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v3nusaphr0d1t3 · 3 years

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i’m so tasty and the price is right (shigadabi)

crossposted on ao3: <3 rating: explicit content warning: shameless porn, name-calling, both feminine & masculine terms used for ftm genitals, uhhhh i think thats it, hit me if i’m wrong tomura has an onlyfans and dabi helps him out for the viewers

tomura shigaraki, the anxiety-riddled, anger-filled, screaming child prodigy turned drop-out streamer that dabi was currently rooming with, had an onlyfans. dabi had only found this out through coincidence one night when he, for the first time, actually grabbed the mail on his way up. tomura had a bunch of perverted letters sent in from fans, all knowing him by his streamer name ‘decay’. they called him by his given name in the letters, something that shocked dabi and made it even funnier to read through.

his first instinct was to charge into tomura’s room to question him on it. and dabi wasn’t really a thinking man, so that’s what he did. he charged in with the letters in his hand, interrupting tomura’s stream as he scrambled to mute himself.

“what the fuck do you want, dabi?” his raspy voice stuck in a permanent whine. it was honestly kinda cute sometimes. it was very easy to antagonize the poor boy, so dabi did it as often as he could get away with before tomura started threatening him. and not that dabi was scared of tomura— he could easily beat his ass at this point in time, all made up of scrawny limbs and long-term malnourishment. the only times he ate a real actual meal were when dabi reminded him and/or provided him with food. it put another pang of worry in dabi’s chest that he chose, again, to ignore.

tomura’s eyes scanned dabi, falling onto the papers in his hands with a confused expression.

“what?” tomura repeated, “what’s that shit?”

dabi’s grin was maniacal.

“nothing, nothing,” dabi moved them behind his back, “only your creepy fan letters. from your fans.” there was a beat of silence before tomura’s face heated up and he stomped over, trying his hardest to grab at the letters dabi held.

“dude, why didn’t you tell me you were a pornstar? that’s like—” his laughing was cut off with a cough as he held the papers above their heads, shaking them to taunt tomura even more. tomura eventually jumped and snatched them out of dabi’s hands, shoving them in his trash can and going to sit back in his chair. he paused his stream as dabi caught his breath.

tomura took a deep (slightly crackly) breath, and started a practiced monologue, “i’m not a pornstar, i just hold… extra liveshows later on for more cash because streaming doesn’t exactly pay the best and for certain legal reasons i can’t really get a good job. so i basically just…” he sighed and winced a bit, “i record myself jacking off?” his sentence ended in more of an uncertain question than a statement, almost as if he was scared. “i don’t do it when you’re home, or at least i try not to, and i don’t bug you with it, so i don’t see why it would matter—”

his rambling was cut off as tomura looked up to see dabi suddenly being a lot closer than he remembered.

“that’s fuckin’ hot, no apologies needed.” dabi’s voice was lower than usual, setting tomura’s face even further on fire, lighting up red as he covered his face.

“what the hell, freakshow, you can’t just say shit like that—” tomura said, muffled through his hands.

“but i can, and i will. you know i’m a pretty honest man, creep.” dabi chuckled. “now are you gonna let me fuck you up on your little stream or what?” he leaned down to be level with tomura who was still sat in his chair.

there was only silence from tomura’s end.

“c’mon, won’t another dude be good for business? i promise i’ll take good care of you.” dabi got even closer with these words, trapping tomura in with his hands on the elbow rests, mouthing filthy promises in his ear.

“okay. we can take turns blowin’ each other.” tomura grumbled, pushing at dabi’s shoulders to move him from his position over him. “but i gotta finish off this stream first, i’ll come get you when it’s time. get cleaned up and shit, i won’t suck you off if you’re gross.” tomura didn’t look him in the eyes, putting his headphones back on and officially ending the conversation as he got back to whatever murder game he was playing with an apology for being gone.

dabi stalked off to the bathroom, burying his intense excitement and arousal deep in his gut and turning on the shower. he got pretty much everything, cleaner than he had been in weeks as a gross dude with an illegal gig barely classified as a job. he always did wonder how tomura was able to pay so much of the bills, but he didn’t want to bring it up and sound bitchy. he was half hard just from the thought, tomura always being the grumpy catch he was always afraid to go for, for fear that he would get kicked out of the apartment the morning after or something along those lines.

the stunt he had just pulled was exhilarating. he thought about the flush he had seen on tomura’s face as he stepped out of the shower. he was still at half mast as he brushed his teeth and put on deodorant (stealing tomuras’), towel wrapped around his waist. dabi had always thought himself to be a kind of a catch, positively covered in tattoos and piercings and even some cosmetic staples. his brother said he was addicted to body mods, bu he chose to ignore those words in favor of finding something else to do to or with his body.

he wondered what he should wear. he didn’t want to struggle with it too much, just going for what he had on before the shower. he shook his hair out like a dog, water slightly darkened from the hair dye (he had just redyed it a couple days ago and he never truly had the care to wash it all the way out).

and when he was done with all that, he went into his room and collapsed on his bed facedown. there he stayed for a few moments as he tried to calm himself down, before just turned to his bong on the side table for some manual chill. he lit up a few times, only enough to make his head swim the tiniest bit, and went to play a few shitty games on his phone.

apparently he had been playing a little longer than he thought, already gone through a cigarette and another couple rips before tomura knocked on his door.

“ready to start up the live stream, get your ass in here if you still want in on it.” he heard through the door, followed by tomura’s footsteps leading off into his bedroom.

dabi, of course, immediately followed, hopping up and throwing his door open, excitedly shimmying his way up to tomura’s doorway.

man

he was. he was wearing black thigh-highs, held up by a garter that he could barely see the beginnings of over a sweatshirt that was giant on his small, skinny frame. dabi’s sweatshirt.

“did—” dabi was damn near short of breath at the sigh ton display in front of him, “did you get that from my room?”

“no, i got it from the living room. now let me get the camera on and the stream rolling before you fuck me up.” tomura chuckled softly, something that he didn’t do often. dab’s heart skipped a beat, and he pointedly chose to ignore it.

“you look fuckin’ hot, baby.” he murmured, eyes glued to the sligh bit of thigh on display over the top of the sock and before the sweatshirt.

“baby? what happened to creep?” tomura pressed record, laptop set up next to the camera so that they could see themselves and the chat, not giving dabi a chance to respond. tomura waited a few moments, before addressing the current pileup.

“hey everyone. i have a guest tonight, my roommate and the dude who eats all my damn cereal—” tomura paused and turned back to look at dabi who was still out of camera, “do you want your identity to be anonymous? ‘n’ do you wanna show your face?”

dabi had a moment of pause, before shrugging. “nah, i don’t really have any shame, you’re not really anything to hide.” dabi once again shamelessly looked tomura up and down, earning an eyeroll and the beginnings of… was that a smile?

tomura turned back to the camera. “this is dabi, my roommate, and the dude who’s gonna eat me out on stream.” tomura said with no pause, and no stutter or hesitation. this was a performance, surely. it was so different from the blushing and hiding man who was avoiding his eyes a couple hours ago. tomura cupped his hand around the side of his mouth, mimicking a stage whisper. “this’ll be the first time with him, so you get our genuine reactions for free.” tomura chucked gently, watching the chat blow up at the premise of some genuine roommate porn.

tomura turned back to dabi, moving to pull him into frame and pushing him to sit on tomura’s bed.

“well, here goes nothing,” tomura murmured to himself, climbing into dabi’s lap and pulling him into a kiss. he immediately heard the dinging of tip notifications off to his side, and he knew his chat was probably going wild. dabi’s hands wandered, up tomura’s thighs that were positioned over his hips, and over the other mans own hips, back down to his thigh-highs. he pulled at them, snapping it against tomura’s thigh, earning a gasp that allotted enough room for dabi to stick his tongue in the others mouth. tomura’s own arms were slung over dabi’s shoulders coming up to run his hands through dabi’s undercut. tomura ground down against dabi’s half-hard cock, trying to work him up further.

eventually their kiss broke for air and dabi stared into the camera with a knowing grin as he ground his hips upwards. tomura gasped loudly, sensitivity intensified by the hormones he had been taking for a while now. dabi moved to kiss down the white-haired boy’s throat, leaving little nips that had tomura giving breathy whines. he could tell some were played up for the camera, but he didn’t mind at all. he was rock hard in his jeans now, and he could feel the slickness that tomura had built up— soaking through his panties. which, by the way— now that dabi could see them, he was obsessed. they were bright blue and lacey, gorgeous against the pale flush of tomura’s scarred thighs. they hugged his hips nicely and made dabi want to rip them apart.

tomura gently pushed him away from his neck, rolling his hips against dabi as he leaned back slightly to look at the camera. “chat, who should go first? who do you wanna see cum first?” his words were syrupy and seductive as their hips worked in tandem. someone donated with a fairly large amount, spouting something about wanting to see the pretty boy choke on cock.

and who were they to deny the nice donator?

tomura turned back to dabi, running a hand down the man’s chest, grabbing at the end of his shirt. dabi got the hint and removed his shirt, hearing the chat pop off for a moment. “your lucky day, freakshow. fuck me up.” tomura whispered and he hopped off dabi’s lap, spreading dabi’s legs manually and making himself comfortable between them.

“feel free to grab the camera to get that angle, yknow?” tomura looked up at him as he laid his cheek on dabi’s thigh, uncomfortable close to the bulge in dabi’s pants.

dabi leaned back on his hands, letting tomura unbutton his pants and shimmy his boxers down enough to pull his cock out. tomura had a moment of shock at the sight of it, long and thick with about 5 pieces of fuckin’ metal stuck into it.

when his shock wore off, he decided a quip would be appropriate. “y’know i always did wonder if it continued on down—” tomura gestured to all of his various facial and body piercings, finally licking a stripe up his length and taking dabi by surprise, making him gasp. tomura was surprisingly good at this, dabi had thought him a lame little virgin before he found out about the whole onlyfans thing. but no, tomura had apparently had quite a bit of practice, shown off by the rapid rate at which he was able to adjust to the intrusion of dabi’s cock, sinking down and feeling the metal rods on the underside grind one by one against his tongue. it was heaven, and dabi reached one hand into tomura’s hair for support.

this led tomura to pull off, only to say the words, “pull on it,” before sinking his hot mouth back down onto dabi’s dick. and so dabi did what he was told, taking the hair in his hands and pulling, earning a genuine moan from tomura that reverberated its way down his cock. the hottest thing was that tomura was making him feel this good with only his mouth. his hands were currently on dabi’s thighs, moving up to his hips as if to insinuate something. dabi pulled him back by his hair. tomura whined, which was the hottest thing ever and looked up at dabi with a wanting— no, expecting stare.

“use your words, babydoll.” he muttered to tomura, watching his face heat up, much more like his bashful self before the camera turned on. the audience was eating it up, so used to his unphased confidence and sheer no-fucks-given attitude, that seeing this form of subby shigaraki was like dessert for them.

“use me, dabi,” tomura muttered, eyes focused on the ground as he shuffled on his knees.

“what was that? i couldn’t hear you, speak up.” dabi teased and used his hand that was in tomura’s hair to slip down and hook his finger under his chin, forcing him to look up at dabi.

tomura’s eyes glazed over for a second at the stern look that dabi was giving him, before blinking harshly and shaking his head a bit, as if to clear his mind.

“fuck my throat, dabi. use me.” his voice was clear and without any shyness now, an almost grin spreading across his cheeks. though his inner submission didn’t go unseen, as the look in his eye and the redness of his face and the way he arched his back even now, was more honest than any words he could say.

“if you say so, baby. tap me if you want off.” dabi moved his hand back to tomura’s hair, gripping it tight and using it to line himself up with tomura’s lips.

“open up. you’re gonna be so good at this, i can just tell.” dabi growled out. tomura followed directions, opening his mouth and sticking his tongue out to show up, dabi sliding his cock to the back of the other man’s throat. he stopped for a moment to let tomura adjust, but tomura took that to his advantage, meeting dabi’s eyes and sucking hard.

“jesus fuck, baby—” dabi panted, starting up a smooth rhythm with his hips, both hands now in tomura’s hair to practically use him like a toy. a human fleshlight.

“god, tomura, you whore— how’dya get so good at this? d’ya— d’ya practice?” dabi’s hips sped up as tomura moaned deep in his throat, vibrating against his cock. the words were turning tomura’s poor brain into jello. the chat was going wild, donations at an all time high as they watched their favorite creator get used like a toy.

dabi felt the tension building up in his gut. a few more moments of this and he would be done for. he reached down with one of the hands to wrap around tomura’s throat, so that he couldn’t even semi-breathe through his nose. he felt tomura gag, throat clamping down on his cock. tomura had yet to tap him, so he continued with his wild ministrations, letting go of tomura and pulling his dick out until just the tip rested on tomura’s tongue as he worked himself off the final edge and came, coating tomura’s lips and tongue.

“don’t swallow yet.” dabi’s tone was winded yet still authoritative. “show your audience baby, you did amazing. show them how good of a slut you are.” dabi grabbed tomura’s chin and manually turned the boy’s head to the camera, watching with hungry eyes as he showed off the spend on his tongue.

“okay, now swallow.” dabi ordered, watching as tomura did it easily. dabi knew at that instant that he had sent tomura into a momentary headspace of sorts. he wanted to treat the boy after using him so roughly, so he helped him up and out of the sweatshirt, splayed out on the bed, hair spread out around his head like a halo. he looked like a proper angel as the blurriness finally worked its way out of those eyes and the real tomura came back on line.

“jesus christ, dabi.” tomura grumbled. his pale face was on fire. dabi thought that was the hottest thing he had ever experienced.

dabi was lowering himself onto his knees, pulling tomura’s hips to hang off the bed, spreading them so that he could lay lovebites along his inner thighs. it was almost agonizing with how long he carried it out, working numerous dark purple hickeys onto his thighs, as if to claim, and to show off. he knew that if tomura did a show in the next few days, they would be visible, and that made him hot under the collar.

“god, freakshow, get on with it!” tomura whined, trying to arch up onto something, but failing as a result of dabi’s iron grip on his thighs.

“ah, ah ah— what do we say when we want something, babydoll?” dabi’s low voice made goosebumps rise up on tomura’s skin, and the poor boy nearly gave in and started begging right there. dabi stopped pressing kisses to tomura’s thighs, sitting back holding tomura’s legs apart, waiting on his reply.

“i need an answer, creep.” the familiar nickname from the man between his legs made it more… intimate. tomura swallowed his pride.

“please— please dabi, please suck me off, i need it—” he was rewarded with dabi ripping his panties off, exposing his nether regions to the open air. tomura whined at the cold, feeling it against his wet cunt. but soon the feeling of cold air was replaced with a soft, excellent warm suction on his dick, one of dabi’s hands reaching up to run two fingers along his slit.

it made tomura nearly scream, instead moving one of his hands to cover his mouth. dabi instantly let up on the attention, reaching up to move tomura’s hand. “you gotta put on a show tomura, remember that.” dabi chuckled before he went back to work, moving his lips down to run his tongue against tomura’s hole. tomura was arching his back and more or less grinding against dabi’s face as he moaned loudly. dabi knew his way around eating out, so it wouldn’t be long for the other man, who had already been so wound up for so long. dabi went back to sucking on his clit and he moved his two fingers to enter, making an awful noise when they did. tomura’s wetness rolled down dabi’s wrist and before long, tomura’s legs were shaking as dabi brought him to the edge.

now, dabi was a little shit by nature. so he doubled, even tripled his efforts in speed and pressure, rocketing tomura over the edge and working his fingers in and out at such a speed that had tomura writhing against the sheets in oversensitivity.

and dabi kept going. he was on a mission, and soon enough, his efforts were rewarded when tomura soaked the sheets and dabi’s arm and lower face. dabi worked him through it, milking him of every drop, before he finally let up. tomura lay there practically braindead for a bit, dabi even going so far as to wave at the camera as he stroked tomura’s thighs, waiting for him to be coherent enough for dabi to leave for a second to get a towel.

once he had come back to the land of the living, tomura ended the stream with a quick thank you to the donators and visitors, while dabi was up getting a towel, and tomura had caught his breath by the time dabi was back with towels and water. dabi wiped his face, arms and upper torso off, and tomura wiped his junk down, throwing the towel somewhere on the floor.

“my junk hurts, you asshole. god— why are you so good at that?” were the first words out fo tomura’s mouth, eliciting a loud laugh from dabi as he opened the window and pulled out a cigarette.

“get me one too, freakshow. i need it after that. my dono’s are through the fuckin’ roof though, so thanks for our rent.” he spoke quietly against the sounds of the city as dabi lit his cigarette and tossed one and his lighter to tomura.

dabi only gave him a devilish smirk.

“you gonna let me do that again?”

#shigadabi #dabi x shigaraki

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yixxes · 4 years

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Anger Management | p.p.

Warnings: Cursing, altercation w a stranger, y/n has a bit of an attitude/anger problem

Word count: 1722

A/N: The reader is Bucky’s younger sister which is like not possible but it’s fine. Enjoy (:

“Oh, go fucking fuck yourself!”

“Hey!” Bucky gave you the look he always gave you when you stepped out of line and you rolled your eyes. You weren’t in the mood to be scolded but your brother obviously didn’t care. “Watch your mouth! The hell’s wrong with you?”

You spared him a two second scowl when he approached the couch, his curious frown trading in for realization and then quickly switching to disappointment. “Seriously? This is your problem?”

Your brows furrowed and your lips jutted out in an annoyed grimace. “This game is stupid, he’s been cheating for the past eight rounds!”

Sam raised his hands with an amused smile on his face that you found beyond annoying. “Hey, I didn’t do anything, but look, I’ll apologize: I’m sorry you picked up the controller before you knew you couldn’t play.”

“Here,” your brother shoved you over and sat in your place before you could enlighten Sam with your colorful vocab and snatched up the controller from your hands. “let me kick his ass for you.”

Sam cackled at Bucky’s confidence and readied up another round. “Yeah, let’s see how far you get with that one.”

“I was playing with that.” You grumbled.

“You’ll live.”

You watched how your brother tapped different buttons and chose certain patterns and inwardly noted how it contrasted to your inarticulate button mashing. It always worked when you played with Steve, why would it not work with...

Crap.

Of course Steve let you win! “That bastard!”

“Y/n,” Bucky warned you firmly and you hated how he kept the button pattern going even when he took his eyes off the screen to stare you down. “seriously, watch your mouth. Who are you even talking about?”

“Come on, kid, I’ll apologize for real if that’s what you want.”

“Not you,” you muttered to Sam. “Steve, he lets me win at this stupid game.” You turned to look at Steve who was on the other side of the couch, smiling guiltily at you.

“You’ll live.” Your brother said again, distracted. “Why don’t you go to the store, we need snacks.”

“Then go get them.”

Bucky paused the game with a sigh and turned to you after setting the controller down on the table. He fished his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a few bills that he extended to you before nodding towards the hall that led to the door. Buck wasn’t asking and you weren’t trying him any further.

“Ugh.” You snatched the money and got up from the couch, but you weren’t clear to go yet.

“Stay away from people and don’t go fighting with strangers again.”

What a gross assumption. “That was literally only two ti-”

“Don’t worry, I’ll go with her.” Peter came up and threw an arm around you. Your sisterly attitude towards your brother melted into a smile and butterflies.

“Good, hey, make sure she doesn’t speed.”

“Got it!” He called over his shoulder, already making his way to the door with your hand in his.

“I don’t get it.”

