#<- my entire explanation. I just like things being more alien.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Everyone who makes jokes about Vulcan hand sex is ignoring the REAL Star Trek hand sex species.

The Ocampa.

[phantom-dc]

Bruce sighed.

He never thought he would die like this. When he started out as Batman he was certain he would meet his end fighting the criminal underworld of Gotham. When he got older and life got stranger, he believed he would die fighting off a threat like Joker or Deathstroke, maybe even Darkseid. Being used as a human sacrifice to the King of the Infinite Realms was not on that list, let alone being a willing sacrifice.

Unfortunately, it had been necessary. An asteroid was on collision course with Earth. The asteroid had a colony of sapient alien life on it, so destroying it was not an option. As the League grew desperate, Constantine revealed a similar incident had happened a few years ago. The King of the Infinite Realms had, along with his subjects, turned the Earth intangible and both the Earth and the Asteroid had survived. Constantine isn’t sure why or how, but there are signs an extremely powerful ghost had merged realities and in the process erased the memories of this event from the entire population of Earth! The only reason Constantine knows about it is because a Demon with time-based powers told him during one of their poker games. Summoning this King was risky, as they had no idea what the King would want in return, but this entity seemed like their best bet. Now Bruce thinks they had been wrong.

Superman pulled Bruce out of his thoughts:

“Bruce, are you sure you want to go through with this? If we work together, we might be able to-”

Bruce cut him off:

“No, Clark. You heard Constantine. If we do not hold up our end of the deal, the Ghost King could simply make his ally, this “Clockwork”, reverse time to before the planet was saved. The Earth and the asteroid will still be destroyed, killing everyone on both. This is the only way.”

Clark looked dejected. He knew his friend was right. The King had turned the entire Earth intangible with one hand! He knew the League couldn’t defeat this foe, not without help. Any being that could help them would demand even more bloodshed in exchange, though. One human life in exchange of saving the entire planet had been a steal, according to the Justice League Dark. Clark looked at Bruce:

“Are you going to put on your cowl? This will be the only chance you have to tell the other Leaguers who you are.”

Bruce looked at his cowl. He had taken of his suit, so that his family had something to bury. But to reveal his identity to anyone other than Clark....

“I will keep it on. Even if I die here, I cannot risk anyone finding out my identity and using it to get to my family. I hope the League understands.”

Bruce is pulled into a hug. As Clark holds him as close as he can without breaking bones Bruce cannot help being filled with regret. He wanted more time with his family and, dare he say, friends. This was not how things were supposed to go. Clark pulls away and seems to want to say something:

“Bruce, I just want you to know, I-”

“WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON, B?”

Suddenly Nightwing enters the room, along with the entire Bat-family. Even Alfred and Oracle, donning masks, are there. They looked confused and scared, which made sense. They had all been summoned to the Watchtower, and when they had seen non-field members there as well they knew something was very wrong. Robin stepped forward, demanding an explanation:

“Father, what is happening? Why did you ask for us here? Explain yourself this instant!”

Red Robin looked ready to fight, staff in hand and in a low stance:

Where is the danger? Who is the enemy? Do you have intel for us? ARE YOU BEING MIND CONTROLLED?

Spoiler yanked at Red Robin’s cowl, pulling him out of his paranoid spiral:

“Easy, Captain Paranoid! Let him speak!”

Red Hood was clearly agitated. It was never a good sign if he was asked to the Watchtower:

“The fuck is going on, old man? Are you dying or something? That’s my stick, not yours!”

Bruce steeled his nerves. This was not going to be an easy conversation. How does one tell their family they are going to die and there is nothing to be done about it? Things had been going well for them, too. Dick and he hadn’t fought as often anymore, Jason had not called him names when he patrolled Crime ally last week, Tim hadn’t done anything that could be considered villainous (that he knew of) and Damian had not stabbed any goons for a month. Truly things had been good. Bruce knew this would mess it all up. He feared Jason would start killing again, or Damian would take out his grief on the criminals or Tim would… Well he had no idea. Last time Bruce disappeared Tim blew up so many LoA bases (he still wasn’t sure whether there had been people inside or not), so it was anyone’s gue-

“Sir, could you please elaborate on why we are here? I’m assuming it has something to do with the reason for this dreadful cold, and perhaps your lack of a shirt?”

Bruce sighed. Alfred always knew how to get through to him. With a heavy heart he told them everything. He would sacrifice himself for the survival of both planets. There was nothing to be done about that, and he asked them to please accept his decision. Naturally everyone was outraged. Amidst the chaos, Orphan asked a question:

“Why you?”

Bruce explained that, according to Constantine, the King had asked for a single sacrifice in return: “To feast on a non-magic, non-meta mortal human that will not resist being consumed.” It had pointed specifically at Batman, making sure they all knew which one it wanted. There had been no time to negotiate the prize, so he had accepted. After that it had left immediately for Earth, turning it intangible so the asteroid flew through harmlessly and fulfilling its end of the deal. Orphan seemed to think for a bit, before speaking up again:

“We’ll miss you.”

She hugged Batman. The others, realizing there was nothing they could do, at least not before facing the King, joined in as well. Bruce told them how proud he was of everyone. That they were strong and brilliant, and to please protect each other and Gotham in his stead. He thanked Alfred and Oracle for their help over the years and to please continue to support the others with the same strength they used to help him. After a moment they were interrupted by a knock on the door.

Wonder Woman had entered the room. With a saddened expression, and a dented doorhandle that showed her tension, she had come to collect her friend.:

“Batman. It’s time.”

Bruce nodded at her. Thanking her, he tried to leave with her, but was stopped by Alfred. After a quick hug, Alfed offered Bruce a cookie from the plate he had brought along:

“Every man deserves a final meal. I’m sorry this was all I have to offer.”

Taking a grateful bite, Bruce allowed himself to indulge in the taste of home.

“Thank you, Alfred. This means more to me then you realize.”

Steeling himself once more, Batman and the others followed Wonder Woman to the main room. It was the largest room in the Watchtower, several stories high with observation platforms, security screens showing cities all over the planet and a teleportation platform. As they approached the room, Batman was surprised by the cold that radiated form the entrance. Opening the door the source of all the cold and grief became visible to the group. Signal had to shield his eyes:

“What the hell!?!”

There it was, the High Ghost King of the Infinite Realms. A giant being, which had been so large they had to move to the observation platform to speak with it. Even then it towered over the heroes. It’s skin impossibly dark, with constellations spotting its tail & torso. The stars converging on its lower arms, making it look like it was wearing glowing white gloves, the same as a strange symbol on his chest that seemed important. The stars on its neck blending seamlessly with its hair, yet leaving its head completely dark aside from a few little spots on its face. The only facial feature they could make out where 2 Lazarus green eyes, focused on the new arrivals. On its hand, a ring with a skull on it that had freaked out the Lanterns. On its head a dark crown covered in patches of frost, and its own Aurora Borealis spreading from it. The room had already been partially covered in frost simply from the King’s aura. Power emanated from it, which had caused several members that had been dead and revived before to kneel on reflex, which was frightening even if they managed to get up on their own again.

Martian Manhunter had tried to peek in the Kings mind, hoping to find a way to convince the King to spare Batman, but he had been unsuccessful. As soon as he tried his knees buckled, and he had been pushed out. Ever since the Ghost King had radiated frustration. Now, as Batman entered wearing only his cowl and some spare pants, that frustration seemed to spike dangerously. Was the King upset he had been left to wait for his offer?

"What the fuck is this? I didn’t ask for a striptease, especially from some old Frootloop!”

“Constantine, what’s wrong? What is it saying?”

Batman was worried. He had not expected more anger from the being when presented with the offering. Looking at Constantine, he saw the magician frantically looking through the pages of his books, desperately looking for a translation.

“Hang on, mate. I’m doing my best here! Ehrm… no, that’s not right… Something about mating? Maybe he likes you, Bats. He also said something about “the absence of clothing” so…

Suddenly he is cut off by a strange sound coming from the Ghost King. It makes a strange motion with its body and its giant maw opens, as more of those sounds escape. It reminds Robin of Alfred the Cat when he has a hairball. However, there is more sound in the Watchtower now. The Red Hood is clutching his stomach as he is doubling down in laughter.

“HAHAHAHA!!! WHAT? HOW THE FUCK DID YOU TRANSLATE THAT BADLY? HOLY SHIT!”

The Ghost King stops making the noises, and it’s eyes snap to Red Hood. It moves it’s head closer to him, casually passing it through the barrier Constantine had put up. Constantine’s swears in surprise, but the King seems not to care as it “speaks” to Red Hood:

"Oh, thank the Acients! Someone who understands Ghost Speak! Can you PLEASE help me and translate for us? This trench coat guy is terrible, and somehow twists everything I say in the worst way!"

Red Hood relaxed, looking up at the Ghost King’s giant head.:

“Sure man, no problem. I’m pretty sure he is using like 3 different dictionaries to get this far. I saw him first translate Ghost to Pixie, Pixie to Gnome and Gnome to Demon before telling us in English! So, what’s up?”

Batman was stunned. The Ghost King actually face palmed. What the heck was going on?

"Of course he is. That explains why it sounds like he is putting this through Google Translate 4 times! These guys summoned me to save the Earth, which, totally cool. Happy to help! But a summons makes it official, which means I need to get an offering. I can’t leave without it or I face a mountain of paperwork from some stupid bureaucratic eyeballs for not following proper procedure. But I can always ask something simple and get it over with. No biggie, right? WRONG.”

Red Hood actually grabs a chair to sit on. Not even in a somewhat respectful way, he is sitting on it backwards, casually leaning on it.

“Oh, boy. How badly did they fuck up? Gotta be big since Batman over there is ready to be eaten?”

The King glares at Constantine, who puts up his bravest “time to out-bollock a Eldritch Demon” face. The King is not impressed:

"Man, I asked, and I quote: “I’d like to eat a regular human meal that doesn’t fight back, like that guy would eat!” I wanted it to be clear I didn’t want blood, or corpses or virgins or any of the other horrible things stupid cults try to give me! I just wanted a burger or something! But then Mr. triple dictionary over there somehow turns that into: ‘’I wish to feast on a non-magic, non-meta mortal human that will not resist being consumed, and it must be that one.” I’ll admit I was pointing at one of the non-supers, but that didn’t mean I wanted to eat him! I just wanted to make sure it was normal food, something that doesn’t fight back!”

Red Hood looked confused, asking if the King’s food usually fights back. The King rolls it’s eyes:

"In life, I lived with mad scientist parents who treated lab safety as a suggestion at best and a chore for teens at worst. Put enough samples in the fridge and you get a whole new type of Thanksgiving trauma. Dang, I’m getting even more hungry. I’d love some turkey right now. Could you get them to bring me some food? That way I can have my sacrifice and leave…”

Red Hood stands up. He asks if the King can wait a few more minutes, claiming that after all that frustration he deserved something better. Getting a nod from the Ghost King, the Red Hood suddenly shouted over the platform railing towards the waiting Leaguers:

“FLASH! Get your squad up here, and bring pen & paper! I got a job for y’all!”

Zooming up every member of the Flash family gets a list of things to get and a warning not to tell the Bats what’s on it, or Red Hood will shoot them in the knees. Looking at the lists, they quickly caught on what was going on and promised they wouldn’t tell. This was way too funny! Red Hood does a fake bow to the King, clearly amusing himself.

“Don’t worry, your Hungry-ness! Your sacrifice is being prepared! Anything else we can assist you with?”

The Ghost King seems to tilt its head in amusement. Whatever Hood was doing, it was working, which honestly was the only reason nobody had tackled him to the floor.

"Actually, if you could get that Frootloop to put on a shirt that would be great. He is shivering and honestly, I’m worried he’s going to poke someone’s eye out with a nipple. Why is he shirtless anyway? Please tell me he wasn’t actually trying to seduce me or something, he’s old enough to be my dad! Gross!”

This caused Red Hood to again double over in laughter. Everyone was confused, what could possibly be so funny in this situation? Constantine had frantically tried translating during their conversation, but it had gone too fast for him. He gave up when the King mentioned eyeballs and seduction, accepting he wouldn’t get anywhere like this. Batman however couldn’t resist his need to know everything anymore.

“Hood, report! How are you communicating with the entity?”

Red Hood turns to Batman, walks past him and towards Alfred, grabbing one of the cookies he had brought with him. As he walks back and hands it to the Ghost King, he starts to explain:

“Honestly, not sure. It feels instinctive, like a second mother-tongue. Pretty sure it’s some sort of “dead-guy-language” you learn when you die. Speaking off: Turns out Constantine is a VERY unreliable translator. Spooky here is actually pretty chill! He used you as an example to make sure we knew what he wanted, not to demand you as a sacrifice. He is in fact pretty ticked that you guys tried to feed B to him. Speaking of: Batman? Put a shirt on, for fucks sake. You look like you’re going to freeze your tits off.”

This earned a round of giggles from Green Lantern & Green Arrow. Now that the tension had left the room, other Leaguers also smiled in relief. Besides, it’s always fun to see Batman being the butt of a joke. Sure enough, Batman let out a frustrated sound, that got the rest of the Bats to join in on the fun. They understood that their dad in fact felt rather silly right now, which meant that they had more to gossip about soon. Constantine now was wondering what Hood was up to:

“Mate, I did my best! Sorry for not being fluent in every language in existence. What the hell did you send the Flash to get? The bloke is a scientist and denies magic when it’s right in front of ‘im! What could they possibly get that I couldn’t-”

At that moment, the Flashes zoom out of the Zeta tubes and zoom across the observation deck. After a few moments of red and yellow blurs, the deck is covered with tables filled front to back with food! Picking up a receipt that fell to the floor, Batman realizes this is take-out from all over the world. Seeing a puddle of Lazarus water grow on the floor, he looks up. The Ghost King is actually drooling! Red Hood steps aside and gestures to the feast:

“Welp! There is your sacrifice! One. And I also quote: “regular human meal that doesn’t fight back, like “that guy” would eat!” Well, more of a feast then a meal, but I’m sure a big guy like you can finish it, and you can always take home the rest I guess. Bon Appetit!”

Opening his giant maw, the Ghost King digs in. Well, as much as he can. He actually looks kind of silly eating everything with a tiny fork. Still, judging from the purring sound emanating through the Watchtower it’s to the Kings liking.

"DUDE, THIS IS SO GOOD? I need to know these restaurants! You want a bite for helping me out? You saved me SOOO much annoying paperwork, I was about to bail!”

Picking up a plate of karaage, Red Hood took of his helmet revealing a second mask underneath and dug in as well:

“Don’t mind if I do, this smells fantastic! Oh shit, you should try this stuff, it’s great!”

Red Hood being allowed to partake in the offering so casually caused Constantine to do a double take. He realizes he seriously misjudged this entity. Still, that didn’t explain the horrific stories about him. He would need to do some digging into that, maybe with Hood as a translator. For now he takes a swig of his drink. The world was saved, no one died or lost their Soul and he didn’t make any new enemies he thinks. Plus, Batman felt like an idiot, and that always made the Brit smile.

All in all a good day!

[cleo-fox]

Unraveled

Summary: It was all fun and games until Loki started wearing that goddamn sweater.

Pairing: Loki x Female Reader

Warnings: Smut, 18+, Minors DNI, dirty talk, praise kink, teasing, orgasm delay, sex, vaginal fingering, godly refractory periods, kitchen sex, semi public sex, Loki in a sweater.

A/N: My explanation for this one is that I saw too many pictures of Tom Hiddleston in a sweater and it gave me thoughts.

Being an Avenger has made you pretty good at rolling with the punches. After your third or fourth encounter with some alien/wizard/android bullshit, your perspective is fundamentally altered and real life seems manageable in a way that it didn’t before. You have to call your insurance company to dispute a claim? Big deal, you’ve negotiated with terrorists; you can handle Garth from Member Services.

The thing is, having that kind of perspective means that the things that do get to you can rattle you a lot more than they should. Natasha had warned you about that, but you were riding high on the thrill of successfully conquering Blue Cross Blue Shield and you kind of got to thinking she was exaggerating.

And then the seasons started to turn and Loki started wearing that goddamn sweater.

You can recognize when someone is out of your league. When you first moved into the Tower, it had been relatively easy for you to assign Loki to that category: he was a god. He’d been featured in last month’s GQ. You were mortal and your most recent press had been a TMZ story featuring unflattering paparazzi photos of you leaving a bodega in your pajamas at seven o’clock in the morning, a bagel halfway into your mouth. You were clearly not the same.

Up until the sweater, you’d managed to keep your cool around Loki and keep your attraction confined to daydreams and the occasional surreptitious lustful glance. Hell, you’d even had the nerve to be proud of yourself for keeping your shit together in front of him.

The sweater lays waste to all of that.

On the surface, it doesn’t seem like a sweater that is capable of completely destroying your carefully constructed composure. It’s a fairly standard crew neck in a deep green so dark it almost looks black at a first glance. But on Loki it just…does things to you. The fabric is well fitted, clinging to his biceps, pulling taut across his chest, emphasizing the line of his pectorals. It somehow accentuates how muscular he is while also still making him look lean and lithe.

The first time he wears it, you find your eyes just trail to him of their own volition, like an incredibly horny moth to the flame. It’s a day of catching yourself staring, panicking, pretending that you were actually looking at something else, and then repeating the process five minutes later when your gaze inevitably wandered again. It almost would have been funny if it didn’t put your blood pressure into the stratosphere.

To make matters worse, at the end of that day’s debriefing, he rises from his chair and raises his arms to the ceiling in a long stretch. The hem of the sweater creeps up, exposing the firm, flat muscles of his stomach, lightly dusted with a trail of hair that meanders in a tantalizing path down to his belt buckle.

You promptly choke on your own spit. Clint claps you hard on the back and asks if you’re okay, which is a question you don’t know how to answer (ultimately, you stick to a thumbs up and mumble something about dust getting caught in your throat). Loki is too preoccupied complaining about the entire concept of office furniture to notice. Or at least you’re pretty sure he doesn’t notice.

You might have been okay if that had been the only incident, but the sweater makes a repeat appearance on Friday. The following Tuesday features the deadly combination of the sweater with a pair of tight, dark wash jeans that nearly send you into cardiac arrest. Your fantasies suddenly become much more frequent and detailed.

You are not really sure what to do about this—it’s not like you can talk to anyone about it, nor can you ask him to stop wearing it without prompting some very uncomfortable questions. The idea that you’ll get used to it is laughable. 

You look at your calendar and note that spring is six months away. At least.

Fucking hell.

*

It’s a Saturday afternoon and in a strange quirk of scheduling, almost everyone is out of town for a mission or a personal obligation, leaving the Tower unusually quiet. As much as you enjoy the daily clatter and chaos that comes with living here, you find a lot of comfort in these moments of quiet, however infrequent they may be.

You intended to make yourself a late afternoon snack. That was the plan, anyway. But as you’re standing at the kitchen counter and cutting up the fruit you just washed, you realize that you’re not entirely alone. From this vantage point, you can see Loki lounging on the couch in the next room and reading.

He’s wearing the sweater. Of course he’s wearing the sweater. And the so-tight-they-should-be-illegal dark wash jeans.

Goddammit.

You have the sense to set the knife down at least. The last thing you need is a trip to the hospital because you got too distracted by your hot colleague while handling a knife.

You let your gaze travel along the firm muscles of his chest. It’s just a sweater. It shouldn’t look this good. It shouldn’t prompt these kinds of thoughts. And yet…

He shifts on the couch and the hem of the sweater creeps up. His hand drops to his belt buckle. It’s entirely appropriate, but the way his long, long fingers are splayed against his stomach makes your mind drop straight to the gutter and wonder what they’d look like wrapped around his rock hard co—

“You know, it’s rude to stare.”

His voice comes from behind you and adrenaline surges through you like an electric shock. The Loki on the couch looks up at you and smirks before disappearing in a shimmer of green.

You wonder if it’s possible to die of embarrassment and a heart attack all at the same time. It certainly feels like you’re about to.

You take a deep breath and try to collect yourself, which feels largely futile. Come on, get it together. You’ve negotiated with terrorists and insurance companies. Shake it off.

You slowly turn around, cheeks burning. Loki is standing right behind you, arms folded across his chest. You swallow.

“I um. I was—I was just…” Words escape you as your brain fires in every direction except a helpful one.

“You were just what?” His expression is intense, but you’re not sure that he’s angry.

“Spacing out,” you say, trying to infuse your voice with confidence that you absolutely do not feel.

He places his hands on the counter behind you, intentionally caging you in with his body. You are overwhelmed by the scent of him—a masculine, wintery musk that makes you want to bury your face against his chest.

“Try again,” he says. His voice is deep enough to rattle your bones.

You swallow. Everything you could possibly say seems wildly inadequate.

Loki has never been one to be at a loss for words, though, and after a moment of terrified silence from you, he continues speaking.

“I’ve noticed something curious over these past few weeks,” he says. “When I wear this sweater, you can’t seem to take your eyes off of me.”

Your heart is pounding. Fucking hell. Have you really been that obvious?

“Now why is that?” he asks, his voice a low purr.

You briefly consider trying to lie again, but the piercing green of his eyes instantly makes you rethink it. “I um…” You swallow hard. “It’s just…it suits you. You…you look good.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I look good?”

You nod.

“Interesting.” His lips twitch in a slight smirk as he looks you up and down. “And how does that make you feel?”

Your heart thuds in your chest, your stomach contorting with a strange combination of fear and desire. You’re still humiliated, but the sound of his voice and the dark intensity of his gaze is intoxicating and incredibly arousing.

“I don’t—I don’t know how to answer that question.”

“Oh, I think you do.” There’s a rawness in his voice that makes your cunt clench.

You shake your head, eyes wide. You’re pretty sure he’s not really mad, but you also don't know where this is going. Surely he’s not making a pass at you…right?

“How does it make you feel to see me in this sweater?” he continues, his voice a low whisper. He pauses for a moment and when you don’t answer, he continues. “Does it…arouse you, perhaps?”

Holy fuck.

This can’t be happening.

You try to think of something clever or sexy, but the bluntness of the question and the fire in his eyes kills whatever remaining brain cells you have left. Mutely, you nod.

There’s that smirk again as he licks his lips. “Are you wet right now?”

Your cheeks burn. You give the tiniest nod possible.

