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rokhal · 1 month

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ANGR Magical Girl AU: MenSynarche

In reference to this post which is both required reading and also has awesome hilarious art.

Robbie gets his first monthly snaketime. Frank Castle explains.

“Ssomething’s happening,” Eli announced from where he’d nestled his pink serpentine coils atop the engine block of a 2001 Escalade. Robbie grunted. He had to stand on a bucket to reach its fusebox comfortably, and the stupid luxury SUV had every fuse filled. He squinted at the wiring diagram on his phone and tilted it sideways, hoping it would make more sense. The phone auto-compensated and straightened the diagram for him, so he had to tilt his head instead. “Now problem or later problem?” he murmured. Normal people couldn’t see Eli, so Robbie often brought him to work as incentive to be less of an asshole. He was okay to talk to on his good days, and knew a lot more about cars than he did about rodents. Which was odd for a snake, and which Eli had never satisfactorily explained.

“Not a problem per se,” Eli mused. “But it’s definitely now. Take a bathroom break unless you want an awkward convo with the boss.”

“You wanna explain?” Robbie tried, and Eli deflected, “That’d take all day.” Yeah, sure.

Robbie glanced down into the fuse box one more time and noticed the pink of his unnatural fingernails glittering through the black polish he’d touched up just two days ago, a strange holographic effect that made his head hurt. He grabbed Eli, his glossy scales smooth and dry and currently warm from the engine block, and headed for the time clock to punch out for a break. Canelo was surprisingly easy-going about his breaks—probably out of consideration for his family responsibilities—but Robbie couldn’t know when his patience would run out. Then he ducked out the back door into the garbage alley and almost tripped over Lenny, seated on the ground with a lighter and some bits of trash and staring furtively up at him and honestly Robbie didn’t want to know. Lenny scrambled to his knees to gather up his paraphernalia and Eli went suddenly limp in Robbie’s hand and the warm bright fuzz of their magic erupted from the stone in his chest and no, not here, I didn’t even say the words what the fuck, the world went soft and distant as his body unraveled.

He waited, just a glittering nebula of himself, for his uniform to give him solidity. The transformation was like his own personal time dilation field; sure it was hard to think, but it didn’t last nearly as long in the real world as it felt like to him. He just had to wait until the magic decided it was ready to re-make him, dress him back up like a paper doll—come on, did it always take this long? He could almost see the pink stone in his mind’s eye this time, an empty channel for power to flow through, but nothing was happening. Why could he see it? Should he push?

A hesitant nudge, and then a flood. Robbie held two roles at once, the source and the vessel, draining and filling himself at the same time, and then with relief he felt the leotard and the skirt and the bows popping into place on his chest and shoulders, the tiara coming to rest on his forehead, and his body condensed and sense returned and he predictably crashed to his face on the cracked pavement behind Canelo’s. He started to push himself up, cursing his stupid gogo boots, but couldn’t get his knees under him. He was pressing up on his hands, but he still felt grit digging into his whole chest and belly. He tried to roll over, but he felt trapped, heavy, and as he twisted sideways to look at how he had fallen, he kept twisting and twisting and—

Eli was massive. His glossy pink body filled the alley, great swoops and coils as thick around as Robbie’s waist. Shit. Eli was normally harmless, but he clearly didn’t like it. Eli at this size would not be so harmless, magical healing venom or not. “Eli,” Robbie said cautiously, searching for his head. He spotted his tail by the dumpster, and unless he’d folded completely in half, his head should be closer to Robbie and he was actually swallowing Robbie Jesus fuck. Robbie summoned his pick-hammers and swung at the pink reptile skin that had overtaken his legs, stupid, that’s what you get for trusting him, and then stabbing pain high in his chest, teeth, must be, so Robbie wriggled desperately from side to side looking for the monster’s eyes—where were his eyes? The lashing pink coils that had swallowed up his legs ended blindly under his flared miniskirt. The wounds in the snake’s body that bled glimmering fuschia ichor stung as his hands passed over them. Eli had nothing to say, because Eli didn’t have a head. Just Robbie, sticking out of his neck like a hood ornament.