Peter frowned and got to explaining the joke to you. “Because the ham sandwich is ordering the beer, but the bartender says-”

You pushed a loaf of bread off of the shelf and let it fall into the basket. “Why would a ham sandwich be ordering anything, it’s a ham sandwich-”

“It’s a joke,” he said pointedly. His attitude at the fact that you didn’t laugh at his joke was funnier than the joke itself. “Why are you laughing? Do you get it now?”

“Yup. ‘s really funny, baby, will you grab the coffee grounds, I’m gonna go get a bag of chips,”

“Okay, wait for me by the chips, I’ll meet you there.”

You nodded and leaned up and forward to kiss his puckered lips and then went off towards the chip aisle with the cart. As much as you were opposed to this shopping trip at first, you really enjoyed doing stuff like this with Peter. Anywhere else, there were eyes on you at all times. With the two of you being the babies of the group and Bucky picking up the overprotective trait that older brothers usually had, your privacy and alone time with Peter typically ranged from scarce to nonexistent. Going on little snack runs with him where you could hold hands and kiss without scrutiny was nice. It even made you think about how maybe sometime down the line you and Peter would have a shared place of your own and trips like these would occur much more frequently and that definitely made you smile.

Your smile was short lived, though, when some man stopped his cart right in the way of yours and decided that right then and there was a perfect opportunity to take a look at his phone.

Breathe in through your nose, Bucky always instructed, and out through your mouth. It could’ve been an honest mistake. Maybe he didn’t see you there, you thought to yourself. So, with a polite but rigid smile, you spoke out to him. “’Scuse me, sir, I’m trying to get through.”

He turned to you with an annoyed expression, phone still in hand. He didn’t even look sorry. “And I’m trying to send a text. Some of you damn teenagers were never taught manners a day in your life.”

Manners!? You went over your words in your head and came up with zero reason why some middle aged prick was choosing to yank your chain like this. Your anger was already begging to be let out but you were trying hard to remember how condescending everybody had been back at the tower. They didn’t think you could make it back without blowing up on someone and you planned on proving them wrong.

“Your cart is in my way.” You returned firmly.

“And your patience is just that thin, isn’t it?”

You stared at that man for a few painful seconds. Was he trying to fuck with you? For all of the time that he wasted being a dick without cause, he could’ve moved his cart and been done with you. Paranoia struck and you took a glance around the immediate area. Maybe the guys were here, lurking around to see how long you could hold out, but after a look around you realized how ridiculous that thought was. The guys weren’t here and this wasn’t a test. This guy was a douche and you were letting it slide but you weren’t sure you should’ve been.

“Can you just move your freakin’ cart?” The ‘before I move it for you’ was as silent as the g in lasagna. What was he? 6′1, 6′2? You’d debunked and corrected taller, this would be a breeze.

You quickly shook that thought from your head. You weren’t fighting this grown man.

“Just go around!” He practically shouted.

“Go around where!? You’re blocking the-”

He yanked the front of you cart forward, pulled his back and pushed it into a display of croissants. “You’re welcome.” He said smugly. “Now will you please leave me alone?”

You blinked at the gaping empty space where your cart used to be and then looked up at him. To absolute hell with proving the guys wrong.

“Hey! I got the coffee grounds, did you grab the-”

“Screw you!” You screamed, reaching in his basket and grabbing the first thing that you laid your hand on and throwing it as far as you could.

“What the hell!?”

Peter swooped in after you had already thrown a second thing out of the stranger’s cart and started pulling you away from the scene.

“You need to learn a thing or two about respect, little girl!” The guy was yelling after you, red in the face, stupid phone still in his stupid hand and the other in a fist on his hip.

“Fuck off!” You screamed back, swiping a bag of cotton candy from an end stand, ready to chuck it at that man.

“Hey, hey,” Peter smacked a bag of cotton candy from your hand and continued lugging you away. “take a breath, take a breath. Let me handle this-”

“What’s going on here?” Naturally, the security guard stepped in at the perfect time. You looked like the crazy one, but in fact, it was the douchey middle aged man that started it and you were more than happy to explain that to security.

"Can I have a retake?”

So you had to get your pictures taken by security. You single-handedly landed yourself and Peter on this ridiculous list of people that couldn’t return to the store without adult supervision which was absolutely ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, the man told you that you couldn’t retake your picture.

“Fine.” You didn’t plan on coming back to this hot mess of a store anyways.

Starting the car, you were more than happy to be in the safety of your vehicle, but you remembered that the two of you came out for a reason... and you left without a single one of those reasons.

You ended up driving to another store that was just up the street and got back to the tower about an hour and a half after you left it.

“Where’d you go for the snacks, Australia?”

You rolled your eyes at Sam’s sarcastic comment and set the one bag that Peter let you carry down on the table. While Peter set the rest down, you walked passed Tony (whose smile was far too big for your liking) and sat down on the couch.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

Peter lied like a rug. “Good. We got a bargain on the coffee grounds, two for-”

“I got us banned from the store unless we have adult supervision.” You were dejected. This never would’ve happened had you just let that man be stupid by himself.

Bucky hit pause on the game and looked over at you like he was beyond ready to scold you. “You what?”

“Ten.” Peter finished like he hadn’t even stopped. “There was a coupon that we actually found on the floor, luckily it wasn’t expired-”

“Kid, will you be quiet!?” Bucky’s mean mug could scare almost anybody into silence. You watched your boyfriend shrink into himself before your brother turned back to you. “This explanation better be good.”

#peter parker x reader #peter parker x y/n #peter parker x you #peter parker imagine #peter parker oneshot #peter parker #tom holland x reader #tom holland x y/n #tom holland x you #tom holland imagine #tom holland one shot #tom holland #mcu imagine #mcu #avengers #avengers imagine

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bellatrixobsessed1 · 3 years

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From Chin To Yon Rah (Part 11)

“How’d things go last night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How can you not know?”

“I don’t really have any other dates that I can compare it to, Hajime.”

“Well did he make you laugh and smile?”

“He did.” But he also reminded her of just why she doesn’t particularly deserve to laugh and smile. She wonders if Hajime would reprimand her for turning his son down. Even if he wouldn’t, she isn’t sure that she should. She can’t imagine that there is a line of people waiting to shower her with affection. She is almost certain that she wouldn’t take well to it anyhow. She isn’t the sort for hugs and kisses and tender touches. It is quite hard to imagine herself on the receiving end of it. She can already picture her cheeks growing red and she loathes the very idea of being left a flustered mess.

“But?” Hajime prompts.

She shrugs and slaps her hands against her thighs. “But then he told me about how his wife died. That kind of ruins the mood, wouldn’t you say?”

Hajime rolls his eyes, “sounds like Seukhyun. He doesn’t exactly know how to choose dinner conversations. I’d wager that he’s just about as...socially confused as you are.”

“Is that how Atsu’s mother died? Did those soldiers kill her too?”

He glances into the other room where Atsu leaps off of his bed with Bao, The Magnificent Mole in hand. He drops the stuffed badger-mole into Caihong’s lap. “I thought that his name was Mud Muncher!” The girl declares. Satisfied that the boy is fully engrossed, Hajime turns back to her. “No. She was killed by the Fire Nation. After our own soldiers left they told the enemy soldiers exactly where to find us. I told Atsu that she just got sick…”

“Have you ever met a good soldier, Hajime?”

“Personally, no.” He replies. “But I’m sure that there are some out there.”

Azula responds with a bitter sniff.

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t. They fight for what they think is best and then they find out that, that thing is actually the worst. And then they realize that they are monsters. Of course, most of them knew it all along. Nobody joins the military unless they want to kill someone.”

“Do you…” he looks into the other room. Atsu has fastened one of Caihong’s dolls to Bao. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

She nods her head towards the children.

“Atsu, Caihong!” They look up. “Rikka and I are going for a quick walk, stay out of trouble or I’ll go right to old man Hajime!”

“Don’t worry dad, Bao the Magnificent Mole has Avatar powers, he can defend the whole house from evil Fire Lord Bonsai!”

“Do you mean, Ozai?” Azula asks.

He shakes his head, “nope, I mean Bonsai! Fire Lord Bonsai is an evil bonsai tree that can talk and its leaves are on fire--except the fire is purple---and Avatar Mao is the world’s last hope because…” he sucks in a deep breath, “...because if he doesn’t stop Bonsai then Bonsai will use Roku’s comet to destroy the lion-turtle!”

“Also Ba Sing Se, Bonsai is going to burn Ba Sing Se if Mao can’t stop him.” Caihong adds.

Azula nods. “If you say so.”

“And! And! And also Fire Lord Bonsai has a son that’s a cabbage named Leaf and he’s the prince.” He holds up a leaf, “this is…”

“Leaf?” Hajime guesses.

“Mmmhmm!”

“Come on, Hajime.” She tugs at the man’s arm before Atsu can introduce any other offensive caricatures.

“You and Cai behave.” He waits for the children to nod before following Azula outside. “We were saying…”

“There are no good soldiers Hajime. It doesn’t matter what side of the war they are on. The winning side simply looks less evil because they are painted well. But they’re all…”

“You were a soldier, weren’t you?” Azula swallows. She feels his hand cup around her own. “Let’s walk by the riverside, it’s quieter there.”

He doesn’t speak to her again until they come to a stop on a rickety bridge. “I know that you like being right but I disagree with you. Sure, there are people who join the war over power and bloodlust but some people join the military because they have no choice. Some folks need money, some were forced into it, and some want to protect loved ones. What was your reason?”

Azula thinks for a moment. It certainly wasn’t a matter of money and really she had no one to protect. She didn’t feel particularly forced, she’d rather enjoyed it and she thinks that she would enjoy it still--to feel the thrill of a conquest, a rush of adrenaline, a feeling of worth and accomplishment. “Power.”

“Power?” Hajime asks.

She nods. “I don’t know why you are surprised.”

He seems to study her for a long time. “Why did you want power?”

She furrows her brows.

“I’ve come to observe that most people who want power want it because they feel weak.”

But she had, had all of the power in the world in riches and in bending.

“So why did you want it?”

“I…” She looks off. Off to where the river leads, curling into a tangle of pine. Catkins and tallgrasses bob in the breeze. And yet, even with all of this clarity, she can’t seem to think of a reason why she would have wanted more power. She supposes that, that is just it; she never wanted it for herself, she wanted it so that she could turn it over to her father.

“I think that soldiers are a bit different in the Fire Nation. It seems like, over there, some people were raised on war and never knew any different.” He pauses to chuck a stone into the river. It lands with a plop and stirred up ringlets on the surface. A dragonfly launches itself out of the grasses. “I guess it isn’t so different in the Earth Kingdom. They make it sound glorious, and good and so you start to think that it is…”

Azula stares at the backs of her hands, feels the breeze fluttering her hair against her neck.

“I don’t think that you wanted power, usually people can say exactly why they want it.”

“To give it to my father.”

He nods. “So...love then?”

“What?”

“You wanted power so that you could give it to someone you loved? He was too weak to get it for himself so…”

“He wasn’t weak. He was the most powerful man I knew. He wanted more of it so I was going to get it for him.”

“Okay, he wasn’t weak.” Hajime nods. He is quiet for the longest time. And several times he opens his mouth as if to say something but closes it once more as if thinking better of doing so. She watches a count of six birds swoop down to take drinks before he finally says, “It sounds like you were one of the people who was raised on war. I don’t think that a good father would want his daughter to go to war for him.”

“My father was a good father.” Her stomach sinks even as she says it. He was such a good father that he left her behind. Strangely that probably was the best thing that he could have done for her. It weighs on her so heavily that she finds herself practically slumping over the bridge.

“You didn’t go to war for power. You went to war for love, to show it or to earn it. Or maybe both.”

Love…

He cups his hand over hers. “Maybe it led to bad things but at least you can say that you had one of the best reasons to become a soldier.”

If only that was it. If only that was the whole truth. If only glory and fear had no part of why she’d done so. If only she had just been a simple soldier. “I’m not what you think I am.”

He chuckles. “Who says that I’ve leapt to any conclusions about you?”

“It isn’t a matter of saying it, it’s a matter of implying.”

“I don’t have any solid ideas of who you are but I know what you aren’t.”

“Oh?”

He tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I know that you’re not a bad person, Rikka.”

Rikka is not a bad person. He can’t soundly say the same for Azula. She opens her mouth and it very nearly comes out. She very nearly tells him just who he is dealing with.

“The people in this village only say good things about you. A lot of them are more open to firebenders because of you. Maybe you think that you’re a bad person, but you’re not.” His hand slides off her hers. “We should probably check on Atsu and Caihong.”

She nods. “Yes, that would be a good idea.”

That day she learns that she might not be a monster.

.oOo.

She hates to admit it but she likes Sokka’s laugh. It isn’t charming. It isn’t elegant. It isn’t a pleasant sound, he snorts. But it is genuine, pure, and unapologetic happiness. The sort of laugh she hasn’t heard since listening in on Atsu and Caihong’s play. She holds the Bao against her stomach, absently stroking his head as she waits for Sokka to finish laughing.

“So you’re telling me that this Atsu kid sees me as a boomerang and he thinks that you’re a…”

“The color blue.” She nods. “Anything that he can find that is blue. He had bits and pieces of information but he had it all mixed up and so instead of blue fire, Fire Lord Bonsai’s daughter is just blue. Anything blue.”

“And ‘Roku’s’ comet was a…”

“Flaming cabbage sent by a very vengeful merchant, yes.”

“Oh man, that kid’s a genius. He outta write for the Ember Island players.” He wipes a tear from his eyes. “Maybe you can introduce me to him one day.”

She squeezes the badger-mole and shakes her head. She is glad that his eyes are still closed with laughter. She campuses herself before he looks up.

“Sorry, I know that I promised not to ask any questions after your story but I really just needed some clarification.”

“Those questions were superficial, I didn’t mind answering them. Your turn.”

“Alright, so do you want to hear about the time when we took Zuko to the Water Tribes for some penguin sledding and he got swarmed by them or…”

“Yes. I want to hear that one.”

“Or…”

“I want to hear the Zuko penguin story.” Azula says firmly.

.oOo.

He supposes that he will have to save the, Zuko stuck in a coconut tree for a day when she isn’t so stubbornly refusing the possibility of a funnier Zuko mishap story. She stares at him expectantly, drumming her fingers upon the badger-mole.

“So it was an anniversary present from me to Suki. I decided that it would be fun to take her to the tribes because she always wanted to see a penguin in person. It was great we got all snuggly and cozy, we had these really warm fur blankets and this fire going. There was a blizzard outside so Katara and Zuko and the others were stuck with Hakoda at Bato’s place. Suki and I had some alone time.” He winks. “She pecked me on the cheek and...”

“Spare me the details, Sokka. The only pecking that I would like to hear about involves Zuzu and penguins.”

He flushes. “Right, well after Suki and I got our alone time we decided to take a group trip to the penguin caves. Aang wanted to go penguin sledding again, he said that he could beat Zuko down the hillside. And you know how Zuko gets, ‘I’m going to beat the Avatar in a penguin race, for honor!’ So he went after the largest penguin. Those things are bigger than you think!”

Azula takes a sip of tea, “are they now?”

He nods. “Pretty sure there was one that is bigger than you. I guess that’s not saying much because…”

She fixes him with a deadpan stare and a quirked brow.

“Because...those penguins are massive, not because you’re really small.” He hears her inhale through her nose and snickers. “So Zuko finds the largest penguin that he could find and just leaps on. But that penguin was a mother and it was meal time so all of the chicks just waddle on up but Zuko is in the way. I think that they thought that he was their mother because they were trying to get food from him.”

“Did they get it?”

Sokka shakes his head. “Not from Zuko. Katara had to run all the way back to the village to get buckets of krill to lure them off of Zuko. He was picking feathers out of his hair for days.”

“That does sound like Zuzu. But usually it’s the turtle-ducks.” She gives a one armed shrug. “I guess that he has an affinity for creatures with beaks.”

“Thanks for sharing the badger-mole story.”

She toys with the sash of her nightgown. “I’m...glad that you enjoyed it.”

He grins, though it isn’t particularly the story that he enjoyed--granted her certainly did enjoy that well enough--what he enjoyed was hearing it from her. Was seeing the soft smile on her lips. Was noticing and observing the way her eyes seemed to light up when she made mention of the boy. It was comforting. Comforting and reassuring somehow.

“Does it make you feel better?” He asks.

She tilts her head.

“To talk about moments that made you happy.”

She works a muscle in her jaw, “I suppose that it helps a little, yes.”

“Maybe all of us can get together and…”

“No.” Azula murmurs. “Not yet. I don’t want to share these things with Zuzu yet, he’ll be...overbearing. TyLee gets too sappy and Mai isn’t interested in hearing me go on about some kid.”

“He’s not just some kid.” Sokka says immediately. “I can tell.” Azula tenses and he lifts his hands. “Don’t worry, I’m not asking questions. But it isn’t a bad thing, you know, to show people that you’ve got feelings and that you care about other people.”

She reclines in the chair, props her head against her arm and drapes the other over her belly. She seems to stare off at nothing at all. “Perhaps.”

“Think about it!” He insists. “Servants and guards have been approaching you more. They aren’t scared of you. I know that Mai and TyLee say that you have a thing for being all scary and intimidating but you don’t need to be anymore because…”

“The war has been over for years.” Her eyes don’t leave that distant spot, wherever it is. “I know.”

.oOo.

“Then why do you still have so many walls up?”

Because she is afraid.

“If you think that we won’t like you for being yourself, it’s not true. We have met all sorts of weirdos that we love. Like those swamp guys, you met them! They’re weird and we like them!”

“The more you talk the deeper you dig.” She rolls her eyes. But he isn’t entirely off in his assumptions.

“You took a lot of walls down for me today,” he continues. “Believe it or not, I liked it. I liked the little glimpse that I saw.”

Her tummy flutters. “Yes well I’m not ready for that.”

“Not ready to let people know that you’re a human being?”

Not ready to let people see her, all of her. Not ready for them to get attached to her and care for her. She isn’t even ready for the possibility. She certainly isn’t ready to let people love her. Not the way Hajime did. Cherishable or not she isn’t ready to feel again what Hajime had made her feel. Not with someone who isn’t Hajime.

#Avatar The Last Airbender #Azula #Sokka #Sokkla #Fanfiction

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makeste · 4 years

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BnHA Chapter 263: [Immigrant Song Intensifies]

Previously on BnHA: Ujiko sicced five Noumus on Miruko. Rephrase that: Ujiko sicced only five Noumus on Miruko. In hindsight this was obviously a mistake. Miruko proceeded to laugh and jump around kicking all of them and literally ripping the head off of the strongest one’s neck with nothing but her thighs. It was legendary and awe-inspiring and also she lost an arm but WHO EVEN CARES, I’m still pledging my allegiance to her. Miruko once beat the sun in a staring contest. Miruko’s calendar goes straight from March 31st to April 2nd, because nobody fucking fools Miruko. Anyway so also the heroes are finally attacking the League of Pliff’s HQ and Skeptic is running around all “AHHHH” so I guess we’ll see how that goes now.

Today on BnHA: Things finally get started over in Gunga, although for the time being most of the kids from 1-A and 1-B are still sitting around in the woods all pent-up and anxious and restlessly shipping KamiJirou. Meanwhile on the front lines, three-and-a-half-year-old Kaminari Denki is all “SOB I WANT TO BE BACK WITH MY FRIENDS WHERE IT’S SAFE”, to which Midnight, who I would just like to remind you is (1) an adult, (2) a teacher, and (3) a person responsible for this literal child’s safety in any number of other capacities, responds with “SORRY KIDDO WE NEED YOUR QUIRK.” I have yet to see any compelling evidence that they really do need it, but putting that dubious matter aside, Kaminari does kick some ass once he gets over his anxieties. Meanwhile Cementoss tears a building in half, Tokoyami reflects on how he was exposed to Kaminari’s good and pure moral character during their many soulful jam sessions, Hawks is about to kill Twice, and – wait, what.

a few stray thoughts since this chapter is taking forever to come out today. one, the good guys need to take out Twice and Toga as soon as they find them, because they’re currently the deadliest combination in the League. Twice for obvious reasons, and Toga because I’m pretty sure she got some of Aizawa’s blood that one time back during the Basement arc, and that fact coupled with the fact that she can now use the quirk of whoever she transforms into spells big trouble for the good guys since she can basically just cancel out whoever’s quirk she wants. plus she’s probably also immune to Midnight’s quirk. all in all bad news

two, it is interesting that Hagakure is the only 1-A kid we haven’t seen yet! probably just me overreacting, but still interesting!

