lurkdragonstuff

[lurkdragonstuff]

Fandom: Sonic the Hedgehog (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Wordcount: 1,024  Relationships: Shadow the Hedgehog & Sonic the Hedgehog Characters: Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog Additional Tags: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Nightmares, Fluff and Angst, Mentioned Maria Robotnik, Mentioned Gerald Robotnik, Depression, Trauma Recovery, whump fight, Whump Fight 2025, Canonical Character Death mentioned, mild Blood and Violence Summary:Sonic drops by Shadow's apartment on the anniversary of the ARK disaster.

[lurkdragonstuff]

Fandom: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom Rating: Mature Wordcount: 1,187  Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Characters: Link (Hero of the Wild), Yiga Clan (Legend of Zelda) Additional Tags: MCD is taken to mean 'major within the fic's framework', Whump Fight 2025, whump fight, Whump, Blood and Gore, Dismemberment, Swordfighting, Swordfighting is fast and brutal when it's for keeps, Snow Means Death Summary: "I see... red... a crimson... deep and rich... oooh. It's the most beautiful colour I've ever seen..."

---

Link gets ambushed by a Yiga assassin near the Hebra Trailhead Lodge.

[lurkdragonstuff]

Fandom: Shadow of the Colossus (Video Game), ICO (Video Game), Original Work Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Wordcount: 2,389  Relationships: Wander (Shadow of the Colossus) & Ico (ICO) & Yorda (ICO), Wander (Shadow of the Colossus) & Koen Dijkstra (OC) Characters: Wander (Shadow of the Colossus), Ico (ICO), Yorda (ICO), Koen Dijkstra (OC) Additional Tags: Immortal Wander (Shadow of the Colossus), whump fight, Whump Fight 2025, Wander the Dad (Shadow of the Colossus), Slavery, Abuse, Rescue, Wander to the Rescue (Shadow of the Colossus), mild violence Summary: Wander and the kids run across a fellow in need of help.

[lurkdragonstuff]

I've only been under anaesthesia once that I'm aware of.

Nothing too weird happened, according to the folks helping me out and my own memories once I woke up. It was for my first colonoscopy, which was last year. Hm? Yeah, thirty-six is a bit young to start those. Family history. Means I get to have them every five years instead of the standard ten, so I'll have lots of chances to gather weirder anaesthesia stories.

Anyway, once I was able to walk, my support worker and I went to the Burger King down the hill from the hospital, because I had done Colonoscopy Prep, which for the uninitiated means you have to eat a liquid diet (with no red dyes! No red jello) for a day beforehand and fast for twelve hours before the procedure, the only thing you're allowed once the fast starts being this absolutely vile concoction that makes you shit your brains out. (And water. So much water. You are instructed to pound water.)

So there I am, ready to eat the entire universe, still pretty loopy from the drugs, and possessing a stutter when I'm stressed. I wobbled my way up to the counter and slurred my way through ordering what was to be the most delicious Burger King chicken sandwich I have ever eaten, then paused for a moment.

The cashier had a pleasant, kind of knowing smile.

In retrospect, I'm sure they get a lot of loopy patients from the nearby hospital and that it's not a big deal, but I felt the need to clear the record. "I swear I'm not drunk," I garbled. "I just came out of surgery."

[lurkdragonstuff]

Fandom: 逆転裁判 | Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Wordcount: 885 Relationship: Odoroki Housuke | Apollo Justice & Nahyuta Sahdmadhi Characters: Odoroki Housuke | Apollo Justice, Nahyuta Sahdmadhi Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Post-Spirit of Justice, Oneshot, Slice of Life Summary: After it's all said and done, Apollo invites Nahyuta over to his law offices to catch up. The conversation eventually turns to how Apollo met Phoenix.

[lurkdragonstuff]

Now that the giftee has seen it, here are the details for everyone else!

Fandom: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types Rating: General Audiences Wordcount: 1,520 Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Amy Rose/Shadow the Hedgehog Characters: Amy Rose (Sonic the Hedgehog), Shadow the Hedgehog Additional Tags: Fluff, Carnival, Oneshot, Gift Exchange, Sonic Fandom Secret Santa, Secret Santa Summary: Amy drags Shadow to the fair.

A gift for the Sonic Fandom Secret Santa exchange of 2024.