“I gotta get sober,” Lenny croaked from the doorway.

Robbie had to undo this, and he had to get out of here. He figured he had one good jump in him; he pictured his bedroom as hard as he could, shut his eyes against the horrible nothingness, and concentrated: get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here...until he unmade himself with a Pop!

Transforming was bad, but at least Robbie could see the logic as to how all the bits of himself stayed roughly in place: conservation of momentum. Jumping was like starting a transformation, pausing, and then being blown to his destination by a great wind. It was chaotic and error-prone and he hated it. This time, though, he could see the wind, a swirling vortex that picked up the glittery mist that was Robbie and carried him—mostly—across twenty blocks to his apartment. He could also see pink glitter that escaped the vortex, bits of his magical essence drifting over the tight clusters of homes built in multigenerational backyards, the alleys, the tiendas, the neglected streets that made up Hillrock Heights. He’d had worse jumps that left him shaking and exhausted; this one felt normal. He wondered how much of himself he’d bled all over the city on magical errands.

The magic reconstructed him in his bedroom, pink anaconda body and all. Robbie felt his ribs pressing against every wall, part of his belly draped over the bed and the rest curved about itself on the floor, scales rubbing against smooth scales. He couldn’t even keep track of himself. As he tried to straighten his snake body to push his human torso toward the door to lock it, some part of his massive body moved, but only to rattle the dresser against the wall. This would certainly put a damper on ghost-fighting.

Robbie facepalmed and spoke the words to return to his mundane form, then punched the floor when nothing happened.

At least he still had hammerspace. He reached up for an imaginary shelf over his head and retrieved his cell phone, which he’d left in his mundane pants, and called Canelo’s. Lee picked up after about ten rings, and Robbie explained that he had to take a personal sick day.

“Mierda,” Lee breathed, horrified. “You...you think you gonna pull through?”

“I’m not dying,” Robbie said.

“Okay, guey. You, uh...you rest up now. We’ll keep an eye on your car.”

“Appreciate it.” Robbie let him go, then tried and failed again to roll over onto his back. He collapsed face down onto the floor, then propped himself up on his elbows and messaged Frank Castle.

Mr. Castle was...scary, and he had little patience for Robbie’s safety concerns. Johnny was supportive, and Danny was talented, but neither of them had the advanced Magical Girl know-how that Robbie needed right now, and right now Robbie needed legs so he could pick up Gabe from middle school, cook dinner, and make it back in to work tomorrow. He stared anxiously at his phone, texted three more times, and then tossed his phone back up onto its imaginary shelf and buried his head under his arms to hyperventilate.

With his eyes shut, there was nothing to distract himself from the press of battered hardwood floor and dirty laundry and walls and furniture against his endless, naked lower torso. He scrunched and tugged and slid and dragged and folded his body until he managed to fit his snake body into the bare space between his bed and his dresser, coils stacking on top of each-other and engulfing his relatively small human self in strangely soothing pressure and darkness.

He sensed his phone ringing from hammerspace and struggled to unspool enough to free his head and one arm to retrieve it. Frank. Okay. He cleared his throat and accepted the call. “Thanks for getting back to me, Mr. Castle.”

“Mnh,” Mr. Castle grunted, then yawned loudly. “You’re lucky you caught me before the sun hit my recliner.” That was an uncharacteristic overshare. “The whole point of using Signal is to include all relevant details in your messages.”

“Okay, sir,” Robbie said, though he was not in the mood for a lecture on instant messaging etiquette from a Vietnam veteran.

“But I can guess your Familiar is missing and there’s snakey bits where some of your human bits used to be.”

“Yess!” Robbie gasped as his coils reflexively squeezed the air out of his human lungs, which was a lot less uncomfortable than it probably should be. He relaxed and took a breath. “I don’t know what I did wrong. I wasn’t even trying to transform. How do I fix it?”

