#( makes me feel full of secrets )

[merakiui]

thinking about riddle being a magic doctor with a very successful career. though he had always wanted to study law, he pushed his desires aside in favor of studying his mother’s profession. growing up, the expectation was that riddle was going to be a magic doctor, and when he was attending nrc that expectation was no longer a simple hypothetical. it was going to happen whether he wanted it or not.

so when riddle, years into a career he’s not very passionate about (but it’s making him plenty of money to live a comfortable life and it keeps his mother placated for the most part), is driving home after a late night working overtime at the clinic he isn’t at his best, mentally and physically. he’s tired, he’s trying to talk his mother out of yet another arranged marriage over the phone, and he isn’t very conscious as he drives down the long, dark, forested road towards his quaint home. 

he immediately wakes when his vehicle makes contact with something, and that something is sent tumbling ahead, coming to a stop a few meters away, sprawled in the shadows like roadkill. riddle hangs up on his mother at once; he surmises a scolding isn’t nearly as bad as damage to his car or the unfortunate animal he’s hit. 

after parking and using his phone to light the way, riddle finds what he happened to hit. and it’s not just any animal. it’s a human being.

rule-abiding riddle rosehearts has hit a person with his car. 

he can already imagine the stories that will be told. he can imagine his mother’s disapproval. he can picture the police as they write him up and take him into court so that he can explain what he was doing on that dark road and why he wasn’t paying attention. maybe they’ll revoke his license. maybe he’ll never get behind the wheel again. and with these rapid-fire thoughts, he can see his career shrivel as everyone looks down on him with scrutinizing eyes. riddle rosehearts, intelligent, reliable, and honest, will lose everything he’s fought so hard to attain. 

you’re in poor shape, bloodied and bruised, and your right arm and leg are broken. he can see the bone bent upwards and piercing through flesh in a grisly, gory sight. he nudges you with the tip of his leather shoe. you don’t stir. his heart squeezes, gripped with raw fear. hitting someone with his car is bad enough, but killing a person... he’ll definitely go to prison, won’t he? and then his reputation and the reputation of the rosehearts name will be forever tarnished. he’ll be labeled as a killer. he’ll be hated and scorned. his life will be over before it’s even begun. 

riddle paces before you for a solid minute, chewing his thumbnail down to a stump. what does he do? what should he do? what’s morally correct? how should he even go about solving this issue? he has to call the police and an ambulance. but then, if he does that, he’ll be taken in alongside you and it’s so obvious that he’s the one at fault. the front of his car has an impossibly huge dent and there’s blood on the road from where you're currently bleeding. and if he killed you... if you’re actually dead, the punishment will be so much more severe. he can’t be jailed for vehicular manslaughter. he’s always followed the rules. he’s been good! he’s never done anything wrong. he’s perfect. his record is perfect. he isn’t a murderer. he isn’t bad. he’s not.

he’s not. he’s not. he’s not. he’s not. he’s not.

riddle drags your limp, bloodied body into the backseat of his car. he is haunted as he drives slowly through the night, his trembling hands gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles whiten. he’s wrapped you in his jacket and a spare blanket he had in his car so that you won’t get blood on the seats and... great seven, he sounds like a murderer covering up his tracks! it’s even worse when he catches himself hoping that there will be rain in tomorrow’s forecast so that your blood will be washed away and no one will ever question a thing. 

his heart is thrumming with adrenaline, each heartstring pulled taut with primal paranoia. no one saw that, right? no one saw him hit a person, wrap them up like a mummy, and place them in his car. no one saw it. not even the animals in the forest. no one saw it. it’s his secret. he’ll deal with it. no one will know.

riddle is a skilled magic doctor, so he will take care of you. he’s dissected plenty of animals in the stages leading up to his degree; you’re no different. and he knows that with both needle and thread and some finely honed magic he can make you look alive again. that’s what he thinks when he fashions a splint for your arm and leg and wraps it well, his experienced fingers shaky with poorly concealed horror. luckily, you’re breathing. he nearly cried from relief when he heard the tiny wheezes coming from you. at least you aren’t dead. but the fact still stands that he hit you with his car and that he’s technically breaking many rules by not telling the truth. but his everything is at stake here. he could lose it all. 

riddle spends the entire night cleaning and bandaging you. he washes the front of his car, grouses over the dent, and resolves to deal with it come morning. he locks you away in his room and walks circles in his sitting room, shutting every curtain and checking all of the locks twice. he turns the tv on and checks the news when the first rays of morning sunshine peek through the trees. he waits with bated breath, half-expecting to see his face on the screen. to see the headline about how the queendom of roses’s most prominent magic doctor has hit and killed an innocent pedestrian. but it never appears. 

it’s hours later when you finally wake, and your scream is filled with so much agony that it has him cringing. you’re sobbing when he throws the bedroom door open and shushes you wildly, his eyes wide and horrified. he has to shove a rag into your mouth to get you to quiet down. you squirm as best as you can, but your every injury causes you a world of pain. riddle would know. he forgot to give you painkillers, which he’s quick to retrieve alongside a glass of water. the rag is still at your mouth when he speaks next, a low tremble in his voice.