(ETA: we do see her standing next to Mina in this chapter, so so much for that. you get out of it this time Tooru!)

and three, I’m not clear on whether or not Skeptic has actually figured out that Hawks betrayed them, or if he just suspects it, or if he thinks that Hawks leaked something accidentally and doesn’t realize that this entire time the dude was 100% playing them. I’m sure we’ll find out shortly. but regardless of how this plays out, I’m already dreading Twice’s reaction to all this :/ my sweet innocent baby. HE THOUGHT YOU WERE HIS FRIEND HAWKS. HE TRUSTED YOU. fff I really hope Twice’s inherently good and trusting nature isn’t a casualty of all this. then again I still think Twice himself is very unlikely to survive this. so basically I’m just bracing myself for pain sob

(ETA: oh this is bad.)

(ETA 2: by the way just to clarify, the above paragraphs were all written on Friday, and the rest of this recap+all ETAs were written the next day when I finally got to read the chapter! this is not important in any way whatsoever but now you know and that’s half the battle!)

“it’s time” holy shit finally lol. you all have been camped out over here for weeks now. not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy each and every second of Miruko’s one-woman murder show, but it is nice to finally check in with you guys over here so we can get to work at last and I can get a better feel for who’s about to die. cuz someone here is dying guys

the chapter is called “I wanna be with the others!!” so. this is gonna be a Kaminari chapter isn’t it. I wonder what fresh new traitorous hijinks he’ll be getting up to this week. that detestable scoundrel

Mineta is being all weasel-y and reluctant, and honestly, I’m a bit annoyed. and for once it’s not directed at him! it’s like... how do I explain it. okay, so like, the manga is showing him being all cowardly and clearly not at all happy about being out here, and the fact that it’s Mineta doing it only adds to the general flavor of this being the wrong attitude to have and just a really shameful way of acting in general, because it’s Mineta and we all know Mineta is vile and so clearly he’s in the wrong here! the only thing is though, I actually don’t blame him even if he’s being a little shit about it, because the kids absolutely should not be here in the first place. are they strong? fuck yes. are they gonna end up being the ones to turn the tide once everything inevitably goes to shit, and thus the others are really goddamn lucky that they’re here? probably. does that make it right to conscript kids and send them out here to a soon-to-be war zone which the adults have very little control over meaning that some of these children will almost certainly be injured and traumatized and possibly even killed? nope! not right at all! no amount of “plus ultra” can justify this, folks. and “we get that it’s wrong but that’s just the fucked up times we live in” doesn’t actually justify it either, even if the HPSC seems to think so

but having said all that, there’s clearly nothing to be done about it at this point, and I’m about to enjoy this chapter of the kids presumably kicking ass even after all that whining, so I’ll just carefully climb down from my soapbox now. but I’m still keeping it handy just in case!

who the fuck is this Thundercats guy who looks like he was part of an old timey street gang in 1920s Chicago

lol can he hear the villain hotel being ripped in half over there in the distance

and speaking of hearing, Jirou is popping her earbuds into the ground to do some reconnaissance of her own I guess!

the heroes?? she better not mean the villains. oh lord I still don’t have the faintest idea how they’re planning on actually containing them all. well, brace yourselves everyone. here comes the shitshow

now Gangs of New York is making the most unnecessary speech in the history of this manga

were any of them actually going to be careless?? I’m pretty sure they understand the gravity of the situation my dude. and if they didn’t, I’d say that’s honestly on you guys and not on them because, again, they’re kids. and if you didn’t want a bunch of teenagers goofing off during your incredibly dangerous and vitally important do-or-die hero mission, then maybe you shouldn’t have brought a bunch of teenagers to your incredibly dangerous and vitally important do-or-die hero mission

“listen makeste are you just going to sit around all day bitching about my cardinal sin of daring to involve your precious little darlings in the actual plot,” the imaginary Horikoshi that sits around trying to keep these recaps from veering off track interjects. and okay fine

sob it feels wrong to see MomoJirou there without their Kaminari

(ETA: and there is Hagakure on the left, FYI. at least I think that’s her?)

their baby boy is all out there alone in the woods. is that why you were really listening, Jirou? you can tell me, I promise not to make a big deal about it

MOMO ARE YOU COMFORTING JIROU WHILE SHE OPENLY WORRIES ABOUT “TOKOYAMI”

I lied, I might make a big thing about it. what a beautiful March day for some OT3

MY INFANT SON!!

HE’S ONLY TWO YEARS OLD!! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!? MIDNIGHT YOU BETTER KEEP HIM SAFE!! at least until he makes it back safely into the hands of his friends, the League of Villains

meanwhile here’s a fun tip, this manga gets 100x funnier if you scroll back up to that panel of Jirou being all serious and saying “they’re on the move” now that we know that this outburst is almost certainly what she was listening to lmao. “oh, Kaminari is crying, that must mean they’re getting started”

and here they go!!

who is that in the witch hat?? COULD THIS BE THE LEGENDARY MAJESTIC, AT LONG LAST? this person looks like they cobbled together their entire hero costume from Sero’s bedroom. just ransacked it and draped all of his tapestries and throw pillows every which way over some Adidas pants. goddammit who is this person, I need to know everything about them right now

DAMMIT MIDNIGHT

HE’S NOT OLD ENOUGH TO MAKE THOSE KIND OF DECISIONS GODDAMMIT. HE IS YOUNG AND PLIABLE!! WHAT DID YOU DO, OFFER HIM CANDY. DID YOU PROMISE YOU WOULD TAKE HIM TO CHUCK E. CHEESE AFTER IF HE WAS GOOD

SON OF A BITCH ARE YOU GUILTING HIM

I DON’T LIKE THIS, MIDNIGHT. I MEAN, YOU ALREADY KNOW, IT’S NOT LIKE I’VE MADE A BIG SECRET OF IT OR ANYTHING. GUH

and he’s shouting back “no I don’t think you adults are pathetic at all!” while still looking terrified! goddammit how do I cast protection on a fictional character in a manga. I don’t play D&D, but D&D players can do that, right? how do I create a shield around my party. Kaminari you stay put while I try and figure this all out

lmaoooooo Tokoyami’s words of encouragement

A MAGNIFICENT FELLOW. you guys I’m gonna be honest, lately I’ve been enjoying these fan scanlations even more than the official ones at times. obviously Viz’s are fine and good, but sometimes it’s almost like they localize everything a little too much, you know? most people don’t go around calling other people magnificent fellows, but would Tokoyami? yes. yes he would. I believe this in every fiber of my heart

LMAO KAMINARI

“KAMINARI, I REALIZED WHEN WE WERE PLAYING GUITAR TOGETHER... WAY TO WHITE-KNUCKLE THOSE SICK FRETS, HALEN.” thank you so much for that Tokoyami but we are kind of in the middle of something so I’m not sure if right now is really the time to start asking my boy here for his autograph. after, maybe

now Cementoss is literally screaming “ATTACK!” and throwing subtlety to the winds

and now we’re back to this!

and it looks like this is most likely Cementoss using his quirk to tear the building in half! so that’s one mystery from last week solved! holy shit you guys I just realized we’re actually going to see Cementoss in action. so long as the environment is right, dude is a literal earthbender. we may be in for a rare treat

Skeptic is shouting at his minions to alert the Council. it’s okay, Cementoss already alerted them for you I’m pretty sure

so he’s sending Violet and Black to the front entrance, and Cleveland and Carmine to the Assembly Hall (where the Council is). these, if you recall, are the names of the various Vanguard squads, though I don’t recall who is actually on which squad and I really don’t want to go back and look it up... but fine!

okay, Twice is on the Black squad and Dabi and Otter Pop are on Violet. so they’re being dispatched to the front, while Toga, Compress, Spinner, and Skeptic himself (how convenient for you Skeptic) are heading to the Assembly Hall. isn’t that nice that Dabi is heading out to the front, where my son Kaminari “Clapton” Denki is. hahaha. fuck

Lefty Hair is now making a sudden appearance and giving Skeptic some threatening “you majorly fucked up and the only reason I’m letting it slide for now is because we’ve got bigger things to worry about” vibes, which I like. also he has a cigarette. it’s been a while since I’ve seen a manga character actually smoke a cigarette. I guess only villains are allowed to smoke them now

YOU GUYS LOOK HOW FUCKING RAW CEMENTOSS LOOKS HERE HOLY SHIT

HOW MANY PEOPLE IS CEMENTOSS GOING TO KILL TODAY. place your bets. and is cement stronger than fire. please don’t die Cementoss

YOU GUYS HE FUCKING SLAMMED THE FUCKING BUILDING OPEN LIKE ARAGORN OPENING THOSE FUCKING DOUBLE DOORS IN THE TWO TOWERS. I KNOW YOU CAN’T ACTUALLY SLAM A DOOR OPEN BUT ARE WE GOING TO SIT HERE AND ARGUE SEMANTICS ALL DAY OR ARE WE GOING TO KEEP READING??

ARE WE EVEN ALLOWED TO HAVE THIS MUCH BADASSERY IN A CHAPTER THAT DOESN’T HAVE MIRUKO IN IT. LOOKS LIKE SOMEBODY FORGOT TO INFORM THE BADASSERY GUILD THAT THEIR UNION MEMBERS ARE WORKING OVERTIME. I DON’T KNOW WHERE I’M GOING WITH THIS METAPHOR I GOT TOO EXCITED

by the way I like how a key part of their “let’s contain all the villains” plan was to open up their secret HQ and spill them all out like a bunch of ants. everyone knows this is the best way to keep people contained. instead of stationing people outside of every exit, let’s just make the entire building into one giant exit and MELEE AWAY ALL YOUR PROBLEMS

who died and made Lefty the smartest guy in the room

if only they had all listened to you, Mister Smart Guy. you’re so smart. why didn’t they put you in charge. probably just because they were jealous

booooo it looks like Black and Violet are attacking but Twice and Dabi are nowhere to be found! because they’re part of the Council?? boooo

Best Sweaterist can do anything a sweater can do. it’s not a very good power. everyone was all “you look like the number 3 hero you must be really strong” and so she got promoted waaaaay above her skill level and it’s too late for her to do anything about it now so good luck Best Sweaterist

finally some people from the League!

but where is Hawks? AND WHY IS DABI HEADING THE OPPOSITE WAY AS EVERYONE ELSE HOLY SHIT

LOL HAWKS YOU BEST MAKE YOURSELF SCARCE MY DUDE. OH FUCK

(ETA: Dabi is either going to arrive just in time to save Twice, or just in time to witness Hawks murdering him, and I’m not sure which would be worse.)

OH MY GOD EDGESHOT GOT A LINE

I CAN’T FUCKING WAIT TO HEAR THIS WITH MY OWN TWO EARS IN THE ANIME. IT’S GONNA BE SO GREAT AH MAN. but real talk, Miruko should be above him in the power rankings. I’m sorry I don’t make the rules. but unless you kill three Noumus within the next few pages here I’d say it’s pretty clear cut

OH NO MY SIX-YEAR-OLD SON, MY POOR BABY, HE LOOKS SO FRIGHTENED NOW. LIKE GENUINELY AFRAID-FOR-HIS-LIFE FRIGHTENED AND NOT JUST COMICALLY FRIGHTENED OH MY GOD I CAN’T

Kaminari you sweet little lamb, it’s going to be okay. you just take a deep breath and zap some of these PLF fuckers and then you can go run and hide and you’ll be playing tacky arcade games and eating hit-or-miss-quality pizza before you know it

Kami is actually in a lot of danger here what with how helpless he gets after he uses too much of his quirk though. (unless of course you subscribe to the theory that he doesn’t actually go dumb at all and that’s when he’s secretly transmitting his traitor messages to the zetans.) whose fucking idea was it to put him on the front lines, honestly. he’s only four!!

fuck me, Midnight sees him panicking and she’s being all soothing and encouraging while also being ridiculously sexy as usual. dammit Midnight

hey Kaminari if you want to think about Momo and Jirou I’m not going to complain, I just want you to know that. you can even make it all platonic by just saying “my friends.” either way is fine and I will respect your smokescreen

ahh he’s turning around and the camera is zooming back to the woods where the rest of 1-A are!

the title of this chapter is becoming surprisingly meaningful!! well played!

WOW

I don’t even know what to say?! I basically just slapped both of my cheeks and said “AWWW” out loud?! would you fucking look at these two bisexual icons living it up in this the year of our lord 2020. what a blessing

oh hey this guy decided it was time for him to talk again

okay Kami I give you permission to go pikachu on his ass. go ahead and show us why the heroes went ahead and violated ILO conventions in order to bring you here

don’t tell me this guy is also an electric type. lol who could have guessed that, there were absolutely no clues at all in his hairstyle or anywhere else. I would definitely have noticed something like that because I definitely pay attention to these things lol

(ETA: and presumably the heroes knew the identities of the Vanguard squadron leaders thanks to Hawks, and knew they had to have some sort of plan in place for this guy’s quirk, hence them being all “hey Kaminari let’s talk.”)

anyway

OH SHIT YOU GUYS KAMINARI IS ABOUT TO BE A BADASS!?

MOTHERFUCKER WAS THAT A SHOUNEN WOOSH???! whaaaaaat oh shit everybody brace yourselves

and now a Tokoyami flashback to the two of them jamming like little hero Hendrixes

because he prioritized the health of his fingers beneath his desire to learn the guitar to help his friends perform, you realized he was truly a magnificent fellow. aw shit it’s all coming together

yep

look how evil that smile in the last panel is. clearly the traitor. probably this other electric man is his dad

USING AN ELECTRIC ATTACK AGAINST ANOTHER ELECTRIC TYPE CLEARLY WON’T WORK AND THUS THIS IS ONLY A FAKE ATTACK DESIGNED IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN HIS COVER!

LOOK HOW EVIL HE IS

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN A FIVE-YEAR-OLD HAVING THIS KIND OF RAW FIREPOWER UNLESS HE’S SECRETLY EVIL!??!

OH MY GOD I LITERALLY SAID “OH MY GOD” VERY LOUDLY IN REAL LIFE AND NOW I’M HOPING MY NEIGHBORS DIDN’T HEAR HOW LOUDLY AND EMBARASSINGLY I SAID “OH MY GOD”

FUUUUCK

just. it’s like this weird and crazy feeling that’s a combination of adrenaline and chills-rushing-up-your-spine. that’s the sensation of clicking to a page and suddenly seeing the thing we fucking knew was going to happen, but just because we knew doesn’t mean we actually wanted it to happen, shit

holy shit. does Jin have to die in order for the heroes to succeed? probably. do I want it to actually happen? NO. am I suddenly reevaluating every single thing I thought I knew about Hawks and mentally updating Jeanist’s presumed mortality status in my head?? yes. are Hawks’s eyes here going to give me nightmares for the entire coming week? also yes. am I really unsettled wondering if those eyes were the last thing Jeanist ever saw? listen why do you keep asking me all of these intrusive and deeply upsetting questions like I’m some kind of magic 8 ball?? am I going to be on the edge of my fucking seat now waiting for next week? fuck

#bnha 263 #kaminari denki #jirou kyouka #tokoyami fumikage #cementoss #hawks #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste spoiler recap #makeste reads bnha #is kaminari the traitor? still no #is horikoshi the traitor? probably #nah you know what #yes

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dontasktheradiodemon · 3 years

Text

Meeting Over Tea 3/21/2021

Alastor visits Sir Pentious a.k.a. Ruddy @ruddygore to check out his COOL MAD SCIENCE MACHINES (and see whether or not he can’t worm his way into being a helpful part-time henchman to this one too).

They talk about universe-hopping technology and magic, and agree to trade some useful info.

Alastor

Alastor’s got his hair styled all fancy and he smells like somebody who actually showers but like, he’s still dressed the way Radio Demons dress. He only fancies up so far.

He promised lunch if Ruddy let him come over so he’s got like a basket of finger foods, the kind of things that wouldn’t get the way if their primary activity is gonna be walking around and looking at machines. Mainly, the sort of things Penny likes plus the sort of things Telly like plus a couple of odds and ends while he tries to suss out Ruddy’s particular preferences.

Sir Pentious

Ruddy isn't very picky. He USED to be, but you raise twelve kids and have to deal with all of their particular tastes growing up.. and you give up on wanting A FINE GOURMET DINNER JUST SO.

Alastor arrived on the balcony of one of Ruddy's ships, he can see the rest of the fleet docked nearby. Ruddy will give Alastor an Analyzing Once Over, because come on, this is the guy his alternate is dating? Really? But whatever, he supposes love is blind. Come along then, Radio Demon, step inside and come see his portal.

Alastor

He’s gotta take a second to admire that fleet, he hasn’t seen a fleet like that since the sixties... okay he’s ready—oh this snake is Tall. Oh my.

HE KEEPS HIMSELF TOGETHER but wow this snake is Tall

Sir Pentious

This snake is tall! It's all the unchecked ego. He was more reasonably sized a few months ago, but after taking out VOX??? He's all thick scales and amped up cobra breathing. VERY HEAVY, a lot of slithering noise when he moves. He'll check the time on his pocketwatch, then tuck it away, pick his cane up from where it was leaning against the railing, and give Alastor a STERN LOOK. "NO FUNNY BUSINESS, ALASTOR. MY ALTERNATES MAY BE FOND OF YOU, BUT I WILL MAKE MY *OWN* DECISIONS."

Alastor

The MOST INNOCENT LOOK! ... But not quite innocent that it looks suspicious! “I’m not planning any business funnier than a bad pun or two! Your alternates are only fond of me because I treat them with the respect they deserve, and I intend to do no less here.”

Sir Pentious

A slight squint from Hattie, but Ruddy nods. "VERY WELL, ALASTOR. I WILL HOLD YOU TO THAT." A flourish! And he escorts the smaller man to the depths of his airship so Alastor can see the portals set up in the cargo bay, with the eggbois busily cleaning blood from the walls and mush that looked like sinners that went through the blender.

Alastor

He’s determined to win you over too, Hattie, just you wait.

Obviously he’s already grinning, but he’s Really Grinning when he starts seeing the inside of the airship, and Really Super Grinning when he sees the gore. “Test subjects?”

Sir Pentious

"NATURALLY. INNOVATION REQUIRES SACRIFICE, AND WHAT ARE A FEW SINNERS INCONVENIENCED IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS?" Ruddy cackles in that Pentious way, gesturing for the eggbois to drag another sinner in to chuck unceremoniously into the portal set into one wall. They come out on the other side of the room intact, somehow, but proceed to explode a few moments later, a hand bouncing to a stop in front of the two.

Ruddy prods the hand, flicking his tongue. "A DELAYED REACTION, BUT IT IS PROGRESS!"

Alastor

“I’m sure it’s the most productive thing they’ve done down here!”

He watches keenly as another test subject is thrown through, and his invisible audience applauds raucously when they emerge intact from the other portal. When the the sinner explodes, the applause increases to outright cheering. “All in all, very impressive! Know what makes ‘em explode yet?”