“Punisher log,” Mr. Castle muttered. “New mission: half-kill Johnny Blaze for not explaining shit to the newbie. ...It’s your synarche, kid. You’re a grown Magical Girl now.” Mr. Castle proceeded to explain that on every new moon, a mature Magical Girl would temporarily merge with their Familiar from moonrise to moonset, for unavoidable and annoying magical-biological maintenance purposes. Nothing was wrong, so there was nothing to fix.

“Fuck.” Robbie pressed at one of his coils with his hand; he couldn’t even tell where the pressure was coming from, just that his hand felt very small. “I’d rather turn into an actual girl than deal with this shit.”

“And I’d rather be talking my actual daughter through her first period, but here we are,” Mr. Castle growled.

“Ssorry, sir.”

“Shit happens. You gotta deal. You’re a Magical Girl, you get Magical Monthlies. The upside is, in this state, you get to peek behind the curtain at processes that your familiar normally handles for you. It’s a good time to refine your skills. Like teleporting.”

Robbie winced.

“Or, if you’re still not ready to practice that extremely useful and potentially life-saving ability, go do some crimefighting.”

“I don’t think I can do that right now.”

“What, embarrassed of the forked tongue?”

Robbie hadn’t even noticed he had a forked tongue; he stuck it out and crossed his eyes as it just kept coming, vibrant red-purple and as long as his hand. “Augh!” He pulled it back in and was walloped by the taste of dust and motor oil and the residual masculine funk that persisted despite his magicalgirlitis. “No,” he said, suddenly hyperaware of the bizarre movements his tongue was making to compensate for its new shape. “It’sss. It’s. My. Uh.” He raised his phone overhead and sent a selfie.

“Huh,” Mr. Castle said after a minute. “That’s a new one.” Robbie waited miserably as though he might change his mind and divulge a secret advanced Magical Girl technique to cut short this stupid syn-whatever, but all he had for him was, “Well, you got about twelve hours to kill. If you do nothing else, meditate.”

Great. Robbie sank back into the dark of his own coils and screamed in frustration.

#all-new ghost rider #ghost rider magical girl au #robbie reyes #frank castle #my fanfic #fanfiction #magical girl au

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rokhal · 3 days

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Ghost Rider/RE7 AU fanfic: Skills

Follows directly from this fic. Set in @wazzappp's Ghost Rider/RE7 fusion AU, during the period that Robbie and Gabe are living in an isolated BSAA-provided safe-house, watched by intelligence agents and also by Chris Redfield.

At least until the thing with Mia, Ethan Winters and Chris Redfield seemed to be friends, and Ethan seems to have looked up to Chris. I don't see this happening with Robbie. Not to say anything bad about Chris -- I'm not familiar enough with his character -- but his wiki page has his full career and this man has spent twenty years professionally shooting things. I just don't see Robbie getting that cozy with him, not without a long adjustment period.

Anyway, here Chris is being friendly. He's got a soft spot for orphans.

Mr. Redfield (like hell was Robbie going to call the private military contractor on whose word they had been extrajudicially deported to a Spanish-speaking country under false Mexican passports, and who had probably trained the guys who trained the guys who disappeared people for the cartels down south, “Chris”) showed up a couple times a month to supervise Robbie practicing with his illegal BSAA-issued firearms and make nice with Gabe. Gabe liked Chris. Robbie had to let them think he liked Chris, because if Chris ever decided that Robbie and Gabe were more trouble than they were worth, presumably as witnesses against Cutting-Edge Health Connections or whoever it actually was that had snatched Gabe up for his life-saving experimental “therapy,” then Chris would probably dismember them both and cremate them in an oil drum. Heck, he could probably skip the cremation step and just leave their corpses in the house. No one would find them for years.

Career-choice aside, Mr. Redfield seemed like he wanted to appear harmless. He generally arrived in a nondescript rental car, biceps straining the sleeves of his polo shirt, bearing some comics or Cholula hot sauce or something else he thought would endear him to them. Today, he trundled down the miles-long gravel drive to the house in a Toyota Tacoma. Robbie didn’t know they sold those in Spain. As he approached, Robbie spotted something mechanical and spindly in the truck bed, which resolved itself into a pair of bicycles.