“Hmm.” His hand alights on the button of your jeans. “I believe you Midgardians have a saying that is appropriate here: trust, but verify.” He slips the button free and your heart pounds like a war drum in your chest. 

You cannot believe this is happening.

“You haven’t been entirely truthful in this conversation.” His palm presses flat against your stomach, the tips of his fingers slipping under the waistband of your underwear. “So I’m afraid I’m going to have to see for myself.”

His hand is achingly slow, creeping lower and lower. He watches you intently as his hand cups your sex, seemingly cataloging the way your breath hitches and all the little shivers that run through you.

His middle finger finally slides between your folds and you can’t help but moan.

“Oh, you did lie to me,” he growls, his index finger joining his middle, both sliding up to circle your clit. “You’re not wet, you’re soaked.”

Your legs are already starting to tremble and you grab on to his shoulders to try and steady yourself. The fabric of the sweater is softer than a cloud against your hands.

“Sopping wet,” he continues, trapping your right leg between his thighs and the counter, the heavy weight of his erection pressing eagerly against your hip. “And this is all for me?”

Wordlessly, you nod. There’s no point in denying it—and you don’t think he wants you to, either.

“What am I going to do about this?” he muses. His index and middle fingers lightly circle your clit again and you whimper.

“Don’t stop,” you gasp. “Please don’t stop.”

“Don’t stop?” he says. His tone is one of light curiosity, like you’re just chatting casually about the weather. “But if I continue, you’re almost certainly going to come.”

“Yes,” you gasp. “Please.”

“Oh, you want me to make you come?” You can hear the smirk in his voice. “Right here in the middle of the kitchen?”

You nod.

“Anyone could walk in, though,” he purrs. “Anyone could come in and see me with my fingers buried in your dripping cunt. What would they think if they saw you so utterly debauched and at my mercy, begging for me to make you come?”

“Don’t care…” you gasp. How are you already so close?

He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t care what they’d think if they saw us like this?”

You shake your head.

“Oh, you must be desperate.” He adjusts his hand, his thumb taking up the rhythm on your clit while his index finger sinks into your slick channel, making you gasp.

“Loki, please—”

“Begging already,” he says, not letting up in his rhythm. “Has it been a long time, sweetheart? When did you last feel this good?”

It’s not a question you can answer. You don’t know that anyone ever has made you feel like this. You moan, your hips bucking hard against his hand.

“Poor thing,” he tuts. “You’re clearly desperate for it. What kinds of filthy thoughts have you had about me?” he purrs. “I’ve seen you staring, I’ve heard your breath hitch. Have you touched yourself while thinking of me?”

You manage a nod and his smile turns feral. “When was the last time?”

“Last…last night,” you gasp.

“How many times did you come?”

“F-Four.”

“Filthy girl.” His free hand slides up to cradle the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair as he tips your head back. “Next time, all you have to do is ask.”

His mouth covers yours, his tongue pushing past your lips as he slides a second finger into you. You moan into his mouth as the pressure in your hips increases.

“Oh yes, let me hear all of those pretty noises,” he murmurs. “Are you going to let me fuck you against the counter after I make you come?”

You nod, whimpering.

“Good girl,” he purrs. “I think you need to be fucked properly and hard. Is that what you need?”

“Yes,” you gasp.

“Mmm, that’s what I thought. This cunt is just too wet and needy for any other treatment.” He draws back to look at you more fully, giving you a lazy, hungry smile. “You’re about to lose it all over my fingers, aren’t you?”

Your orgasm is cresting, the tingling pressure in your hips becoming unbearable. You nod, lost for words.

With one more smirk, he curls his fingers inside of you. “Come for me, pretty girl, let me see you.”

Your cunt spasms around his thrusting fingers and your whole body shudders as your orgasm overtakes you, your head tipping back as you cry out.

“Oh, that’s it,” he murmurs, “there’s my good girl.”

A shiver runs through you at his words, your hips still moving against his hand, trying to draw out every last ripple of pleasure.

He kisses you as you come down from your high, and you take the opportunity to run your hands over his chest and tentatively feel the hard planes of muscle that you’ve been staring at these last few weeks. But after a few moments, he takes your hand and guides it to his cock.

His preference for leather pants or those sinfully tight dark wash jeans made you suspect that the size of his ego might actually be proportionate to the size of his cock and your initial assessment seems to confirm that theory. You rub your fingers over the denim that covers his thick shaft, feeling yourself grow even wetter at the low groan he makes in the back of his throat.

“Take my cock out.” His voice is so deep and his eyes are so smoldering, it feels like the command goes straight to your cunt. You are practically trembling with anticipation as your shaking hands  make quick work of the button, buckle, and zipper.

You can’t help but suck in a breath when his cock comes into view. He’s long and deliciously thick—big enough to be a little intimidating, but not overwhelmingly so.

He guides your hand to wrap around his shaft. He barely fits in your hand. “Look at what you’ve done to me,” he says, his voice raspy as he guides your hand to stroke his cock. “Feel how hard I am for you, feel how much I want you.”

His cock practically pulses with need, the tip slick with pre-come and you grasp him more firmly, your cunt pulsing as he gives a deeply satisfying groan.

You stroke him from base to tip, squeezing lightly. He groans again. “They told me to stay away from you, you know,” he says.

You aren’t so far gone that you can let this information slip by. “What? Who?”

“Stark. Rogers. Romanoff. My brother.” He reaches behind you and shoves the fruit and cutting board into the side, the knife clattering into the sink. “They saw how I looked at you,” he says. “They saw that I wanted you. They told me you were too good for me. Too sweet.”

You feel your jeans and underwear melt away in a shimmer of green and he lifts you easily onto the counter.

His eyes flash with desire. “I wonder what they’d say if they knew you’d let me fuck you raw in the middle of the kitchen?”

For a brief moment, frustration almost wins out over your lust. “We could have done this sooner?”

His gaze turns serious. “Darling, we could have done this the moment we met, but I’m told a handshake is more appropriate.”

You take a breath, about to embark on a rant about the individuals he’d named and how they hadn’t even asked, they’d just assumed, but Loki puts a hand up against your mouth.

“Don’t make me wait any longer,” he says. There’s a sincerity and a need in his gaze that you’ve never seen before and it’s enough to calm your anger for just a moment.

“Okay,” you say, wrapping your legs around his waist and angling your hips toward his, “but clear your schedule because I’m gonna need you to fuck me a lot to make up for all that time.”

His grin is feral as he pushes into you.

You shiver at the blunt stretch of his cock, your hands gripping his broad shoulders. He indulges in a low groan as his hips press flush against yours.

“If I’d known they were keeping me from this tight cunt, I would’ve done something sooner,” he rasps. “You feel absolutely perfect.”

“Please,” you breathe, “I need—please.”

His hips snap hard against yours and you moan, your head tipping back.

His eyes glitter as he pulls you close, pressing his mouth against your ear. “The next time I have you, I will be sweet and soft.”

“And this time?” you ask, though you think you already know the answer.

“This time—” His mouth presses against the curve of your neck, teeth scraping just this side of too hard against the tender skin. “—I’m going to utterly ruin you.”

His pace is fast and rough—the word possessive comes to mind. You twist the luxurious fabric of his sweater in your hands as his cock hits that sweet, aching spot inside of you, pressing against your sensitive cunt in a way that makes your muscles spasm and clench around him. You moan, a shiver rolling through you as you inch closer to release.

“I’m…fuck, I’m getting close,” you gasp.

His pace abruptly slows and his grin is wide and his eyes are dancing with mirth when he raises his head from your shoulder.

“That was unnecessary,” you say with a scowl.

“Oh, I just want to savor you for a little longer, my love,” he purrs as he settles into an easy and slow pace that still makes your toes curl. “You’re going to take me right over the edge with you and I’ve waited so terribly long to have you.”

“I feel like you’re probably omitting the fact that you like being a tease,” you say.

He grins again, increasing his pace ever so slightly. “Both things can be true.”

He does this a few times—taking up a wicked pace that almost sends you hurtling over the edge, only to slow at the last possible moment, silencing your whimpering protests with a deep and slow kiss that is good enough to make you forgive him until a few minutes later when he does it all over again.

You hold out for as long as you can, but eventually, the ache in your hips overwhelms you.

“Loki,” you breathe when his pace again begins to increase. “Please don’t stop.”

“Don’t stop?” he rasps, somehow finding the concentration to raise an eyebrow. “You’re quite sure?”

You nod.

“You want to come all over my cock?”

Speech is slightly beyond you at this point, but you manage to gasp a desperate plea as you hurtle into the final plateau, right before the fall.

Loki regards you with that same playful look as he fucks you. You wait, unsure of what he’s going to do, your body desperately crying out for your release.

His lips curl into a smile. “Come for me, sweet thing.”

At the sound of his voice, every one of your muscles is tensing and releasing, the slick walls of your cunt clamping down hard on the thick girth of his cock as you shudder and moan.

The remnants of Loki’s composure are fraying, his eyes closed and his jaw slack as he chases his own end. His brow furrows and he throws his head back, letting out a low groan as he comes and you think it might be the best sound you’ve ever heard.

You sag against him as you both come down from your respective highs, his heart beating hard under the soft fabric of his sweater. He reaches for your face, tilting your head back so he can kiss you, impossibly slow and soft.

You’re in the middle of the kitchen. You understand this. In a wholly rational world, you would be quick to hop off the counter, quick to try and negotiate the return of your jeans from whatever pocket dimension he’s sent them to.

Instead, you find yourself wanting to stay in this moment, with his arms wrapped around you, his cock still pulsing inside you as he kisses you breathless.

You count to ten, then twenty. At forty, you draw back slightly, only to have him pull you back into the kiss.

It’s somewhere after one hundred when he trails his lips to your neck and you manage to say what you intended: “We should probably…” you trail off as he sucks at your pulse point, sending a shiver down your spine.

“We should probably what?” he murmurs against your neck, before tracing a lazy figure eight with the tip of his tongue.

It takes you a moment to find that sentence. “Get dressed and such.”

You feel the sharp press of his smile against your skin. “I think not.”

Before you can open your mouth to say anything, the kitchen is fading in a shimmer of green to an unfamiliar bedroom and the two of you tumble into a bed draped in green silk.

“I’d like to stay like this for a while,” he says, a smile playing at his lips as he slowly rolls his hips against you, somehow still impossibly hard. “In fact, I think I need to have you again.”

“I can live with that,” you say. You tug at the fabric of his sweater. “But this is going to have to go.”

His gaze is smoldering and his bare skin is suddenly pressed against yours as the sweater and the rest of your clothes disappear in that familiar shimmer of green.

“Will you like me as much without it?” he asks, rolling his hips against you.

You drag your fingernails up along the firm muscles of his back. “I think I’ll manage.”

“Good,” he says, leaning in to kiss you, “because as I understand it, we have quite a lot of time to make up for.”

[thewertsearch]

In that instant, her empire was gone. Gl'bgolyb's swan song wiped out her entire race, save the Condesce and her lone heiress, leaving the empire nothing more than a galactic necropolis of floating tombs.

I think that this would be a very interesting setting to explore, as the dust settles.

Picture it. You’re an alien race, one of thousands that have been enslaved by these awful galactic conquerors for untold centuries. One day, with no warning or apparent explanation, every single one of them starts howling in unbelievable pain, streams of technicolor blood erupt from their eyeballs, and they die.

Once the celebrations have died down, how does the galaxy respond? How do you rebuild civilization around such an enormous, unexpected power vacuum? Do the former colonies unite, salvage what they can from Alternian infrastructure, and try to form a government of their own? Does the universe devolve into anarchy, with everyone fighting over the mountains of resources now unguarded?

What happens to your sci-fi setting, when your Evil Galactic Empire is just... erased?

She should arrive any minute now. When she does, she will find nothing but ruins and dust.

And, in the midst of all of this – what do you do if you’re the lone Empress, the last of the trolls? How long can you survive, when every single being in the galaxy would shoot you on sight?

If she cared to look closer, she would find a city of slain exiles, a man on the moon, and a pair of black lovers locked in a deadly dance.

A man on one of the moons, anyway. We still don’t know anything about Alternia’s pink moon – and, considering the dark significance of the Green Moon, I’m awfully suspicious of its sister satellite. Who’s living there?

But whether she looks or not, one thing will find her with certainty. A new employment opportunity.

The Condesce is fresh out of options, and has nowhere else to go - and if there's one thing Scratch likes, it's a woman who's out of options.

Why, though? What use is a dethroned empress to Scratch – or English, for that matter?

Anyway, the last of the twelve ancestors arrived a bit late. In fact, she would cross through her portal six centuries after the descendants had come and gone.

I would raise the girl to be groomed for her calling. My lessons would emphasize obedience, mastery of the clockwork majyyks, and being locked in a room.

So that's what's up with Fauxradia.

Megido, I am so fucking sorry. In a comic packed to the brim with terrible parents, you still managed to win the lottery. The absolute fucking jackpot.

You literally cannot get any lower than being raised by Doc Scratch.

[idiotmf]

Alien scientists who just really want to study you

Another one of my most recent favorites is my alien boy Xyon. Can you tell I'm a whore for 'y' in names? It's a curse, really.

Also, in case it's not blatantly obvious... I'm introducing characters and beings that I wanna write some good ol' smut on later. (▰˘◡˘▰)

For good measure: Minors scram, for the rest: there's going to be NSFW themes but they are more biological in nature.

A/N: Please feel free to point out typos and grammar wrongdoings so I can obsessively fix them. I write these on my phone and chances are I'm fat-fingering this tiny keyboard, since I use my thumbs for typing. Also, English isn't my first language, so there's also that.

This post is pretty long and covers a more in-depth explanation of this Alien species because I wanna use this as a reference sheet later...

Anyways, here's some random lore dumping about Xyon, Xenians and Xen'jai, their native planet.

As you may have already noticed, I loooooove naming patterns. In the previous post it was my shadow demon boys Aryllus and Oryllion, here it's Xyon, his planet Xen'jai and as you'll come to find, most of the other things related to his planet also start with an X. Here is why:

1. Language:

In the native language of Xenians, the X represents a prefix referring to a life form. Xenians are the people, Xen'jai is their planet, and Xyon is a person. Linguistically speaking, especially for humans, the X doesn't translate as such, it is a complicated sound that a human cannot reproduce and the closest possible sound for an accurate translation. (Can you tell I spend way too much time world building?)

Speaking of their native language, Xenians do not speak the same way as humans do; rather, they communicate via a mixture of various noises, including clicking and verbal sounds that could only be described as waving sheet metal in the air. Imagine this but less goofy and with various pitches, echoes and clicks.

For storytelling convenience, they of course possess a translator that can both pick up foreign languages and translate their own. Although I have one story where they just fully cannot communicate for a long time and that one's wholesome as heck.

2. Appearance:

Xenians are in principle considered humanoid. They have two legs, two arms, a head and a torso. Their posture is slightly different, due to the differing gravity on their planet, so their spines are entirely straight, rather than curved like a human's, which gives them a rather uncanny look at first glance. Although if you do meet a Xenian, honestly that is probably the last thing you notice about them.

The first thing is most likely their height. Xyon himself is between 2.5 meters (approx. 8'2) and 2.8 meters (approx. 9'2), which is considered average for a male of his species, with females being slightly taller on average at 3 meters (10 feet). A male Xenian, if threatened or putting on a mating display, can stretch its spine and torso to appear larger and more threatening. Females are incapable of doing so, but as larger and more intimidating presences, they have no need for it.

The bodies of Xenians are covered in fine, dark blue fur, even if it appears as skin to the naked eye of a human. Like the fuzz you have on your face, but more prominent.

Their gray skin underneath is almost leathery to the touch, which can be examined on their long, almost reptilian tails that serve multiple purposes, such as balance, showing emotions and affection, or can be simply used as an extra arm to grab onto things.

Their faces aren't exactly faces. It resembles more the face of a cat, featuring a short snout and a flat nose, although there are no visible nostrils, as Xenians have millions of microscopic openings in their noses to absorb and filter air. Just like felines, Xenians have sharp teeth and retractable claws, paw pad like palms and soles and most importantly, slit pupils, making some humans speculate that perhaps they are a species of highly intelligent bipedal felines. Xenians do not have whiskers or any of the like, since their tail does most of the work for them.

Unlike humans, Xenians do not wear clothes. Despite being a highly advanced race of what used to be carnivorous hunters, Xenians have no sense of embarrassment from appearing naked. They do wear an exoskeleton which serves various protective functions, however their genitals are sheathed, making Xenians appear genderless to the unschooled human eye.

3. Social Constructs:

Xenians are social creatures. They live in large groups, much like humans, often with their families until they are old enough to train for their purpose.

Unlike humans, Xenians are born with a 'purpose', a path chosen for them that they must follow; Xyon's purpose lies within studying intergalactic life forms. Thanks to their technology, calculations for things such as possible base intelligence, strength and overall health are possible before a Xenian even hatches, promoting not only the growth and increasing intelligence of an already highly advanced race but also unethical practices, such as culling of unhatched eggs with undesired traits. This may appear highly disturbing to humans but is extremely common and even considered a relief amongst Xenians, as they lay between five and twenty fertilized eggs that may hatch, yet only ever one to three Xenians hatch and reach maturity due to culling, keeping their race from overpopulating their rather small planet.

Xenians, while not the sole creatures of their planets, are the most intelligent, much like humans on earth. They have moved past their need for food, instead consuming gel-like substances with all their needed nutrients and calories, yet they will occasionally initiate fake hunts with competing parties as entertainment, much like a human would play a game of soccer with a friend. However, they do not kill any animals, rather using their own version of AI to calculate intricate escape routes and keep the game interesting.

While Xenians have both male and female as a base sex, gender and gender roles do not exist to the same extent as with humans. Taking care of hatched eggs is usually done by either of the parents, sometimes a different party entirely, as some Xenians live in mating groups. It is usually the male-coded Xenians that try to impress female-coded mates with their displays of stretching their torsos, however, same sex relationships are common, since mating isn't about offspring but mainly about spirituality.

Which brings us to the point you probably came here for lol...

4. Mating:

Unlike humans, Xenians mate for life, using pheromones present in their sexual fluids to claim each other once a bond is established. Mating is considered highly spiritual, finding a mate is an extremely important part of a Xenian's life.

As mentioned before, some Xenians will live in mating groups, featuring various different partners, which is a fairly new occurrence and sometimes frowned upon by followers of traditional mating practices, which are still upheld on Xen'jai but due to their beliefs in equality, those who frown upon this practice are usually frowned upon themselves.

Xenians with male genitalia possess two sheathed and usually hidden phalluses, which are extremely close together, like fingers on your hand. Both can be slightly moved and serve different purposes. The upper, smaller one can be quite similar to that of a human in both size and shape, it serves to fertilize eggs present in a Xenian with female genitalia, which renew with a new cycle of their native moons. This smaller phallus is extremely sensitive, much like a clitoris and the only of the two that can ejaculate.

The larger one on the bottom is solely used for pleasure, as female-coded Xenians have a mechanism that only allows for impregnation during heightened pleasure, thanks to an additional opening inside their equivalent of a vagina, which only stretches during arousal to let sperm through. Being used for pleasure, their larger phallus has evolved to be able to bring just that. It is both thick and long, covered in small bumps that secrete lubricant for ease of mating but also serve to stimulate the insides of their partners.

As you may be wondering, does a Xenian of the female sex have two vaginas, then? The answer is no. During mating, eventually both phalluses may be inserted into the female, which is a lot easier than you likely imagine, since their insides aren't as tight as that of a human (which is a delightful discovery Xyon makes when he gets to fuck a human for the first time).

Unlike female humans, Xenians do not possess a clitoris, another delightful find for Xyon, all of their pleasure is derived from the nerves inside of their vagina, most of them connected to the muscle that controls whether sperm can be let through or not.

Just like humans, Xenians have contraceptives, since sex is occasionally rather casual. They work differently, however. It is a gel, that must be applied to the smaller phallus, killing sperm as it comes out and blocking the production of mating pheromones that initiate a bond, by triggering the partner to release their pheromones as well. In case of a relationship that is made of two males, both must apply this gel, in case of female only, it is neither but can be triggered with a pheromone dispenser to initiate a female-female pheromone bond.

This is considerably longer than I thought it would be and I still left a lot out to shorten it... Like I didn't even mention that you have to teach him what kissing is and Xyon gets obsessed with it, or that they subconsciously wrap their tail around things and people they like, which... I'm sorry but that is adorable to me... (╥﹏╥)

At first I tried doing the cool headcannon thing some people do with bullet points but I just cannot keep myself short enough to do that*. I also just have a preference for flowing sentences, rather than bullet points. But man...

Anyways, yes, this is a reference sheet once I get into writing some good ol' Xyon x reader smut. (≧◡≦)

I also have another Xenian boi, Xenon, who is a geologist, rather than a biologist but he is still very new and there isn't a lot established yet. Xyon is far more fleshed out and I'm going to introduce him a bit more too, maybe along with some smut.

* as evident from this ending note lmao

Dear gods, I have so many established fantasy worlds I wanna share, so my next lore dump is probably in sight, if I'm not already writing another one.

[lillified]

How do your transformers see gender?

that’s a good question!

Cybertronians are sexless so it’s entirely social concept. The gender roles they experience are arbitrary and borrowed from hierarchical Quintesson social norms, like many of their roles.

On a meta note—I decided to represent gender this way because I want to directly parallel the spectrum of gender presentation in people. The fact that the robots are gendered, and even more generally anthropomorphic, is arbitrary enough as is, and I chose to embrace that instead of coming up with in universe explanations for why women have to exist (you’ll notice that it’s always “why women—“ a sexless, monogendered alien species being functionally men is seen as neutral). I did this because I want to allow for the range of gender expression that exists in people to be mirrored. They can change, adjust, tune, or declare their gender however they want.

While I do have canonical genders for certain characters (as in, beyond just their preferred pronouns), one thing I’ve noticed is that people have a lot of varying readings of characters and their genders. like, for example, some people interpret certain characters as butch that I’ve never considered (though maybe that’s because I am butch and I might just write all my masculine characters in a butchy way).

I think that’s cool! I know very well how important it can be to identify with characters when very little specific representation exists for you, so while there are some characters whose specific gender identities are explicit and story-integral, I’m willing to leave others up to interpretation because I like seeing what people think.