@sparkylurkdragon submitted:

Hey there, @nodulemodule !

I heard you like Shadamy and good character dynamics, so I wrote you a little story where the two of them go to the fair!

Have a safe and happy holiday season!

[lurkdragonstuff]

It is 2018, and there is time for Gris.

Beautiful little game about grief. Cried at the end and enjoyed my time with it.

[lurkdragonstuff]

Wanna read some haiku about dragon sewers? Of course you do!

[lurkdragonstuff]

It is 2020, and there is time for Mare!

It's all right. It has some pervasive issues with typos that kind of took the wind out of some dramatic scenes for me, but this little indie RPG Maker horror game clearly had a lot of heart and tears put into it, and I enjoyed my time with it. It took me about four hours to get what seems to be both of the main endings, and that included an as-it-turns-out unnecessary bout of minigame grinding for cash and items in the endgame. What can I say? I'm a cautious player.

The nonspoiler pitch is: your character wakes up barely remembering their own name and seeks to find out what happened to them and why they lost their memory.

Surreal, graphic violence ensues.

I suspect that for people who are averse to spoilers that this is one of those games that you should just kind of play and see what happens if the content isn't a turnoff. I'll give some endgame spoiler thoughts below the cut.

Mind those content warnings on the download page and get it here at itch.io.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's a very interesting take on the idea of the citizens of dream worlds having their own thoughts and feelings. I got some pleasant "Link's Awakening with more blood" vibes from it once it was revealed what was going on. It's very much its own thing, of course - the dreamer is a suicidal victim of transbashing and not a flying whale god - but I'm pretty picky about "it was all a dream" stories, and this one is great at that aspect in both true endings.

As a writer, I prefer True Ending 1, where the dreamer awakens. Sure, you have to come out of the dream eventually... but you can always go back. I like that, and find it rings true for my work.

[lurkdragonstuff]

What? Danielle is evolving!

[lurkdragonstuff]

Ahhhhh... much more to my liking than the previous custom sprite, which had too much Rattata left in the design for me, particularly in the face. I did make one concession to the thought of "how is it using all of the Rattata line's biting moves" with a set of leaf incisors.

Also Hoppip's dinky tail is much funnier than a leaf there, I think.

[lurkdragonstuff]

I picked Pokemon Infinite Fusion back up with my Fusionlocke! The Pokemon fused with Happiny ended being Meowth, so here's a custom sprite for Happy Cat.

The Rattata/Hoppip fusion I caught in the wild ended up already having a custom sprite, but I'm dissatisfied with it: it has too much Rattata in the face. So I'll be spriting up something for Danielle as well.

[lurkdragonstuff]

A snoot made for booping! Come on down!

[lurkdragonstuff]

Fandom: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Gorons (Legend of Zelda) Additional Tags: Song Parody, Original Music: Yogcast, Filk, Poetry, Song Lyrics Summary: The lyrics of "Diggy Diggy Hole" updated for the Gorons.

[lurkdragonstuff]

I'm an atheist and a philosophical materialist. I don't think there's anything more to the universe than what can be observed and measured. Disagree if you want, that's fine, but take as read that this is where I'm coming from.

As you can imagine, this makes it very strange to me that my brain thinks I'm a dragon.

I have been trying to square this circle for years. Since around the 2000's, when I first made contact with the Internet, I would look in on the otherkin community, and the draconic community nested inside it, and I would think, man. I wish I could believe that. I wish I could believe that souls were real, and that I had one, and that it was a dragon, and that's why I was so odd. For quite a while, I just explained it as a furry fandom thing. Sure, yes, my fursona is feral, but ferals are furries, too. This is still true! I'm still in furry fandom, and my dragonself still acts as my fursona. But they are also, in a deeper sense, me.

I'm a secular pagan. I don't think gods exist, and I don't think magic is literally real. I can't really cast a curse on shitty charities. The moon's a big shiny rock. It doesn't care if I roar at it when the sun reflects off it just so and I can see the whole of its tidally locked face.

But my dragon brain doesn't know that. It likes the big shiny rock. It likes little shiny rocks, too. It likes to light things on fire, and considers this a sacred act, both bringing destruction to noxious things and bringing honour to things worthy of it. It likes to growl and hiss when things annoy it. It likes to collect things, to have a hoard. It likes to range around its territory, keeping an eye on what's around in what season. It finds it frustrating that its wings don't seem to work at all, and its other limbs barely better. It wants its tail back. It wants its fire breath.