Sir Pentious

"OH. YES, I DO, AND I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY PREVENTED AT LEAST ONE DEATH. BUT IT'S SO FUNNY!!!" He grins, all teeth, and gestures for another to get chucked in. "AT THIS POINT I AM JUST TESTING THE LIMITS. HOW MUCH WARPING CAN A BODY HANDLE? THE LESS, THE MORE OF A DELAY BEFORE THE BODY EXPLODES."

Alastor

“And a good scientist certainly keeps experimenting with different variables after getting one success! He must be thorough, mustn’t he?” He watches gleefully as the next is chucked in and laughs when they pop. “Plus it’s a hell of a good show, I’ll give it that!”

Sir Pentious

Preen preen... He smooths down his lapels and rumbles a purr. "A GOOD SHOW..." He hums, tapping a silk encased finger to his lips. "YES! THAT DOES REMIND ME. YOUR ALTERNATE ASKED ME TO BROADCAST SOME CARNAGE FOR HIM, PERHAPS I WILL LET HIM SEE THIS BEFORE I GO SHOOTING ANY OVERLORDS DOWN."

Alastor

“Oh, DID he! I’m sure he’d also enjoy seeing the amazing teleporting blender! And do tell me when that other show’s going to happen, I’ll be sure to tune in!” A caaasual sideways glance. “I’m sure you can handle your own broadcasting needs, but! If you ever find you’d LIKE an on-site commentator at your carnage, I’d happily volunteer myself for the position. There’s too few brawls worth watching these days, much less reporting on.”

Sir Pentious

Ruddy scoffs, but fixes Alastor with a mischievous side eye. "I SEE, THAT'S HOW YOU WON OVER TELLY, HM? ENDLESS FLATTERY. HE DID CALL YOU ENTHUSIASTIC."

Alastor

Oh goodness. He’s talked to Telly. He HADN’T talked to Telly earlier. What did Telly say about him? Enthusiastic??

To his credit, Alastor’s only frozen with panic for a half second. “And every bit of the flattery is sincere! I am a keen fan of your work, sir—and I see no good reason to pretend I’m not.”

Sir Pentious

He's snickering, shoulders shaking slightly as he turns his head away. Like a deer in the headlights, wasn't that the expression? "YES, I'M SURE. GENIUS IS ALLURING, AFTER ALL." And then he immediately switches gears, slithering over to a nearby console to pick up something that looked suspiciously similar to a grocery store barcode scanner. "NOW COME HERE. I HAVE FOUND A USE FOR YOU!!!!"

Alastor

Well THAT’S a very interesting choice of words. Oh he’s gonna ask Telly some questions later.

But if they’re moving on, then Alastor isn’t about to ask what Sir Pentious suspects/knows. “Do tell! I’m all ears.”

Sir Pentious

He gestures with his scanner, pointing it at Alastor with a knowing smirk. Oh, he is so clever. "YOU ARE FROM A DIFFERENT HELL." That doesn't explain things, Ruddy. Try again. "I CAN LOCK ON TO YOUR HOME REALITY AND OPEN A PORTAL THERE WITH *THIS*, AND THEN I'LL HAVE THE COORDINATES LOGGED FOR FUTURE USE. IT WILL BE MY FIRST STEP TOWARDS INTER-DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL!"

Alastor

“Wonderful! What’s involved? Do you scan me?” A nod at the scanner-looking thing. “Or do I carry it home with me, take some readings, and bring it back to you? Or what?”

Sir Pentious

"SCANNING YOU WILL BE ENOUGH TO OPEN A PORTAL TO YOUR HELL. HOWEVER, IF I WANT TO OPEN IT SOMEWHERE *SPECIFIC,* I WILL NEED THE LATTER. HELLS CAN BE SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, AFTER ALL..." He shrugs. "I DON'T KNOW IF YOU SAW, BUT WHEN YOU ARRIVED WE WERE PARKED OVER THE RUINS OF THE CANNIBAL COLONY OF THIS HELL. IF I OPENED A PORTAL TO THE SAME LOCATION IN YOUR HELL, IN *THEORY* THE OTHER SIDE WOULD LEAD TO SEVERAL HUNDRED FEET ABOVE A MUCH LESS RUINED COLONY. HOWEVER, UNTIL I GET MORE DATA, I AM BEING CAUTIOUS ABOUT OPENING PORTALS WHERE I *THINK* THEY WILL GO. I DON'T NEED TO INVITE ANY OUTSIDE OVERLORDS INTO MY TERRITORY."

Alastor

A surprised jolt. “No, I didn’t notice, actually.” He’d been too distracted by that beautiful fleet.

He considers that. Sound thinking, all around. “While you’re still experimenting with opening portals across dimensions, I’ve found that the Happy Hotel is a remarkably stable location across dimensions—probably why his majesty put a building there to begin with—and, thanks to the princess’s project, it’s fairly reliable neutral ground in all the nearest neighboring dimensions. If you’re being cautious, that might be a safe spot to start.”

Sir Pentious

"THE HOTEL, HM? I HAVEN'T BEEN BACK THERE SINCE THE LOCAL ALASTOR CRUSHED ONE OF MY AIRSHIPS." He gives Alastor a quick scan, then turns to type the information into his console. "PERHAPS I WILL APPROACH THE PRINCESS ABOUT MAKING USE OF HER GROUNDS. NOT AS A GUEST, HOWEVER. I PUT NO FAITH IN THAT REDEMPTION NONSENSE." A press of an overly large button, and lo and behold! the "out" portal shuts down, the in portal reveals a red sky, shimmering like it was being seen through a heat haze.

He takes a moment to look pleased, then gestures for the eggbois to chuck another sinner through.

Alastor

“Hm! Tingly!” He watches the information being entered. “Oh, of course not—the whole redemption thing is ridiculous! But most versions of her I’ve heard about have been perfectly happy to let people use the hotel grounds for other purposes. Management feels it’s good PR for the whole project.”

He blinks curiously at the portal. Well, it sure looks like his Hell—but then again, so do most Hells.

Sir Pentious

Ruddy watches the sinner fall through, slithering closer as the eggbois reel them back in to wait for the explosion.

It doesn't come. He nods. "I WILL KEEP IT IN MIND. THOUGH I DON'T RELISH THE THOUGHT OF LOCAL ALASTOR ALTERNATE BOUNCING OVER THE WAY HE DOES TO ASK THE SAME QUESTION AGAIN EVERY TIME WE MAKE EYE CONTACT. HE WORKS THERE, AFTER ALL, I IMAGINE I'D SEE A LOT OF HIM IF I SET A SCALE INTO THE BUILDING."

Alastor

Well, how about that! Round of applause.

Alastor gives him a curious look. "Same question?"

Sir Pentious

He rolls ALL of his eyes, moving away from the console to scan the sinner with his gun.

"HE ALWAYS ASKS IF HE KNOWS ME. THE SAME JOKE FOR EIGHTY YEARS, ALASTOR. AND HE ONLY SEEMS TO GET MORE EXCITED TO ASK EACH TIME. NOW THAT THE COLONY IS NO MORE, HE PRACTICALLY SPRINTS ACROSS THE CITY IF HE CATCHES A WHIFF OF MY COLOGNE. SURELY HE HAS SOMETHING BETTER TO DO WITH HIS TIME!!"

Alastor

Alastor don’t be weird and smell his cologne. Alastor. Alastor don’t do it.

He puts some serious thought into this pronouncement. “You know... he probably doesn’t.”

Sir Pentious

In Alastor's defense, it's a VERY nice cologne that Ruddy pays obscene amounts to get smuggled in from Earth. Just like the materials he used to make his own suit and gloves.

There's a moment where it almost seems like Ruddy didn't hear him, then the snake turns to slither straight into Alastor's personal space, leaning down to look him in the eyes. Suspicious man. "EXPLAIN, ALASTOR."

Alastor

OH HELLO THERE. He does an impressive job of not leaning back. “He’s probably bored out of his mind! I’M usually bored out of MY mind. If he’s going out of his way to make the same joke over and over? Why, I’m sure it’s one of the few reliable things he’s got that keep on giving him a few minutes of entertainment! So no! He probably doesn’t have anything better to do with his time.” A shrug.

Sir Pentious

A flick of the tongue. The cobra withdraws. Back to poking the protesting sinner with his cane, then. "I SUPPOSE NOT. YOUR BOYFRIEND SAID THE SAME, MORE OR LESS."

He scoffs. "THE MAN SHOULD LEARN TO MAKE FRIENDS, IF HE'S SO DESPERATE FOR ENTERTAINMENT. OR TAKE OUT AN OVERLORD! VOX HAD HALF THE RADIO TOWERS IN THE CITY CONVERTED BEFORE I KILLED HIM."

Alastor

Ignore the weird squeal of radio sound effects there.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but people have a tendency to scream in fear and run away when I say hello. It makes it a little tricky to make friends. And I’m not interested in politics—I took out my share of overlords when I arrived, the prospect of going after MORE sounds less like a fun whim and more like a tedious day job.” He pauses. Very VERY casually, “Is that what he’s calling me?”

Sir Pentious

Ah, there it is. Ruddy hums, twirling his cane around in his hand to suddenly crack the handle against the sinner's skull, sending blood and brain matter splattering across the floor. Can't have them listening in, after all!

"I SUPPOSE MOST SINNERS ARE STILL COWARDS." Ah, perfect, an eggboi with a towel to wipe the bits off his cane. " AS FAR AS WHAT YOU'RE CALLED. WELL. I SPOKE TO TELLY BRIEFLY... AND HE IS EVEN LESS SUBTLE THAN I. HE CRUMBLED UNDER THE SLIGHTEST INQUIRY AFTER PRAISING YOU INCESSANTLY. THE ONLY REASON I AM TELLING YOU THIS IS SO YOU ARE AWARE THAT _I_ KNOW. IT IS NONE OF MY BUSINESS, AND FRANKLY I DON'T CARE. BUT IF YOU WANT TO STAY UNDER THE RADAR, YOU'RE FAILING MISERABLY."

Alastor

“Oh, THAT’S all fine,” says Alastor, who is Not Fine At All, “it’s just the terminology, is all. We haven’t really talked it out yet, see. And ‘boyfriend’ sounds a little... eugh, it’s juvenile, isn’t it?” He makes a bit of a face.

Sir Pentious

There's a loud snort, and Ruddy slithers to the portal to stick his arm through, then withdraw and go to scan that next. "JUVENILE IS PUTTING IT MILDLY. HOWEVER, TELLY IS A VERY JUVENILE INDIVIDUAL. FOR A PENTIOUS, HE BARELY SEEMS TO KNOW WHAT HE'S DOING."

Whatever information he got from the scanner seems to please him, a smile stretching across his face as his talons flex. "THOUGH PERHAPS MY STANDARDS ARE TOO HIGH, I DID MEET PENNY FIRST AFTER ALL. A PENTIOUS WHO ESCAPED HELL! I COULDN'T BE MORE PROUD."

Alastor

He bristles slightly, but manages to hold back most of what he’d like to say to that. “He isn’t so juvenile that I’d insult him by calling him a ‘boy’ ‘friend.’”

Alastor doesn’t think escaping Hell ought to be used as a point in that Sir Pentious’s favor, considering that it was due to a lucky relationship rather than due to any sort of maturity—but is he going to be the sort of man who talks up his lover by talking down his best friend? (He’s actually never had to consider this question before.) No, no he is not. Although he does ask dryly, “And you’re so certain Telly *hasn’t?*” Sure, it was for one trip—but it was via the exact same method every single one of them had ever left Hell. “Sounds like he can keep some things under the radar, after all!”

Sir Pentious

Alastor gets another of those analyzing looks, and then a smug nod. "I'M AWARE THAT HE'S BEEN TO OKKYLK, HE TOLD ME THAT AS WELL. MADAME VALERA HELPED HIM THE SAME WAY SHE DID ME. AND PENNY. AND THAT ALASTOR IN HER HOME WHO CROSSED HIMSELF WHEN HE SAW ME. THAT WAS STRANGE."

He _shudders_, memories of Leal's antics playing in his mind before he turns his attention back to his guest. "RELAX, ALASTOR. YOUR _PARTNER_ IS IGNORANT, BUT HE IS A SIR PENTIOUS. HE'S GOT THE INTELLECT WE ALL SHARE, I AM NOT DISMISSING HIS ABILITIES."

Alastor

Huff! “Which one was THAT?”

He offers a tight smile. “No, just his maturity—and I heartily disagree with you. But, I’m not here to argue. Nor to discuss relationships! You see, I’m far less interested in my own amorous entanglements than I am in the cutting-edge technological advancements I came here to discuss!” A nod toward the scanner?

Sir Pentious

The first question is completely ignored by Big Snake, a knowing look crossing his face before he changes tracks straight back to the technological side of things. Blelele..

"YES, MY SCANNER. YOU MAY TAKE THIS AND SCAN WHATEVER AREA YOU DESIRE IN YOUR OWN HOTEL, AND THE COORDINATES WILL APPEAR ON THE DISPLAY UNTIL YOU SCAN ANOTHER SPOT. THEY WILL BE SENT BACK TO MY CONSOLE WIRELESSLY, SO NO NEED TO REPORT BACK TO READ IT OUT. SCAN HOWEVER MANY LOCATIONS YOU LIKE, ONCE I HAVE THE HOTEL I CAN BEGIN MY NEXT TEST."

Alastor

“Wonderful.” He makes no move to take the scanner yet. “I believe we’d also discussed the possibility of a mutual exchange of information? See if any of my magic might help you speed up your science and vice-versa?”

Sir Pentious

The suspicious squint is back on Hattie's.. face? "WE DID. THOUGH I'M CURIOUS ABOUT WHAT MY TECHNOLOGY CAN DO FOR A MAN OF MAGIC LIKE YOURSELF."

Alastor

Snaps fingers; a portal opens, his grimoire hops out and flips open, and a massive, elaborate star chart unfolds. It’s a giant complex system of precise lines and coordinates narrowed down to the fifth decimal point, glowing red, almost all of them changing second by second. “You’d be surprised how much math there is in my line of work.” All pure astrology, baby.

“THIS helps me do THIS.” A dramatic gesture, a surreptitious blood offering, and a portal opens behind Alastor. Through it, clear blue sky shines. “And it could probably help YOU get there just a little bit faster, too. Magic might not require as many microchips, but it’s got to find passages between dimensions and create temporary connections between distant locations, just like anything you’re making. We’re running on different machinery but it all relies on the same underlying laws of physics, it just exploits them in different ways. If I know how yours exploits them, it could help ME find ways to exploit them—and the same goes for you.”

He thumps his knuckles on his grimoire. “The spell I’ve got here lets me open a portal anywhere—provided that it’s on my Earth, because the location system built into the spell is based on a geocentric astrological model of the universe that’s only capable of spitting out coordinates on Earth’s surface. If I know how YOUR machine determines its coordinates, I might be able to find a way to substitute it in for this spell’s current coordinate system.”

Sir Pentious

Ruddy slithers backwards when the grimoire appears, all his eyes flicking around to watch Alastor explain himself and his thinking from a safe, or at least safer, distance. He may not have bad blood with the radio demon, but he wasn't an idiot.

His tongue flicks towards Alastor's portal to Earth, tasting the faint scents of something once familiar. Seeing a sky so blue... No. He shakes his head. Focus, Pentious.

"INTERESTING. ASTROLOGY AS A GUIDING FORCE. DID YOU LIFT THAT FROM STOLAS?"

He doesn't bother waiting for an answer, he doesn't actually care. "REGARDLESS. FOR MY EXPERIMENTS ON EARTH, I'D INTENDED TO USE THEIR SATELLITES. CELL TOWERS. ALL THAT AND MORE. THEY HAVE PLENTY OF TECHNOLOGY DEDICATED TO TRACKING PRECISE COORDINATES, A SMALL MATTER TO GET THAT TO SPEAK TO MINE. FOR HELL, HOWEVER, IT'S ALL ABOUT.. I SUPPOSE TUNING IN TO DIFFERENT FREQUENCIES. YOU'RE A MAN OF THE RADIO, YOU CAN IMAGINE WHAT I MEAN. YOU RESONATE AT THE FREQUENCY NATIVE TO YOUR HELL, MY SCANNER CAN TUNE IN TO THAT, AND THEN THE COORDINATES COME AFTER. FREQUENCY, LOCATION, IN THAT ORDER."

Alastor

Well, if he’s moving on, then Alastor’s not going to waste time on explaining where he got the spell!

“So your plan for Earth is close to what I’m already doing—it’s just that the satellites I’m tuning into are the planets and the satellites you’re tuning into are manmade.” He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “I’d still like to see how you do it—if nothing else, they should be useful on a few more planets than Earth, and I work better with radio waves than I do with astrology.” It might even be easy to modify them to work on AM frequencies instead of cell phone frequencies.

Those Hell frequencies, though... Alastor shuts his eyes for a moment, seeing if he could detect that particular frequency himself. He didn’t even know if it was something within range of his own powers. “Are these frequencies only specific to Hell—or could you potentially use them to reach anywhere in any dimension? And if you’re getting the coordinates from that scanner doohickey, I take it you don’t even need cell towers for that.”

Sir Pentious

Ruddy puffs his chest, fixing his already perfectly even bowtie as he preens. "I HAVE TO DO MORE EXPERIMENTS, ALASTOR, BUT *THEORETICALLY!!!* THE FREQUENCIES COULD BE USED TO REACH ANY REALITY I PLEASED. THOUGH AS OF NOW MY SAMPLE SIZE IS YOU AND VALERA, AND I HAVEN'T HAD A CHANCE TO SCAN HER YET." And that's assuming he CAN scan Valera, her whole... Singularity thing, may make it more challenging. Not that *he* knows that yet!

"I DON'T NEED CELL TOWERS! THOUGH TRYING TO TAKE IT TO DIFFERENT REALITIES WOULD LIKELY BE ENOUGH TO BREAK THE LINK, I HAVEN'T...." A sudden thought, and he whips around to rip open the side of the console. "UNLESS I ADD PORTAL TECHNOLOGY TO MY OWN SCANNER OF COURSE!" Here comes that Pentious Cackle all over again.

Alastor

He waits politely for the cackle to finish. What a lovely sound. “So, hypothetical question—say you want to visit somewhere you’ve never been before. You know the dimension is there, you’ve talked to people from it—but you’ve never physically met them because they don’t have the ability to jump between dimensions and visit you first. So you can’t scan them and can’t pass off your scanner to them to grab coordinates for you. Are there other ways for you to get that information and manually enter it?”

Sir Pentious

Pentious freezes mid... whatever the hell he's doing to those poor wires, head tilting dramatically to one side as his face scrunches. "... I BELIEVE SO, YES. THEY HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION THEY ARE COMMUNICATING TO YOU THROUGH, SO THE INFORMATION IS BEING BROADCAST *SOMEWHERE*. IT IS A MATTER OF TRACING THAT, UNSCRAMBLING IT..." Oh here comes an eggboi, holding a tray above its head with a cup of tea and a heavily abused leatherbound journal. Both are snatched up, the tea held in the elegantly coiled tip of Ruddy's tail as he fiddles the journal open and finds a blank page to start scrawling on.

Give him a minute while he mumbles under his breath, or as close to it as a giant snake man can get. He's having a moment of genius.

Alastor

Don’t mind him as he scootches over to try to see what Sir Pentious is writing. He gets on his toes to try to get a better view. Considering that the snake’s got like three feet on him, this may not actually help. But by God he’s trying.

Sir Pentious

It's easy to ignore Alastor's efforts, but Ruddy moves seemingly automatically, twisting his body around Alastor to maneuver the smaller man between his chest and the journal. There, an unrestricted view. More than that, he starts explaining.