“i’ll let you go when you’ve healed. i... i won’t hurt you. i just need you to stay here for a while. until you can walk again. you can’t go outside and you can’t call anyone. i’ll need your phone for that reason, okay?” you shake your head, whimpering a sad, blubbery sound that has his heart aching. this entire situation is a mess. he wants to cry alongside you, but he can’t. he has to fix this, so he hardens his stare and adds, “i’m a doctor. your leg and arm were severely fractured in the...accident, and you’ve sustained bruising and scrapes from the road. it’ll take a while for your broken bones to properly heal, but i’ll do everything i can to speed up the process so you can leave. if you understand this and don’t plan on screaming anymore, nod your head.”

you comply and he sighs, withdrawing from you. the rag falls from your mouth. he helps you take the painkillers, holding the glass to your lips as you drink. who is he kidding? of course he isn’t going to let you go. he can’t when he’s already in so deep. and when he starts to see your image on the news, he knows he absolutely can’t let you leave. 

riddle’s life has always been complicated, but this is a new form of complicated. this complication will cost him everything if anyone finds out, which is why he’ll keep this secret buried deep within the forest in the peaceful walls of his home.

[rithmeres]

i have decided to keep working on the painting even though it makes me wanna end it all fr but i need mutuals to weigh in and tell me which version is worse:

[bunmuffin]

Me reading other people’s comics: God their sketches are so clean and beautiful~ I bet they don’t even have to do lineart That drawn expression is chefs kiss Who do I sell my soul to to be able to figure out good lighting like that I’d let those majestically proportion hands ring my neck Laughing my ass off, crying in the club, my heart is full, or all three in one comic

Me when I make a comic:

[benbamboozled]

Funny that DC just went “nah she was lying,” LIKE THE WHOLE REASON THEY ENDED UP WITH SHEILA WASN’T BECAUSE OF BATMAN GIVING LADY SHIVA THE “tRuTh SeRuM”!!!

Source is Batman #428

[bidokja]

okay okay this is long overdue. im doing it. im updating my reading list.

[artichow]

SECRET SANTA TIME WOOO

So this is my secret santa gift for the amazing @voidix  and it was so much fun drawing this, it was like giving myself a gift as well :’) I feel like I pushed myself to improve and also really tried to give them little details I like :D

So yeah, happy holidays to everyone and I hope you spend a peaceful and pleasant end of the year, thank you for being here <3

[lemongogo]

[good-beans]

🌻

[spotaus]

Thinking I might redesign and/or finally design a smarter base for ec-4o!Dust. Because a farm-house is funny, but doesn't make much sense anymore.

So, I think it's smarter to have an old government base as his location. It'd have good space for storage when Blue eventually comes along, a bunch of old firearms for Dust's obsession, and would be a safe and defensible location as long as Dust's Paps keeps an eye out for intruders. It makes sense for a lot of plot points too, and adds an extra symbolic layer?

Like, Dust being there, he wasn't familiar with the government so he just clears out and burns whatever is left in the "office space" so he can make it into a house. He patrols the other two or three buildings every once in a while, but for some reason he doesn't know, folks avoid the place like the plague. He lives the solitary life he wanted.

Then Blue shows up, and he lets him and Rust share the space with him, for supplies and money in turn. Society is rebuilding, and Dust is gonna need to catch up. Blue has no clue why it's intimidating for his shop to be set up in an old government lab. He's unaware of the implications, but he's such a friendly guy that customers eventually warm up to him. The scariness of the government is lessened, because the old government that destroyed the country is gone, and now there's a kind soul helping others in its place. Rebuilding trust and comradery unknowingly.

And later on when other characters interact with the space, it gets Life in a way it never had. When Ink gets his hands on it and paints murals on the walls of the workshop in vibrant colors. Saejun is my favorite, because when he moves in, the other extra workshop is transformed into a garden, a green-house. He does hydroponics and breathes life slowly but surely back into the dead dirt, flowers cracking through the concrete style. It's a bright green spot that branches out in all directions like veins. Plants grow up the sides of the office, and harmless nature-creatures reside there.

When Cross, and Error, and Night and Dream find this place, when they're repaired, it has very little life. They're afraid of the war just as the organics are. Will it happen again? Are these people tampering with our codes? But no. They get to see this place turn into a home. Shelter others. Recreate lost things from scratch. It's a paradise they never got to see in their lifetimes. It was never in their calculations.