“Got something for you two,” Mr. Redfield announced, getting out and lowering the tailgate. He vaulted into the bed, and motioned for Robbie to grab the bicycles as he handed them down. Robbie had to take a moment to identify a secure place to grip them; bicycles were about 80% moving parts. Robbie steadied them both awkwardly by the handles to keep them from toppling over, and Mr. Redfield jumped down with a large brightly printed box under each arm. “Casco para Bici de Montaña” and “Casco Juvenil para Bici,” the glossy boxes read. The price stickers were still in place; the helmets had each cost over fifty euros.

Mr. Redfield waved for Gabe to come over, and Gabe ran up and grabbed his helmet with both hands—“Is that for me? Do I have to give it back? Does Robbie get one?”—while Mr. Redfield used his foot to depress a metal brace near the bottom of the frames that allowed each bike to stand upright so Robbie could let go of them.

“They’re a little old-fashioned and I had to guess on the sizes,” Mr. Redfield apologized, gesturing to the bikes. “I figure they should be good enough to have some fun on, though.”

Robbie couldn’t guess what about these bikes was old-fashioned; the paint and seats had a few scrapes and there were stickers plastered to the frame of the smaller bike, but they both had actual shocks with springs and pistons and everything. Each handle had its own cluster of levers and cables. Robbie wasn’t stupid, he knew a bike was basically a big pair of gyroscopes that steadied you as they rotated and he could deduce that the levers and gears and chain served the same purpose as a manual transmission for whatever fraction of a horsepower a human’s legs produced, but understanding how one worked and actually operating one were very different. These weren’t the small one-speed bikes his peers back home might meander along the city sidewalks or pull wheelies on; these looked like the kind grinning sweaty white people rode down mountains on TV commercials for allergy medication. The saddle on the larger bike was taller than Robbie’s hip. If he tried to sit on it, neither of his feet would touch the ground. “It’s big,” he remarked.

“The seat’s not hard to adjust.”

Crap. Mr. Redfield must think Robbie was complaining. Robbie had no opinions about bicycles—no, maybe he did. Bikes were quiet, inexpensive to operate, difficult to conceal tracking devices on, simple to repair, and while they couldn’t compete with cars on the freeway, they were the next best thing for long-distance travel. And they didn’t require ID or registration. If the BSAA had meant to trap Robbie and Gabe in this off-grid house, maybe Mr. Redfield was offering them a plausibly deniable escape. Or maybe he was just irresponsible. That left only the major problem. “Gabe doesn’t know how to ride a bike.”

Mr. Redfield made as though to punch Robbie in the shoulder, and Robbie flinched before he could stop himself. Redfield completed the punch slower, lightly, the same way he insisted on manually adjusting Robbie’s posture when he supervised firearms practice, like he was doing Robbie some kind of favor by pushing his tactile boundaries. “Well, lucky he’s got you for a big bro, huh?”

“Uh, about that,” Robbie started, then froze when he heard a crumbly hiss of tires on sand, and a scream moving rapidly downhill. “¡Ay! Gabe!”

“Thought you said he didn’t know—” Mr. Redfield started, but Robbie was already sprinting around the Tacoma, between the endless shrubs, down the rocky slope after Gabe, who was hurtling toward the ocean at ten, fifteen, twenty miles an hour—toward the ocean and the rough cliffs that led down to it.

“Gabe! Stop!” Robbie stumbled on a loose rock and gasped for air. “Gabe!”

“Whoa, little dude, safety first,” Mr. Redfield called, waving the boxed helmet in one hand as he overtook Robbie without obvious effort. Maybe he was some kind of bioweapon. “Come on back here, let’s get this fitted.”

