of anecdotal journeys and they are actually all good. Guiddoo is your greatest Chicago Travel Manual as well as vacation planner application when you explore Chicago abroad, providing intricate details of globe's best travel places. Remaining hooked up still isn't as smooth as maybe. Our company would certainly adore to view more USA companies streamline their rates and decrease expenses for international travel. The lesser the frequency, the denser your energy, and also the much heavier your concerns seem to be. Cordy 1 as well as 2 are actually a number of system activities that have actually been around for some time. This quote encourages me to reside my life the means I would like to. Traveling is actually a big aspect of that, particularly now that I run my travel blog post. The HRG Trip app gives access to key attributes of the HRG corporate travel company as well as has a Support resource that attaches you along with some of our travel experts whenever you need to have help. Beautiful box challenges still participate in a significant duty in the video game, however many other brilliant reasoning games are sure to gratify your mind and also condition you to look very closely at whatever that could turn out to be a problem. Although there are actually http://lifestyleblog-hu.com/fizzy-slim-ertekelesek-velemenyek-kapszula-vasarlas-mi-az-ara-hol-kaphato/ , standard platform activities seldom work with touchscreens. Google.com's got a big occasion on October 4 where that's counted on to announce (and many more traits) a pair from phones: the 5-inch Pixel and 5.5-inch Pixel XL We don't definitely understand everything a lot about the phones, as the presumptive specs are somewhat vague. There's some type of story in there regarding a sweetheart or one thing, but definitely, you just touch your targets as the pop out from behind cover. The planner app neatly keeps track of all form of trip commitments, consisting of air travels, accommodation information, cars and truck services, as well as social events. That's an enjoyable little bit of opportunity prodigal that features an inexpensive cost as well as no in-app acquisitions. Our auto rental company uses collision as well as personal effects insurance, as performs our general trip insurance policy plan. The outcomes also showed that few through which the lady had greater free of cost cholesterol degrees and also the guy performed not likewise took longer to come to be expectant compared to pairs in which both companions had ordinary cholesterol degrees. A bunch of technique video games merely don't work with Android, yet Oil Rush does it right, however, when it relates to gameplay, that carries out participate in like your normal real-time technique video game. Yes, the smaller sized phone looks sharper with the help of a much higher pixel density, but certainly not through much. Yet that is actually a fun little bit of device to always keep about, and also I could discuss coming from experience that handing somebody a bodily image indicates a lot greater than a digital one. Fingerprint Blood Pressure Mosaic Prank is the most effective use for deceiving your close friends. Your medical insurance policy might reimburse you for health care expenses as soon as you pay up and discover your very own escape of health center in Bangkok and also rebook your traveling after skipping a flight. When you journey with another person, the trip is actually much more concerning your common experiences, which can be a wonderful point sometimes, but not consistently.