Anyway, tldr: gender exists because I want people to be able to see themselves and their own experience with gender in the robots. that’s the most important part. I have my own internal lore for social structures and biology, but that’s less important than the fact that I want people to know that if your gender exists, a robot can have it.

Sorry for the long rambling, I hope this answers your question!!

[captain-space-kin]

My take on the regional Sora’s trend! She’s an alien now >:3

I had no idea what to do for this initially, but then it hit me, I could just shove her into my OC story. If I have the motivation I might shove everyone else into it too! I roughed out some ideas for the main cast while working on this.

A (sort of) brief lore explanation and tag list under the cut o7 (also tumblr killed the quality so click for a better view etc etc)

A lot of this still a work in progress since I’ve been changing this species lore a lot recently, but! Starsino’s are a semi-aquatic vaguely amphibious + reptilian race, whose society at large bears a striking resemblance to Imperium (hence why I chose it for Sora). Their eyesight is not great, and as a whole the species used to have a sixth sense that would them navigate in difficult to see areas like underwater (similar to a platypus!). At some point the ✨Space Fae✨ (not an 100% accurate description but it’d take too long to explain their lore afshhdf) came down and gifted them the ability of True Sight. Which expanded their sixth sense to allow them access to telepathic/telekinetic abilities. Eventually the ✨Space Fae✨ got bored and left but also took the True Sight with them, which inadvertently cut off their species ability to access this sixth sense at all, which caused their entire society to collapse. Not everyone lost their “sight” but the majority of people did. Some people are still born with the sixth sense and even True Sight, they’re called Seers and True Seers respectively.

Nowadays there are two major factions of Starsino’s society, The Dictatorship, and The Cult. Both are trying to restore everyone’s access to the True Sight they’re just going about it a different way. There’s a lot more to it them this but it can basically be boiled down to a Science Vs. Magic thing.

Sora being born with True Sight (which is where her tech manipulation stuff comes in), is taken from her family as a baby and given to the Science People to experiment on. Eventually she escapes and makes it out of Starsino controlled space. Where she meets Arin! Who is just some human guy who managed to get off of Earth somehow, idk I haven’t really worked that all out.

Anyway! Gonna try to not let this be an all consuming project like my AU’s usually are, but it is oh so tempting

Tag list -

@Inspectorghoul @fading-through-existence @juniperjellyfish @carmelo-san @lightningchicken

@crying-over-cartoons @officercooks @mywasasi @ashclouds366 @basicallyjaywalker 

@finn-m-corvex @garmaballs

[j-nope-not-today]

How would bay guy's react to saving someone and the person's reaction is,

"Damn I didn't know there was life forms from outer space on earth already- *gets a clearer look at the guy's* oh shit oh wait- you dudes are like... Anthropomorphic! Or something similar- Shit! Did I offend y'all in any way by saying you guys are outer space life forms or anthropomorphic??? IM SO SORRY-"

They're a absolute nerd and only scraped the surface of social interaction, that's why they appear vv fucking akward. Very respectful and nice tho

TMNT reaction to intelligent s/o

A/N: heyy..sorry this took me so long 😭 I sort of took this as a reaction sort of thing so apologies if you wanted smth different.

Leonardo

I feel like he would be...flattered?

Outer space beings are seen as generally pretty cool in his eyes

So like..in his eyes..you think he's cool too

You're gonna catch him smiling to himself like he's the only one there

I mean you didn't scream or run 😭

He would be beyond flattered I think

Now don't expect him to say anything other than some stupid wise shit

"oh uh..Be still..we come in peace?"

He will in fact be in charge of de-escalating

Will 100% be thrown off by any smart shit you say and will immediately look at Donnie for clarification

But oh boy...he'd fall hard

Rapheal

The hell did you just say to him??

Did you just call him an alien??

"hey! I'm not.. anthropomorphic?"

Cue him looking at Donnie

Upon getting an explanation..cue tough teddy bear

"oh uh..yeah.. anthropomorphic..sure"

Will be in his own head the entire time

Trying to memorize big words to look up later

He wants you to think he's smart too 🥺

Why do you gotta be so cute 😭

Donatello

LOVE

Finally someone who speaks his language..

Genius

Will immediately jump into a heated discussion with you

Will definitely get irritated if anyone asks him anything

My boy just wants to talk to you 😭

"Would you like to discuss the properties and differences of outer space life forms and anthropomorphism?"

Say YES

He will 100% try to rizz you up with those big words of his

Michelangelo

"hey good looking-never fear Mikey's here"

He will definitely think that line killed

Is so confused by your entire being 😭

Your so smart!

Which he is absolutely loving

But he has never been more confused

Will consistently stop you and ask questions about what your saying

"dude.. what's that mean?"

He'll absorb what you're saying like a sponge

But will get distracted staring at you and thinking about how CUTE you are to him

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

THE HUNDRED LINE: LAST DEFENSE ACADEMY - Journal #4: Route 0 Days 46-56. [MASSIVE SPOILERS]

//Well...THIS was interesting.

//To be perfectly frank, this part of the game left me very...conflicted. As in some of the ideas that we have presented here, as well as the general plot progression of this part of the story...didn't really sink in with me on first experience, and didn't exactly invoke the kind of feeling in me I think it was supposed to.

//Was it a drop in quality? No, I wouldn't say so. What actually happens is still awesome, just...maybe it's something I'm not quite wrapping my head around.

DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS POST IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED/SEEN THE HUNDRED LINE: LAST DEFENSE ACADEMY. I WILL BE TALKING ABOUT VERY SPECIFIC PLOT POINTS AND MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE GAME.

//So let's get started:

DAY 46:

//The day starts off with Nozomi, who now seems more willing to be open and more willing to talk to Takumi, calls everyone to the War Room so she can finally give us more info about what exactly the group from STLDA learned from Nigou about "World Death."

//By the way, I've been unintentionally calling this thing "World Ender" because I'm writing ReCaptured, and this is what the Remnants call the Future Foundation before they find out the actual name of it, lmao. Unintentional, but honest mistake.

//And of course, this kicks off with a bunch of juicy new lore.

//As I have mentioned in passing with these blogs, one of my favourite parts about this game's story is how it's clearly set in a "distant" future, where humanity all live under a giant dome-like structure, and throughout the game, we see the characters react weirdly to phenomenons that we as regular humans think is natural.

//Just as it creates interesting scenes like that where the characters are unfamiliar with concepts that we find basic, the concepts that they live with under the TRC are what seem alien to us. So the more we learn about them, the more it hooks me.

//But essentially, Nozomi just gives a straight up summary here of WHY the Tokyo Complex was even created in the first place.

//To summarize what she says, Earth became uninhabitable due to a phenomenon called "World Death," caused by the planet itself deciding to end its life in response to humanity’s exploitation and environmental destruction. As natural disasters ravaged the planet, most of the population perished, but a few survivors escaped to massive underground shelters like the Tokyo Residential Complex.

//Over a century later, TRC's residents are the last remnants of humanity, with no memory of life above ground. Now, their survival is again threatened as resources run out. Their only hope lies in the mysterious item hidden in the Defense Room by Sirei. Nozomi and the others believe that the reason why we are here for 100 days specifically, is because that item is set to activate on the 100th day, serving as potentially humanity’s final chance at salvation.

//I don't know if there's nuance to this explanation, but considering the context we have thus far, it checks out.

//And again, there are some interesting tidbits here. For one thing...we find out that Darumi had an abusive brother...shame that, but unfortunately not super important for the current situation; though I am definitely more curious about it...

//And another, as it turns out, despite living in the TOKYO Residential Complex, none of these kids really even know what Tokyo WAS before World Death consumed it.

//Again, the difference in perspective between the audience and the cast is the most interesting part of this game's plot. This is normal for them. The idea that they descended from an entirely different race of human beings that covered an entire planet never even crossed their minds.

//This situation also got me thinking about the Invaders themselves. The current theory that the students have is that the Invaders are part of the world's will to destroy the rest of humankind.

//A definitely plausible theory for the moment, but I personally don't think it's true. And the main reason why I believe that at this point is because if the Invaders are part of World Death, then why can they not get past the Undying Flames? Or at the very least, how come the mooks can't get past the Undying Flames without some sort of special method? If they were part of the same apocalypse, shouldn't they be able to bypass it far easier than they've been shown to?

//I have other reasons, but they prop up later in this journal, so I'll cover them when I get there.

//MY personal theory is that the Invaders are exactly that. Alien Invaders. It's why they speak a completely unrecognizable language, and why they look so strange and...well...alien. My only issue is that at this point, I don't see why it's important for them to get past the school and into the Defense Room.

//However, my best guess is that whatever it is that humans are using to survive is potentially something that they stole from that alien race, and these guys want it back.

//And I think this checks out, because this conversation we have here really does go out of it's way to highlight that even after ALL the shit that's happened as a result of Earth trying to protect itself from greedy douchebags; the government of what's left of the world is still played up to be extremely selfish.

//A large reason why, or at least, as it's indicated by the characters, that most people in the TRC don't know about the old world is because most history books or textual knowledge on it has been scrapped. And I can only assume the reason is because they tried to erase any history of their fuck-ups. They don't want people to point the finger and blame them for their currently dying race.

//Coupled with the fact that they clearly have a hand in this war we're fighting, and drafted literal children into it to fight for the human race, and...yeah, it really calls morality into question.

//I'm almost thinking there's going to be an ending to this game where we find out the truth about the Invaders and what humans have done to them, switch sides, and help subjugate humanity. Of all the possibilities, there has to be at least one route that lets you turn your back on these nasty bastards.

//Anyway, with that all out of the way, it causes everyone's resolve to tighten...Everyone that is...except Ima and Kako.

//Oh, sorry, everyone except Ima and Ima alone. Kako is clearly far more motivated to fight than ever now, since only she and her brother are the one's sitting on the sidelines while even Shouma was able to come around to the idea.

//But Ima does not let Kako speak for herself, and it aggravates me to no end. Again, I was holding out for hope, because from what I'd seen of these guys so far, there had to be at least a good reason why. I was really banking on that actually, because in this part of the story, Ima just becomes insanely iredeemable, at least for a bit.

//We'll get back to that though.

//I still had Free Time for the rest of the day, and fortunately, within this time it's taken me to play, I've started to figure out more about what you should be doing with your spare time.

//One of the big issues that I had with this game was how upgrading moves costed BP. BP, which is an unreasonably rare resource during explorations. And one of my biggest critique's of the game itself was that doing explorations did not net nearly enough resources needed for character and weapon upgrades; even with a team that increases the likelihood of finding the resource.

//Turns out I was doing things a bit wrong.

//You're not SUPPOSED to farm BP with explorations. You just CAN do it. The REAL best way to get BP is by playing the VR training missions.

//I made the, admittedly, stupid as fuck mistake that you could only get the rewards from the VR missions once. Turns out you can just play them over and over again to get the points you need, and the best part is that it only costs one slot of time. And the more missions you unlock, the higher your potential reward is.

//If I spend a full day grinding the VR missions, it nets me about 6000 BP points minimum, which is perfect and serviceable for what I need. This is something I wish I'd recognized sooner; even before I started the game.

//But hey, better late than never.

//So...yeah, a lot of these 10 days I cover is gonna involve me grinding out the VR training. And again, even though she's not in the squad anymore, Hiruko is still registered in the training sim.

//I'm not going to talk extensively about what happens during my grind, because it's just the same mission over and over again, but I was able to get some new abilities for my characters.

//The standour one's are that Kurara now has an ability where she makes a turret that gives allies shields every turn, which, while not strong shields, is still very useful. And on top of that, Shouma actually got an attacking move.

//From what I can understand, Shouma can throw a punching attack that increases in power the lower his health gets. However, if he does attack, he immediately becomes stunned. Which...makes sense considering what we covered in the previous journal.

//This isn't a huge problem, but it does still make taking hits and reflecting the damage back his better option; especially since he can still lure enemies away from the point.

//Speaking of which, I did a big booboo in this fight as well, because I did not realize that Kurara's ultimate move worked the same way as the trip mine item; as in if they go off, it hurts EVERYTHING in the vicinity, INCLUDING your own teammates.

//So yeah, Gaku (appropriately) ended up getting blasted to death by the bombs. Poor guy.

//After the day ends, we have another Karua scene where she drops lore on what Earth was like before the TRC; very relevant to our current conversations.

//Although, to be honest, what I took away from it was really strange, and probably not important, but apparently what's going on is Takumi is in the middle of doing his summer homework, and Karua is watching him.

//My question is why does the concept of SUMMER break exist when the Tokyo Residential Complex has already been established to not have seasons?

//Should the concept of "summer" even exist to these people? And how come no one's questioning it if that isn't the case?

//I can't even call this a nitpick; I just think it's weird.

DAY 47:

//To be honest, a lot of the days I'm about to list are actually just days with Free Time. Which is good, because we need as much as we can get. But there are spruces of plot to break them up that mainly revolve around the twins, because obviously it's their turn to join the fight.

//But we did actually get a moment today during the breakfast sequence that actually made me laugh a bit.

//Can I just mention that I do really like that the writers of this game do give us extensive scenes to make up each day, even if they don't add much to the overall story. Kind of gives you this reminder that we are basically just living together like this, and we are regular people at the end of the day, despite what we go through.

//And it's a better chance to show off the characters just being friends; especially after the sheer spite between the two groups in the last arc of the story.

//Also, Komatsuzaki, holy shit, you branched out a lot for these sprites, huh?

//Yeah, not gonna lie, as weird as Gaku's sprites during this sequence is, him having a foodgasm over Kurara's curry is really funny to me. Especially given what's been going on with me at the moment.

//I haven't really talked about it, because it wasn't super relevant, but I've recently been rewatching a lot of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure; particularly Diamond is Unbreakable, because that part's my favourite.

//And one of my favourite episodes of that part; which I'm confident many agree with, is the Tonio Trussardi episode where Josuke and Okuyasu just go eat Italian food at Tonio's restaurant, and every time Okuyasu ate one of Tonio's dishes, he had a very critical breakdown of each one; and acted very intelligent about the flavor.

//This reminded me of that, so for me personally, it's as funny as it is relevant.

//I am also glad to see Kurara being hospitable. Because she is genuinely one of my favourite characters so far; especially after the last arc. Even when she was being a complete jerk, she was still a fav of mine, but having her acting this way just bumps her up for me.

//And one thing that I am so disappointed about is after breakfast, I actually spent the morning of that day hanging out with her to increase my stats. And while I don't remember exactly what happened with it, I remember Kurara was really mad at Gaku about something.

//And then she pulls out a fucking gun!

//Like, no cap, she tells Takumi she's gonna get revenge or...whatever, and then the screencap shows a fucking handgun, and she's like "Yeah, I'm gonna smoke this dweeb!" and Takumi has to talk her down.

//Caught me off guard in the best way, and I think Kurara might actually be one of my favourite characters in the game now.

//For context, after these days, this is my current tierlist. However, I will say that there is not a single character in this game that I think is bad or poorly written. The cast itself is genuinely very solid, and I pretty much like all of them.

//Which was one big reason why Danganronpa 2 was so good for me; because even the worst characters in it I still like a moderate amount.

//I spent the afternoon reading to increase my stats, and it kind of reinforced this idea that I brought up previously. The book I read was another one that contained a lot of history on the TRC, but so much of the content in it was censored.

//Again, the reason is pretty clearly because the government of the TRC are trying to leave the old world behind, along with how badly they screwed it up.

DAY 48:

//Today was another day where I just played the VR sim again, and even though I know it's going to get stale doing the same fights again and again just to get the resources I need, I think I'm getting used to it.

//It's not the WORST thing in the world. At least your efforts are fruitful.

//Only other thing worth noting is in the morning, there's a scene with Eito in the cafeteria where he mentions that thanks to what we now know about World Death, the possibility of Nozomi being an alternate universe version of Karua is looking increasingly unlikely.

//His reasoning is that since we're fighting for the sake of helping the Tokyo Residential Complex and the remains of humanity inside it to live another day, the likelihood of the academy and the complex being from different worlds is fairly minimal.

//Like I said before, I knew that that wasn't going to be the case, because the game does not just feed you answers like that. But yeah, I guess that's as good a reason as any.

//But once again, I am still absolutely clueless on who or what Nozomi is in that case. And I genuinely can't think of any good theories until the game gives us more information on her; which they have been pretty shy about.

//My best guess is that Nozomi's arc is going to come after we get the whole squad together.

DAY 49:

//I expected this would happen, but Ima has officially cut both himself and Kako off from the rest of the group.

//If you'd noted the tierlist above, Ima is currently square at the bottom of the list, even though I don't hate him. I just really don't like him for most of this part of the story, because he acts SO CONTROLLING. And the longer it goes on, the worse he gets. Again, we'll get to that, but his behaviour just gradually gets more and more disturbing as time goes on.

//But today turned out to be a little bit different. At the point I was at, I managed to get most of my social stats to level two, with Math and Gym being the one's I had to get next. Nozomi raises Math stat, so I planned on giving her a gift so she could help me level it.

//Unfortunately, I did search what she liked, and I didn't actually have the resources to make it. So what I did is I decided to go out exploring, and in one sitting, get to ALL the Treasure Chest locations on the map that I had unlocked so far.

//As a reminder, I am currently flame level 2 in the game, so I only have access to the Desert and the Forest.

//But I'm not gonna lie. Remember how I mentioned that the exploration stuff was by far my least favourite part of the game?

//Well...it STILL is...BUT I have managed to find a way to make it much, much, MUCH easier on myself. And it largely revolves around the team I picked to go out with.

//That squad is Nozomi, Shouma, and Kyoshika.

//First of all, I know that I kind of shit-talked Kyoshika initially, because her playstyle didn't really click with me, but after getting her some more moves and understanding how she functions, she is easily one of the strongest characters in the game.

//Even at a lower level, setting up the game right allows her to do more damage to enemies than even Hiruko was able to pull off early game. So in this squad, Kyoshika is my main DPS, with Takumi as my sub-DPS basically. If you use Takumi to clear out the smaller enemies and get them on their own with no adjacent backup, Kyoshika can effectively take out stronger enemies in one hit with her attacks.

//Having someone that strong means that I clear enemy spaces very easily very quickly, even the tougher ones.

//Shouma is really great for long-winded investigations because his whole thing is having the most health out of every character. So if you land on an event square where you take damage, he can take a lot of it and not really worry about it.

//He's also good at getting rid of smaller enemies on a wide scale in battle by luring them in and having them hit him. And again, considering the whole point of these missions is that health depends on how long the exploration is for, him being able to take damage that would normally badly hurt his party members makes him a godsend.

//This same reason is exactly why Nozomi continues to be the absolute uncrowned queen of this game, because in this kind of situation, having the ability to heal is just ESSENTIAL.

//So my main strategy is if my team is running low on health, I try to aim for spaces that initiate a battle, and during the battle, I have Nozomi just pump everyone's health up again. And then that health carries over to the board game mode.

//Of course, the issue is Nozomi herself is very squishy and lacking in health, so one really unfortunate roll on the board could kill her instantly.

//But in the event of something like that happening to any of my characters, I have been strictly advised to save-scum the fuck out of it, otherwise it's just not enjoyable.

//You need a LOT of patience with this gamemode, because if you don't have mental fortitude, it's gonna eat away at you. Getting these gifts in one sitting took SEVERAL HOURS, because you move so slow around this board, and in some places where you need to go, there aren't even any checkpoints that you can automatically jump to.

//Still easily the worst part of this game, and that's very unfortunate. But with the new characters on the team, it's at least not nearly as much of a luck-based grind that could end purely by chance.

//But I managed to get it all done, and ended that gameplay session there. But Day 49 doesn't end just like that though, because we have a really interesting cutscene.

//Remember how I mentioned that we had a scene where Karua and Takumi talked about the outside world again? Well, in that scene, Karua mentions the Moon, which again, is something that these kids are unfamiliar with. They live under a giant dome, so they've never seen anything in the sky ever.

//But this day ends with Takumi feeling a presence outside his door; which at the time I guessed was the Undying Flames boy, but it's raining when he goes out and no one's there. He ends up looking up at the moon and...

//...yeeeaaaaaaaaaaaahhh, that ain't normal.

//I have no idea what to make of it, but I do actually have two theories, and both of them relate to the same thing.

//That "thing" is my theory about the Invaders being aliens.

//THEORY 1: What we're looking at here isn't the moon, but the spaceship that the alien Invaders actually come from. They descend down to earth from this conviniently moon-shaped spaceship.

//My reasoning? Sirei mentions at the beginning of the game that the Undying Flames are specifically an inpenetrable wall of fire. The Invaders sometimes get through it, but we're never given explicit detail on HOW. HOWEVER, Sirei does mention that while the flames respond to enemies that try to get OVER them, he does mention that there is a limit to how high they can reach.

//And when he explains it, he very notably mentions that one way to get by it is to come in from outer space.

//Which is what I think the Invaders are doing, because even though we know some of them get past the Wall of Flames, we're never explicitly given details as to HOW. Just that some particularly strong one's can just...do it. So that would also explain THAT little detail.

//THEORY 2: Remember how I mentioned earlier that whatever's in the Defense Room may be something we've taken from the Invaders that they're trying to get back?

//While this might sound ridiculous, here's a distinct possibility that we're not even ON Earth right now.

//Maybe that's a bit confusing, but what I mean is that the moon that we're looking for is ACTUALLY where the Tokyo Residential complex is. It's not underground; we are GENUINELY on another planet.

//I'm not sure whether we're actually on Earth after World Death though, like Nozomi claimed earlier, or if what we think is the moon is actually the Earth, and we're on a foreign alien planet. It's really going to depend on what the actual mission here is, and those juicy lore drops are stuff that I just cannot WAIT to explore.

//Either way, as I predicted, almost immediately after Takumi looks at the moon, the Undying Flames boy showed up. This time, Takumi goes to manhandle him, but before he can do anything, the doofus slips on the rainwater and knocks himself out.

DAY 50:

//AND WITH THAT WE ARE HALFWAY THROUGH!

//I honestly have no idea how Takumi didn't catch an effin' cold seeing as he not only slept all night under the rain, but the fact that his body is not acclimatized to any kind of weather. Also, did his clothes somehow not get damp? How come Eito or he didn't even notice?

//Today we had a very interesting event happen...Takumi was going to tell everyone at the cafeteria that he'd run into the strange ghost boy again, but in the middle of him trying to explain it, the Invader alarm sounded, meaning everyone needs to rush over to the war room.