"AS I SAID, THE SIGNAL IS BROADCAST, AND I CAN ASSUME IT'S THROUGH THE PLATFORM WE ALL USE. NOW THAT I HAVE YOUR COORDINATES? I CAN, MOST LIKELY, FIND WHERE THEY'RE STORED, AND THEN USE THE SAME PATH FOR OTHER PEOPLE."

Alastor

“Oh.” He just got grappled/embraced to have a bunch of Science shown to him. “Brilliant.” Is his voice is a little higher than it should be? AHEM. “I suppose that wouldn’t be usable to reach ANY dimension, but it takes care of any with v#xblr...” A thought occurs to him. “Say. With blockhead dead, does that put you in charge of all his networks in this universe?”

Sir Pentious

"I'M NOT WORRIED. WITH ENOUGH OF A PRECEDENT I SHOULD BE ABLE TO START MAKING EDUCATED GUESSES ABOUT OTHER UNIVERSES. ONCE YOU LEARN HOW TO FRY AN EGG ONE WAY, YOU CAN FIGURE OUT THE OTHERS!!" Ruddy that didn't make sense.

Oh right, a question. No time to cackle, he has to stroke his hood and preen more. "IT DOES!! ALL HIS RESOURCES ARE MINE, INCLUDING HIS NETWORKS, THE POWER GRID, HIS WEALTH.. AND HIS PATENTS. NOT THAT I HAVE ANY USE FOR THEM!"

Alastor

Alastor nods. That makes perfect sense. One experience with eggs... can lead to many experiences with eggs.

“He has PATENTS?” Alastor laughs. “Who the hell did he steal them from?!” Oh but that’s not what he was going to talk about. “Now, no promises, but I MIGHT have a solution to your local Radio Demon problem.”

Sir Pentious

Looks like they're done talking about science now, time for Ruddy to unwind himself from around Alastor and put a polite distance between them again. "DO TELL, ALASTOR."

Alastor

“If you’ve got all of the boob tube’s holdings, then you’ve got his television and radio towers. Now, I can’t speak on behalf of an alternate of myself that I’ve never met before—but out of the ones I’ve met? Four out of five, if you offered them a couple of towers in exchange for a promise not to make one specific stupid joke, they’d fall all over themselves to take the bargain. Can’t imagine you have much use for most of those towers in your line of work anyhow; I doubt you’d feel the loss if, say, VSPN suddenly started broadcasting show tunes instead of hockey matches.”

Sir Pentious

A bribe, basically. He can understand the logic, what's a radio demon without a station? Give Alastor a few towers, get him off his tail. Hopefully permanently, but at least for most of the day while he was busy playing radio host. Hmm..

Ruddy slithers in a slow circle, ignoring it completely when an eggboi vaults into the middle of the mound of scales and muscle. "PERHAPSSS.. I HAVE LEFT THOSE STATIONS RUNNING NORMALLY, THEY NET ME A TIDY PROFIT. BUT I'M SURE I'LL SURVIVE WITHOUT THEM, IF IT GETS THAT FOOL TO STOP TACKLING ME. LET THE RADIO DEMON USE THOSE CHANNELS. "

Alastor

“You could always build a couple of replacement towers for the channels you’d be giving up for him. Or, hell, make a couple of fresh ones just for him to play with. After all, you’ve got the capital and the resources for it—and he doesn’t.”

Sir Pentious

"AND YOU REALLY THINK THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH TO DISTRACT HIM FROM EIGHTY YEARS OF HIS INCESSANT NONSENSE?" Well, why not? Alastor was right after all, he had the resources to spare. It would cost almost nothing from his perspective...

He taps at his chin, eyes narrowing. "PERHAPS. BUT DEALING WITH THE RADIO DEMON HAS A WAY OF COMING BACK TO BITE ONE IN THE *ASS*, FROM WHAT I'VE HEARD. I HAVE NO GUARANTEE THAT HE WOULD STICK TO HIS END OF THE BARGAIN."

Alastor

“No, I don’t think it would be enough to *distract* him. But I *do* think that if you make a proper deal with him, he won’t violate it just for the sake of making a stupid joke. Make his ownership of those towers contingent upon his ability to restrain himself from making stupid jokes at your expense. Hell, throw a restraining order in if you want! Put in a couple of clauses defining what happens if the contract is breached, to ensure that souls don’t get involved—if he makes his dumb jokes, you get the towers back; if you destroy or seize his towers, he regains his current freedom to pester you, nothing more than that. I can help you draft up the contract if you want—“ he laughs, “or refer you to some reputable neutral parties to draft it if you don’t trust a Radio Demon to help arrange a contract with a Radio Demon. Because you’re certainly right, dealing with me typically ends VERY badly, no point denying that—but usually that’s thanks to poorly-worded deals that let me get away with more than I ought to! With an airtight contract, I can’t do anything but what the contract says I can.”

Sir Pentious

Look at the face scrunch on that snake. "I WILL TAKE IT INTO CONSIDERATION, ALASTOR. BUT I WILL GO TO A NEUTRAL THIRD PARTY. AS YOU SAID, I WOULDN'T TRUST A RADIO DEMON I BARELY KNOW TO NEGOTIATE IN MY FAVOR AGAINST HIS OWN ALTERNATE. YOU MAY BE THE MOST LIKELY TO ALLY WITH SERPENTS, BUT YOU ARE STILL WHAT YOU ARE."

A shrug, and he takes his tea to give a cautious sip. Ah, good. Drinkable. Perhaps he'll try some of that food Alastor brought, too, before he forgets... "DID YOU WANT SOME COFFEE, ALASTOR? I ASSUME YOU DON'T CARE FOR TEA, IF YOUR ALTERNATE IS TO JUDGE BY."

Alastor

“Of course! If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me either! I don’t plan on giving you any reasons to doubt my intentions, I can wait to prove I’m trustworthy.”

A hand on his chest. “Very thoughtful of you! Yes, thank you.” He’ll just set that basket up on a table where it’s easier to access everything inside.

Sir Pentious

Ruddy hesitates a moment, then pulls out his phone to send a text off. Here comes a very fancily painted eggboi, a chair held over their head as they run on their tiny legs. Good, he DID have chairs in storage, he wasn't certain. "HAVE A SSSEAT. YOU ARE A GUEST, AFTER ALL." As far as he goes, he will coil up on himself to nibble this finger food.

"DO YOU HAVE ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT MY MACHINES, ALASTOR? THE SCANNER, THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND IT?"

Alastor

“Thank you!” And sit he will, like the guest he is! “And yes, actually! How many are you willing to put up with?”

Sir Pentious

"FIVE." A sip of his tea.

Alastor

Ooh. It’s a game now. He rubs his hands together, sorting through his questions carefully. “I’m going to assume that includes follow-up questions.” Where to begin... “Well, let’s start with the important part! In as close to layman’s terms as you can get—how, exactly, DOES this thing open up portals to other dimensions? I think we’ve only really discussed how to find coordinates, not how you reach them once you’ve got them!”

Sir Pentious

Now *that's* a good question. Ruddy grins over his tea, flicking through his journal before sliding it Alastor's way. "THROUGH MEANS OF HARNESSING HELL'S *ABUNDANT* ENERGY INTO A SINGLE POINT, I CAN MANIFEST A CONNECTION TO THE FOURTH DIMENSION I MAY TRAVERSE. OR *WHATEVER* THEY CALL IT THESE DAYS. IT INVOLVES SOME DISTORTION OF TIME AS WELL AS SPACE, SINCE YOU CANNOT TRULY MOVE FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. BUT WHO NEEDS TO, WHEN YOU CAN SIMPLY WRINKLE REALITY TO CONNECT TWO POINTS? IF THE UNIVERSES ARE LAYERS OF FABRIC, I AM PUTTING IN STITCHES AS I PLEASE TO BRING THEM TOGETHER. FEEL FREE TO GLEAN WHAT YOU CAN FROM MY JOURNAL! I USE A CIPHER, BUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE ACCURATE TO MY THOUGHTS."

Alastor

His eyes brighten. “Like a...?” No, that would count as a question, he can hold onto that thought. He flips open the journal—and then, after a moment of thought, pulls out the loose pages detailing his spell and slides them over to Sir Pentious. “Most of it’s ritual and sigil, but there’s some buried in there on the mechanics that the magic is operating on, if you want to try to compare. I haven’t deciphered all of it myself, honestly—but if I HAD, I would’ve been Albert Einstein’s lab assistant instead of a radio host.” He starts looking through the journal, fascinated (as much by the cipher as by the illustrations), trying to see how much of it looks familiar.

Sir Pentious

The pages are accepted, silk gloves skimming over the sigils as Ruddy tries to parse what he's looking at. As long as he thinks of it as a rival's cipher, he can try to imagine what the seeming nonsense is saying. The hand not holding the papers wiggle fingers through the air, mumbling to himself as he pantomimes his way through math equations. It wasn't a one to one comparison, obviously, but there were enough similarities to be interesting, at least on the superficial level. Further research may be required after all, even if he hated to admit it.

Alastor

And just enough in Sir Pentious’s notes was familiar enough to nearly make sense. It was like trying to read music in measurements of Hertz and Decibels versus trying to read music in treble and bass clefs—two different systems to convert the same sounds into print.

He makes a “look here” whistle as he slides Sir Pentious’s journal over so he can compare one of the illustrations to a doodle Alastor left in the margins of his notes when he was trying to conceptualize the overlap between the mortal realm and the postmortem realm. They look pretty similar to him, and it tickles him.

Sir Pentious

Oh, those did look similar, didn't they?

... He's going to take it as a sign of his genius, figuring out the inner workings of magic beyond the average sinner entirely by accident. A smug smile stretches across his face, the strength of his raspy cobra purrs enough to vibrate the table beneath him. And here comes that fancy eggboi again, with a mug of fresh coffee to scoot onto the table in front of Alastor, complete with a biscotti.

"MY BRILLIANCE SURPASSES MY OWN EXPECTATIONS, I SEE. THERE IS POTENTIAL IN THESE PAGES."

Alastor

He picks up his coffee to save it from the vibrations. And a biscotti, no less! How fancy. They know how to treat coffee drinkers around here.

“You might benefit from learning a bit of magic! Not because I think you ought to switch fields—you, sir, will do a hundred times more with machinery than we could ever do with magic—but I bet you’d have a knack for decoding what all us magicians are doing half by instinct and dragging it into the world of science.”

Sir Pentious

The eggboi offers Alastor a curtsy, then scampers over to start running a cloth over Ruddy's scales. Gotta make sure his boss is shiny!

Ruddy ignores the egg entirely, mulling over Alastor's suggestion with expression ranging from disgust to consideration, then back. He shakes his head, lifting his tea for a sip. "NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! ..... WELL. MAYBE. I *SUPPOSE* I C--NO!!" A pause... "*WELL*..." Face scrunch. Shoulder shrug.

Alastor

How does he get that egg boi’s job? Tries not to stare too much.

He bites the inside of his mouth to fight the urge to laugh at that impressive face journey. “I’m sure you have plenty else to fill your time without diving into the occult!”

Sir Pentious

The eggboi doesn't notice the staring, humming happily while they move from the tip of Boss Man's tail and up. Turns out Ruddy can be moved around with a good poke to his underbelly.

The man looks like he sucked a lemon, but sighs heavily and gives up. "TRUTHFULLY, I HAD CONSIDERED THE OPTION BEFORE. BUT IT ISN'T EXACTLY A BEGINNER FRIENDLY PRACTICE, AND I HAVE NO INTEREST IN WASTING TIME WITH THE *BULLSHIT* CRYSTALS AND INCENSE THESE CADS PASS AS MAGIC THESE DAYS. IF I WILL BE STUDYING ANY MAGIC, EVEN IN A PRACTICAL SENSE, I EXPECT THE *PROPER* MATERIALS. THOSE ARE DIFFICULT TO FIND, EVEN IN HELL."

Alastor

He perks up! "I could recommend some authors? Both antemortem and postmortem texts—quality antemortem texts generally offer a good grounding in the theory of magic, postmortem ones assume prior study and are written by occultists who have the liberty to just ask fallen angels if they want to co-author. And really, if all you want is to study how it works, a few good books are all the materials you need! Unless you intend to experiment?"

Sir Pentious

Ruddy gives Alastor a withering look, ruined only by his tongue flicking out in a frilly little waggle. "DO YOU REALLY THINK I WOULD STUDY A MEDIUM AND *NOT* EXPERIMENT WITH IT, ALASTOR?"

Alastor

A shrug! "It depends on what you're studying it for, I imagine. Still! Even if you do experiment, there's plenty you can do with a piece of chalk, a starter spice rack, and an obsessive sense of focus! What kind of magic have you been looking into that needs rare materials?"

Sir Pentious

"I WONT BE SHARING *THAT* INFORMATION WITH YOU JUST YET, ALASTOR. THOUGH IF YOU BEHAVE YOURSELF LONG ENOUGH, PERHAPS I *WILL*." Oh yes, that's a smirk on that snake's face. "SUFFICE TO SAY, THE CONCEPTS IN MY MIND ARE AS ELABORATE AS MY MACHINES. IF THEY WORK, THEY WILL BLEND SEAMLESSLY WITH MY DESIGNS."

His tea is emptied in one last dainty little sip, the cup set aside and quickly spirited away by a second fancy egg, this one done up in a red, gold edged diamond pattern. A true Faberge eggboi. Now those hands are free to wave around as Ruddy speaks, which is either a boon or a curse depending on how much Alastor enjoyed watching him flail around on a whim.

Alastor

That’s just the slightest bit ominous. “Well, I don’t plan to *stop* behaving myself any time soon, but... Do be cautious with it. I’m sure you take all necessary precautions when working with new techniques, but magic can be particularly unforgiving if one’s ambitions outstrip one’s experience.”

Fortunately, he’s perfectly content to watch Sir Pentious gesture wildly. He tries to catch sight of the fancy egg’s number as it leaves. *Those* are certainly a new addition.

Sir Pentious

The fancy egg leaving with the empty cup is #88, laid out on the back in an overly ornate font. Only a few of the eggbois seem to be done up in fancy paints and metals, most of them the humble eggboi classic. The fancy ones seem to be allowed to interact with Ruddy personally without getting launched across the room.

Speaking of, the eggboi polishing the Boss Man has now climbed onto the table, sitting obediently as Ruddy drums his claws over the enameled shell. A little wave is directed at Alastor, but it keeps uncharacteristically quiet. As does Ruddy, for all of two seconds. "THE CONCERN IS... *APPRECIATED*." Getting that out was like spitting tacks, but he carries on. "I WILL BE CAUTIOUS. AND ACCEPT YOUR SUGGESTIONS OF AUTHORS." Accepting help. Disgusting.

Alastor

Huh. Alastor wonders if Sir Pentious has a thing for doubled numbers. He’ll have to pay attention to the other fancy ones.

And here Alastor expected Sir Pentious to get offended by the concern. (He suspects Sir Pentious still IS offended, but at least he’s not taking it out on Alastor.) “I’ll go through my personal library and send you a list of recommendations soon.”

Sir Pentious

Ruddy tik tik tiks his claws on the eggboi, letting out something that could have been a sigh or a hiss. Look at him, having a *casual conversation* with the radio demon. This was dangerous, no matter how much of a snake fetish this man seemed to have. "AND WHAT DO YOU WANT IN EXCHANGE FOR THIS, ALASTOR? I CAN HARDLY EXPECT SOMETHING FOR NOTHING, ESPECIALLY NOT FROM YOU."

Alastor

Alastor's brows go up. What does he WANT? He doesn't want anything. Nothing concrete, at least. He wants to see Sir Pentious learn to reverse other overlords' magic tricks. He wants to prove himself useful to Sir Pentious. Nothing more than that.

But there would be no faster way to gain Sir Pentious's suspicion than by claiming he's helping out of the goodness of his heart. If Alastor says he doesn't want anything, Sir Pentious might refuse to take Alastor's help all together. After a quick moment of thought—something harmless, something that will be as low-effort for Sir Pentious as collecting a few names will be for Alastor—he says, "A recording of your next fight, if you'd be so kind. It need not be high quality—I'm primarily interested in the audio, anyway." Play up the harmless fanboy angle, it's probably the persona that can get Alastor past Sir Pentious's wariness the fastest.

Sir Pentious

A recording of his next fight? That was something he already planned on streaming, but.. a recording wouldn't be hard to arrange. No harder than, say, thinking for a few minutes about what names to suggest for an aspiring scholar of magic to start looking into. It was equivalent. It was *fair*. He wasn't sure how to feel about that. But he couldn't see it biting his tail any way he twisted it. Knowledge for entertainment, books for bloodsport, even.

He nods. "VERY WELL. I WILL SEE ABOUT UPGRADING ONE OF MY SMALLER DRONES WITH A CAMERA. I HAVE PLANS FOR ANOTHER OVERLORD IN THE NEXT DISSSTRICT, YOU'LL GET YOUR BLOODSHED."

Alastor

Mission accomplished. Well done, Alastor. “Oh, do tell! Is it a name I might have heard?”

Sir Pentious

Ruddy pokes his own cheek, cocking his head dramatically to the side as his face scrunches. A name... A name... "ERM... MAYBE? SHE'S HARDLY A MEMORABLE BEING. THE REPTILE. WITH THE.." He mimes around his head, trying to convey big hair, then cups his chest. An *ample* bosom. "MADAME... ZILLA??? MISS ZILLA? MISS LIZARD? I DON'T KNOW. SHE ISN'T STYLISH ENOUGH TO REMEMBER, AND IF THINGS GO WELL SHE'LL BE DEAD SOON ANYWAY SO IT WONT MATTER!!!"

Alastor

Reptile with boobs named after a movie monster. Didn’t ring any bells. “I bet she’d make a lovely coat.”

Sir Pentious

"MAYBE FOR YOU! SHE'S FAR SMALLER THAN I AM, AND HER FLORESCENT YELLOW HAIRDO IS AN AFFRONT TO MY EYES." Unlike his FAR more respectable yellow, of course, which is nothing but pure class. Preen preen.. Oh, he got distracted.

The scanner is slid across the table. "BACK TO BUSINESS. YOU'LL BE NEEDING THIS, I'M SURE."

Alastor

“Ah, right! Of course!” He picks up the scanner. “I lost count of my questions. It’s probably been five, though. Oh, but one on the operation of this.” He taps the scanner, “If I’m going to be picking up viable landing points for you, then probably the best thing I can do is trace the corners of the building and then the corners of the lobby, isn’t it? Otherwise you’ll have to guess where the walls are, and I can’t imagine that would end well.”

Sir Pentious

"CORRECT. I'M GLAD YOU FIGURED THAT OUT ON YOUR OWN, SAVES ME THE BOTHER OF EXPLAINING!" Odds are opening a portal into a wall would be fine, since he could see through the portal before slithering through, but he'd rather not waste more sinners than he had to in foreign hells. Harder to get those back.

"IT WAS EXACTLY FIVE, IN FACT. THOUGH IN FAIRNESS, THEY WEREN'T ALL RELATED TO THE ORIGINAL TOPIC. I WON'T COUNT YOU ASKING AFTER THE NAME OF A RIVAL OVERLORD, SO YOU HAVE ONE LEFT." Sir Pentious smooths his lapels. So great and generous a man, truly. Letting people pry into his genius like this.

Alastor

"Very kind of you! In that case..." Well, all his most pressing questions about the science have been answered, it'll take him a while to think up more. So instead... "What's your goal, visiting out parallel dimensions like this? Alliances, turf, resources? I can't imagine you're expending this much time and effort just to go sightseeing."