I'm autistic. Sometimes speaking is hard, and I growl and hiss when things annoy me. I like to collect things related to my special interests; I have a sprawling collection of cetacean, Nintendo, and SEGA figurines, as well as lots of little animal figures. Plushies, too, and videogames, and books. I do wildlife photography, as well, marking who's around in what seasons. This is, to my frustration, limited a lot by waning energy because of chronic health problems.

If backed into a corner, to say what I really believe, of course I'm a human. It is in my DNA, expressed in a bipedal body plan, five fingers on the forelimbs only, nails and not claws, no wings, no muzzle, no tail, short neck, skin and fur instead of scales. Not even any horns. I find this frustrating, but it is what it is. I also find it frustrating when people call me 'she' and not 'they', and that really there is no feasible gender presentation that would guarantee that strangers would use the right word. The best I can hope for is that people will read the 'they/them' button on my hat, or otherwise call me 'he'. Still wrong, but at least novel.

I honestly think my draconic identity developed when I was younger as a way to explain why I was so weird. I have never been normal. I will never be normal. As an adult, I have fancy words like "autism" and "anxiety and depression secondary to post-traumatic stress disorder" and "seasonal affective disorder" to explain why I'm abnormal.

But a part of my brain, I think the same one that still believes in magic and deities even though I don't, tilts its head, then grins a sharp grin and says, "Cool story, bro. I'm still a dragon."

I generally have, for any given of my eccentricities, the philosophical materialist explanation (generally that I am either brainweird in some way or another or am playing pretend for placebo purposes to manage executive function etc.) and the dragon explanation (generally what the pretend play revolves around). But - and this is hard to explain - it isn't exactly playing pretend, either. It's me.

When I'm pretending to be Link, either playing a Zelda game or writing Zelda fanfic, Link isn't me. I might be inhabiting him as an actor, but he isn't me. When I play Animal Crossing, and I'm playing a character named after me, that's closer. It's me but greater. Me but more. Me existing in a life I wish I could have.

When I put on my mask, when I sit and daydream about the multiverse-hopping shenanigans I get up to, when I hiss at someone startling me by getting into my space, that's me. I'm not a dragon, I'm a human wearing a mask, daydreaming, hissing because "back the fuck off!" isn't allowed in the workplace.

Yeah. Cool story, bro.

I am still a dragon.

[lurkdragonstuff]

An ambitious Fae gets a job as a receptionist. After all, what better way to have a ton of people willingly give you their name?

[lurkdragonstuff]

The reason why Pokemon Black, specifically, is my favourite mainline Pokemon game is because N as the Hero of Ideals and Hilda/Hilbert as the Hero of Truth makes a lot more sense to me than the other way around.

I certainly can make the opposite Tao Dragon matchup work, but it feels... I don't know, less thematically appropriate to me? The crux of N's character revolves around his ideals: at the start of the game he's wrong because his ideals are warped, but they're still his ideals. The player character, meanwhile, helps show him the truth of how the world actually is.

Flip it around and I suppose you could say it as: N's world is the only truth he's ever known, and the player character shows him that striving for the ideal of mutually respectful Pokemon and human interactions is a worthy thing, but... eh, I don't know. As I say, it doesn't have the same thematic punch to it for me.

Neither N's personal ideals nor his personal truth survive the end of the game. His conception of his place in the world, his plan to make the world better for Pokemon, even his relationship with his family: it's all irrevocably changed.

But while N's personal ideals are shaken, they're still there and are still more or less N-shaped. At his core, his ideal world is one where Pokemon are free from abuse. Before and after losing to the player character, that ideal remains the same: he's simply changed his mind on how best to make it a reality.

His personal truth, on the other hand? That feels more like it was completely shattered. He isn't a king, he's just some guy with a knack for talking to Pokemon. Pokemon largely don't want to be separated from humans. His father wasn't in it to make the world a better place: he's a cruel piece of shit who never cared about N or his dream, except insofar as he could use N for his own ambitions.

N's heart was in the right place, but he had the wrong facts to a ruinous degree.

Isn't that the epitome of a Hero of Ideals who needs a Hero of Truth to temper him?