//I was surprised because it hadn't actually been that long, and I thought for sure that the next fight we did would be where Ima and Kako stepped into the fray. But turns out I shouldn't have spoken so soon.

//I actually did notice that something wasn't quite right with this time's alarm, because even though it played the intruder alert CG, normally after that, we get a cutscene showing the swarm of invaders rushing into the school. We didn't get that this time; which should have been a clear suggestion that this wasn't what we thought it was.

//When we get to the War Room, Yugamu points out that even though the alarm sounded, there isn't actually anybody on the campus, much less the invaders. However, from the flames, we do see a lone figure incoming. And while at first we think it's an Invader Commander, as we zoom into the image...

//YEEEEEE-!

//To be perfectly honest, this wasn't how I expected Moko to be introduced into the plot...like, at all.

//I thought that after we managed to get Ima and Kako to join us in the fight, Nozomi would bring Moko up again, and we'd go out on a search mission to rescue her.

//But it seems like she's come to us instead.

//I'm really not sure how she was able to get past the Undying Flames without a Fire Hydrant, but maybe she somehow still had one and used what was left of her Hemoanima to get inside?

//But that's also weird, since STLDA didn't have a wall of flames, so there was no need for those things, and I doubt Moko ever used one. Hopefully it will be explained later.

//We don't actually see a lot of Moko yet, because she spends most of this time recovering, but she's in the Student Profile now, and on the map. And we get this short scene of Nozomi consoling her; which was one of the more notable CG's that were revealed in the pre-release.

//Even with only a few dialogue lines at the moment, she is pretty entertaining already. Kind of just the silly character it seems; though a less psychotic version than Darumi. Whether or not she'll have any notable involvement in the plot or not remains to be seen.

//We do learn a little bit more about what happened to Moko from Nozomi here, and more about Moko as a character. First off, she's apparently a real high-school wrestler, and strong enough to take out a small army of Invaders on her own.

//Nozomi recounts how, when the second group first woke up at the Second-to-last Defense Academy, they were just as frightened and disoriented as the A-Team had been. But Moko quickly stepped up as a leader, keeping the group from falling apart. Effectively, she was originally for the group what Nozomi is for them now.

//She apparently always knew the right words to lift their spirits when things got tough, and it's because of her guidance and support that they evolved into the powerful team we were first introduced to.

//Tragically, on the tenth day of training, a massive swarm of Invaders attacked. Even with Moko leading them, the team was almost completely wiped out. According to Nozomi, they used a diversionary force on the north side of the school to keep the group occupied, while strike teams silently picked them off one at a time. The group, still inexperienced, couldn’t respond fast enough once they realized what was happening. Yugamu, Kurara, and Kyoshika were killed, and the defensive barrier was destroyed.

//To make things worse, Nigou was captured and the Revive-O'-Matic was damaged. Knowing that Nigou was vital to everything, Moko launched a desperate rescue. Despite being exhausted, she managed to reach him and throw him to safety, but she was too drained to escape and ended up being captured herself. By the time Nigou revived the others, the Invaders had already retreated, taking Moko with them.

//All of this is to say that I'm quite excited to see how Moko plays in battle. Particularly because I don't see what kind of role she might fit into.

//We already have DPS with the likes of Hiruko, Takumi, and Kyoshika, and Takemaru and Shouma already fit into tank role. I doubt she's a support, so...I am interested to see how differently she might play compared to who we've got so far.

//One of my favourite parts of this game is the variety of playstyles and strategies between characters. I do hope that Moko keeps that ball rolling.

DAY 51:

//Despite the fact that Moko came back, Day 50 was surprisingly short considering it's a milestone number.

//Not an awful lot happened today, but I have two highlights.

//First of all, the breakfast cutscene that morning got to show Yugamu and Darumi having an "enlightening" conversation, and even though we don't get much of this duo, I hope we get more, because their conversations are always cryptically hilarious.

//And second, would you FUCKING believe it, after all that grinding I did to get Nozomi a nice gift so I could raise my math stat, because she's busy taking care of Moko, Nozomi is UNAVAILABLE to hang out with!

//FUCK!

//I JUST WANTED TO GIVE YOU CHOCOLATE MY GIRL! WHY MUST I BE CUCKED THIS WAY!?

//Anyway, Eito also raises the Math stat, so I reset and decided to get him a gift instead.

DAY 52:

//*sigh*...Okay...

//Remember how I mentioned at the start that there was a significant point in this part of the story where the plot started to decline in quality? Well, it's this part here.

//This is the point in the story where Ima and Kako's involvement in the plot, and their character arcs, finally come forward. And unfortunately, it's not executed in the way that I hoped or wanted, but...let me explain.

//As I've mentioned before a few times leading up to this day, it's become clear that Kako harbors deep discomfort regarding her brother's behavior toward her. Even if, on the surface, they appear to be a typical pair of siblings, and fortunately, Kodaka doesn't ACTUALLY cross into incest territory with the Tsukumo's, it doesn't stop Ima’s actions crossing the line into something far more disturbing.

//And THIS PART of the story is CROSSING! THE LINE!

//As the plot unfolds, we begin to see Kako’s true desires more clearly. Rather than staying in her brother's shadow or continuing to play the obedient little sister, she wants to stand on her own and be part of the group’s effort to protect the school. Her determination grows steadily, and by this day, she finally reaches a breaking point.

//She gathers the courage to challenge Ima for the first time, to raise her voice and assert herself.

//Unfortunately, Ima’s reaction is as chilling as it is immediate.

//Rather than even pretending to consider her feelings, Ima glares at her with open malice, his expression dark and hostile. He coldly dismisses her words, grabs her by the arm, and drags her out of the cafeteria in front of everyone!

//He claims he’s going to “punish her for stepping out of line” and promises to give her a “thorough reeducation.” It’s a deeply disturbing moment, not just because of what he says, but because of what it implies.

//If you followed my main account @creepercraftguy, you'll know that I recently made a repost from one of @hopeymchope's posts where they talk about how he finds the cast of this game to be terrible, selfish people, and I went out of my way to refute their points and defend the characters and the games writing. In as civilized a way I could manage, I want to add.

//However, I CANNOT defend THIS! I think that hopey's assessment of what happens here with not just Ima and Kako, but everyone's reactions to what happens with the siblings, is spot on.

//This kind of control, entitlement, and possessiveness that are hallmarks of ABUSE!

//The terror on Kako’s face in that moment says it all. While it’s later implied that Ima didn’t physically harm her beyond perhaps a stern verbal tirade, since she seems relatively unharmed the next time she appears, the psychological toll in the moment impossible to ignore. This is the kind of dynamic you’d expect to find in an abusive household, not between two supposedly loving siblings.

//And that's not even the WORST part.

//Just as Ima starts PHYSICALLY dragging Kako away, Takemaru steps forward and blocks their path. Calm and composed, he doesn’t shout or resort to threats.

//He simply states the truth: if Ima truly cares for his sister, he ought to respect her autonomy and listen to what she has to say.

//It’s a simple, rational appeal...but one that Ima responds to in the most violently irrational way possible.

//Without a word of warning, Ima pulls out a weapon and STABS TAKEMARU IN THE STOMACH!

//JUST LIKE THAT!

//Like...this was his PLAN A! He wasn't even attacking in self-defense! Takemaru literally said ONE THING about how Ima was mistreating his "beloved" sister, that was very clearly true and everyone around him agreed with it, and Ima just STABS HIM FOR IT!

//I know that the game kind of already played it up for a long while before this bombshell dropped, but Ima might GENUINELY be the MOST FUCKED UP character Kodaka has ever written.

//Well...okay, maybe not, but he's DEFINITELY UP THERE!

//But it's not over yet!

//The scene itself is chaotic, shocking, and horrifying. After the stabbing, Ima successfully escapes with Kako, and Takumi, Eito, Gaku, and Yugamu manage to stabilize Takemaru and carry him back to his room so he can recover.

//But in the aftermath, something even more unsettling occurs. Despite everything, the threat to Kako, the stabbing, the obvious danger Ima now poses...Takumi just shrugs it off!

//He basically says it’s "too late" to act that day and simply decides to go to sleep, as if nothing could be done! The others seem to quietly accept this, and Takumi’s parting words are to “worry about them later.”

//LATER!?

//Kako is almost certainly being subjected to more of Ima’s abusive behavior right now, and yet the protagonist apparently prioritizes rest over rescue!

//And even putting that aside, AGAIN!

//IMA!

//STABBED!

//TAKEMARU!

//I can accept the students treating both Hiruko and Kurara's violent threats the way they did, with little agency, because we ultimately KNOW that neither of them are going to actually follow up on them. For Hiruko, it was clearly an incentive to get those afraid to fight to step up, and the same goes for Kurara; wanting to finally settle the disputes between the two sides at that point.

//But IMA is acting entirely selfishly, and did something that could almost have killed Takemaru with VERY LITTLE REASON! IF ANY! Literally all Takemaru did was say "You should listen to your sister!" and Ima went "Haha! You die now for that!"

//The lack of urgency is INFURIATING! No one is making any attempt to rescue Kako, restrain Ima, hell even both!

//And while I have gassed this game up to high heaven, and will likely continue to do so because I AM still enjoying it, this whole situation is a CLEAR failure on the part of the game’s narrative to treat the situation with the seriousness it deserves!

//The evening ends with Takumi getting a letter from Kako, essentially pleading for help. She asks Takumi to try and convince Ima to let her fight with the others, just as he was able to do for Tsubasa, Gaku, and Shouma. And Takumi agrees that tomorrow he will finally confront Ima about it.

//Which gave me a bit of hope that he was gonna step up...only for the next morning to have those hopes immediately dashed...

DAY 53:

The next morning, just as Takumi is about to go convince Ima to let Kako fight, Ima himself shows up at Takumi's door...completely unrepentant, mind you, and has the gall to ask for a favor.

//He flips the situation on its head, and gives us a different mission than normal. Instead of Takumi convincing Ima to fight, Ima instead wants Takumi to convince Kako to abandon her hopes of fighting alongside the group and return to passive obedience.

//However, he doesn't come empty handed. In exchange, Ima offers to take her place in the defense effort. So long as Kako doesn't fight, Ima himself will join the front lines so he can protect her.

//While this scene DID lighten the load a TAD, because it showed that Ima really does just want to protect Kako from any kind of harm, it’s an absurd proposition.

//In return for the privilege of Ima’s help; the same Ima who just stabbed someone for speaking out; you're asked to emotionally crush a victim of his mental abuse, and restore her to her "proper" role as his submissive little sister.

//To put this into Danganronpa fan perspective, this is equivelent to helping Kanade convince Hibiki that her only purpose is a mindless doll for her sister to play with.

//Worse still, this isn't a choice the player can meaningfully engage with. You're railroaded into compliance. No matter how many times you try to refuse. Even if you don't want to; and trust me, I DID NOT WANT TO, the game offers no real alternative.

//You’re stuck in a classic But Thou Must scenario: the story won’t move forward unless you agree to Ima’s terms. For me, it’s not just frustrating. It’s a betrayal of the emotional stakes the game itself has built up, forcing you to go along with a resolution that feels morally bankrupt.

//Yes Ima! Considering you stabbed a man and also look so much like Kokichi Ouma, you DO look like a HUGE liar!

//ANYYYWAYYYY, since we've essentially been FORCED into doing this, instead of going around to learn more about how to appeal to Ima, we instead go to learn a bit more about Kako and the twins in general.

//I'm actually okay with this part because even though I'm not on board with the actual mission, it does pique my interest.

//Mainly because we do get a little more information and characterization from Kako herself; who's contributions to the plot so far have been...fairly minimal. And some contribution from Ima too, who starts to open up about their backstory.

//Ima has always made it painfully clear that he’d throw the entire world under the bus if it meant ensuring Kako’s safety, but it's only with this part of the story where you see how his obsession with protecting her borders on apocalyptic. He would happily damn humanity if it meant shielding her from harm.

//But but the very obvious issue with what he's doing and why he's acting this way, is what does that kind of safety even mean if Kako isn’t allowed to be happy? If she’s not allowed to be free to make her own choices and have Ima dictate her his whole life?

//That’s the core problem, isn’t it? It's not just about whether she’s alive or unharmed — it’s about whether she gets to live her life, by her choices. And right now, thanks to Takumi's ongoing deference to Ima’s twisted logic, that freedom is slipping further and further out of reach.

//I’ll be honest. It’s incredibly frustrating watching Takumi cave like this. Whether it’s out of guilt, confusion, or just plain weariness, he keeps conceding ground to Ima, inch by inch. It’s not just disappointing. It’s disheartening; especially since Takumi has very quickly become one of my favourite protagonists in one of Kodaka's games, rivalling even KAEDE.

//We also learn something new about in that apparently, the twin's father used to be a detective. Which definitely shines a light on where Kako’s sharp intellect and analytical instincts come from. Even though she's unnasuming, she has been shown to be very keen, intelligent, and good at estimating outcomes, and I see where she gets it now.

//Her love of tech is another defining trait, and when Ima suggests getting her a motor scooter, it surprisingly turns out to be a solid idea. She reacts positively to the idea, and it’s one of the rare moments where Ima actually seems to understand her interests rather than project his own desires onto her.

//We also get confirmation about something that’s long been implied: the twins lost their parents at a very young age. I’d suspected as much, but hearing Ima talk about it gives it some more weight.

//He mentions that while they technically had other family members, those relatives didn’t care for them in any real sense. They abandoned the twins, leaving them to survive on the streets alone.

//Which, while this might be a stretch, kind of reminds me of Rei Mekaru's backstory in Danganronpa Another. As a reminder, Rei's backstory was that her birth parents were at risk of going backrupt and ending up on the streets, so they ended up disowning their daughter so that Rei wouldn't get caught up in the trouble and be dragged down with them.

//However, the family members that they entrustred Rei to abandoned her when things got a bit too difficult, betraying the trust of Rei's birth parents, and twisting her to make her believe that they'd never truly loved her. I'm getting similar vibes from this.

//That experience, as Ima explains it, is at the root of his obsession. Without Kako, he has nothing. She’s not just his sister, she’s his anchor. The only thing tethering him to the world.

//BUuuuuUUUuuUUUUuuuUUUuuuuuUUUUT-!

//While that tragic backstory helps explain WHY he clings to her so tightly, it doesn’t ABSOLVE him. Trauma might shape behavior, but it doesn’t excuse cruelty, especially not on this level. And what he’s done to Kako over the years is undeniably cruel, even if Ima himself didn't mean to come across that way.

//Effectively, Kako has relied on Ima to protect her basically their whole lives, and as a result, Ima knows nothing BUT protecting her. There's literally nothing else to his life besides making sure she is safe. Now that Kako is stepping up to fight, his own life is losing its purpose.

//Which I think is the REAL reason why Ima is so desperate to stop her. And honestly? It's sad! It really is sad; because Ima seems incapable of considering that these two could just be normal siblings that support EACH OTHER rather than forcing her to do things she'd rather not, just for her "protection," and his own selfishness!

//It's not that I don't GET it; I just don't think it's stated very plainly! And that kind of ruins the experience for me!

//What's worse, the version of events we hear feels incomplete. Maybe there’s more to it that we'll see later on. For now, there's not too much to work with.

//Interestingly, this moment marks the first time in the game where we’re able to make a gift without having to spend an entire in-game day gathering resources. Everything we need is just…handed to us. No scavenging. No side quests. Just a direct path to giving Kako something meaningful.

//It’s oddly convenient, almost like the game wants this interaction to happen smoothly, and that in itself feels a little suspicious.

//What follows is the minigame where you have to talk to a character and guide the conversation toward a specific outcome. But this time, we’re not trying to persuade Kako to stand up and fight. Rather this time, we’re convincing her to stop.

//And again, I'm REALLY NOT OKAY with this!

//I don't want to tell Kako to pull back, because it feels like I'm telling her to accept the very role she’s spent so long trying to escape. To make things worse, at least in my experience, this minigame was concerningly easy compared to the one's I did with Tsubasa, Shouma, and Gaku. I had basically no trouble with this one and got like...one wrong answer.

//Fortunately, there is one silver lining in this mess, if you can even call it that.

//The minigame ends as it does normally, but right at the last second, the game reverses, and ends in FAILURE. Takumi completely fails in his mission to convince Kako to step away from the fight. This is the only time in the game (so far) that this has happened, and THANK GOD, because this was the one time I NEEDED it to fail.

//At first, it seems like a small victory: she won’t be silenced, and she’s not going to just fade into the background as her brother wishes.

//Then, in a scene that’s surprisingly short and understated, Ima appears in the flesh and...finally relents.

//He doesn’t APOLOGIZE, at least not outright, but he does acknowledge, in his own indirect way, that he MIGHT have taken things too far.

//For the first time, he gives Kako his approval to stand alongside the others. It’s brief. It’s quiet. But it’s genuine.

//And...I DID like the exchange the twins have. Really I did. I think it's nice to see them come to an understanding, but also...it highlights what my biggest issue with this arc of the story was! It was TOO SHORT!

//The exchange itself is only a few lines of dialogue, and again, it kind of just ends with Ima giving up; not so much apologizing. It's the same issue as what happened with the stabbing scene. It went from 0 to 100 in no time flat, and now it's gone back to 0 equally as fast. Both times for very little rhyme or reason.

//And again, Takumi is not in the right here.

//Because while he fails to get her to abandon her determination, Takumi DOES twist the conversation into a justification of Ima’s possessive and controlling behavior. Instead of helping Kako recognize the toxic, dehumanizing grip her brother has had on her for years, Takumi, perhaps without even fully realizing it, romanticizes it. He reframes Ima’s suffocating control not as abuse, but as some kind of noble, selfless devotion. He paints it as an act of love that should be cherished and repaid.

//And to Kako, who has been emotionally manipulated and gaslit for so long, this recontextualization lands with horrifying effectiveness.

//I can accept that the Tsukumo's love each other really, and that Kako always wanted to fight for the sake of protecting her brother. But the way it's handled feels like some gut-wrenching reversal that doesn't sit right with me.

//Takumi may have walked into that conversation with good intentions, or at least some vague sense of moral responsibility, but the end result is...while I wouldn't call it a CATASTROPHE, because it DID mean something to me, it wasn't completely wholesome and above all else...not warranted.

//Rather than helping Kako, and hell, IMA too, liberate themselves from an emotionally damaging relationship, he becomes complicit in reinforcing it. He gaslights the gaslit. He enables the abuser. Whether it was done through ignorance, cowardice, or sheer moral failing, the outcome is the same.

//I suppose the problem I'm saying is it feels like Ima really didn't get a deserved commupance OR strong character arc here. He kind of just decides everything in this situation on his own, and everyone else is dancing to his tune. Which I really cannot get behind, despite how much I do like this game's writing overall.

//But...yeah, that's how the day ends. Not with a bang but with a "for fucks sake!"

DAY 54:

//Nothing much happens today, and the Tsukumo Twins are kind of off doing their own thing as always. Except this time, they're remaining seperate. I guess to sort things out on their own for once.

//I spent my free time doing gift giving to Takemaru. Gym was the one stat I still needed to upgrade to get more abilities. But in the meantime, I did check out the new area of the school, since it's the one time the game doesn't actively force you to check it out.

//The courtyard is basically just an indoor garden, but the standout feature of it is that there's a giant bird-shaped cage in there that's clearly setting up for something bigger, since they mentioned that it nullifies any powers.

//I don't know why we'd have that cage in the fucking courtyard, which is a place normally for relaxation. If we had any prisoners in there, that'd be really annoying.

//Takemaru's reaction to recieving gifts he likes is...surprisingly cute actually??? lol.

//I mean, I guess it makes sense because the guy clearly isn't the hardass that he comes across as.

//Also, I'm gonna be real, I actually don't care about the stupid guesswork, and did straight up google what gifts each of the characters like in this game to make the best out of my presents.

//And of course, one of the gifts you can give is a goddamn vibrator...

//And of COURSE, KYOSHIKA is the one who likes it.

//I don't know why I'm even surprised.

DAY 55:

//You know what's most surprising?

//Today is the penultimate day that I normally end these journals on where the Invaders come in and attack, but...I actually don't have very much to say about this fight!

//It's GOOD, but definitely not as impactful to me as the previous defense battles were.

//I’m finally starting to get a solid grasp on how to manage my time efficiently in this game. Now that I understand how everything works I feel a lot more in control.

/To be honest, it was pretty obvious this time around that the Invasion was going to come today; all the signs were there, and unlike last time, they rolled out the full cutscene to introduce it. So unlike the fake-out with Moko showing up, I knew that this one had to at least be legit.

//I had a strong hunch that Takemaru would still show up to fight, even after taking a knife to the gut courtesy of Ima. Lo and behold, I was right. He reappears, injured, sure, but still ready to stand his ground.

//I kind of thought that when we got into the fight, Takemaru would either be fatigued, or have lost a little bit of health off rip. But I guess the devs didn't really think to do something like that; or they just chose not to.

//The first round of the battle went relatively smoothly. It felt like a warm-up, especially with the team starting to fall into rhythm. But then round two hit, and things escalated fast. That’s when the Invaders started deploying a nasty new trick: Fog Machines.

//Do I even need to explain how infuriating this mechanic is? Surely the word "fog" is a dead giveaway.

//Once it's on the field, your visibility drops to practically zero. You can’t see any enemies unless you’re standing directly next to them, and UNTIL you’re adjacent, you can’t attack them either. It completely derails long-range strategies and makes positioning way more stressful than it needs to be.

//Basically, it forces you to fumble around in the dark, hoping to bump into something hostile before it bumps into you, and in the event you want to attack them on the main turn, that burns through AP like no tomorrow.

//Even more annoying is the low visibility means you can't even use Shouma to draw enemy fire away from the barrier. You CANNOT DO ANYTHING to the enemies UNTIL they are visible!

//Unsurprisingly, I hated this mechanic. It doesn’t feel challenging in a fun way, more like artificially slowing things down and punishing careful planning. The GOOD news is that it doesn't last very long.

//Luckily, help arrives in the form of the Tsukumo Twins, who join the fight mid-battle (who would have guessed?) with the exact tools needed to shut the fog bulshit down.

//And the way these two play is...well...WEIRD...

//Kako, true to form, plays a long-range sniper role. She can pick off enemies from a safe distance, which is a godsend in a battlefield where visibility is severely limited.