Gabe arrested his headlong course toward certain death by some kind of miracle, and turned his bike around a mere five hundred yards from the cliff. (It looked closer from Robbie’s perspective.) He stood up on the pedals to put his weight into climbing back up the hill, just like he’d had full use of his legs his entire life, before swinging down off the bike and walking the rest of the way, panting. Robbie wheezed and braced his hands on his knees when they reached each-other.

“Cliff,” Robbie managed. “Gabe. Don’t go down the cliff.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” Gabe protested. “That’d be stupid.”

“I know, I know you’re not stupid. But.” Robbie grasped desperately for some way to explain his panic besides, every time you show me something new you can do I get scared you’re possessed again. “This ground is a bad surface for braking. You could skid and lose control at high speeds.”

“I want to try on my helmet,” Gabe said, passing his bike to Robbie as he jogged up to where Mr. Redfield was opening the box. Robbie watched closely as Redfield set the helmet on Gabe and stuck little strips of foam to the inner rim wherever Gabe said it chafed him. Gabe kept trying to loosen the chinstrap until Robbie admonished, “If you cracked your head open I’d be so sad I might die.” Then Gabe slumped and let Redfield tighten the chinstrap according to the diagrams. Redfield was following the English language instructions, but Robbie noticed that he’d had to turn to the middle of the guide pamphlet to find them. The front pages were all in Spanish.

“Thought he didn’t know how,” Mr. Redfield remarked, not bothering to lower his voice despite Gabe being right there.

“Uh,” Robbie said. He still knew almost nothing of what Gabe’s life had been like while the Connections had had him, but he doubted it had included many outdoor activities. Gabe was looking away, picking at a sticker on his bike’s handlebars. “He was...away...for a while.”

“Daddy Baker taught me,” Gabe explained. His voice was quiet. “He taught Evie first. Then me. She really liked it, she made me ride for her after she got too old.”

Robbie swallowed. “You, uh. Are you happy to have your own bike now?”

“Yeah.” Gabe was still absorbed peeling off the previous owner’s stickers, but Robbie watched Mr. Redfield watching his brother with a blank, analytical expression. “Evie was really sad she couldn’t play with her real body anymore. She was nicer when I let her play with me.”

Did Gabe mean play together or play with, like a toy? Hopefully Mr. Redfield would assume Gabe meant the first one, because the second option might have left traces that might require more aggressive decontamination. “I’m really proud of you for learning how to do this,” Robbie said, trying to change the subject. “But you gotta tell me before you go out riding, okay? And stay where I can see you. I don’t want you getting lost again.”

“I wasn’t lost, I was turned around,” Gabe protested.

Mr. Redfield laughed. “Great comeback. Okay, dude. To keep from getting turned around, you just look for your major landmarks. Right here, that’s the water, that’s always gonna be South. You climb up the nearest hill, and you look for either a downhill slope, a river, or the sea itself, and you can figure it out from there.”

“See?” Gabe said, raising one eyebrow at Robbie.

Are you fucking kidding me. Robbie glared helplessly at Mr. Redfield. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now you two can do some sight-seeing. Or,” he said, winking, “zip into town for groceries in an emergency.” What was that wink for. Was Redfield trying to warn and prepare Robbie for something, or just playing Friendly Paramilitary Babysitter? “Don’t act too excited, now.”

“Right, thanks,” Robbie said. “I, uh. I rode a motorcycle once. Bike can’t be that different?”

Redfield frowned. “You never rode a bike?”

Why was he acting shocked. He’d read their file. Foster kids couldn’t haul bikes from home to home. “Who was gonna teach me?”

“Me,” Redfield muttered. “Now. Apparently.”

“Is it a requirement?” Robbie checked.

“No, not like firearms training,” Redfield said, confirming one of Robbie’s previous suspicions and raising more questions at the same time. “But I figure you want to keep up with him.”

“Yeah.” Ahead of them, Gabe mounted his new bike again and squiggled back and forth up the hill toward the driveway. “Thanks.”

#robbie reyes #gabe reyes #ghost rider re7 au #i just got way too into this over the past two weeks. procrastinating other stuff #fanfiction #my fanfic #all-new ghost rider

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