Sir Pentious

"A FINE QUESTION, ALASTOR!" He smiles genuinely at the smaller man, though it's quickly wiped away by a tide of smug self importance as he fiddles with his bowtie.

"I HAD LITTLE INTEREST IN TRAVELING THROUGH VARIOUS HELLS UNTIL I MET MY ALTERNATES, AND LEARNED SUCH FEATS WERE NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, BUT APPARENTLY COMMONPLACE! I HAVE LITTLE IN THE WAY OF GOALS BEYOND PROVING THAT I CAN DO IT AS WELL AS ANY MAGIC!" Sir why are you proud of that fact. "ARE THERE USES? CERTAINLY! BUT THEY ARE SECONDARY. I DID NOT START THE PROJECT THINKING OF CONQUEST OR RESOURCES IN THE SLIGHTEST."

Alastor

Oh look, Alastor got honest praise for asking a mundane question. Alastor could get to like this snake, he knows how to hand out cheap flattery to reward behavior he likes. “So scientific exploration for its own sake and the pride of doing what others thought could not be done! Entirely respectable.”

Sir Pentious

"THAT'S ONE WAY TO PUT IT, YES." Alastor sounded like a PR agent. Which was funny, but Ruddy was perfectly aware of who he was. Years of being told something had that effect.

He pulls out his pocket watch, checking the time on reflex. "THAT MAKES FIVE, ALASTOR. YOU HAVE BEEN A MODEL GUEST SO FAR, SO I'M NOT INCLINED TO DUMP YOU OUT OF THE BAY DOORS."

Alastor

What kind of a radio host would Alastor be if he didn’t know how to spin the news?

“And you, sir, have been a model host, so I’m not inclined to jump out of the bay doors.” He finishes the last of his coffee and gets to his feet. “Thank you for the demonstration, the conversation, and the hospitality! It’s been a most pleasant time.”

Sir Pentious

"OF COURSE. I WOULD BE A SORRY EXCUSE FOR A MAN IF I DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO ENTERTAIN SUCH AN..." Eyebrow raise. "*ENTERTAINING* GUEST. I WILL BE AWAITING THE COORDINATES AT THIS CONSOLE."

Alastor

How polite. He scoops up his basket. “I’ll have them with you shortly!” He picks up his basket, bows extravagantly, and takes two steps back into a portal he opened for himself.

Time to collect coordinates.

Sir Pentious

Alastor has all the time in Hell to get around to that, Ruddy managed to get sucked into tinkering with some small clock on top of the console.

Alastor

It doesn’t more than a few minutes for him to start sending in coordinates—first around the exterior corners of the hotel, and then the interior corners of the lobby. And then, a few minutes later, a second set of coordinates from the hotel the next dimension over. And then a third iteration of the hotel. He’s going for extra credit.

Sir Pentious

Good thing he couldn't hear the way Ruddy squawked when the first notification popped up, his screwdriver getting flung halfway across the room and straight into the mouth of a nearby eggboi. The amount of hissed swears and frantic fumbling to clear all the little gears and springs away from the screen would have made a sailor blush. The whole project is swept onto a tray and put aside, and Ruddy gets to watch the expected coordinates show up. And then another set? And a third. This Alastor wanted to impress him so badly, no wonder his alternates were so insistent he was trustworthy. Feeding their egos was a surefire way to dazzle them.

Ruddy sniffs haughtily, but stores the coordinates anyway. Fine, Alastor. You win points, but he's not HAPPY about it. Even if the information *is* valuable. Hrmph.

Alastor

When Alastor's finished, he very helpfully messages Sir Pentious an explanation—coordinate set #2 is for Penny's universe, coordinate set #3 is for Telly's. Alastor imagines Sir Pentious would be most interested in visiting his own alternates first, after all.

Sir Pentious

... Alright. A few extra points, but he hates it. He messages a ⚙️👍 back, sinking into his own coils to stew in suspicion and gratitude. How *helpful* of Alastor, thinking ahead like that. Awful. But useful. But *awful!!!*

Alastor

The Radio Demon is infamous for his nefarious helpfulness. Watch out!!

#ruddygore #chat log

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cornflowershade · 3 years

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Ok so here’s an extra reason why I think Cas was originally set to be seen returning at the end of 15x19. (Yeah I know we have a bunch of evidence already, but this is a bit more focused on storytelling. Illustrating the high plausibility, based purely on the episode’s writing.)

SO to set this up, we know that Mark Pellegrino—who only appeared in episode 19 of the season—said his last day of filming was with Misha & Alex. If Cas died in 15.18 and was never seen again, this obviously makes no sense. We also know that there was a clip show montage at the end of 15.19, which could easily have been added in last-minute to replace another scene. Perhaps a scene which was a teaser of Cas returning, which wouldn’t make sense after they decided to cut him from the finale. (There’s other posts with reasons why Misha was likely on set for the finale but I won’t go into that here.)

The teaser, based on Mark’s statement, probably would’ve taken place in the Empty. Lucifer had died again, so he was with Cas in the Empty, and that’s when Jack—who has just become God—appears to retrieve Cas. Bringing his chosen father back to life and leaving Lucifer behind to watch. (Ah, the poetry.)

Now, within the storytelling of 15.19, I think one compelling reason why this teaser was the original ending is based on the rule of three. In writing, the rule of three is basically that you’ll have something happen three times, because it has the most impact. It’s funnier, more dramatic, more emotional, has the right amount of setup... whatever the case may be. It can be done in larger ways like a joke being repeated, or in small ways like with tiny visual cues. (Basically, one instance doesn’t have the lead up, two is just a coincidence, three lands perfectly and by four it’s getting old.) You also have this on a MUCH larger scale in stories. I mean, think about an arc, right? Beginning, middle, end.

15.19 has an early scene where Dean gets what he thinks is a phone call from Cas, who says he’s hurt but alive. Dean runs off to let him into the bunker, only to see that it’s actually Lucifer. Dean is given false hope, but it’s shattered. This is our first instance. Also note that with the end teaser I suspect existed, this would also perfectly mirror it. It’s Lucifer alive instead of Cas, and later it will be Cas alive instead of Lucifer.

Our second instance is when Sam and Dean are trying to bargain with Chuck. Dean tells him that they’ll do whatever he wants as long as he sets things right, adding “Cas, you’re gonna bring him back.” Chuck refuses. For the second time, Dean is left hopeless. After all, at that point in time, there’s no other way to get Cas back.

After Jack becomes the new god, he does everything Dean had asked Chuck to do. He sets things right. He brings back “the people, the birds...” but notably, not Cas. Two out of three, but Dean’s last wish is never fulfilled in the episode. (This feels suspiciously like a loose thread.)

Now it’s true that Cas is mentioned one other time in the episode, at the very beginning when Dean tells Sam and Jack that he died, but that instance seems more like exposition than part of the arc I’m discussing. Because in my opinion, it was an arc. False hope, to lost hope, to... to what?

If we decide they had no rule of three going on, and just look at it as a random progression in regards to Cas, the episode would look something like this:

- Dean tells Sam & Jack that Cas is gone [this could also be seen as a 1/3 for Jack on the topic of Castiel.]

- Jack mourns Cas outside, wishing he was there (hmmmm he mourns him at the beginning, wouldn’t it be so balanced if he brought him back at the end?) [Jack’s 2/3 except there is no 3/3]

- Dean thinks Cas is back but it’s actually Lucifer

- Dean begs Chuck to bring Cas back for real

- Castiel’s name is carved in the table. (Ok this is something I had admittedly forgotten about earlier so I’m gonna talk about it for a second.)

Cas’s name being written in the table sort of illustrates that Dean (also note that we only assume it’s Dean who carved that—I mean I’m convinced it was but still) has possibly started dealing with him being gone, or at the very least done the closest he can to honoring Cas, considering he can’t give him a proper funeral. It could make sense to have that be the end of the progression they were going for—adding in some kind of acceptance or finality—but I don’t think that makes total sense, purely because this episode had a focus on the idea of Dean’s hopelessness in regards to Cas returning (or not.) If we have a thread about the idea of Cas’s resurrection, then the middle point—Dean realizing that yes, Cas IS NOT coming back—shouldn’t agree with the end point: yes, you were right, Cas IS NOT coming back. So I guess the problem roots from the scene where Lucifer pretends to be Cas, because it’s a powerful scene that truly reads to me like the beginning of a “now we’re talking about the possibility of resurrection” thing, not to mention it also foreshadows... well, literally nothing if Cas doesn’t return, which is weird and random and depressing. In Lucifer returning, it also reestablishes the fact that yes, God (or anyone with his powers *cough cough*) CAN in fact resurrect people from the Empty. Why do that—why bring Lucifer back at all, if this does nothing? Yes he worked as a counterpoint to Michael, but that was ridiculously short-lived and his presence wasn’t actually that necessary to the plot. One of them could’ve easily almost killed themselves in order to summon a reaper (like they have done in the past) then killed the reaper on their own to create a new death. No need for outside help on that if they took a minute to use their heads.

Anyway. This is probably kinda messy because I was honestly thinking it out as I went lol, but these are some of the reasons why I think it’s very possible that Cas was slated to appear at the end of the episode and was cut. I hope my rambling was vaguely interesting to someone. :)

#spn #castiel #supernatual #dean winchester #meta #mine

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homespork-review · 4 years

Text

Homespork Act 3: Insane Mindscrew Haymakers (Part 3)

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to PM, WV, and AR in the far but not that far future. WV is trying to obey the letter’s direction to give the package to PM but AR keeps shooting. Yet WV and PM take cover behind a rock and WV is able to complete the task. The letter calls PM “Miss Mail Lady” so we now have a gender.

Back to Dream Jade. She flies to another golden tower and peers in on John sleeping. This bedroom is also defaced like his one in the waking world, plus there’s a creepy harlequin doll next to him. She isn’t sure if he got her present or if she even sent it, so she decides she’ll ask later.

CHEL: Dream John is fitfully asleep, but Jade intends to let him wake up on his own. Here, it’s established that Dream Jade does not know everything waking Jade does, as she decides she needs a system to remind her of things, which in the waking world she has (remember the COLORFUL REMINDERS).

The moon on which the city is now revealed to be placed is moving close to Skaia, the gargantuan sphere of cloudy blue sky mentioned by Nannasprite as the crucible of creation. Apparently it’s not safe to be outside during the “eclipse”, so Jade heads back to her tower.

FAILURE ARTIST: We cut to John alchemizing a bunch of stuff, some useful and some never to appear again. One of these things is a Cosbytop computer and that hasn’t aged well. John feels like it’s both his birthday and Christmas and though he thinks that’s impossible these pages came out a few days before Christmas. This fourth wall wink and nod comes up during another alchemizing frenzy.

CHEL: He contemplates a “1980s time-lapse montage” but instead we have to sit through him alchemising everything item by item.

GET ON WITH IT!: 12

Though he does come up with some useful stuff, including a rather snappy suit. By combining his glasses with the PDA he gets hands-free internet, and the sledgehammer, telescope, and Sassacre book together create the TELESCOPIC SASSACRUSHER, an extremely powerful weapon which unfortunately he can’t lift. Nannasprite’s ectoplasm and the gushers make healing candies, and ectoplasm, the fake arms, and the PDA solve the giant hammer problem by making REMOTE GHOST GAUNTLETS. One of the funnier items is a steam-iron-hammer he calls the WRINKLEFUCKER.

Dave, meanwhile, is STILL strifing with Bro, who apparently doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about the fact that the city is being flattened by meteors around them. Not doing a good job of showing “yes, this fight should be taken seriously”.

TIER: Neither does Dave for that matter, fucks given remains at a cool absolute zero on this roof.

GET ON WITH IT!: 13 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6

CHEL: At least it’s captioned FINAL ROUND now. Surrounded by watching crows, Dave hurls himself at Bro, and their collision results in the snapping of Dave’s sword, the bisection of Lil Cal (hooray!) and, somehow, the splitting of the picture of the record on Dave’s T-shirt; not cutting the cloth, turning the picture of a whole record into one of a broken record, which it will remain for the rest of its time in the story. Lots of analysis has been done by fans about how this represents Bro’s abuse shattering Dave’s true inner self, but in the context, it just looks like even sillier cartoon physics than we already had, if one even notices it (in the rush of visuals it’s easy to miss the first time round). It probably doesn’t help that Bro never actually says anything (nor do either of the other living adults), so we don’t really know what his thoughts on the matter are.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 12

Dave goes flying, rolling and skidding across the roof, landing in a rather battered-looking heap but with no serious harm done, and Bro chucks the game discs at him and… flies off on a hoverboard which I guess he has? Yet again, not adding to a serious tone here. Are hoverboards normal in this universe? Like the sylladexes, it was never established. Dave messages John, matter-of-factly telling him “bro just kicked my ass”. It’s still unclear how literal John thinks this ass-kicking is.

BRIGHT: This is apparently a universe in which some form of combat with one’s guardian is apparently routine, so John might well be thinking of Dave’s strifes with Bro as just a more intense version of a normal practice. On the other hand, by that same token, there’s nothing at this stage to say it isn’t just a more intense version of a normal practice. In fact, both John’s and Dave’s reactions suggest this is the case.

The problem really comes later on. If Dave’s situation is going to be taken seriously, then so should everyone else’s. Right now, although there are suggestions that all is not well, the tone of the text takes none of these situations seriously. It keeps everyone on a more even footing.

CHEL: Back on the golden moon, the eclipse is happening; during same, the moon and Jade’s tower thereupon, which are chained to the planet, swing right inside Skaia, surrounding it with clouds. On the surface of the clouds, we see images of events which happened earlier, including John’s house in the Medium, Rose’s house aflame, the tree in the desert, and the meteors falling on Dave’s city. This, we gather, is from where Jade obtains her mysterious information!

Dream Jade types messages to John, while the Dreambot types them out on a keyboard in the real world so he can actually get them. We proceed to see the same conversation about the package and SBurb we saw when Jade was first introduced, but this time I think a recap of it is actually pretty useful, especially the reference to the explosion. What happens is a little hard to parse, but as far as I can make out, a cloud shows a vision of a meteor emerging from a space portal, and the meteor actually emerges from the vision, becoming a cloud in the process. Said cloud-meteor then passes into a vision of Jade’s island when the volcano was still active and strikes down as the real meteor did in that time period. Jade, in her tower, hears it; I guess this is why it’s not safe to go outside during the eclipse?

In the volcano vision, we pull into a close-up shot of the lava-filled crater beneath the volcano, and a very familiar featureless canine head starts to emerge from it. Creepy.

Jade leaves the tower to check, and finds a vision of the lava with a blossom-like lit-up spirograph emerging from it, but when she tries to look, vision-Bec blocks her view of it, as the real Bec flies back and forth in front of the Dreambot. She messages John again, saying Bec doesn’t want her to go near the meteor crash site.

In John’s dream tower, the bed is empty; Dream John is now hovering outside it, eyes firmly shut. Jade sees him and drifts toward him, while John’s eyes slowly open. (This bit fuelled a fair amount of shipping at the time.) We see again the shaped clouds and the slowly approaching silhouette of Jade, revealing this to be the time when John fell asleep earlier, and at the exact same moment, real Jade and real John awake.

Again, we have a repeated conversation, this one being the one where Jade implores John to wake up. Now we know what she meant! Again, I think recapping this is reasonable, but maybe it could have been trimmed down so we just got the important points? That should have been done with all the repeat convos, really.

TIER: Personally speaking the little blurbs of repeated conversation shown during the flash would've gotten the point across without having to completely rehash the conversations.

With Jade awake properly, we get another convo rehash (now with proper context from both sides). Jade then consults her COLORFUL REMINDERS, as the visions of past and future events visible in the clouds as she sleeps can get very confusing very fast and the things help her put everything into usable info! With is fitting because dreams are trippy and easily forgotten. Jade notes two things: that this time there wasn't that much of future being shown, and that this is the first time that her dog guardian Bec has shown up a dream.

Bec has apparently never let Jade wander into the weird temple that is such a strange landmark of her island, but with the overpowered pooch taking a nap at the feet of his master's corpse, this is a good a time as any to try and pull one over him!

As Jade zip lines towards the temple and Rose continues construction on John's house, we cut back to Dave in the aftermath of the strife.

Dave is slightly saddened by poor Cal's “unfortunate” bisection (personally I was hollering because fuck that thing Jesus). His strife kind has also been turned into a ½ bladekind, courtesy of Bro fucking up his shit blade. Fucking rude man.

BRIGHT: Fighting with half a sword never seems to hinder Dave, but it still seems a silly thing to do when Bro quite possibly knew Dave was headed into heavy combat. It’s funny at the time though!

FAILURE ARTIST: When I first read Homestuck, I was sad Bro didn’t seem to care about Lil Cal, but with later revelations...would be better if that puppet never existed.

TIER: Dave attempts to grab the beta that he worked so hard for, but wouldn't ya know it his dang inventory is all filled up. Mostly with useless crap, as Dave admits as well. After a quick setup change for his modus, Dave finally has the beta! Congrats!!

CHEL: *looks pointedly at GET ON WITH IT count*

TIER: While Dave attempts to pester her, Rose has finished building up John's house, which marks the end of how much more she can help John as his server player. There's not much else to do for her till Dave shows up. She's also nearly done with John's gift, that'll show him that Rose is the God King of, and I am quoting right now “facetious sentimental gestures”. That's a peculiar and slightly worrying sentiment to have. What an adorably wordy yet cheeky little goth.

With that, we jump back a few months into the past, when it was Rose's 13th birthday. She's opening a package from John (signed under his old handle ghostyTrickster) containing the gift of knitting stuff (yarn and knitting needles) and a very dorky yet endearing letter from the blue boy. What a goof.

Rose is then pestered by one of the trollslum inhabitants, this one by the name of grimAuxiliatrix! They type Like This, And I Think It's Very Neat. Also quite verbose this one. Like personally I kinda need to carefully read and reread their words to get what the fuck they're trying to get to. In this case, it's politely bitching about humans while weird time related fuckery gets explicitly name dropped. Mainly the weird situation that is the trolls being/not being from the future. It's as confusing as it sounds.

CHEL: I think here’s the first indication that the trolls aren’t just other humans. Meanwhile, notice that one of the names in the Trollslum is “centaursTesticle”. Lovely. That character will, as the handle suggests, be the source of a LOT of CALL CPA PLEASE points. But anyway.

GA: No We Arent From "The Future" GA: But We Are All Already In Agreement That You Dont Get It And Never Will TT: I thought you said we spoke in the future. GA: We Did GA: Your Future GA: For Me It Was Only A Couple Minutes Ago TT: I understand. TT: You exist in some temporal stratum through which you have communication access to various points of my timeline. TT: It's not that complicated.

TIER: While that confusing thing keeps happening, we jump on over to a younger Dave, whole record shirt and dumb not-Kamina anime glasses wearing. He too is opening a birthday gift, which consists of his iconic aviators and a letter as well. The letter is just as endearing as the one John sent to Rose. Might just be my bias talking concerning how much John is undoubtedly and unchallenged my favorite character overall.

CHEL: I think so too, but I’m still giving him a point for him telling Dave his “gay butt stinks”, even though he is a twelve-year-old boy - it never gets called out or presented as bad that the kids say -ism-based insults until near the end, and that part has its own problems which we’ll get to then. The rest of it’s cute though.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 11

I’d like to bring up another webcomic which is known for its incredibly offensive humour; R. K. Milholland’s Something Positive. Specifically, I’d like to contrast the offensive humour of it with the offensive humour of Homestuck. In S*P, the point of the offensive humour is that the characters saying or doing the offensive thing are horrible people who should not be emulated, and even they disapprove strongly of homophobic/racist insults. Here is one of the tamer examples, from 2003 (so later comics have no excuse). Please note the character saying all this is both very drunk and very frustrated by having read a lot of terrible writing at the time, and his decision to do this comes back to bite him later.