//Ima, meanwhile, is highly mobile and downright overpowered in this terrain. He floats above the ground, completely unaffected by terrain restrictions, and can travel across the map with ease.

//That said, neither of them really do enough damage to really net value out of. They're GOOD, but there are stronger characters in the squad, like Eito. Not that I'm devaluing either of them, because being able to cover that much ground between the two of them is very useful.

//But on top of that, Kako’s main attack comes with an annoying drawback. Every time she uses it, her damage output decreases.

//I get the idea; forcing the player to think carefully about when to use her; but it makes her feel less satisfying to use as the fight drags on. I’m not really a fan.

//After the twins enter the battlefield and start tearing through the fog machines, the tide of the fight shifts dramatically. Once those devices are destroyed, the fog lifts, and the battlefield opens up again. With full visibility restored, the rest of the fight is pretty straightforward. The enemies are fully exposed, and from that point on, it’s a no-holds-barred brawl.

//In the words of our forefathers: Rip and Tear until it's done!

//However, even though the fight itself is nothing to write home about...the CONCLUSION brings a pretty dramatic twist to the story.

//As established, most of these combat situations end with picking one of the students to end the life of the commander and absorb it's hemoanima. But in the past, we've mostly done this to commanders that are defeated and defenseless. The only time that we've done otherwise is the first commander, that Hiruko didn't really give the time of day.

//This time though, the commander survives past the initial cutscene, and pleads for mercy just like the first one does. While we ARE about to ignore it, the twist comes from the Commander REMOVING its mask and...

//...

//...Is it bad that I find it insanely attractive?

//Okay, jokes aside, there is a very chilling moment here where the characters are shocked to find that the enemy Commanders look like regular human beings under the masks. However, we still can't understand what she's saying because she speaks a completely seperate language from us.

//There is another interesting lore moment here where Eito suggests that she's speaking a FOREIGN language, which is why the students can't understand her. I didn't even realize that the concept of racism might not even exist within the TRC because it's just the world as they know it. Everyone looks the same and speaks the same language; unlike the world we know.

//Of course, the Invaders speak a completely alien language even to us, but these guys have no way of knowing that.

//But yeah, this fight ends with this Commander succumbing to an entirely different fate than what we're used to. Instead of killing her outright, they take her prisoner and lock her up in one of those cages I mentioned earlier; until they could understand her language and get information out of their enemies from her.

//I KNEW that was gonna come into play somehow!

//I have a distinct feeling that this Invader is gonna end up being an important character, and I didn't even think about it until now but...what if this Invader joins OUR side and becomes the 16th student!?

//Like, we HAVE to have 16 party members by the end of this, right!? It's already so weird that we only have up to 15. I dunno, I guess we'll see.

DAY 56:

//GO HOME GO BED!!!

Conclusion:

//Yeah, this part of the story was a low-point overall.

//Not UNSALVAGEABLE, and definitely good character moments, but my main takeaways from it aren't great:

I like the Tsukumo twins a little bit more than I did before now that I properly understand them, but I think they are still my least favourite characters in the game. At least Ima is.

I did NOT enjoy the coercion segment of this chapter. It felt so wrong trying to steer Kako off doing what she wanted, with no choice but to do so. In the end, I'm glad she stuck to her guns regardless of what Ima and Takumi said.

I'm hoping the twins end up being better characters in the future. I already think Kako is cool and cute, but she hasn't had much change to shine on her own thanks to her fuckhead brother; who definitely didn't get the commupance he deserved.

There are still so many questions about World Death that even the general explanation doesn't answer. The mysteries of this game keep piling on; especially with the introduction of this potential ally commander.

//I AM still enjoying this game as much as I always have done. Even with all that's happened here, it hasn't really affected my opinion of this game; nor my willingness to continue playing it.

//Every game has highs and lows, much like my expectations. I had them high, and was low-blowed by them. This part of the game was fundamentally flaws overall, even if I do understand the idea they were going for; since it felt super rushed and unpolished.

//Which is a real damn shame. Here's hoping the next part will be better.

-Mod

[ckret2]

Chapter 29 of human Bill Cipher will find a way out of being the Pines' prisoner or so help him, featuring:

Summerween!!!!

and also:

Henchmaniacs.

Kryptos doesn't actually talk like that, it's just how he's currently feeling.

####

January 1, 1982

"You're late," Bill said, a bit reproachfully.

Ford gave him a surprised look. "Did we have an appointment?" He didn't remember one. He was pretty sure he'd remember an appointment with his muse, even if he'd made it in a dream.

"Pfff, appointments are for people without an eternity of time! No, I'm just used to you dreaming by midnight. It's weird for you to stay up past two when you aren't working on a project."

"I suppose it is." Ford was flattered Bill was paying close enough attention to notice his sleep habits. "I thought I'd stay up late to bring in the new year."

"The what?"

"The... new year?" What wasn't registering. How do you explain New Year's to an alien/angelic messenger? "It's when—"

"Oh, oh right." Bill waved off the rest of Ford's explanation. Several calendars and clocks spiraled in the air like a Ferris wheel in front of Bill, "Between trying to figure out whether you meant it was 0 Pop or Tishrei 1, I completely forgot about Chaos 1. You guys have too many calendars!"

And he'd skipped over January entirely. Wryly, Ford said, "The next time somebody asks for my input, I'll let them know you want us to use a few less."

Bill laughed. "Smart aleck." The calendars and clocks vanished. "And all you did to celebrate was stay up a little later than usual? No parties? Okay, I know you don't know anyone throwing a party—but you didn't even celebrate at a bar?" Bill ruffled his hair. "All work and no play makes Ford a dull boy!"

Ford endured the ruffling. He wasn't quite sure whether Bill was scolding him for staying up celebrating, or for not celebrating enough. "I... suppose I could celebrate in here?"

"What do you want, a fireworks show?" In the distance in Ford's mindscape, a single large firework exploded. It shifted colors, purple to yellow to green to red, before fading. "I don't think so! If you wanted fireworks, you should've gone to the show on the lake. I've got some prophecies to pass on, and I'd rather get to them this REM cycle."

By "prophecies" he probably meant a random assortment of warnings about Ford's upcoming week, which historically had varied in severity from "don't visit the lake Tuesday evening or you'll get caught in a snowstorm and die of hypothermia" to "you'd better get groceries in the morning before they sell out of your toothpaste brand." And Ford was always grateful for such messages—but now he wished he could see what sort of fantastical color-changing dream fireworks show his muse could put on. "I take it it's not a new year on your calendar."

"I don't keep track of that stuff. When you're as ancient as me, celebrating the new year is like celebrating a new hour."

Bill had so easily brushed off the implicit invitation to discuss "his" calendar. Ford wasn't surprised. Over the years of sporadic meetings with his muse, Ford had noted that Bill never shared information about where he'd come from or how he filled his time when he wasn't bestowing his wisdom—as if Bill was a thing that simply is, a muse that offered inspiration because it was made to inspire, with no history or identity outside of its role in service to humanity. He always dodged the questions gracefully.

But he never seemed bothered that Ford had asked. In fact, as long as Ford didn't pry into Bill's history and kept his inquiries comfortably shallow, Bill always seemed happy to receive personal questions. Ford had found that even when Bill talked like he was in a hurry, it was very easy to get him off track (and consequently extend his visit to two or three more dreams) by asking him about himself.

Ford wondered why that was. Was it a part of his duty—was he compelled to answer his chosen students' questions, to enlighten them on the mysteries of the universe, to help tug back the curtain of reality to reveal wonders unknown—wonders that included Bill himself? Or perhaps Bill was used to students seeing him as a source of knowledge without seeing him. Perhaps he was grateful that somebody was interested in him enough to ask.

Whatever the case—Bill clearly liked being asked about himself, and Ford liked getting his muse to stick around a little longer than planned. So rather than letting Bill get on to the prophecies he'd promised, Ford asked, "Do you ever... participate in any human holidays? After all, you've offered so much to humanity. I'm sure any of your prior protégés would have been honored to invite you as a guest to our celebrations. I would be honored." And Ford wouldn't mind having friendly company on the holidays that he'd gotten in the habit of ignoring until they shrank to nothing but a square on a calendar.

"Ha, I know you would! But no, not really," Bill said. "Don't get me wrong, it's not that I look down on your cute little local festivals. They just don't have any relevance to me! A celebration of a bountiful harvest, a prayer to get through the winter, the veneration of a local long-dead celebrity... I come from a timeless realm of divinity, sublimity, color and light! Most of your planet's holidays are about issues that don't matter to me."

"Ah. I see," Ford said. "Are there any human holidays you care about?"

Bill mulled over the question. "Maybe one or two."

####

June 22, 2013

Bill thundered down the stairs, charged into the kitchen, and announced to the Pines, "If I don't get to wear a Summerween costume I will literally die."

Without looking up from the morning paper, Ford said, "Then die."

####

It took ten minutes for Bill to bargain Ford up from "death" to permission to wear a costume—provided that it was free; that Bill agree to stay inside for the holiday without complaint (WITHOUT COMPLAINT) no matter what fun activities he heard happening outside; that Ford didn't have to do anything to help Bill obtain said costume; and that Bill take a dang shower.

Bill groaned. "Another shower already?"

"You wouldn't need so many if you didn't insist on running around in an acrylic sweater and polyester leggings in summer."

Bill knew that. That was one of the reasons he did it. It was useful for the humans to think the showers were their idea.

Bill agreed to all terms, and even volunteered to get the dang shower over with now so they could both get on with the rest of their days.

He'd never admit it, but Bill had been wanting a shower. Not for the hygiene, but for the privacy. This was the first time he'd had a door between himself and the Pines since he'd broken the shack's unicorn hair barrier.

Time to call in reinforcements.

Bill covered the mirrors, turned on the shower, undressed, stuck his head under the shower stream so that if anyone barged in on him he could use his wet hair as proof he'd been showering, and squinted through the wooden door to confirm there weren't any humans lurking nearby. Coast was clear—but wow, it hurt to bend his eye that way. He rubbed at it irritably as he set up his ring of candles again, and wasn't surprised when his fingertips came away bloody. He thought it hurt more than it had last time. He wondered how many more times he could glance into higher dimensions before this body's eyeballs gave out on him. Hopefully he wouldn't need them that long.

He drew Kryptos on the floor, lit the candles, and started muttering the chant to summon him. "Rhombus sapphirinus. Fraternitas, caritas..."

The steamy air went chill, the water pattering in the tub grew muffled, the whole world slowed and paused. For weeks, Bill's every attempt to break into the mindscape had been a futile strain; but now, instead, the mindscape surged up and swallowed him into its gray twilight, like evening embracing the land on the heels of sunlight's departure. Bill knew he wasn't awake anymore. It was working.

A force outside of Bill borrowed his throat to speak the last of the ritual—it worked!—and before his eyes, a diamond window opened into the Nightmare Realm.

####

Standing at the edge of one of the Quadrangle of Qonfusion's many perpendicular floors, arms crossed, scowling deeply, Pyronica glared at a neon-acidic cotton candy nebula light years away. "Guys," she said, "it's doing the thing again."

8 Ball, Keyhole, and Zanthar glanced away from their video game toward the nebula. Amorphous Shape peeled a few squares off a column to peer at it with Hectorgon.

"Look at this." Pyronica clapped her hands.

In the nebula, crackles of lightning-like bolts of light millions of miles long shot through the starry clouds. A noise like thunder boomed from it, rattling the Quadrangle. An ugly statue fell off a column-shaped pedestal and landed on a wall.

She clapped twice more—each time, eliciting more lightning—then gestured emphatically at the nebula. "How am I doing that!"

"Can't be you controlling it," Amorphous Shape said. "That nebula's over a dozen light years away. That light had to have happened years ago, we're just seeing it now."

Already turned back to his video game and determinedly trying to murder Keyhole, 8 Ball said, "Maybe the nebula's controlling you."

Pryonica said flatly, "You think a bunch of stars is making me clap."

"Eh. Like astrology or something."

Hectorgon said, "Could be a time loop thing."

"Could be," Amorphous Shape said thoughtfully.

Pyronica threw up her hands, which made the distant nebula's colors shift slightly. "If it's not weird butterfly effects or faster-than-light light, it's time loops. I hate this place. All it'd take is a hard sneeze to knock the whole dimension down."

She'd been saying things to such effect for the past few months. Consequently, nobody really paid much attention to the latest round of griping about the Nightmare Realm's poor maintenance, until she said, "I'm bailing on the Quadrangle. Soon as I can find a decent rock in some other dimension. Who else is coming?"

8 Ball glanced down at Pyronica from the floor with their gaming setup. "Hold on, are you serious?" He quickly had to look away as Zanthar took advantage of the distraction to attack.

"Yeah, I'm serious. I don't wanna break up the gang, but I'm sick of this dump."

Huddled on a nearby wall like an unemployed gargoyle, Paci-Fire said solemnly, "I will stay, Mother. The Quadrangle of Qonfusion is the only home I have ever known."

"Probably one of my worst life decisions," Pyronica muttered. "The Quadrangle isn't our home, it was Bill's. We're just... just..."

Ducking in from between two columns that seemed to lead to a purple-shadowed nighttime meadow, Teeth said, "Eternal couch-surfers."

"Ha! Yeah, that. Hey, where you been the past week?"

"Took a wrong turn to the bathroom. I ended up in that pocket dimension Bill grounded the electrical wiring into."

"Again?"

"I never know how many times to cross that one infinitely looping hallway!"

Pyronica gestured at Teeth. "See, this place is a complete mess. We'd be better off moving to any other dimension. And you'd like living in a real dimension if you gave it a shot, Paci!"

"No." Paci-Fire crossed his arms. "I do not want to."

"At least think about it. Wouldn't you like to live somewhere that has moons? Instead of going on a road trip to another dimension every time you want to drive a civilization to extinction?"

Keyhole muttered, "I hate those stupid road trips. They're always a zillion light years long and we never do anything fun."

"Hey!" Pyronica pointed at Keyhole. "Watch it! My kid's a lunarcide prodigy, he gets to go on as many moon-destroying trips as he wants!"

Keyhole cringed. "Right, right, sorry." 8 Ball muttered something disparaging about Keyhole's intellect, right before blowing him up for the second time.

Paci-Fire asked, "And say we were to move to a dimension with more moons. What would we do when the authorities follow us home after another successful slaughter?" A side-effect of growing up in the Henchmaniacs was that Paci-Fire regarded The Authorities as a nebulous bogeyman that was personally out to get him and all his family and friends. "Are we to lock the door and cower from them like—like cowards? Or constantly flee from one dimension to the next? No, Mother. I do not wish to live like a pariah in the dark corners of—" his lower mouth sneered around his pacifier, "civilized dimensions. There is nowhere safer for us than the Nightmare Realm."

"Sweetie, you don't have to be afraid of the authorities in other dimensions—"

"Mother! I know no fear." Paci-Fire's eyes flared a bright, dangerous red.

Pyronica playfully tugged one of his horn. "We can find a dimension as primitive as 46'\ without any interstellar cops. Like—which dimension were you from, Teeth, it doesn't even have any organized space authorities, does it?"

"Oh, yeah, pretty much every world in my galaxy was still ground bound when Bill recruited me." Teeth stepped on a column, slid off, and shuffled around it, trying to remember which side doubled as a walkway to the kitchen. "I don't really mind staying here, though. I mean yeah, we don't have a roof, or consistent walls, and the wiring's a mess. But the rent's really reasonable for a place this size in this part of the Nightmare Realm."

Hectorgon processed that. "Hold on." He lay on a wall and slid up it until he was mouth level with Teeth. "You've been paying rent?"

Teeth paused mid-column. "Wh—yeah? What's that supposed to mean?"

Pyronica bit her lip to keep from laughing, elbowed Paci-Fire, and hissed, "I thought Bill was joking about charging Teeth rent!"

Paci-Fire murmured, "Bill Cipher was always a most droll prankster."

"Who are you paying it to?" Hectorgon asked.

"I mean—I was paying it to Bill. But I dunno who took that over, so I guess, kinda... no one?"

With a mildly offended tone, Hectorgon lied, "You were supposed to give it to me now."

"Oh." Teeth shifted awkwardly. "Uh... sorry, Hect, no one told me. I don't think I've got enough on hand to cover all the..."

"It's fine, everything's been topsy-turvy since... the last few months. Just give me what you have and pay back the rest as soon as you can, okay?"

"Sure, sure, no problem. Thanks, man."

Pyronica bit her lip to keep from laughing. "All right, so Teeth is stupid enough to stay here."

"Hey!"

"But I don't see why the rest of us should be." She looked up at the trio playing games below her, then tried to remember which stupid paradox staircase led to that level. She hesitantly headed up one that looked promising. "Moving out would be worth it just to be somewhere with consistent physics!"

"I am contented with the inconsistent physics," Paci-Fire said.

"It took you fifty years longer than most kids to learn how to walk," Pyronica said. "I know you're my little genius! It's this dimension that's holding you down!" 

"Boo," Paci-Fire said sulkily.

"Paci, you don't even like the Quadrangle. Nobody does."

Amorphous Shape let out a chorus of sharp gasps. They slid around a corner and reappeared sliding from the underside of the staircase to the top, laying zigzag atop the steps to glare at Pyronica. "Excuse us."

"I'll step on you, Morph," Pyronica threatened. Amorphous Shape grudgingly slid over for her to pass. "Fine, Bill's stupid 2D groupies like the Quadrangle. But the rest of us don't."

"What's wrong with it?" Morph demanded.

"What's—?!" Pyronica gestured upward at the floor below them. "You don't see the problem with this?!"

"It's supposed to be like that. It's a shortcut." 

"It's a—!" Pyronica covered her face and suppressed a scream. "It's giving me vertigo!"

"It doesn't give us vertigo," Morph said defensively. They partially peeled off the steps to look at Hectorgon. "Does it give you vertigo?"

"No, I'm fine."

"What about you, Kryptos?"

There was no answer.

"Krypt?" Morph reluctantly peeled off the stairs entirely and hovered in the air to try to get a better view.

"He probably got sucked into The Void," Keyhole muttered, "it was vibrating this morning."

8 Ball sighed. "Why do we even have that Void?"

"Man, I dunno."

Pyronica ascended to the bottom of the stairs, sat on the arm of the gamers' couch, and said, "The point is—none of us need this place. I got by fine before joining Bill, most of you guys did too, and we can get by just fine now without squatting in his weird architecture project."

She leaned behind Keyhole and 8 Ball to poke Zanthar's arm. "Big Z, you still have worshippers in your home dimension, right? Aren't you still getting offerings?"

Zanthar shrugged noncommittally.

"They've still got legends of you, you can whip them back into shape in no time. Keyhole, you've got family—"

Without looking away from the screen, where he was losing hideously, Keyhole muttered, "I'm not moving back in with my mom."

"I'm not talking about your mom, stupid, what about your sisters?" 

Keyhole winced, though it was hard to tell whether it was from Pyronica's question or from getting killed for the third and final time. "I don't know... Bill and I were talking about them once, and I realized they're as bad as Mom was. Bill said probably the only reason they didn't treat me as bad is because they never got the opportunity—"

"Who cares what Bill said," Pyronica snapped. "Bill's dead! We don't have to listen to him anymore!"

"Hear hear," 8 Ball muttered; but he couldn't throw in anything else, lest Zanthar blow him up and win the match.

Pyronica said, "Face it: the only reason the rest of us didn't leave the Nightmare Realm millennia ago is because Bill couldn't leave."

Morph drifted through the kitchen—reaching around Teeth to grab a drink out of the fridge as they passed—and unfolded questioningly around a corner. "There you are."

Kryptos was in the rec room, lounging on Bill's stupid tacky optical illusion throne with the fabric of reality upholstery, staring out a window (or skylight, depending on your point of perspective). He grunted at Morph.

Morph said, "Bill's gonna be furious you're using his throne."

"Whatever. Z's already spilled time punch on the armrest." Kryptos pointed at the patch of reality on the armrest that was out of chronological synch with the rest of the throne.

"He's not gonna be furious," Pyronica said, shouting through the doorway that inexplicably connected to the rec room. "He's not gonna be anything because he's dead. He died. D-E-A-D."

"He's not." And suddenly Morph were in Pyronica's face, all of their polygons and lines and piercing slitted eyes circling her head like angry moons. Keyhole leaned toward 8 Ball to see the screen around them, and 8 Ball elbowed him back over. Morph said, "He can't be. If Bill was dead, the Nightmare Realm would be falling apart even faster—"

"So let's bail while we can—"

"—but it's not," they said. "If anything, its degradation is slowing down. That would be impossible if he were dead, he's instrumental to holding the Nightmare Realm together—"

"Unless he lied about that, and he was actually making everything worse," Pyronica said.

"Bill's not a liar! We have the data to prove it, we've been measuring the degradation for billennia—"

"I'm sick of your stupid measurements! It was your 'measurements' that said 46'\ was perfect to take over! Was that stupid barrier part of your measurements?!"

"That barrier was extremely localized, there's no way we could have detected—"

"The portal was right in the middle of it! How did you idiots miss it?!"

8 Ball groaned as Zanthar whittled away the last of his HP. Zanthar let out a gentle hum like the sound of an apocalyptic vacuum cleaner as the game declared him the winner.

8 Ball tossed his controller at the TV. The TV squealed in fear. "If Bill is alive, that's just another reason to get out of the Nightmare Realm! Leave before he gets back! He can play king in this dump by himself."

Paci-Fire said, "Surely, you do not mean that. Were Bill still around..."

"No! No, I do mean it! The only reason we've stayed so long is because everyone's too starstruck or too scared to ditch him! Not anymore! If his flat-brained cultists wanna wait for him, fine! But why do we all gotta stay?"

"Hey!" Hectorgon rushed in from the kitchen to snarl at 8 Ball. "Who're you calling flat, cue tip—?"

Kryptos tuned out the argument downstairs/next door as 8 Ball and Hectorgon started brawling. Who were they kidding? Nobody was leaving. Maybe 8 Ball, he'd tried to split four or five times before crawling back, but Kryptos didn't care about him anyway. Bill had always been right about him: he was too selfish to care about the rest of the gang but too stupid to make it on his own. They'd taken in losers like that before and it had never been a big loss when they left. But no one else would leave. Where would they go?

Where could they go?

