#i haven’t made anything serious in a while because of this stupid robot cyborg thing. whatever

[microwavemoth]

free draw doodles

[storyunrelated]

Candidate for Completion – The side of angels

The side of angels

“Hello and good day, sir!” said the woman in the cape, beaming down and giving a wave. Jack waved back, unable to stop himself. “We are superheroes,” the woman continued, gesturing to herself and her friend.

Jack looked them over again, all at once feeling very underdressed and underprepared for this sort of thing. His longing for a shower grew more desperate but, alas, too late.

“That makes sense,” he said.

WHAT

They - for it was a they, Jack thought, rather than an it or a what - appeared to be in a state of some serious disrepair. Approximately person-shaped, it was unclear if they were actually a person on account of quite a lot of them appearing to be made of machinery. 

Certainly, the mangled remains of their legs and right arm were sparking rather than bleeding, which seemed to suggest a machine, but the groans and growls of pain suggested otherwise. Hence Jack’s assumption that it was a they and not an it or a what.

 He hadn’t the foggiest idea who this was, but he could be at least vaguely certain that they were injured, and Jack was entirely firm on this being a bad thing. Hurt implied suffering, and suffering was - as Jack had seen first-hand at some length while looking after dad - not a lot of fun. 

The solution was obvious: he had to help.

Until recently – recently as the previous week, in fact – Jack had been looking after his ailing father. He has now stopped this because his father has stopped ailing and started being dead. Jack is now alone in his parent’s house without an awful lot to do. Job is long-gone, friends never really existed, the house and its garden have seen better days. It’s not great, but then things were never much better, so hell.

Then a villain crash-lands in his garden (just after he’d made a start on cleaning it up), screams at him to drag her inside so the heroes she was fighting don’t spot her, yells at him to help her fix herself up enough so she can leave, then leaves. He does all this because, well, she asked him to so it’s the polite thing to do.

She later comes up back, cuts his house out of ground and takes it back to her lair, because she kind of weirds him out and there’s something about him she can’t put her finger on. Oh, and he saw her face, so he’s a security concern. That too.

And so on.

WHO

She didn’t have a lot of direct interaction with members of the public. Typically they ran away from her (and for good reason, usually, being nearby was an invitation for accidental injury) and then hero-types turned up and there was fighting. It didn’t leave a lot of time for chatting, typically.

Her general impression of the rest of humanity was that they did not like her. Because they were stupid, obviously, and had no idea what was good for them. But that didn’t alter the fact that on the whole they didn’t like her and usually reacted with fear or hostility or fearful hostility whenever she was around. This she had observed on more than one occasion, and so this was what she took to be the normal reaction.

This one though just seemed to not know how to react to her at all, which suggested that perhaps he was unfamiliar with her work.

Or was an idiot, more so than most. Anything was possible.

The characters involved have hilariously stupid names (except Jack, which is just a name name) because I haven’t been fucked to come up with proper ones and, honestly, don’t really care.

So there’s Jack, who was never exactly a ray of sunshine and whose recent experiences have left even more downbeat than usual, but he tries his best.

There’s the Queen, who is the villain who crash-lands in his garden. She is a big, tall, cyborg lady with roboarms and a big cape and this big impressive helmet and robots and shit. She means well, she’s just really not the best at compromise or working with others. There is the expression ‘Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good’ That’s kind of her deal. Jack is the first person who has actually spoken to her in years – most of her interaction has been being punched by heroes, which kind of makes you feel unwanted after a while.

Then there’s Flying Brick and Powered Armour. I’ll let you guess what their deal is. Got it? No? Well, Flying Brick can fly and is strong and crap, Powered Armour is basically a less-rich Iron Man – wears armour, makes stuff, blah. They’re the heroes who were beating up the Queen at the start. They also mean well, but are more about keeping things more-or-less stable while making minor, gradual improvements.

And bringing up the rear is Speeding Brick who is basically just Flying Brick on weekends and probably some actual villain who is an actual dick, but I haven’t got that far yet.

WHERE

“This is Jack! He’s the Queen’s, um - the Queen’s friend?” She said, faltering towards the end.

Flying Brick wasn’t entirely sure how to describe Jack’s position, especially as she herself wasn’t entirely sure what it actually was. So she fudged it and decided to play it safe. Speeding Brick didn’t mind.

“Right on! Come here, little guy!” He said, ignoring Jack’s extended, shake-ready hand and instead sweeping him into a crushing hug. Speeding Brick was the hugging sort. It was rather like being smothered in a lycra sack of biceps. Not unpleasant, just…

...memorable.

The structure for this one goes something like:

Establish Jack is in a pretty sour place --> Queen crash-lands in garden, he helps --> Queen comes back later and steals his house and him --> This ridiculous course of action reveals her hideout to her super-foes, who track her down --> ???? --> Former enemies now working uncomfortably together --> ????? --> Badguy? Maybe? --> ????? --> End

So yeah, I’m missing a few steps.

WHY

“Because he was concerned! About me! And not the way everyone else is. He wasn’t concerned with how I looked, wasn’t horrified or disgusted or scared! He wasn’t concerned with what I wanted to do! Didn’t want to dissuade me or stop me! He didn’t even know! He didn’t want to know! He was just concerned about me! He saw that I was hurt and he wanted to help me! He made me tea! No-one has ever made me tea! I have a machine that makes me tea! I never used it! He offered to make it for me! Without me having to ask! He offered!”

The whole point and reason of the story is “I wanted to do a thing with a tall lady who is kind of mean but gets a hug anyway, yay”. This is pretty transparent. I don’t really care. That’s what I wanted, that’s mostly what I’ve done.

Everything else got added in afterwards as flimsy justification.

We all have our vices.

WELL

“Things just happen, I think. They might seem good or bad to you but they’re neither, not really. They just are. But so what? You’re you and they seem good or bad to you, so why not focus on the good and try to work to reduce the bad? You’re going to be here one way or another anyway.”

If you’ve paid attention to anything on here (and I’m not sure why you would) you’ll probably have noticed that this suffers from the same problem anything else I’ve ever tried suffers from: namely, that it’s half the suggestion of an idea, entirely lacking in any of the structure that will allow that idea to properly express itself.

Which is to say, it’s entirely possible to try and write fluff about cuddling a big, gruff, villainy lady. It’s another thing entirely to get that into enough of a story to give that cuddling the proper context to give it sufficient emotional heft.

If you follow?