In contrast, the point of Homestuck’s offensive jokes seems to be that either offensive things are inherently funny or the writer doesn’t realise why they’re offensive.

John tells Dave he thinks he needs to get out of his brother’s shadow, showing no concern for Dave’s actual wellbeing; more evidence that either they don’t know about the strifes or don’t care. The gift John has given is the glasses worn by Ben Stiller, which John suggests could replace Dave’s current anime shades. John worries that they’re “sort of a shitty present”, which again makes me wonder about the Egberts’ financial status - we weren’t able to find an actual figure for them but those things would cost thousands, so what the hell makes him call them “shitty”? How much did Hussie think movie memorabilia cost? Name of the count aside, we’re using it for when their economic statuses are weird in general, so here we go again:

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 8

TIER: Dave too is dealing with a trollslum inhabitant, this one by the name of adiosToreador. It's around here that the trolls typing starts to get head tilt worthy. As Dave so eloquently puts it, toreador types like a tool. I mean, lOOK AT THIS, lOOK ME IN THE EYES, aND TELL ME THIS AIN'T RIDICULOUS.

CHEL: AT opens by telling Dave he’s awful, and Dave responds with frustration at having to deal with the trolls yet again. He complains that he’s “wasting good material on you guys” and that there’s no substance to their trolling; he also mentions one of them thinking he was a girl, which I think is the original source of the fandom’s popular female-to-male transgender Dave headcanon.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think it’s just that Dave is a popular character.

CHEL: I don’t know, it started well before the fandom started getting really enthusiastic about assigning identities to everyone, from what I saw, but maybe.

TIER: My two cents concerning this matter is that it's probably a combination of the two. Dave seems to resonate quite well with a great majority of the fans, so from what I've seen they more readily project onto him.

AT: i KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE, AT: oR WILL DO, aCTUALLY, AT: iT'S THE MOST AWFUL THING, tHE WORST YOU CAN EVER DO,

CHEL: The readers immediately start wondering what this thing is, but Dave is unconcerned, and immediately accuses AT of perving on him. Here is where the CALL CPA PLEASE count really starts to ramp up, because on one hand, yes it’s hilarious to watch the tables being turned, but on the other, this coming out of a boy who literally just turned thirteen that day is… uncomfortable for a lot of adult readers, especially since we know his home has obscene material lying around all over it and as mentioned before that can really mess up a kid, even if Bro was not in fact putting him in his movies directly.

TG: and i want to know exactly when i got to clear some space in my calendar for when some fuckwit blunders out of a magical phone booth and makes a ballad-inspiring play for my throbbing beef truncheon AT: sHOULD i BE PERTURBED BY THESE ALLUSIONS, TG: no man TG: look TG: i just need to know when to be there TG: when the stars come into alignment and your flux capacitor lets you finally sate your meteoric greed for crotch-dachshund TG: i wouldnt want to miss it and cause a paradox or something TG: itd suck if the universe blew up on account of you missing your window of opportunity to help yourself to a pubescent boy's naked spam porpoise AT: uHHH, AT: oK, THIS IS SORT OF STARTING TO UPSET ME, CALL CPA PLEASE: 5

TIER: How many words does a 13 year old need for his private parts? Asking for a friend. I get that Dave is a little gremlin but holy shit y'all.

CHEL: To quote Hiveswap, “SOUNDS LIKE SETUP TO ‘RIDDLE’ OR PERHAPS ‘JOKE’.” Or maybe a really weird rewrite of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I just realised the (in)appropriateness of that song title. Anyway, I’m giving one CPA point for each of those elaborate descriptions. AT, perturbed, announces his intention to leave, but Dave continues.

TG: we're motherfuckin entrenched in this bitch TG: you and me TG: welcome to nam TG: now grab my hand and shimmy your soggy ass off that muddy bank before charlie gets the fuckin drop AT: uHHH, wHO, AT: wHO'S CHARLIE, TG: hes the guy whos gonna read our vows TG: im feeling pretty friggin MATRIMONIAL all a sudden TG: take a look down by your foot see that little bottle TG: stomp on that shit like its on fire TG: noisy ethnic dudes are flipping the fuck out and waving us around on chairs til someone gets hurt TG: im your 300 pound matronly freight-train TG: and my gaping furnace is hungry for coal so get goddamn shoveling AT: oH MY GOD, CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9

Hey, our first double point assignment! Two points for using the same racist joke again, as if it wasn’t offensive enough the first time. And another one for the fat joke.

FAILURE ARTIST: Lifting the newlyweds on chairs is a Jewish tradition so I guess Hussie’s antisemitism didn’t start this year.

CHEL: Isn’t stepping on a bottle a Jewish thing too? Does that count as more than one anti-Semitic joke or is it all part of the same one?

FAILURE ARTIST: Yeah, that’s also a thing. But I’d say it counts as one big joke.

CHEL: Does the Vietnam joke count as a separate one? I’m not sure what the general attitude to those is since about half of 20th-century British comedy revolves around WW2 jokes and no one minds those.

TG: thats what you see TG: a kaleidoscopic supernova of all your hopes and dreams all swishin together TG: radially effevescing arms of more little boy peckers than you can imagine TG: turning out insane corkscrew haymakers of a billion dancing vienna sausages strong CALL CPA PLEASE: 7

CHEL: All the counts aside, I can see what Hussie was going for and the general idea’s still amusing, culminating in one of the funniest bits in the comic when all this leads up to adiosToreador [AT] blocked turntechGodhead [TG] - I think we’ve all wanted to be Dave here. I’m fully aware that this sequence was meant to be somewhat uncomfortable, but given that Hussie later tries to tell us that Dave’s home life scarred him for real, yet he presented this as funny, it adds to the general feeling of Hussie berating the reader for laughing at the comedy. I think he was just trying to pander to the woke side of the fanbase with that, but we’ll get to it when we get there.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13

FAILURE ARTIST: We go to AIMLESS RENEGADE, who has finally run out on his clip without hitting anyone. Apparently, some nitpicker on the forum (not me) pointed out the AR’s gun is magazine-fed, not clip-fed, but AR doesn’t give a shit about that.

CHEL: “A clip is not a magazine, a mag is not a clip; neither is a grip a stock, and "stock" does not mean grip.”

FAILURE ARTIST: AR examines the murals and declares the amphibian and reptilian images illegal pictography. AR arms themselves with a rocket launcher but wonders if they should befriend WV and PM - particularly PM. However, AR decides the two have committed too many crimes that make AR’s carapace steam. AR dresses as a judge (to complement WV as a mayor and PM as a mail carrier) and declares order in the court. AR wants to go down the moving platform to catch WV and PM but it isn’t operating right.

Closer to present time, Jade puts her gift to John on top of the monument. The gift disappears, just as Jade planned. Back in the future, PM looks at her drawing showing where she’s supposed to go. The drawing seems to be inaccurate until the tower is shot down. It turns out AR accidentally launched a rocket at it. AR tries again to hit the criminals but is distracted by PM’s beauty. Instead, AR shoots the mobile station. WV throws a can of Tab and PM grabs the package in a clever callback to SBaHJ’s sock ruse comic.

PM gets the package to the Appearifier and Sendifies it into Jade’s toddlerhood, back when Grandpa was alive and shooting butterflies. Inside the package is a letter from John, a too-big t-shirt with a blue ghost on it, and pumpkin seeds. So we have the root of Jade’s friendship with John and the others and her interest in gardening. That’s a very elaborate time loop.

CHEL: Get used to elaborate time loops. Anyway, the letter’s painfully adorable again. John thanks Jade for her years of friendship and for being the reason he met Rose and Dave. He gave Jade pumpkin seeds because future Jade had been upset that her pumpkins kept disappearing so he wanted to help her grow more. Unfortunately his declaration that three people is “almost like, TOO MUCH FRIENDSHIP” was cute at first glance, but given how he has no contact with anyone but them that we see, it becomes a tad creepy. Did he not expect to ever have any friends, or more than one friend? The implication that Dadbert kept him locked in his room all the time is looking more and more likely!

We cut to a cartoon sound effect, WHOP, and You bear the vicious brunt of this story transition directly in the face, “you” now being Archagent Jack Noir. The sound effect is the result of Dad Egbert punching Jack in the face. Jack pulls a switchblade, but Dad retaliates by lighting Jack’s hated jester hat on fire, throwing it to the ground, spraying shaving cream on it, and stomping on it. Jack immediately sets Dad free.

Jade is instructed by the prompt to “Play guitar to summon giant lily pads”, which she does, and it works… somehow? I’m not sure how that happens. Anyway, she uses the lily pads to hop over to the frog temple, finding in it a wall covered in tiny lime green glowing symbols.

Cut back to Dave, who has finally succeeded in installing the beta, and not a moment too soon as Rose’s room is now full of red light, soon to be aflame. Rose is calm enough to join Dave in a SBaHJ joke, and we go into the act-ending animation, [S] Enter.

Dave dramatically sips his fortunately-really-apple-juice and draws cartoons as the game loads, while Rose plays with Vodka Mutini and Jade scurries through the temple. For clarity’s sake, I’ll describe each character’s actions in a separate paragraph.

"Homestuck - [S] Enter [End of act 3]" (Watch on YouTube)

In Rose’s burning house Dave quickly deploys the necessary machinery. There’s so little safe room left to use that he has to throw Rose’s bed into the burning forest for one, put one in the observatory, and put the third on the nearby roof; fortunately Rose is able to get to them all. Dave uses the wizard statue to knock open the Cruxtruder, then drops it outside, breaking its hand off and sending the hand flying. He moves the cruxite to the lathe, where Rose produces a totem for her entry item, a bottle. Rose flings the dead Jaspers into the Kernelsprite and Dave grabs the Eldritch Princess doll to put in too, but the flying wizard statue hand knocks the entry item into the nearby waterfall. Rose leaps out over the drop, successfully catches it, and is in turn caught by a long purple tentacle....

Flaming whirlwinds approach the house; Rose swings the bottle to shatter it, and the meteor lands.

In the temple, we see an enormous flower atop another countdown device, noting four-and-a-half minutes till disaster, but Jade suddenly falls asleep again, waking up with only nineteen seconds to go. Unlike John randomly falling asleep mid-battle, this has been happening often enough to seem to be a legitimate problem with a story-based cause. Keep an eye on that.

Dave, meanwhile, is still in his room, which is now filled with crows. He seems flustered at first, but in a later shot he’s back at his computer with a crow perched on his head, seemingly fine.

Back at John’s house, Nannasprite opens up his newer copy of Sassacre’s book and starts to inscribe the very message we read earlier, so she didn’t in fact know about it during her life. Seems odd that she’d bother doing this rather than just saying it, though, especially since when she finishes, she drops the book into the chasm, where it plummets through grey clouds, emerging over a dark-blue land scattered with tiny lights and black rivers. John, covered in oil, runs up the many stairs of his remodelled house, smashing imps left and right with single blows from the WRINKLEFUCKER and directing the SASSACRUSHER with the GHOST GAUNTLETS to take on the ogres. When he reaches the top, he slams his hammer down one last time and bounces upwards to the spirograph portal, entering whatever’s on the other side. Fade to white.

Generally, a very good flash! Exciting but doesn’t sacrifice useful information for drama, and now two characters have reached their current goals but more is still going on. Lovely music too. I think the Flash animations are one of Hussie’s greater strengths here.

FAILURE ARTIST: The animation was what drew me into Homestuck and this is a particularly good one.

CHEL: A couple of static pages wrap up the Act; we pan out from John’s house to see it and the pinnacle it’s perched on are now looming above the same dark-blue land covered with thick clouds that the book fell onto, which we now see is in fact an entire very small planet. Curtains close.

So that’s the end of Act 3! What does everyone think?

FAILURE ARTIST: It was fun seeing Jade and the Exiles but sad thinking about how underutilized they ended up. Especially poor AR.

BRIGHT: This is where the elaborate time loops really started to kick in, and I’ve gotta say, I’m not a fan. I recognise that they’re a key feature of Homestuck, but I found some of them too confusing on my first read through. (Though they do make more sense on subsequent reads.)

I think on the whole this Act is quite well paced. I really loved the bits with Jade, and a lot of nifty background info gets introduced without being infodumped.

TIER: I wasn't even aware that webcomics on the internet were a thing at this point, but I do believe that it's around here that Homestuck's popularity was starting to pick up, no? This chapter went a lot deeper into the strangeness of the game to!

FAILURE ARTIST:

Homestuck was popular but I don’t think it became a phenomenon until Act 5 when the trolls were fully introduced. Lots of people even skipped Acts 1-4 and the Intermission to get to them. I think a lot of the pre-Act 5 fans were my age (20s) while after that many were teens or tweens. Admittedly, I didn’t do much in the fandom except check the SA thread until Act 5 came around.

CHEL: I don’t think I got into it until Act 6 - I remember the first time I got further than a few pages in I gave up when the Alpha kids got introduced because it was way too complicated.

As for my thoughts on the act, well… Before, I was able to more or less chalk up the racist/sexist/fatphobic/homophobic remarks as being from the characters’ mouths (they are, after all, twelve to thirteen years old) and not the author’s, but they don’t really get called out by the narrative and Hussie has sufficiently drained my goodwill that I have to complain, and I suspect after recent events that it actually was him speaking there, if you get my meaning. Most of the dialogue is still as sweet and funny as I remember it being but those bits really taint it. Hypothetical rewrite would definitely remove those.

I’m in two minds about keeping Dave’s hurricane of euphemisms to AT for said hypothetical rewrite; on one hand, considering his home situation, it’s worrying, but on the other the whole point of the joke is to make AT uncomfortable and it’s hard to do that without making comments that would also make the reader uncomfortable. Maybe if Dave’s home life was adjusted a bit the reader would be more easily able to assume he just picked them up from Urban Dictionary.

Speaking of Dave, his storyline here is where we really start to see a thing which is a recurring problem with the comic. Namely, reliance on theme and symbolism over what is actually happening. If Hussie was indeed trying from the beginning to portray Dave’s situation as serious abuse, then he shouldn’t have chosen to represent said abuse with ridiculous cartoon physics while literally portraying Dave as unharmed onscreen. Dave’s behaviour does hint at some issues, but they’re easy to pass off as related to other things, and swords so sharp they cause printed pictures to change are not most readers’ first assumption for the cause.

Other than those, though, I think we’re still mostly fine; none of the problems are problems with the underlying structure of the story, so it wouldn’t require a huge retooling. That state of affairs will continue on for another couple of acts, but when it fails, it fails.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 13 CALL CPA PLEASE: 7 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 14 GET ON WITH IT!: 13 GORE GALORE: 0 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 14 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 6 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 0 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 2 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 9 TOTAL: 79

#homestuck #Homespork #homestuck review #homestuck meta #homestuck reread #let's read homestuck

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thankskenpenders · 5 years

Text

So there’s this little cartoon you may have heard of...

As I’ve said on this blog before, I’d never watched all of SatAM. This might be shocking to hear from someone who runs a blog dedicated to Archie Sonic and one of the top twenty Bunnie Rabbot fangirls in the world. But it’s true.

SatAM was very difficult to track down compared to other Sonic cartoons when I was a kid, and I just never got around to watching it as an adult. So for the longest time, I had only ever seen the first episode, which I found uploaded in parts on YouTube in 2007. As the one cartoon featuring the characters I liked from the comics, it became sort of this holy grail of Sonic media for me as a kid, especially with people online always talking it up as the best thing ever and petitioning for a revival. Hell, to this day, a lot of people hold it up as this masterpiece and act like the Archie comics were a complete mockery of it

Anyway so I finally got around to watching the whole series with my boyfriend these past couple weeks, and it was pretty good. So instead of covering a comic today, here are some thoughts on the cartoon that started it all

General Thoughts

SatAM is a pretty good show. It isn’t the greatest piece of Sonic media ever, unlike what some older fans will tell you. It might not even be the best Sonic cartoon (you could easily make a case for the Japanese version of Sonic X, or Sonic Boom if you’re looking for something more comedic). It hasn’t aged the most gracefully, in some ways. The animation’s cheap, the stories sometimes bland. But for a DiC-produced video game cartoon from the early ‘90s, it’s really solid

I think that in many ways, SatAM is carried by the strength of its ideas over its actual execution. The darker, more serious tone is a really cool idea, even if at times it can get a little dull, and even if the show actually gets silly as hell pretty often. (This is a show where Snively literally tortures a captive Antoine by preparing French cuisine improperly.) That opening scene of Robotropolis in the first episode actually sets the mood really well and feels like it came straight out of some cyberpunk anime from the ‘80s or ‘90s. The concept of Robotnik turning people into robot slaves is really cool, even if surprisingly little was done with this aside from Uncle Chuck’s storyline. And I think the Freedom Fighters make a great supporting cast for Sonic, even if the writers didn’t use them to their full potential

Interestingly, I’d often heard from fans that season one was the stronger of the two, when I’d say that the opposite is true. Season one episodes were pretty samey, usually involving low stakes missions to Robotropolis with no real continuity, and Sally ended up being a damsel in distress more than I’d like--hell, so did Bunnie in a few episodes. It wasn’t bad, but it was highly repetitive, and I got a little bored at times. Season two had a few real stinkers (the Antoine episodes) and Dulcy was an unwelcome addition, but I thought the heavier focus on continuity gave the season some real momentum and more emotional weight, which made it way more enjoyable overall

Things I Liked

Sonic. I quite liked this version of Sonic, actually! Jaleel White is a great Sonic, and he was written pretty well. At times the extremely tubular ‘90s lingo was grating (I never wanna hear “Gotta juice!” again), but I was surprised to see that this version of Sonic had a lot of heart. He really cared about the well-being of his friends and Uncle Chuck, and they even let him cry a couple times. I thought they struck a good balance between snark and sincerity with him

Sally. I don’t think SatAM Sally was perfect, but I liked her. I’m still of the opinion that she should have been given more ways to defend herself physically (maybe some kind of power of her own) so that Sonic didn’t have to save her as much, but I liked the banter she and Sonic had. Unlike the early Archie comics, Sally doesn’t come off as the bossy girlfriend who ruins Sonic’s fun. Maybe it’s Jaleel White and Kath Soucie’s performances doing most of the work, but they had a fun back and forth dynamic, with Sally’s sarcasm keeping Sonic’s ego in check, but there still being clear chemistry between the two of them

I also liked the greatly reduced emphasis on her being a princess compared to much of Archie’s material. Like yeah, it’s there. Her dad’s the king, and left her some classified info via Nicole. But her status doesn’t really affect things much. They don’t talk about her having this grand destiny and being the next in line to rule. It’s clear that she’s in charge of the Freedom Fighters not because of her status, but because she’s smart, brave, and gets shit done. That’s the Sally I like.

Plus! In the finale, Sally insisted upon going with Sonic for the final confrontation, and was a crucial part of the climax. Her powering up with Sonic and matching his speed and strength ruled. Compare that to the climactic defeat of Robotnik in Archie, where she was fucking dead

Robotnik. I don’t think much needs to be said here. Jim Cummings rules as Robotnik, like everyone has always said. He’s just so evil and so much fun to watch

Snively??? I’ve never cared for Snively as a character, but Charlie Adler rules and his over-the-top performance made the character way funnier than he should’ve been. Just something about all the little noises he makes, and the way he almost shifts into the Red Guy voice at times

Nicole. It was fun to see Nicole start to get more of a personality in season two, having some banter with Sonic and also picking up some slang from him. It makes the later decision to turn Sally’s computer into a full character (which would have happened in season three, and obviously eventually became a big subplot in the comics) make a lot of sense

King Acorn. While he was only around briefly, I liked that he wasn’t a huge dick, unlike Archie’s King Max

Things I Didn’t Like

The misuse of the other Freedom Fighters. This is, by far, the show’s greatest crime.