Kryptos didn't care about the outerplanar Henchmaniacs' reasons for joining Bill; but the shapes were here because Bill had promised to make them a new home. He was the only one in all of reality who could do it. Kryptos was as desperate to hear from Bill as Morph and Hect were. They'd held fast to Bill's promise for a trillion years—so how could they let go of whatever thin thread of that hope remained? Who would they be if they lost it?

But in his heart, Kryptos didn't really believe Bill was out there. He'd been gone too long. And Kryptos couldn't imagine anything less catastrophic than Bill's destruction could have reversed Weirdmageddon.

Yet he was still here, and still waiting, because he didn't know what else to do. He'd stay in the Quadrangle until the whole realm finally fell apart, just in case Bill casually floated back in one day. He'd do anything they could think of to find him and bring him back.

And then Kryptos got a call from Earth.

He sighed heavily.

Calls from Earth weren't unusual. Perks of having helped found the Fishmasons: Kryptos was occasionally summoned by the Fishermen high-ranked enough to be told their organization really did know an interdimensional alien who was their de facto secret leader and presided over their most important rituals. Assuming "de facto secret leader" meant "living equivalent of a beloved sports team mascot," and "presided over" meant "got free invitations to," and "most important rituals" meant "most fun parties." But the humans liked to pretend that their little group was a lot more important and cloak-and-dagger than the social club it really was; and all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge pretending-Kryptos-was-in-charge, while silly, was also kind of flattering. You didn't get many chances to be the star of the show when you lived around a supernova like Bill.

So, Kryptos got calls from Earth from time to time—at least a handful a year—typically from a middle-aged man in a business suit trying to pretend he wasn't giddy about being the guy who'd gotten permission to pull out the candles and contact The Alien.

Kryptos was not in the mood to talk to humans. Humans were why they were in this mess. Humanity could go jump in a lake.

But it wasn't every human's fault that a handful had somehow taken out Bill. And maybe they were calling for a party. Maybe it would cheer him up.

So he sighed again, half heartedly shouted, "Guys—guys, shut up a second, I'm getting a call," and opened up a window to Earth.

His vision was filled with a brown-skinned golden-haired haunted-eyed human who, at the sight of Kryptos, gave him a relieved, face-splitting smile. "H—"

Kryptos hung up.

To reiterate: he took calls from middle-aged men in business suits. That was a naked woman crouched on the floor like an animal.

"Who was it?" Hectorgon asked.

"No one. Some woo-woo witchy type who probably dug up a leaked Fishmason ritual online."

Hectorgon laughed. "I bet it thought it could ask a 'demon' for lottery numbers."

"Sorry, sister, but that's Bill's schtick," Kryptos said. "My number is unlisted for a reason."

Kryptos wondered about Bill's human pals. Well—"pals" was a bit of a stretch—devotees and students. How often did he get calls? And now they couldn't reach him.

Stinks for them. Must be awful, reaching out to someone in another dimension for help and getting nothing back.

####

An ethereal, sourceless voice whispered in Bill's ear, "The all-knowing dream demon you're trying to reach is currently unavailable for visions and prophecies. If this is an emergency, wake up and call your nearest Masonic lodge. Otherwise, please leave your prayers or petitions after the beep." Beep.

Bill stared, jaw dropped, at the empty patch of air where Kryptos had been projecting just a moment ago. After several seconds of mute outrage, Bill said, "Kr... Kryptos. You... I swear, if you don't get back here this SECOND—"

The sheer force of his anger woke him up. His eyes fluttered open to the world of color and humidity and pattering water. He grabbed every towel he could reach, wadded them up, and screamed into them. "KRYPTOS YOU SON OF A— I KNOW YOU NEVER CHECK YOUR VOICEMAIL! AND WERE YOU ON MY THRONE, WERE YOU SITTING ON MY SPECIAL THRONE—!"

He shrieked until his lungs were empty.

####

At sixty minutes exactly, Ford knocked and opened the bathroom door. Bill stood scowling behind it.

Dryly, Ford asked, "Have a pleasant shower?"

Wet hair hanging in tangles, face flushed red, eyes even redder, Bill snapped, "Yeah. Refreshing."

####

"Mabel?"

Mabel glanced down from the stepladder at Bill, then pointedly looked away and continued taping Summerween decorations to the hallway wallpaper. "What."

"Mabel," Bill tried again, a touch more pleading. "O great Shooting Star. My hero. My one and only friend in this hostile universe. Last person who hasn't utterly forsaken me." He leaned on the wall, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead. "The sole illumination in the dark night of my accursed postmortem existence—"

Mabel grudgingly looked at Bill again. "What do you want?"

"Listen: I know I upset you at the mall, and I still need to make it up to you—I do, I do, I just haven't had a chance yet—and you're still a little mad at me, okay—buuut... can you help me make a costume." He pressed his hands together. "Please. I'll owe you one. I'll be in your debt. Just let me dress up for Summerween."

Mabel frowned at him. She frowned a little more. She said, frowning, "You're so lucky I love costumes."

####

(Next week: Summerween part 2!! Thanks for reading, if you enjoyed I'd love to hear from y'all what you think! I've been waiting to get to the Henchmaniacs for a long time. Mainly in the hopes y'all will yell at me for putting Bill through heck again.)

[botaniqueer]

Mycorrhizal Networks, Anthropomorphism, Popular Science, and the Fantastical

One of my favorite podcasts, Let's Learn Everything did an episode recently on a topic I had been thinking about recently (episode 84 which you can listen to here), which is the topic of mycorrhizal networks and the connections between trees. Specifically about how it has entered popular science and become uncritically adopted as fact alongside some very New Age spiritual interpretations of it.

I obviously love plants and nature (I have an entire science blog!) and I want to learn all the cool things about them! But also liking a thing means not making up said cool things about them and also not projecting a lot of human attributes and values onto them, and instead enjoying them on their own terms. Here is a scientific paper more about this! ('Mother trees, altruistic fungi, and the perils of plant personification')

This isn't to say that there isn't something there are all– fungal connections between trees are absolutely substantiated! But we also need to not immediately construe it the way it's been portrayed in pop-sci articles– we don't actually know the nature of it, and it might not be deliberately to help other trees at all. We do know that chemicals from trees are making it into the others via the fungi though, we just shouldn't project human motivation or sentience upon trees and fungus, they are aliens to us, but that's one of the things that makes them cool. And everything is genuinely interconnected which is also really cool! Just not in the way that New Age folks construe it to be, with its spiritual connections.

In general we need to be more aware of the cognitive bias of bias towards more fantastical explanations; they're attractive to us because they help break away from the drudgery of real life, and in cases where the explanations being sought are related to human suffering, make life feel like it has more meaning. In the worst case scenarios, this leads people to look for conspiracy, blaming marginalized people or a shadowy council for the world's ills, when the motivations of the powerful are much more mundane, though not as cathartic, causing the causes to be ignored.

The above case isn't nearly as harmful, but it does link to the greater problem of how science is communicated, and also that there is a need to be flashy in order for people to even pay attention to research. (This is also a capitalism problem. Boring mundane science is the meat of science and research, and allows the flashier stuff to even come up. It also doesn't get funding) Another area of study like this is quantum physics, which while very cool and strange is also more mundane that portrayed in popular culture.

[kathaynesart]

I remember when you first started Replica and I haven't been here in a hot minute!

May you please do a debrief of what it is, the characters and their relationships.

I want to be able to give my friend (who I finally dragged down into this TMNT rabbit hole) a good explanation of your wonderful comic!

(⁠.⁠ ⁠❛⁠ ⁠ᴗ⁠ ⁠❛⁠.⁠)

Aw thank you so much! Hm… I suppose a summary would be good to have on hand. For the uninitiated with no context, here is the basic elevator pitch:

The year is 2044 and the last remaining Resistance of Earth has just fallen to the alien invaders known as the Krang. In a last ditch effort to save the planet, Casey, a freedom fighter is sent back in time to undo the events that first led to the invasion. While he is ultimately successful in his mission, the state of his original fallen timeline remains unknown. The last of the freedom fighters, his family, perished to ensure his safe escape, leaving their world to the mercy of the Krang.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: when you already know the heroes are doomed to fail, what can be gained from being told their story?

For the rest below, I’m going to write with the assumption that the reader has some basic knowledge of the series and the film because I feel that this story is best enjoyed with proper context.

SUMMARY

Replica is a story meant to answer many of the questions the first 4 minutes of the movie left us wondering. It’s to explain the basic history of the bad future timeline and how it came to be. The plot focuses particularly on the later half of the apocalypse, all with the intention of leading up to the opening scene where the Krang wins and Casey Junior is sent back in time to fix the mistakes that Leo and his family could not.

It’s to answer questions like:

How did Leo get injured?

Why is Mikey so old looking?

What were these characters like in the future?

What happened to Raph, Donnie, and April?

Where is big bad Krang Prime in all this?

How did the Resistance finally lose to the Krang?

Did they plan to send Casey back in time in advance?

What happened to this world/time-branch after Casey Jr was sent into the past?

MAIN CHARACTERS

For the most part, the cast is comprised entirely of characters from the series. My goal is to keep this as canon as possible, so no new OC's... save for one (kind of).

Omega Bootyyyshaker 9000 is where this story starts and ultimately where it ends. He is a brain scan AI of Donatello, created to act as both a support system for the Resistance after the turtle’s untimely death and also a key component in a plan that will hopefully put a stop to the Krang should the Resistance fail. Omega is great because he adds some much needed levity to the story, acting a bit more like the aloof but silly teenage Donnie (a side affect of not having to experience the usual physical weariness that comes with being an organic, aging organism in an apocalypse). However, he also adds more weight by being the thing that is supposed to outlast all of them and act as the last line of defense for the remainder of the universe. He claims to merely be a "replica" of Donnie's mind, but whether he's just a digitized scan, his own AI person, or somehow connected to Donnie in a deeper way has yet to be seen.

Leonardo Hamato: the man, the myth, the legend. Casey Junior spins tales of how great his sensei was in the movie, but in this story we really get to see Leo go from his lowest point as a pawn for the government, crushed by the shame of his past actions, to his greatest height as the leader of the Resistance. He is going to fail a lot in this story... but ultimately his greatest success is overcoming his own inner demons and coming to terms with being the father figure he had never asked to be. He cares deeply for his family and Casey... but he thinks he'd be a horrible dad.

Michelangelo Hamato: the only other surviving turtle to see the end of the world. He is the emotional bedrock of the family and a stand in therapist when he's not being a silly little guy. His mystical powers are unparalleled, but in his attempts to regain his lost Ninpo he taps into something far deeper, leading them down a path that intertwines the destiny of their doomed future and a past that has yet to occur.

Casey Jones Jr: a sweet boy taken in by the Hamato family. He strives to become a great warrior like his mother (Cassandra) and his Sensei (Leo). We are going to watch him grow from child to teenager as he slowly takes on the roll of being a fighter in the resistance. Through it all he must walk an unsteady line that allows him to find the strength to weather the storm but retain a certain spark of hope that helps keep his family going.

April O'neil: Commander of the Resistance and another honorary Hamato family member. She is the voice of reason and most emotionally stable of the family. Even after dealing with so much loss, she keeps a stiff upper lip as well as cold and calculating mind that always puts the colony's wellbeing first and foremost.

Donatello Hamato (deceased): The story begins shortly after Donnie’s passing during an infiltration mission against the Krang. He was dead set on planting a probe behind enemy lines that would allow them to spy on the Krang’s movements. However it seems that he had a secret agenda in planting something that would work as a final doomsday weapon against the Krang. What that is exactly, we do not yet know. The man self-destructed in a last ditch effort to avoid being interrogated by the Krang as well as a final attack to injure Krang Prime.

Raphael Hamato (deceased): The eldest brother who sadly passed away many years ago in the fight against the Krang. A boisterous but considerate man whose death sapped a great deal of the fighting spirit out of his brothers. His absence is greatly felt, but he might not be as far gone as he seems.

Krang Prime (One): Our big bad of the story. He is the leader of the Krang that has latched onto this planet like a cancer, using up its resources and assimilating its population. However, unlike the hundreds of planets that have come before this one is particularly personal. He doesn't want to merely assimilate but utterly destroy the descendants that caused his imprisonment thousands of years ago. His current state is unknown after being last seen with Donatello at the time of the man's self-destruction.

NEED TO KNOW DETAILS

All Resistance fighters have tiny self destruct bombs in their brains so that the Krang can not probe their minds to find out the Liberty Colony's location. They go off automatically after Krang infestation reaches a certain percentage, but can also be set off via voice command.

Donnie's brain bomb was far more potent because of the amount of information he knew. He did not want to risk the Krang getting any part of his mind.

The Krang have been searching for the resistance in a frustrating game of cat and mouse which has only become more difficult now that the Resistance easily knows their every move by using Donnie's probe.

Central Park Colony: now destroyed, but was once the last massive human colony in North America, housing both the EPF (Earth Protection Force) and US Government. Racism was a huge problem as most yokai and mutants were either quarantined, tested on, or used as living weapons in the fight against the Krang. It has since been destroyed.

Liberty Colony (aka the Resistance): grew from the ashes of the Central Park Colony. It is comprised of the survivors and lead by Leonardo, April, and several others. It is much smaller and more militaristic, but treats yokai, humans, and mutants equally.

Artificial Intelligence (like Omega and Shelldon) are able to fend off the Krang assimilation that people and tech would normally succumb to. It is for this reason Omega is used as both a protector of the Liberty Colony and operator for a majority of the vehicles so that the tech can no longer be easily taken over by the Krang during attacks.

Leonardo and Michelangelo (as well as Donatello's) Ninpo have all been stripped from them by this point in the story. While Leo can not tap into his family connection at all, Mikey at least has regained the ability to use some of his mystic powers.

Mikey's mystic abilities however come at a price. Since he can not tap into his Ninpo and the fountain of energy from his ancestors, he is instead using his own life force to cast his spells. It is slowly draining him.

TIMELINE Can be viewed HERE

SOURCE MATERIAL The video that inspired this all can be viewed HERE

Hope this helps! Sorry it's a bit long, tried to break it up with images. At least there might be a few interesting bits of information other readers may not have noticed. I snuck in a few things that haven't been mentioned yet, hehe.

[archie-sunshine]

your art is genuinely cute and hot but you shouldn't treat your followers like that, man. responding everyone like everything is so obvious isn't the way you should treat the people who love you and your work.

maybe if you did a less confusing pinned post you wouldn't be that stressed out about people asking you things for the billionth time and getting your blog pixelated, just a tip.

I see your point, and I’m definitely working on being less reactionary when people don’t read the rules and all, and I totally recognize in the past my response has been frequently disproportionate

But really, here’s the thing. I post art online for fun. Yes it’s my job, but it’s also something I do because it’s fun. I had requests open near constantly for like an entire year, and that’s a service, you know? I said ‘hey, I’ll draw something for you guys for free, and the only rule is to read my clearly marked rules page’

And then they didn’t read the clearly marked rules page. And continued to not read the clearly marked rules page and that feels like. Really shitty! When people send in asks that go against my rules, I feel sad and disappointed that people didn’t at least check them before sending in an ask.

And then, after months of people doing that, and dozens of deleted rules breaking asks stacking up and people are still not listening to me, then it’s easy to have animosity to people who just genuinely didn’t get the memo. I like to consider myself a pretty patient guy, but you’d be as irked as I am if someone repeatedly prodded you on a topic you didn’t feel like talking about.

I feel bad for alienating people from my page but man you can’t come here and order sushi from my sandwich restaurant and then get an attitude when I get upset because you might not know it, but like the last 8 people in line before you all also asked for sushi from my sandwich restaurant and every single one left pissed off because I DIDNT HAVE SUSHI. WHEN I ADVERTISED THE FACT I DIDNT HAVE SUSHI. AND THEN SOME PEOPLE TRY TO ARGUE WITH ME ABOUT WHY I DONT SERVE SUSHI AND WHY I SHOULD SERVE IT.

Like to them, what they see is ‘I sent in an innocent ask one time and he blew up on me’. But what I see is ‘oh that’s the 12th tfp ask I’ve gotten this week and it’s only Wednesday, I’ve had enough, everyone leave me alone’ and yeah, it’s a bit immature of me, and I’m working on that

Going into this year I’m not gonna do the whole litany or explanation or anything like that, I’m just going to start deleting stuff more regularly, but I hope that explaining my side of things helps you understand my way of thinking.

And for the record, I don’t think my pinned post is that confusing. I made all the important links colour coded and a bigger font, it’s not that hard to find my rules.

[ganondoodle]

was at my sisters house to watch the cats a bit and played some botw again after a long time, spent an hour running around phirone (faron) and checking out all the cool sonau (zonai) stuff and i felt a wave of sadness wash over me, those ruins there feel so ... heavy with story, with sadness of tragedy, with the thrill of the unkown, yet its revealed to be nothing in totk, i honestly dont feel like the sonau of botw and of totk are at all releated tbh, theres like, NO design overlap besides sometimes some dragon-like figures that feel more like they put them into totk just to have some connection at all-

the botw sonau ruins are all full of curves hewn into dark stone with red accents, theres swirls and snakes everywhere, appropriately withered by time and weather- it was already a stupid idea to replace the shiekah tech with literally another ancient highly advanced civilaztion, but then to not even make them look or feel at all connected to the little things that were there?? totk sonau is white stone and gold and green, its all extremely angular and clean cut, together with weird hologram shit that reads, somehow, as both unfittingly techy to everything else while also neither mechnical nor magical

its fucking bonkers, i know they put some totk sonau bullshit into some of the ruins in totk, like the main ones in phirone but like, especially in that case with the direct comparison its so jarring and artificial, and i hate the excuse of "hylians built those different looking buildings as a monument to the sonau", like we needed more shitty excuses for bad writing decisions- the ancient AND current hylian stuff aligns more with totk sonau stuff, why would they adopt a completely different style to built shit around actual sonau stuff that somehow also looks like it was abandoned like, 50 years, 100 years ago, not over TEN THOUSAND years ago, both the botw sonau ruins and the shiekah tech look more ancient than anything totk sonau

and what for??? i imagine more botw sonau style ruins and like, thats entirely possible, why make it sth utterly different and give it a shitty excuse?? its so unnecessary?? like okay make the wheels out of withered stone hanging together like clumps by invisible magic like how the iwaroks (the .. stone enemy) works- i still would like it sicne i dont like the whole building thing in botws world, but at least it would feel like truly magic bs and fit into the design of botw sonau (even though im still not over NOTHING ever hinting that they were one step away from spaceships hologram aliens, the refusal to work with the stuff they themselves have put into their games drives me up a wall, YOU PUT IT THERE! DO SOMETHIGN WITH IT!)

just to put some modern tech into it? was it worth it?? (no)- and there i could even go on about how much i hate the 'tech' design too, its too little mechanical to be called 'tech' but too modern tech like to call it 'magic', (a balance which the shiekah tech did tremendously well imo) i keep being impressed with how conflicting and incoherent design and story can be in this one single overpriced game

(the reason them making it so modern techy looking was so players would immediately know what it was apparently and i just ... doesnt that make it more boring? like instead of the shiekah stone(slate) they just put a flip phone with numbered buttons and all and give it a vaguely stone texture? instead of like, a guardian with its spider legs and strange creepy design, just put a fucking tank there??? (and like, in a way i feel like the fact that they still tried to not make it look too modern by putting that green texture on it and like, a face here and there, makes it WORSE, a bad cover up is worse to me than none at all, like a shitty explanation can make sth worse than no explanation at all *ahem* literally every interview they did >:C )

also i dont know how you could even design a fan so it doesnt look like a fan? you dont need to put in literal car wheels with suspension and all in there to make it clear its a wheel bc how would you even design a wheel so it doesnt read like a wheel???

since when did they get so anxious about players not understanding something?? the whole series was built on puzzles of varying difficulty, whats with the sudden loss in trust in the player?? botw was already pretty easy but in totk the whole game treats you like you cant think or remember sth for more than 30 seconds to the point it gets actively agonizing to play through- the same two sentences of unimportant info repeated and shown to your face over and over, both in story and gameplay- and even with their immediately readable design choices for the sonau 'tech' they made half teh shrines either sloggingly slow tutorials or one puzzle shrines that are dedicated to teach you how the obvious thing works when you really learn it all on the literal tutorial island AND its obvious from the start BECAUSE THEY WANTED IT TO BE OBVIOUS!! its fun to figure things out and try stuff, its no fun to have a step by step guide glued to your forehead at all times especially when its so obvious, yes thanks for teaching me that a literal fire hydrant spits out water!! wow! never thought about that! thanks for telling me it 5 times too!! (even if it annoys me that they can just do that when not connected to the ground .. would have been more fun to make puzzle with if they were,,), its part of why i felt like the game was so condescending or outright laughing at me-

why even try to teach me how a fan works over and over when like, there arent even any creative things you can do with it in a reasonable amount of time and its never needed or incentivised either bc the game just hands you the literal solution or at the very least give you the four parts or what that you need to make what you need, like pulling apart two bricks of baby lego in fornt of a toddler to see if they can put them back together once you hand it to them

and dont come at me with the "its for kids" argument, the old games were too and theres alot of stages of 'kid', they arent stupid either and nintendo should know that they have alot of adult fans too, it doesnt need to be dark souls and its allowed to have easy stuff in there but the fact that it never gets any more challenging is the problem, yes part of the fun in games can be making your own rules and messing around but it really shouldnt be controversial to want a 70 bucks game to offer a fun experience without you having to make it fun all on your own (i for one dont enjoy spending 30 minutes glueing togehter a tank with ear shattering lasers just to inefficiently beat up 3 bokblins i could just swing my sword at for a few seconds instead and are not worth the materials spend anyway)

in the end it would have been less immersion breaking and more fun if they straight up put a honda civic into the game you can summon anywhere at no cost (hmmmm where did they just do it before hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm) and transforms like a batmobile to fly around in rather than the weird sonau nuts and bolts hassle you have to put up with, costs stuff, can waste hours of your time and despawn as soon as you look away from it unless you want to make le funny tiktok videos i guess

its such a waste too bc the mechanic itself IS impressive, but its utterly missplaced in this game, it would have needed its own, truly own, game built around it, placing it in botws world is like dumping a bunch of knock off brand toys into a world that felt believable and meaningful turning it to feel like its really just a game for you to mess around in, never has a game felt more gamey to me and it SUCKS to have that magic pulled away like that, silly me for letting them make me care about it i guess

maybe its petty but as someone how really cares alot about design stuff, both visually and gameplay wise, it makes me furious to think about (as you can tell) .. also hyperfixation go brrrrrrr

(this is obviously my view on it, writing this to get it out, not to argue, i believe i have heard all the arguments already anyway and by this point all that is left is just insulting me directly lol)

[thefirstknife]

The Thread Unfurls Against the Clocks: Saint-14 and how we saved him

Hello. It's time. I already did one summary of how we saved Saint, but I want to go even more in-depth because I later realised that so much of this is unavailable and also happened so long ago that most people don't even know where to look for it and what to look for. I also want to address all the adjacent lore like the stuff about the Sundial and also how it all relates to the current plot.