And then when Geno and Reaper show up. Geno, a guy who'd been stripped of his whole life, forced to start and finish a war that took millions of lives. The answers he seeks are all in an old government building, a place that ruined his life. He swore he'd see things to the end, though, so he approaches it expecting the worst. And instead of government officials that somehow escaped his vengeful wrath, he finds a ragtag group of monsters and robots, who are living peacefully in the location. Some of them resent him for what he did, but others accept him with open arms. He's not sure how to react for a long time. The belief that something good prospered through the war us unthinkable.

Then Reaper. He's under the belief that tech is his enemy. He was raised to resent the robots, even before the war. The war only proved his family right. And so seeing this place, with robots living freely? It made him furious. He'd been stripped of his weapons after attempting an attack, though, so he had to bide his time. And yet, the longer he stayed, the more he heard of each robot's story. How they were manipulated, and had their very essence altered. Their bodies and functions forced to do something they never wanted to. That struck a bit closer to home. But it was Saejun and Axe that really hit hard for him. Axe was raised in a Cult. That was what he'd called it. One that made him believe things that harmed him. One that forced him to do things against his will. For everyone else this was a place of relaxation, but for Axe it was a place of healing. And Reaper realized, begrudgingly, that Axe's story felt a lot like his own. And maybe, just maybe, he might've been in the wrong.

And idk this place that once brought so much fear, a place where robots were customized for a horrible war? One that Dust barely survived, one that Blue was too young to remember, one that everyone either participated in or was forced to live through? The place that started it all heals the damage done by it. Smth smth story symbolism?

Oh, one last thing: Lust's recovery was initially meant to be in a hidden room of the farm-house, but now I'm thinking there was a scrap room in the warehouses that no one ever got to, and Lust was put in there because his model was just too impractical for the remodeling for war-machines. There's a lot in that room like him, but he's the only one with his files still in his ecto. So, his experience with this place is jarring too. Last he remembered, he was being ushered into a building with other ectos, and they were being scrapped. Now he wakes up in the same location, but none of that horror is to be seen, instead replaced with a bright workshop and even brighter eyes looking him over worriedly. He was freed from his programming constraints while Blue worked on him, so he has to learn to be an actual person, and this place he was sent to to become a pile of scraps became his first real home.

[daydadahlias]

i’m crying you did NOT gaf about LH1 😭

oh i loved LH1 !! I think it's an absolutely bonkers insane piece of art but it's not really an album that I can listen to tbqh and i do not say that in a derogatory way at all. it just sends me into absolute hysterics every time and that's not very productive for me, so i dont really listen to it (just bc i genuinely can't handle it) and, because of that, im not personally chomping at the bit for LH2 (even if I know a ton of people are) because I just know that I, Jess, am not the target audience for it and i shouldnt have to pretend that i am

[figofswords]

yknow those artists who post exclusively original art and yet still have massive followings and consistently get good amounts of notes on all of it. yeah how do they manage that

[grasping-earth]

Well we just played through the second installment of Secrets of the Obscure, and I had started compiling a mental list of comments for when we were done, but... I don't have much positive to say so I'll stick with, that was... not really disappointing, because my expectations were well tempered. But vastly uninteresting, and felt kind of shoddy.

[krispiecake]

you know when you get those adverts for like protein shake meal replacement bullshit products and people say shit like ‘im just so busy with work i never have the time for breakfast or lunch or dinner or snacks, so this horrible brown powder milkshake is a huge life TIMEsaver!’ and ‘its so convenient! i just swallow a glass of tasteless powder to meet my basic vitamin needs and then i have all the time my employer wants from me!’ and then you have to keep watching the unskippable ad only for the person not to become immediately radicalised by what they were just forced to say. I genuinely cannot fathom how people write these scripts, say them out loud, film these videos, edit them and publish them and nobody involved in that process is going insane. are you even listening? are you reading those words? cant you see the exploitation of workers is forcing you to stop performing even the most necessary of tasks like eating real food? and cant you see we have been so convinced that is normal that there are entire businesses and ad campaigns based on it?

food, actual real good normal food, is a human right, but also part of your culture, your family, your community. Its a source of joy, health, fun, love and creativity. please dont let these fucked up companies convince you its just time that could be better spent slaving away for the rich monsters that hold your contract.

[techniiciian]

time to make some cash! let’s go paramedics in training! let’s go.

[theshadowrealmitself]

A: So anyways with the captain and backup captains out of commission, we all took a vote and voted for B to be our next captain

B: I begged them not to! :)

B: But they didn’t listen to me

C: The only order we didn’t follow, but for any after that, we’re your loyal crew

[forbiddennhoney]

i think at least the next 4-5 tattoos i want are nearly all kink related and i think thats beautiful