Finally, I want this to serve as an explanation that there's something very weird going on and that the Saint we have is the real Saint. I've seen people already super resigned after this week's story, simply accepting that there was a reveal that he is truly the "wrong" Saint. I want to analyse all we have on Saint in-depth and focus on how we saved him to show the level of detail involved because I think it's important to understand things in the episode.

Obviously, really compelling lore changes can happen and work out, but in this case I'm just not feeling it, for various reasons. We'll see, but I still think this is worth putting together and that we have plenty of indications that we saved him "correctly" so to speak.

Saint is a unanimously beloved character and one that is so closely linked to our player character as well. The setup for his return was established so long ago and was kept consistent the entire time. I feel like the stuff in Echoes is almost like a culmination of it all, as well as a reminder about what we've done. We'll suffer for a bit for sure but there is no doubt in my mind that Saint will come from this safe and healed. No matter what ends up being revealed, I believe he will be fine.

Contents! Long post under. Spoilers for Echoes Act 2, mostly just in the Echoes section.

Intro

Curse of Osiris quest

Season of Dawn

What's up with the Sundial?

Echoes

Intro

I'm not sure how familiar people are with the full scope of Saint-14, but he's been a character since the beginning. We didn't know much about him at all; the first mention was in vanilla D1 in this grimoire about the Darkness, listing what various characters think about it. Saint's thoughts:

Saint-14's Position argues that the Darkness was an invading armada, an alien force of incredible - but tangible - power. Some adherents believe that this armada sprang from species rejected or discarded by the Traveler for their sins.

All things considered, he wasn't that far off! Really cool detail, but this lore was referenced in TFS, in the lore book Chirality, and especially Saint's bit:

* Saint-14's Position is the most eminently practical of the bunch, no matter how the man himself protests that such an obvious facet of the truth doesn't require a formal philosophical stance to be named for him.

There's 10 years separating these lore pieces! But they're still being referenced because there are some incredible nerds writing this.

This doesn't tell us much about Saint, besides that he's thinking in very practical terms. He views the Darkness as something that can be fought back. Note that at the start we don't know anything else about him, not even if he's a Guardian. In House of Wolves, we get this lore where the author (the Speaker) is going off about Osiris. We get a little piece about Saint; Saint-14 suggested that Osiris should become Vanguard Commander and also vouched for Osiris. This was the first piece of info that these two are familiar with each other. How far we've come since!

After that, we get his helmet as an exotic in The Taken King (though it has no lore other than the flavour text) and a little bit of insight into him with the first proper lore tab that actually features him as a character. It shows his iconic headbutt and ends with him deciding to follow Osiris to Mercury. A few little details are mentioned in flavour text on the following items, mostly quotes about or from Saint: 1, 2, 3, 4. Number 3 is interesting:

"Stand with your back to the Wall, and not even the Darkness itself will move you." —Saint-14

Remember that!

There's a few more in Rise of Iron, again, just flavour text. He's really funny here, and being his usual heroic self here. That's it for his stuff in D1. Saint-14 was some sort of historic figure, he was a Titan, he fought in historic battles, he fought against the Eliksni and he had some sort of connection with the Speaker and Osiris. He was a practical man, a warrior and a protector.

He wasn't really a full character or anything and only had a few quotes and one lore tab where he actually does something. But the stage was set! He was clearly a character they wanted to explore and they did, in Curse of Osiris.

Curse of Osiris quest

Curse of Osiris returned his helmet as an exotic item and immediately gave us hints about the expansion of Saint-14's character and where they're leading him. The lore tab on the exotic is a conversation between Cayde-6 and Lord Shaxx where Cayde-6 insists that Saint is not dead, while Shaxx is just kind of resigned to it. Cayde also notes that Saint was a "weirdo:"

C6: No one ever put down a Kell faster than he could. But man, he was a real weirdo. SX: Eccentricity was his strength. C6: Talking about the Speaker like you're related to him is eccentric. Claiming he's seen the future, that he fought Six Fronts fueled on the idea that some Guardian savior is coming? That's insane.

Wait a minute. Saint-14 claimed he's seen the future and that he believed in "some Guardian savior"? What's that about? Wink wink. Nudge nudge. To make things even more obvious, the remaining conversation is... about the Young Wolf:

SX: Belief is a hell of a thing. C6: Sure, yeah. One Guardian's going to fix everything. Kick Crota off the Moon. Make it look like us Vanguard know our head from our hindquarters. Hey, where are you going? SX: One of the new recruits from Old Russia I've had my eye on—entering the Crucible for the first time. C6: Hey, maybe they're the one. We'll call 'em Crota's End.

Maybe Cayde should've started making prophecies too! But yeah. This was the first proper hint about what they cooked up for Saint's story. Saint has apparently seen the future and believed in a "Guardian savior" and he fought for the City fuelled by this belief. Very interesting! To make things weirder, there's Saint-14's Gray Pigeon which also features some strange lore at the end where Saint addresses an unknown person:

To my inspiration. Your final gift to me I now send back to you. It will be good to see you again.

This was wild to read at the time because it clearly references something that we don't know about, but that's incredibly important to Saint. The theory was that he might be talking to us, the Young Wolf, but how?

That's where the quest comes in. Curse famously didn't have a lot of content, but it did have the post-campaign quest with Lost Prophecies. They were a set of quests where we essentially had to collect items to transform "prophecy tablets" into weapons in the Infinite Forge which was a sort of interactable area in the Lighthouse on Mercury:

There were a total of 11 of these, with the final one being to acquire the Perfect Paradox. Each weapon came with a prophecy in the flavour text and a lore tab. The final one however, Perfect Paradox, triggered a whole separate quest in two parts. In part one, we discover an old Vanguard comm signal coming from the Forest which we follow and analyse to discover that the signal is from Saint-14.

Detecting traces of familiar Light up here. Wait… Saint-14? He's been missing for decades. Saint was one of the greatest Titans who ever lived. Hero of Six Fronts. All that power and he just… vanished. The City's still looking for him.

This quest also features this conversation from Osiris and Sagira:

Osiris: If Saint-14 is lost in the Infinite Forest, it's because he came here to find us. Sagira: You can't blame yourself for every missing Guardian, Osiris. Osiris: For him I can.

If you're lucky (or unlucky, depending on how many emotions this gives you), you can hear this line from Sagira in Presage. This is where it comes from!

The quest is kinda set up in a way to make you think we'll actually be saving Saint here. We finally found his comm signal and it's leading us into the Forest. He's clearly affected the Vex and the Forest with his Light and he's fighting back. Osiris gets involved and urges us to find him. The whole thing feels like we're doing what we usually do; find a problem and fix it.

Part two of the quest continues in a similar vein. The quest is called "Not even the Darkness," btw. Remember that quote from Saint from The Taken King? Yeah. Anyway, we go back to following the trace leading us to Saint, into the Infinite Forest, this time into a simulated future. There, the Vex get alerted and summon a big Minotaur; Hagios, Reverent Mind (whose name means "sacred" in Greek, so essentially... Saint). We kill the Minotaur and then the area behind it opens; it appears to have been guarding it.

When it opens, we're treated to a bittersweet sight:

The area is beautiful, but it's a tomb. Saint-14's body is laid out like this in a pillar of light, surrounded by piles and piles of dead Vex. The Vex fought him for an unknown amount of time and they ended up respecting him; enough to create a tomb and seal his body and set a whole Vex mind to guard it, and apparently, revere it. Despite how hopeful we've been about saving him, he is dead.

As we approach his body, we take the remains of his personal weapon. Back at the Lighthouse, we use these remains and the prophecy to craft the weapon as it was; Perfect Paradox shotgun. The prophecy attached to it:

A tale that's different from the rest: the thread unfurls against the clocks. The one the Speaker loved the best must have a perfect paradox.

The prophecy is from Osiris, of course, which means that at some point when he was making them, he already knew about the strange fate of Saint-14. Not that he is dead; Osiris hoped to find him in the Forest. But his prophecy talks about time travel and a paradox. In the lore tab itself, Saint attached a letter to the gun in which he once again addresses a mysterious person. This person is now definitively identified as us:

All I have left is this weapon. The Cryptarchs say you crafted it yourself, built it out of scraps and Light and sheer will, inside the Infinite Forge. I'll make sure it finds its way back to you.

Well that's correct. We crafted the weapon in the Infinite Forge. But we only did so after recovering its remains from Saint's body, so how could he have had the gun in the first place? Almost like... there's some sort of a time travel paradox involved. This was naturally bizarre at the time; we had nothing else on Saint or any of this during this quest, just these vague baffling hints that there's more to the story. Especially since it involves our character; Saint repeatedly talks as if he had already met us. He says so in the letter as well:

I mourn that I will never reach the heights you have. To me, you represent everything a Guardian can become. Yours is a thriving City. So different from mine. My whole fourteenth life I fought to make my City yours. I never finished.

He knows that our City is thriving and that we are "everything a Guardian can become." But we've never seen him before. This was really confusing and there was also not even a promise that it would be resolved. But it felt like something that they cared about deeply.

It would take 3 years until we got the resolution.

Season of Dawn

This is a big one in general because they really wanted to be as attentive to all details as possible. Even before the season started, they released several weblore pieces to remind us of Saint and bring up some important information.

The first one was The Accolade, about Saint's past and heroic deeds revolving around saving people. The weblore focuses on explaining what his "accolades" are; aka his purple ribbons on his armour and ship. They're gifts from people he saved; tokens of appreciation that turned into a type of a ritual with Saint. If you're saved by Saint, you have to give him something purple and he will wear it with him and remember your name. It ends with Osiris shortly after we found Saint's grave. Osiris went to see it for himself, to check, to make sure. He also laments that he never asked about the ribbons.

The next one is a glimpse into the past, a conversation between Osiris and Saint as Saint hands him the Vanguard Commander title. It's a good look into how that all happened, as well as the differences in approach and beliefs between Osiris and Saint.

And then they released The Sundial weblore (TW for suicide if you're reading the full weblore. One of his Echoes does not have a good time). Osiris is found on Mercury with a machine he built, putting finishing touches on it. It's called the Sundial. Osiris built it in response to Saint being dead, the implication very much being that he intends to use some form of time travel or some other time shenanigans to change the outcome and save him. Osiris never recovered from learning that he's dead and from seeing his dead body in the tomb. The design is Sagira's, and he's also helped by Drifter, who shows up to check the math. I'll go more into the Sundial later.

Osiris wraps up his work on it and turns it on. He splits into his Echoes and enters the machine to start searching through Saint's timeline on Mercury with the intent to find the right moment with the right Saint to save him; he is specifically looking for the moment when they drain his Light.

Osiris’s Echoes scour Saint-14’s timeline on Mercury. But the corridors of time refuse to give way to the moment they need: Saint and the Martyr Mind in the depths of the Infinite Forest. The Echoes work tirelessly for weeks, then months in the space between moments. In desperation, he splits the dozen copies into many thousands more as the work continues fruitlessly.

Osiris experiences what the kids these days call "epic fail."

None of the Echoes ever approaches a Saint. They never find the right one.

Despite all the work put into this machine and all of his knowledge and skill, Osiris doesn't manage to use the Sundial successfully. He never finds the right moment and he never saves him. It's worth noting that when Osiris used thousands of his Echoes, he experienced the time and life of every single one. But for Osiris outside the Sundial, it's only been a few moments. In those few moments, he essentially lived thousands of lifetimes. And died thousands of times. I need people to understand the amount of effort he put into this and what kind of an emotional toll it had.

Completely defeated, he gives up and hides the Sundial. He moves on with his life, doing what he always does, until stuff suddenly changes, which is explored in the next weblore: Actions of Mutual Friends. Us killing the Undying Mind in the season before Dawn changed everything, for the Vex and everyone else. We essentially created a point of divergence. The Vex suddenly had to change their projections of the future; Osiris noticed this and got very concerned.

While he wasn't looking, his Sundial was found, by Psion sisters. They figure out the potential of the Sundial and work to reactivate it, which they succeed in. The Red Legion descends on Mercury, looking to use the Sundial to essentially rewrite the course of the Red War and win.

Osiris finds out and goes to Ikora, to the City, to ask for help. This is the topic of the next weblore: Desperate Times. Osiris defends his choice to make the Sundial to save Saint, despite everybody else basically trying to explain to him that the universe might implode because of it.

This is a lot of setup, but it's necessary. It all leads into what happens in the season and what the season revolves around; saving Saint. It wasn't even a secret, as they very clearly showed it right away in the trailer (best trailer they've ever done). The seasonal gameplay revolved around us using the Sundial to defeat the Red Legion and stop them from trying to figure out how to essentially change the course of history. We had to fight three different Psion bosses, one of each of the sisters, until the end, when the three of them joined together into a single Psion entity for us to defeat.

As we were using the Sundial for this, Osiris also told us about what he made it for originally. He explains a little bit about it and about his failure to succeed, then warns us against using it for ourselves, but doesn't stop us.

I told you before - I tried to save Saint-14. I bent the rules of time using a prototype of the Sundial. It allowed me to walk the corridors of time here on Mercury. But I failed. I never found Saint's final moment against the Vex. I encountered younger versions from his first mission to Mercury, among others. But none were the right Saint. The prototype Sundial still exists, accessible off the main deck. And it can still travel through Saint's personal timeline on this planet. But venture there at your own peril. He cannot be saved. I have walked every permutation of those corridors with a hundred thousand of my Echoes and found nothing. Saint-14 is lost.

Despite this, we make the attempt and then the first part of the quest starts. When we use it, the Sundial reacts. It reacts specifically to the Perfect Paradox:

The Shotgun you crafted in the Infinite Forge is reacting to the Sundial! An onboard transponder is broadcasting coordinates: a path through the Sundial, crossing two time periods. The prophecy blueprint you used to create the Perfect Paradox must have included this broadcast. If you can open up the initial chamber, I can align us to the first time period the broadcast is referencing.

The two time periods are two points in time where it's relevant that we meed with Saint. The first one is in the Dark Age, when he came to Mercury with civilians in an attempt to reclaim the planet and help the struggling population of Earth with resources and possibly old Golden Age technologies. We connect to Saint via comms. He is devastated and demoralised. He failed to protect his people and he's also under siege by the Eliksni and is more or less resigned to dying. Lucky for him, we get there in time to help him out of this situation.

After the battle, we talk to him. Our Ghost hesitates a little but then decides to do it anyway; he shows Saint the projection of the Last City from the future, to prove to him that the everything will be fine if he continues to fight and stays hopeful. We also give him the Perfect Paradox, to help him fight. The loop is set! This gun was crafted in the future and was brought to the past. In time, Saint will die with it and we will pick up its remains from his body, allowing us to craft it in the first place.

Saint-14: What is this? Ghost: The Perfect Paradox. Built by my Guardian out of spare parts and Light and sheer will to aid you.

More importantly, this is the moment that Saint spoke of to other people that made him seem crazy. As we've seen in lore from years before, Saint kept saying that he saw a thriving City and that there's some sort of Guardian savior coming and that he's seen this future. He also wrote in that letter how we gave him the shotgun and how we saved him. This part of the quest is constructed around this lore. This moment is what Saint remembered and talked about. We saved him and invigorated his will to keep going. This is why he is the way he is.

We part ways and leave the Sundial. Ghost immediately goes to check if we messed anything up and to let us know that there's one more point in time to go to:

Okay, let's check the Tower databases to make sure we didn't just wreck the entire timeline. Queuing "Saint-14"… Records state he was a former Commander of the Tower. He vanished on a final mission to Mercury in search of the exiled Warlock Osiris. Well, those are the big beats. Timeline intact. Good job, Saint. But our trip's not over. That broadcast I picked off the Perfect Paradox marked one more set of coordinates within the Sundial.

The second part of the quest started a bit later, but it doesn't waste any time once it does. We're immediately linked up to the other point in time that Perfect Paradox reacted to and we're back in simulated future, in the same area where back in Curse we fought Hagios who guarded the entry to Saint's tomb. Except now, we find Saint who has just had his Light drained from him by another Vex mind; Agioktis, Martyr Mind (note that the name is more or less in the same vein as "hagios," aka "sacred," dedicated to Saint). This is the moment Osiris was looking for, but couldn't find it, because he didn't have the Perfect Paradox.

This is the Vex mind they built to destroy Saint and we find him as his Light has already been taken. But Saint is still eager to fight and greets us happily. Unfortunately Saint is then restrained, the Vex doing everything in their power to kill him. However, this time he's not alone. We're there and we fight in his stead. We manage to piss off the Martyr Mind enough for it to now move to restrain us, which frees Saint, returning his Light to him as well. Saint then delivers the final blow to the Martyr Mind which frees us!

Saint-14: It's been a long time, my friends. I've chased your memory for centuries. You should go now. Those who could kill me are dead. You've made sure of that. Ghost: And what if the Vex take your Light again? Saint-14: Impossible. It cost them everything to build the Martyr Mind. When you crushed it, they were doomed. Ghost: You want us to leave you? You'll be stuck here for years. Saint-14: You've both done plenty. Just open the Infinite Forest gate for me. I'll meet you the long way around, at the entrance. Saint-14: What's a few more years of fighting Vex?

Saint decides to stay in the Forest and wait until we open it from the outside for him, in the future. This is how he leaves in the right time, instead of too early for his timeline, so nothing else is really affected. He waits it out and then exits the Forest at the time of Season of Dawn. This gives us one of the shortest but also the best cutscenes ever. As a note, in the cutscene, when Saint leaves, the Forest gate looks new, like from Mercury's past. This is because of the Sundial's effects on the surface of Mercury at the time, splitting the surface through time, so the Forest gate looked like it's from the past, but it's not. It's present day Mercury.

When we report this to Osiris, to say that he's amazed would be an understatement. I often quoted this from him, especially when people were being weird about Osiris and claiming he doesn't like us or whatever:

In his youth, he talked often about the Guardian who inspired him. I should have guessed it would be you.

We've done the impossible. Literally. The quest is called "Impossible Task." Osiris did everything and he couldn't do it and he lost hope that it would be done. But we did it, because we created the time loop; a connection with Saint that allowed us to use the Sundial in a way Osiris could not.

Saint has been saved! After this, he settled in the Tower. He had a series of minor quests and errands, the best one being the quest for the Devil's Ruin exotic which featured a really long and funny conversation between Saint and Shaxx. Another one is obviously the Corridors of Time quest which is genuinely cannot be compared to anything else as it was a community puzzle of epic proportions. An article that showcases just a little bit of how bonkers it was.

The important part of it is that the culmination of the quest featured us finding our own grave and Saint narrating a eulogy for us. This is important to us now for two reasons: 1) on our grave was a sword, a sword we received as an actual item in TFS, directly from the Traveler to fight the Witness 2) it's possibly a different timeline. The second one is unclear because we simply can't know when we die, but the eulogy specifies that the sword was shattered in the final confrontation where we died. Our current sword is chipped, and it wasn't when we originally got it in the campaign. So either this is a different timeline where it didn't shatter or this isn't that confrontation when we die and it will shatter at some other point in the future.

In this post I also noted how the music that plays in our grave scene and the music that played in TFS when we get the sword is the same. A very clear and deliberate choice. This is a very cool link to Season of Dawn that they brought back over 4 years later.

With the Corridors of Time puzzle ending and the Corridors closing, that concluded the Saint stuff. He was finally saved and he could rest in the Tower! And we know everything that has happened since.

Okay. So...

What's up with the Sundial?

We don't know! But I want to get into it because it's one of those things that they made sure to hint about, without fully explaining it so obviously every weird nerd online (me) wants to figure it out.

Back in The Sundial weblore, there are some peculiar and never explained details about the Sundial that have been kinda concerning and just intriguing to think about. There are a few lines essentially saying that whatever is at its core, it's not good. First is Sagira's:

“That work was theoretical! If the Vanguard find out what you did to build it—“

What did he do to build it? No clue. The infamous core is described only as:

He turned to look at the fluctuating glow of the exposed chronometric core.

When the Drifter shows up, he immediately reacts to this, fairly negatively which makes things more ominous since Drifter tangles with a lot of weird and bad stuff himself. So if he's disturbed about this...:

Drifter walked to the central spire and put his ear up against it. “This core…” he said, leaning close. His eyes darted back to Osiris. “It’s whispering.” Osiris’s expression didn’t change; his arms didn’t uncross. “We’ll seal the core away. I understand the ramifications.” “Good luck keeping that contained. Not something I would bargain with, hotshot.”

The core "whispers." Osiris understands the ramifications. They're both so frustratingly vague so the only thing we're left with is this ominous vibe of something bad being at the center of the Sundial.

This whispering, alongside a few other concerning descriptions and implications of the Sundial is mentioned in yet another weblore that I only briefly mentioned earlier because it wasn't relevant to Saint stuff; Sisters. It's about the Psions finding the machine.

The Psions could somehow feel the Sundial. Or perhaps just the effects it had on time on Mercury, even while it was powered down and hidden.

“Small disturbances,” said oldest Ozletc, the wisest. “Little currents in this timeline. Can you see them, sister?” “I can taste them,” said second-born Tazaroc, the hungriest of her sisters. “I can feel the edges.” Third-born Niruul, the quietest among them, reached her hand out to test the air. “As can I,” said she. “And something else. The source is disguised. The technology is Human, but refined. Surprisingly so.”

They also note the whispering, as well as its potential:

A strange device shimmered into existence around them. They looked up the length of an enormous, golden spire. “It whispers,” said Tazaroc. “Then block your ears,” said Ozletc. “Do you see the potential in this?” “Chaos,” said Niruul. “No,” said Ozletc. “Opportunity. See how it tugs at the fabric of our time? Can you see the seams?”

They also make the strange comparison to the OXA:

“It is so clear,” said Niruul, reverent. “An unobstructed glimpse into what was and what will be.” “Not the troubled ramblings of a mad thing, like the OXA,” said Tazaroc.

The Sundial offered something more and better than the OXA ever could, implying, perhaps, that these machines have something in common; possibly something beyond simply Vex technology. My insanity about this has been going on for a long time and also helped with the TFS CE lore. A bit of a tangent, but also possibly related, depending on what the core is.

Furthermore, Osiris refused to tell Saint about details of the Sundial, including remaining vague about its core in this weblore:

[u.2:13] One is a manifestation of Light. The other… reserved for Taken Kings. Better suited for traversing the Sundial because of what lies at its core. [u.1:14] One day you’ll have to tell me exactly what you and the Guardian did to bring me back. [u.2:14] We did what we had to. Trust me.

So what is it? Well, we know:

It whispers (very obvious and easily detected, both by Drifter and the Psions)

It's something bad (Drifter's reaction to it is uncharacteristic for a man who tangles with the Taken for a living and deals with strange dangerous artifacts all the time)

Osiris' Echoes are better suited for the Sundial because of its core, and Echoes are something "reserved for Taken Kings." Bizarre way of saying it to avoid explaining it

Similar to the OXA, and possibly any other time/prediction machines based on Vex tech (because the OXA itself is confirmed to be more or less the same as the FWC Device, for example)

To recharge it, we needed to feed it Light. This is particularly concerning with what Osiris says about it: "The Sundial is my greatest creation and my greatest regret. What I had to do to forge it I can never take back. As a result, it has components that consume Light. And if you're serious about operating it again, you'll need to feed it. Nothing is free. Ever."

What this points to, to me at least, is Darkness. The core is a Darkness artifact of some sort, merged with Vex tech. This only gained more proof to me with all the new lore about the Darkness and how it governs the mind and memory, especially when the Vex are involved. To the Vex, the future is memory. Merging Darkness artifacts with the Vex might be able to create dangerous time travel machines or machines that displace consciousness through time and timelines, like the OXA and the Device, allowing the user to "predict."

To make things even more convoluted (and me more insane), there's an almost perfect explanation for what this artifact might be. So perfect that I feel like it's too good to be true, tbh. It's a Nezarec relic. I will now list everything that connects this:

It would explain the Darkness artifact. Nezarec's relics were full of Darkness and were being used by utilising that Darkness

Drifter's involvement and experience with it. Hell, the Drifter may have even provided this relic to Osiris, since he had one and did not particularly enjoy having it, which was detailed in Lightfall when they showed us how he got it. Plunder was also rich on this, showing us that the Drifter immediately recognised the relics and understood what they were.

Whispering. Darkness in general has a whispering thing; the Veiled statues, the Witness, the old stories about Dredgen Yor, there's a lot of whispering going on here. But it's really super connected to Nezarec. His relics were whispering to us in the H.E.L.M.. The glaive? Nezarec's Whisper. Another disciple also called him a "whispering Nightmare." All of Root of Nightmares armour lore has it as well, with Nezarec tormenting his victims with whispers; for example here, and here, and maybe even here. I could go on. He's the whisper guy. Literally, Nimbus called him Mr. Whispers.

Psions. The Psion sisters found and reactivated the Sundial... Somehow. They especially were able to almost instinctively locate it despite Osiris hiding it well enough. The Psions also needed quite a lot of time to activate it again and admired the complexity of the encryption, despite it being human, so we can't really say that they found it easily because Osiris' did a poor job of hiding it. Were they drawn to it? Were they drawn to it because of its core? Psions are inherently linked to Nezarec. It's been confirmed back in Lightfall, but also curiously mentioned again in TFS with the Lost Ghosts quest (timestamped here). I'm definitely hoping for some Psion content in the future but this is fairly interesting in this context. Season of Dawn was really the only proper Psion-focused storyline.

Osiris' coma. His coma appears to have been somehow paracausal. At least strange! The scans were showing that he has "no residual activity" in his brain, despite us having lore from his POV showing us that he had a very vivid and visceral activity. He was able to feel some external stimuli, but was mostly drifting through strange visions, seemingly hopping between his... Reflections. Or possibly Echoes. His final thoughts here are also of the Sundial; as if his mind was somehow stuck in there, or lost, trying to find his way out of it. This could just be a consequence of his memories constructing something for him to experience so obviously it's just cycling through what he knows, but...

Waking Osiris up from his coma happens with the use of Nezarec's relics. An important point to note here is that this wasn't so much about it being Nezarec's relics; it had more to do with the inherent Darkness they consist of and Darkness can help the mind and consciousness move or awaken. However, given all of this and given his POV from the coma and the possibility that his mind might have been stuck somewhere with his Echoes in the Sundial, if the Sundial's core is a Nezarec relic, then a Nezarec relic had more chance to bring him back. It's such a perfect connection that I feel insane thinking about it and it feels like I'm constructing a fanfic, but also. I think it's worth considering. Cutscene of him waking up + article from Bungie that details on the whole idea of waking him up with Darkness and why that's important for understanding Darkness.

I have to mention the other theory, especially in comparison with all the above to try and illustrate why it never made sense to me and that is the popular theory that the core of the Sundial is an Ahamkara bone and that the Sundial worked on wish magic.

I'm not quite sure why this was even a theory to be honest. Even back in the day of Dawn, this never really resonated with me because it seems that the only reason this was a theory was Drifter saying "not something I would bargain with" and... Possibly whispers? Obviously a lot of things can whisper, and Ahamkara have been also mentioned doing so, but I don't find this significant to Ahamkara enough for identification just through that. I also don't think that one mention of the word "bargain" is enough either. Many have bargained with Darkness too. There's simply an overlap between Darkness and Ahamkara here, but there are also other pieces that are more closely linked to Darkness like eating Light. We could go even further, if we're considering Ahamkara; we could also consider Worm Gods, for example. The point is that several things can fit here, but I feel like there's overall more things pointing at Darkness.

What gets me the most is that they alluded to this in Season of the Wish, in what seems fairly obvious as disproving this theory to me. Riven and Osiris talk:

Riven: Isn’t it unfortunate your City hunted down all of my kind, Osiris? You might have wished for Saint-14’s return from the Forest. Osiris: And have him trade the Vex’s torment for yours? Riven: Perhaps you simply didn’t want him back badly enough to pay the price. Osiris: Save the bait for someone naïve enough to take it.

I talked about this earlier, but there's several layers of why the moment I heard this, it sounded like it's here to disprove Osiris using an Ahamkara. First, Ahamkara wish magic would be felt by Riven. If Osiris put an Ahamkara into the Sundial, then he did use wish magic and she would know about it. In that case she would not have said this; perhaps she would've teased him about using her powers to save Saint, but that would be a completely different sentence.

Second, Osiris is well aware and wary of wish magic. He knows that had he done so, he would've probably put some form of torment (wish magic backfire) on Saint. This, to me, indicates that not only did he not do this, he didn't even consider it as an option.

Third, if Osiris had an Ahamkara bone and was considering to use it, he could've just done so without building the Sundial. Why bother with the machine if you can just instantly make a wish and the wish doing exactly as you want? Obviously with a caveat, but still. It would've worked right away. Perhaps the Sundial was an attempt to contain the backfire, mixing wish magic with Vex tech to try and prevent the whole thing from going backwards, but even then; Osiris knew there are possible consquences.

And fourth, even if he did all that, it just didn't work, which would be quite uncharacteristic for wish magic. It's paracausal; it should override any Vex tech in the Sundial. If he made a wish, he should ask for a refund! The Sundial worked only because of the paracausal loop we created with the Perfect Paradox and it had nothing to do with anyone's wishes; definitely not ours.

One interesting thing for this theory is the way they said how similar wishing and simulations are. It happened in Wish and now again in Echoes. Here's a freebie for the Ahamkara theory enthusiasts.

Personally though, I simply feel like there's much more connecting and sensible explanation with it being a Darkness relic, rather than Ahamkara.

HOWEVER. The truth is that we simply don't know. I am personally more into it being Darkness (and Nezzy specifically), but I could be wrong and the Ahamkara theory could be proven correct somehow. Hell, it could be something completely different. It could also be nothing; as in, we will never know because they won't tell us because it doesn't matter.

And technically, it doesn't! Nothing really changes if this doesn't get answered. I want that to be clear. This isn't some sort of lore breaking detail. But you know. The nerds would love to know. I really wanted to get into this now that we've had a resurgence in interest about Saint and how we saved him.

Echoes

Okay, so why this monster of an essay? Well, because Echoes revolves around Saint and the Conductor trying to convince him that he's the wrong Saint. That Osiris acted out of grief and pulled a random Saint from the timelines, that he's simply satisfied with what he got because he couldn't get his original Saint because that Saint died.

Saint is convinced in this; that he's some sort of an aberration in the timeline, a simulation or a copy or just the wrong Saint from the wrong timeline. Even an error that must be corrected.

And I simply think that people are too quick to jump to the conclusion that this is the story being told, especially because of the radio message this week where we're shown that Saint and Osiris suddenly have different memories. But I feel like people have already forgotten the other radio message, from week 1. You know, the one where Saint and Osiris talk about their memories and the memories match perfectly:

Saint-14: Osiris. Do you remember when we knew? Osiris: Knew what? Saint-14: That we were meant to be together. There was one moment... though, it took us time to get to it. Oh, but our Hunter Vanguard, so smart, Tallulah... she knew before we did. All our little squabbles and bickering. She saw it first. Osiris: it, uh — ah, well, I was — obtuse. Stubborn. I couldn't recognize my own emotions. Then, Tallulah told me to.. "Be serious". Saint-14: Haha! I remember. So yes, she told me later. Was good laugh. Osiris: Well, I'm glad you found it so amusing. Saint-14: Who could not look back and smile? And I remember your smile, then. So knowing, and so full of our future together. Osiris: What brought these memories on? Saint-14: Hmm. I think about others who will have those same moments now that they know they will a future free from the Black Fleet. Now they have a chance to find love and be happy, like us. We can look behind, but also forward. We cannot see what is coming, but we know it is good. Osiris: You're certain? Saint-14: About us? Yes. Since the beginning. Now, and always.

We have this memory as a lore tab as well. I think this was given to us deliberately, to show us that Saint and Osiris have identical memories and that Saint's memories were never in question and that their history is perfectly aligned... Until he got yoked. Something changed when he got yoked, not when he was saved. This is a new development, which tells me that the Conductor did something to him, rather than Osiris saving the wrong Saint. Because until now, this was never a problem. Saint never had discrepancies in his memories before, with anyone he ever interacted with.

If we take a look at the whole story of how he was returned, it's beyond clear that Osiris was very fixated on saving his Saint, not a random one, and that we went to great lengths to do just that. We only ever interacted with one Saint, the same one, and we linked each other with the Perfect Paradox. It cannot be any other Saint, even with the existence of other timelines. This Saint and this Perfect Paradox are ours, from our timeline, the originals.

However, other timelines do exist. And some entities can access them. The Vex are obviously first on the list. Characters like Elsie and Osiris have also seen them. And clearly, the Conductor should be capable of this as well. It's beyond clear now that the Conductor is Maya Sundaresh. Maya, who was simulated 227 times by the Vex and had those 227 copies of her wandering the Vex network and different timelines.

If the Conductor knows where to look and how, she could see these timelines, including these other Saints, and she could've fed Saint false information while he was yoked. Implanting memories of other Saints perhaps, or something similar.

I know a lot of people weren't there for Dawn, let alone Curse. There's a lot of information about Saint here and a lot of really interesting clues from the past about what's happening now. It's also really interesting how many little details have been transferred through the story over time, showing that this is a plotline they care about very much and want to make sure doesn't get messed up.

There's probably a lot more stuff we could get into for speculation and explanations because there's still more stuff that plays a role in this. The Infinite Forest is a big one, and I suspect the Perfect Paradox is as well, as we're likely to get it next week or the week after as part of the story. Because it should be relevant to the story! It's an inherent part of Saint's story and why he's with us now in the first place.

So what's really going on? We're not entirely sure yet, but assuming that the Conductor is correct and that her messing with Saint is revealing something about Saint's legitimacy is I believe wrong. I think she's using him as an experiment and that she's messing with him, and by extension, with us as well. There's no way that we've had a "wrong" Saint this whole time and that nobody ever had any issues with him. That nobody had any discrepancies between memories with him. Not Osiris, not Ikora, not Shaxx, not Saladin, not Zavala or anyone else Saint interacted with since he's been back. As I mentioned, literally the first radio message shows us Saint and Osiris with matching memories.

It only started after he was yoked. Which means that the yoke and the Conductor did something to him, possibly shown him some other timelines or fed him false information.

Can't wait to see where this is going. I'm not sure how much this Act will cover and if we'll get a resolution to this right now or if it will stretch to Act 3, though if it doesn't get stretched, then I wonder what will the draw of Act 3 even be. Possibly just dealing with the Conductor? I'm very excited. This episode being so focused on Saint and Osiris and the whole throwbacks to Dawn and other past content has been really good. I'm enjoying it very much, this is my entire jam. I had high hopes for Echoes and so far it's been going great.

I'm super excited to see how they solve this and what comes of it and how much of this information will be relevant. And of course, if it will end up being correct! Because as much as I have my theories and as much as I'm convinced that there's something off here and that our Saint cannot be the wrong Saint, I could still be wrong. Looking forward to finding out!

[adventuringblind]

Church Girl

Oscar Piastri x Autistic!reader

Genre: hurt/comfort

Request: no (check masterlist for request status)

Summary: Church has a tendency to make people feel unwanted. When reader goes to visit her family, they convince her to go with them to the place she’s trying to forget. Good thing Oscar is there with her.

Warnings: toxic religious folk, religious trauma, creepy old men, panic attacks

Notes: okay so this goes out to my neurodivergents who were stuck in a church that didn’t understand them with peers who made them feel like they were an alien, adults who were always asking the wrong questions and judging their clothes, and were forced into the stereotypes they wanted you to fit in. Fire Drill by Melanie Martinez was on repeat while writing this.

This is loosely based on true events

Masterlist

Summer break is here which means it’s time to go visit family. She and Oscar board the plane to her home country, all smiles and laughs.

She’s missed them since being away. Her family hasn’t always understood her, but she loves them dearly.

When they arrived they were greeted with hugs and questions about the trip.

At the dinner table that night, Oscar was quick to realize that he didn’t fully realize how religious his girlfriends family is. It seemed to be their favorite topic.

The girl next to him was struggling with the conversation and he could feel her stimming under the table. She’d talked about her church experience a little with him. He didn’t want to push her so he didn’t know the full extent of everything that happened. He recalls her mom having to put up with some horrible people and the tears over how it hurt her to see her mom so broken in a place she should feel loved. How her sister felt she would never be good enough for their expectations. How her dad uses is to control them sometimes.

And yet they’d convinced them to go with. Well- more like she was trying to please and wants to spend time with her family.

In the lonesome of their room that night, she collapsed into him.

“I think I might vomit.”

He simply hold her. “Do you want to talk about it? We can always say we changed our minds.” He suggests. His attempt at reassuring her futile as she panics more.

“The people there judge so critically. It didn’t help that I was weird to kids my age and mature enough for the adults to ask me why I’m showing my shoulders because they’re a distraction.”

Oscar hums in understanding. Carful not to interrupt her explanation but still show he’s listening.

“They say it’s a stereotype, but it’s true. I’ve been teased and looked down on and made out to be over dramatic. My old youth pastor used to talk to my mom about my ‘behavior’ and how I argued with him to much. Then I yelled at him for getting in my personal space and saying things an adult should never say to a child, in my opinion. I was constantly told I talk to much about the wrong things and not enough about the right.”

Though Oscar’s shirt is getting wet, he doesn’t care. Her more harmful stimming habits are showing as he’s determined not to let that happen. She plays with his fingers instead. “I can’t do it Jack.”

The endearing nickname alerts him this is serious. He didn’t know how far this trauma had been rooted inside her. No wonder she struggles with her self-esteem, she was told her entire life she’d never measure up. She’d endured hours of countless awkward conversations and events she couldn’t wait to leave.

The worst part is that he knows it’s why she apologizes for everything. It didn’t matter how much she tried to look ‘normal’ she couldn’t get it right and people were mad at her for it.

“I will leave it up to you, but say the word and I’ll have us out of here in an hour.”

~

Oscar had half a mind just to feign sickness and tell them they can’t go. The girl pacing the room had yet to get dressed or pull the plug and say she doesn’t want to go.

“I say wear something comfortable and scandalous.” He leans back on the bed with a smirk.

“Since when are you so evil? And are you crazy? I’d get eaten by judgmental stares.”

“Let them stare. You deserve to be comfortable in whatever you wear without feeling judged and preyed on.”

~

They took a separate car from her parents. Partially because they wanted to leave early, mostly because in case of emergency they had an escape vehicle.

He could feel her trying to self soothe in the passenger seat. She’d finally settled for her favorite pair of pants and his sweatshirt. Comfort clothes for a hard situation definitely seemed like the best option.

He held her hand as they walked to the front door and stopped right outside. “Remember you’re not stuck. We can leave anytime you want.” She nods her head appreciatively, then they step through the doors.

He felt like the were underdressed. Which is an absolutely ridiculous notion because it’s eight in the morning and he’d rather be asleep. How these people look dressed for a ball at this hour is beyond him.

Oscar spots her family amongst the sea of people and weaves them into their vicinity.

“Y/N, hi! How are you? It’s been so long!” Chirps an elderly woman who awkwardly embraces the girl. She’s still as a board and yet the lady doesn’t get the hint.

“I’m alright.” She smiles politely.

“And who’s this young man?”

“My boyfriend, Oscar.”

He reaches out his hand to her and she shakes it. “It’s nice to meet you.” He offers his media coached smile.

“Oh are you two planning on settling down? Having kids?”

She shuffles awkwardly looking for a response. She hates invasive questions like these. Now would normally be where an inappropriate joke about Lando practically being their child would go but she thinks that might be wrong. But what’s even right in this situation?

“Not currently. I travel for work majority of the year so it would be difficult to start a family.” She’s grateful Oscar knows to manage conversation.

“Oh well… that’s to bad.” Then the woman shuffles away.

“I told you it’s bad.”

“I see your point. Did you know her?”

“No but apparently everyone is allowed to talk to you like that even if you just know a persons name because we’re a ‘church family’.

As they wait for the service to start, they pass the time by people watching. Snickering at the obvious fake smiles and perfect families people show off on Sunday mornings.

They are rudely interrupted by a male probably in his forties. “Excuse me, I have got to ask, are you two siblings?”

He must be newer, she thinks to herself, it’s not like she’s been gone that long. She shakes her head at the man, one hand in Oscar’s the other inside the sweatshirt pocket. “No sir, we’re dating actually.”

“That’s a real shock. He’s a keeper if that’s how you dress all the time and he still chose you.” His comment is directed at her. The social analysis kicking in. Is this sarcasm? Or maybe a joke she doesn’t get? Is he being serious?

“What do you mean by that?” Oscar is quick to ask back. Again, saving her from most likely saying something she shouldn’t.

“Most guys enjoy when a girl wears appropriate female clothing. I’m just saying she’s lucky to have you if this is what she wears all the time.” He eyes her up and down. “Would be prettier in a dress I reckon.”

“Nope. She’s pretty in everything she wears.” Oscar is dragging her off in the opposite direction before turning around. “Also, sir, I’m the lucky one.”

The service is long and boring. The two pass notes back and forth like they are in high school. Though they aren’t necessarily trying to hide the fact they are doing it.

When it’s over, they quickly tell her parents they are heading out because truthfully, the girl is in the verge of a meltdown from the over stimulation.

They get almost to the door before being stopped again by the last person she wanted to ever see again. Her old youth pastor.

“Y/N! I didn’t think you were ever coming back!” He goes to hug her but she steps back. Almost using Oscar as a barrier. “Awe don’t be like that.” He pouts.

“We were actually just heading out.” Oscar steps in. He didn’t like how the man is eyeing her. It’s uncomfortable for him and even more so for her.

“And you are…?”

“Oscar, her boyfriend.”

A look of shock spreads across his face. “That’s gooier to hear. I didn’t think she’d ever find someone.” Oscar doesn’t hesitate to use his sarcasm and over expressive facial expressions as he feigns curiosity.

“Why’s that?”

“I could never get her to shut up about things that weren’t important. And after the lengthy discussion we had with the board about her argumentative attitude with her male superiors, I just thought it would never happen.”

She didn’t tell him about that one. Oscar can see out of the corner of his eye how her head drops in shame. He doesn’t let go of her hand. “So you work with kids but when one doesn’t act the way you want you take to abusive behaviors? Glad to see a church full of people who are supposed to be loving are letting their youth get hurt by adults.” He says launder then necessary, but it gets his point across because people heard him.

He turns in his heels and places a protective arm around her waist as they walk to the car.

He knows she’s overstimulated, so he tries lets her go at her own pace when they get back to her parents house. The spare key still in the same place it’s been for years, so no need to wait outside.

In the safety of the room, she latches herself onto the Aussie. “I’m sorry.”

He holds her and does his best to soothe her. “You’ve nothing to apologize for. Those people are sick, I swear. I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

“That meeting was the worst day of my life. Sitting in a room with a bunch of older men telling me how to behave. They made some jokes that they shouldn’t have and told me I’d never have a good life if I kept acting like I had been.” She’s wailing now.

Oscar can practically hear his hear shatter. How could people be so ignorant and blind?

“They said that my autism isn’t an excuse and that I need to try harder. Then they said maybe one of them can take me under their wing and show me how to treat a man right. I was barely eighteen.”

They spent the night like that. Her crying into his shoulder and him trying to calm her down. She fell asleep in his arms and he didn’t have the heart to move her and risk waking her up.

He couldn’t fathom someone telling her her brain being different means she’s not good enough. It’s what makes her unique in his eyes. How could someone not love the way her eyes light up when she talks about those interests that she never gets tired of. How her honesty and ability to stand her ground make conversations with her never dull.

Oscar leans down and kisses her head. “I don’t care who says you aren’t good enough, they are lying. You are for more then enough and I feel so special that you love me and are willing to share those pieces of yourself with me.”