I already write approximately 100k words a week on this blog about how I think Bunnie Rabbot is amazing and criminally underused, so I’ll keep this brief, but I was shocked to see how little she was used in this show. People tend to say Dulcy stole her screentime in season two, but she didn’t have much to do in the first season either! We somehow never got a single episode focusing on her. The one where she got temporarily deroboticized focused much more on Uncle Chuck. We never got to learn the story behind her roboticization, or delved into her feelings on the matter much. She mostly just served as a positive, lighthearted supporting member of the team who acts cute and gets some funny lines, but usually stays home

Antoine might have been even worse, honestly. Like, they used him so much! They had multiple episodes focusing entirely on him! And yet I’m not sure he ever really helped. Sonic and Sally kept taking him along, but every single time it felt like it would’ve been a wiser decision to bring Bunnie instead. The jokes about his broken English were just dumb, and god, the way he constantly hits on Sally and starts kissing her hand at the most inappropriate times is just SO fucking creepy. SatAM Antoine is just a horrible, one-dimensional stereotype. There’s a reason why readers of the Archie comics wanted him out of the series until later writers majorly rehabilitated him

Rotor also didn’t get much use, which was a shame, but it at least felt like he was used efficiently. I got the vibe that Rotor was much more bitter about the war with Robotnik than his friends, and it would’ve been interesting to see this explored more. At least we got that one fun episode where he went to space with Sonic

Dulcy. Oh my fucking god. I wanted to like Dulcy! I really did! But most of the time she was just a clutz used for comic relief, and they kept reusing the same joke where she crashed, bumped her head, got dizzy, and thought she was talking to her mom. This happened in almost every episode she was in.

The other miscellaneous Freedom Fighters. Like in the early Archie comics, none of the other miscellaneous Mobians they meet were as interesting as the core cast. They just always felt very bland and I was never as invested in them as the writers wanted me to be. Ari was boring, and that episode where they found the underground city and this other dude started hitting on Sally was a drag. Lupe’s cute though

Rings. This is a common problem in Sonic adaptations, but the fact that rings always serve as Sonic’s instant win button kind of sucks. Basically any time Sonic’s in a pinch, he pulls a ring out of his backpack, powers up, and wins. Not exactly a recipe for suspenseful action

Oh, also, I did kinda find it weird how much Sonic and Sally kissed? Like, all the time? Often while their friends just stand there and stare at them? Not something I’d expect from a Sonic cartoon

Things Archie Did Better

I’ll limit this to the first 50 issues or so, since I don’t think it would be fair to compare two short seasons of SatAM to the highlights of nearly 500 issues of comics

Tails. Tails is okay in SatAM, Archie just used him as Sonic’s sidekick way more. He was barely even in the show. Poor little guy only gets to play dirt hockey all day

Bunnie. Again, Bunnie was underutilized in both series, but the Archie comics did her better. They actually showed the story of how she got roboticized (even if it was a silly story), and they got to flesh her out a bit more. Gallagher showing that she was a carrot farmer before her roboticization and saying she wanted to be a hairdresser was at least something. And as I keep harping on, Rich Koslowski’s backup story in #37 where we find out Bunnie has recurring nightmares about her robot parts taking over and making her a threat to her friends? This single backup story did more to flesh her out than all 26 episodes of SatAM combined

Antoine. Not hard to do better than SatAM here, really. He was really bad early on, serving as little more than Sonic’s punching bag, but eventually they started to set up a romance between him and Bunnie and explored his past a bit, saying that Antoine’s father (his personal role model) was a member of the royal guard who was roboticized in the war. While he still had a long way to go, these were important first steps towards him being a decent character. Hell, these days, being Bunnie’s love interest is one of Antoine’s defining characteristics! And it doesn’t come from the cartoon at all

Roboticization in general. I was surprised how little this came up in the cartoon! In the comics, it’s such a central element. We see more of the heroes’ loved ones turned into robots, and we even got some fun stories where characters like Sonic and Sally were roboticized temporarily. The Freedom Fighters’ efforts to reverse the process was a major part of the plot for quite a while. Bunnie’s fear of losing control is a pretty important part of her character (even if it was only touched on briefly), and after they’re rescued, the rest of the Mobians fear that the “Robians” (including Sonic’s entire family) will turn evil again. It comes up a lot! There are interesting things to discuss here! But SatAM only really talks about Uncle Chuck. We never even see what happened to everyone else

Closing Thoughts

SatAM is not the best show in the world, but it is a solid and enjoyable one. It’s easy to see why people who grew up with it are fond of it, even if I think that it’s long past time certain fans quit acting like it’s the only valid take on the Sonic source material and petitioning for a third season. At the very least, the concepts and characters introduced here are strong ones, and it’s easy to see how they spawned over 20 years of comics exploring said ideas in greater detail. While I’m not sure I could recommend it to non-fans, I think it’s definitely worth checking out for Sonic fans who missed out on it (especially fans of the Archie comics)

Anyway I got to see Bunnie dropkick some Swatbots twice her height so I had fun

#tkp post #other media

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jewel-s-blog · 5 years

Text

a nap for two - j.jh

genre: enemies(ish) to friends(for now), fluff

transfer student!jaehyun x gender neutral!reader

warnings: other than my bad writing? kind of a slow burn?

word count: 6.5k

inspired by this prompt from @yoonohprompts

plot: transfer student!jaehyun, is an unlikely friend in your final year of high school, but the two of you find yourselves cozily napping under the stairs together rather regularly

a/n: I’m thinking about making this a series, but depends on the feedback I guess. Also, I didn’t actually hate high school (quite the opposite actually, since I found it to be a happy time for me), but I made the oc hate school because I felt it fit with the story better so 🤗 enjoy!

[September 4]

It was kind of strange to see someone new transfer into what was the final year of hell that you were required by law to show up to. What made it even stranger was that most people who did transfer to your high school, mid-quarter, were usually military kids or other lost souls who had been kicked out of whichever previous hellhole whence they came. So when his fresh face walked onto campus, already a good month into senior year, all anyone could talk about was him.

Jung Jaehyun.

He was quiet, and didn’t seem to be very outgoing or the over sharing type, so naturally the theories around his sudden appearance began surfacing like crazy.

Some people said that his parents were these super rich research scientists for the military and they had moved out here to follow their work. Others spread rumors that he had an inappropriate relationship with one of his previous teachers—which you didn’t find hard too hard to believe considering... well, have you seen him?

But most of these theories kind of just went in one ear and out the other. You didn’t have any classes with him, which meant you never really got to have any real interactions with the guy. That meant that while you were aware of his somewhat enigmatic existence, you were really just more focused on needing to get your college apps done and have them looking good enough to make sure you weren’t drowning in debt going into adulthood.

To be honest, while you didn’t particularly love having to get up every morning to drag yourself to get your high school diploma, you still wanted your future to be funnier, happier, and brighter. And to you, that meant being able to go to college. But it wasn’t an easy feat, to say the least.

On top of your studies, there was sports practices, volunteer work, your part-time job, and the piano lessons that your mom convinced you not to quit nearly 7+ times in the past 14 years(the asian jumped out).

Due to the laundry list of obligations you had constantly looming over you, sleep became an elusive little thing. After about a month of running on an average of three hours of sleep per night, the only tea you had time for was the extremely caffeinated kind that filled your two liter flask day and night.

Eventually, you were in such a dire need of rest that you made it a point never to schedule things that took up your lunch time unless completely necessary. And rather than hitting up the cafeteria for a nutritious meal or the lastest gossip (usually about the mystery man himself), you settled for the space under the stairs of the newest building addition.

The place was cool, and quiet, and completely void of all others; which making it the perfect spot to spend the meager 25 minutes of lunch break to get some shut eye.

——————————

[October 12]

It had become routine for you to head straight for your nap-time spot as soon as the bell for lunch rang. Being a Monday made it that much more necessary for you to get to your spot so you could stretch out your legs on the chilled concrete floor and lean back against the backpack you used as a cushion against the just as chilled concrete wall.

You nonchalantly speed walk and whip out your phone, getting your slow jams Spotify playlist ready to shuffle for when you finally get into the perfect napping position.

Rounding the corner, just before your secret spot comes into view, you stop in dead in your tracks because you hear someone. Or more accurately, some people.

Apparently your “secret” spot wasn’t so much a secret anymore. You sigh in dissatisfaction at the thought that someone had the audacity to take away the one thing you looked forward in the craptastic day you were already having despite it not yet even reaching noon.

You hear a high pitched giggle, a sound you’ve become all too familiar with over the past four years of witnessing teenage hormones take over the masses of the student body. At one point, you were a part of those masses, but nothing lasts forever. Instead, it’s the low, baritone heavy voice that surprises you for a split second as it’s not one you can recognize. But once that split second is over, you take that one extra step that reveals the scene that you prepared yourself to find.

“A-hem.” You clear your throat, making your biting annoyance and presence known.

The two bodies face you in an instant, and the innocent shock you see on their faces actually makes you feel a little guilty for interrupting a moment that you really had no business butting into.

So you stand there a bit awkwardly, averting your eyes from the couple, but not allowing your feet to retreat. Staring at the wall, you think about succumbing to the tension in the now cramped space and apologizing. That is, until you hear the low voice reverb yet again, but with a haughty tone laced into it.

“Do you mind?”

Normally, you’d say that you have a particularly long fuse, but in this moment, you allow all the stress, lack of sleep, and frustrations of the day get the better of you. Darting up to look into the eyes that had just challenged you, you seeth back,

“Yes. Yes, I do mind.”

You let your peeved gaze fall onto the girl slightly hidden behind the shoulder of the taller figure before her. Letting it linger, to let her know that you were just as aggravated, if not more aggravated than her companion, she shrank down to hide herself more and let her hand find the side of his arm.

“C’mon. Let’s just go.” She whispers, clearly feeling more embarrassed the longer you hold your ground.

Frankly, this girl was someone you knew personally. She wasn’t in your immediate circle of friends, but you had worked on projects together and hung out outside of school on a few occasions. Basically, the two of you were pretty friendly. She also knew that you weren’t someone to be messed with as you had built a reputation of being amiable but deadly if the situation required.

“Jaehyun—,” she whines, “let’s go.”

He didn’t divert his eyes from you as she tugged at his shirt sleeve.

Jaehyun. That was his name.

You had forgotten momentarily since lately you had gotten so busy, your brain couldn’t register and recognize the unfamiliar face fast enough. But none of that mattered to you now. All you cared about was that you now had only 23 minutes to nap instead of your usual 25. So you add,

“Yeah, Jaehyun. I think it’s time for you to go.” You cock your head and allow a little smirk to form as you are satisfied with how this situation was quickly turning in your favor.

You couldn’t quite believe how mean you’d sounded considering that you’d normally been a pleasant person until senior year rolled around. But never had you really been in a situation that elicited quite the way you were acting in this moment. Whereas you’d normally bottle up the rude snarkniess that formed due to annoyance, you definitely weren’t holding it back now.

Jaehyun huffs, turning his back to you, before grabbing the girl’s hand and walking towards you. You side step, allowing space for them to pass, and didn’t fail to notice the scowl he aims at you while the girl shyly opts to look elsewhere until they were out of your line of sight.

Not about to waste another precious second of your daily rest, you settle into your comfy spot and stuff the white earbuds in place before hitting ‘shuffle’ and finally letting your eyelids descend. A deep sigh falls from your chest as sleep overcomes you until the alarm you’d set on your phone blared into your ears, signaling that it was time to take on the remainder of the day.

——————————

[October 13]

Tuesday morning passes rather quickly before you hear the glorious ring of the lunch bell sound through the classroom. Before anyone has anytime to even attempt making contact with you, you are back in your resting place, with the thankfully empty space swallowing your exhausted form.

To your dismay, it is not long until you feel like another presence has entered the space, making your eyes open reluctantly. Once your vision focuses, you are met with the view of a handsome figure standing before you.

It was a bit of a shock, as no one had ever interrupted your slumber before, but your body was just too tired to provide any physical reaction. So you continue looking up at him, not doing or saying anything before you see his lips moving yet hearing no voice come out with it. You remove one earbud from its place and ask,

“Did you say something?”

He chuckes before repeating, “Hi, I’m Jaehyun.”

A little smile creeps onto his face, thinning out his lips, and revealing two deep dimples that makes your heart nearly erupt. But you shake the feeling away, knowing that just 24 hours prior, you’d seen this very same person in a compromising state in the very same spot you sat in now.

Caught up in your thoughts, he takes your silence as a sign for him to continue the conversation on his own.

“y/n, right?”

And before you can even reply, or nod, or give any indication that he was indeed correct, he’s taking a seat next to you, no doubt aware of how his actions make you visibly uncomfortable.

“What are you—?” You start, voice admittedly a bit shaky due to the fact you were almost in snoozeville just moments ago and there was now another body in such unexpectedly close proximity to yours.

“I gotta hand it to you, this is a nice little getaway you’ve got here.” He cuts you off, looking straight ahead while raising his arms to place his hands gently behind his head.

Turning to meet his eyes with yours, you realize again that you had been silent, and had just been staring at him for a solid 10 seconds. Perhaps he realizes this too, because when your eye contact lingers just a little too long, he noticeably blushes and clears his throat while facing forward again.

So it’s all an act, you think to yourself. In the single interaction you did have with Jaehyun, you had already formed an impression of him in your head that he was your standard ‘blessed-with-heavenly-looks player’ who’d let all the female attention get to his head, boosting his ego, self confidence, and all the qualities of your neighborhood fuckboy.

But the rosy stain on his cheeks, and the quick reddening of his ears made you think different. Maybe he wasn’t actually the person you’d created in your mind of him. And maybe, like you had thought, it was just him acting. So you venture out a little to inquire,

“So... why exactly are you here?”

“Well... uhm...” He keeps his head straight forward again, feeling your gaze burning deep into the side of his right cheek. Evidently all traces of the confident 17 year old boy who had originally approached you was fading fast.

“Because if you knew I use this place as a getaway, then you’d also know that me having a getaway means that I don’t intend on sharing it with others.” Your monotonous tone slightly echoing off the concrete surroundings.

Taking your statement as an attempt at playful banter, he responds in an equally playful way.

“No sharing? Even for me?” Letting the adorable dimples make a reappearance.

“I don’t know you.” You deadpan.

“But you do know me. I just introduced myself. I’m Jung Jaehyun. And I know you, you’re y/n.” He wraps his jacket tighter around his chest to block anymore cool air from getting in, and crosses him arms, stuffing his hands into the crooks of his armpits.

“Okay, but I don’t know know you.” You question to yourself why you were letting this rally of questions and responses continue, knowing full and well that it was cutting into your beloved nap time. Making your priorities shift back to your original reason for being under the stairs in the first place you add,

“And I really don’t care about knowing you. All I care about is that before you came here, I was on the express train to dreamland. But now that you are here...” You don’t finish the sentence because you realize that would mean you admit to his presence having some kind of affect on you.

“Oh, so me being here really bothers you that much? I wonder why.” The smirk clear on his face yet again makes your irritance bubble over. He raises an eyebrow at you and moves his face impossibly closer to your own.

Scoffing at his implication, despite it being true, you shove your left earbud back into place and say,

“I don’t care what you do. Just don’t bother me when I’m trying to sleep. I already have enough things in my life doing that, and I don’t need you to be doing it too.”

With that you close your eyes again, leaning your head against the concrete hoping that there’s still enough time to at least get a good REM session in.

The slow beat of your music drowns your mind and lulls you back, but not before you hear Jaehyun negotiate,

“Ok, I won’t bother you. But only if I get to nap here too.” You feel him shift a bit in place before he too settles into a comfortable position and begins to doze off.

Eventually you do find yourself falling asleep, but it feels like less than five minutes later when the phone alarm goes off, jolting you awake. At first, you are unaware of the heavy head that rests on your left shoulder. But when you do notice it, you can’t help the warm feeling that washes over you as you peer down at the soft pale face snoring lightly against you.

Then the school bell rings, and you think that Jaehyun may stir from that, removing the heavily growing weight off of you. But he doesn’t. He keeps his head there, and continues to snore away softly.

Conflicted about what to do, you think about the best way to wake him up that would result in the least amount of embarrassment for the both of you. But soon enough, you begin to hear voices and footsteps ascending and descending the staircase above. And you know that if you don’t leave now, you may not make it to your next class on the fifth floor in the building that has no elevators.

So rather than from a decision of reasoning, but from a decision of panic, you quickly stand, letting Jaehyun’s unconscious body fall to the ground.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” Covering your mouth after realizing what you’d just done. You extend your hands to reach down and help, but he’s already standing up and cupping the shoulder that he not-so-graciously fell on.

“It’s all good.” He says in his sleep jaded voice.

You almost swoon at the raspiness of his low timbre, but again choose to not let it show. You opt to check your lock screen, and face it to Jaehyun to show him the time.

“We have four minutes to get to class.”

He squints at your phone screen before clearing his throat and replying, “Okay.”

“Okay...” you return, “bye then.” Unsure how you should depart from this situation you decide to make it quick and painless, before briskly walking away.

Still in earshot, Jaehyun asks, “So I’ll see you around?”

You don’t stop when you call back to him, “Maybe.”

—————————

The next couple days go by somewhat normally.

Except when you were just about to succumb to the sleep you desparately needed on Wednesday, Jaehyun wordlessly sat himself next to you like he had done the previous day, and seemed to mimic your actions. You both woke up at the sound of your phone alarm and preceded to your classes without so much as a goodbye.

Thursday lunch came, and you were surprised to be greeted with an already sleeping Jaehyun sitting atop a dark blue blanket covering the cold concrete. You admired the way his chest gently rose and fell at a steady pace, and how his milky complexion looked so contempt despite the frown it adorned. Something else you noticed was that there was a space to the right of Jaehyun on the blanket under him. Almost as if he had intentionally made room for you to join him on it.

Going against what you’d assumed what the space was meant for, you chose to sit further in a corner away from him in case he didn’t actually intend to leave that space for you. Because if you did sit there, and he didn’t expect you to be there when he woke up, it really would be quite the embarrassment on your part.

So again, you fall asleep without exchanging words, and leave as soon as the bell shrills a warning for you to begin your five flight ascent.

——————————

Once Friday rolls around, you forget about Jaehyun and your nappy time. Because instead, you have to lead a meeting for one of your volunteer clubs and you had stayed up the whole previous night preparing for it. It didn’t help that all morning you were running around campus making copies of event sign-up sheets and getting signatures from the club advisor.

So when Jaehyun wakes up to the sound of ringing echoing off the walls, he finds himself disappointed that you didn’t show. And due to the busy last 24-hours you had, the possibility of of a frown on his face when he fails to find yours next to him never even crosses your mind.

It is later in the day, when you are grabbing your gym bag from your locker, that you’re startled by a face appearing once your locker door is shut. You hadn’t heard him come up to you thanks to the earbuds that seemed to constantly occupy your small sound receivers. But Jaehyun’s puppy-like features are suddenly next to you, and out comes a little stumble back with a quiet gasp escaping your lips.

After collecting your composure, you take out the left earbud again.

“Jeez, you scared me.” You say, bringing a hand to touch over your heart.

He chuckles, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to,” and scratches the back of his head while retreating a little to give you some space. “I just...well...you weren’t there today...”

A bit confused at the vagueness of his sentence, it takes you a moment before you realize the meaning behind it. Your eyes widen at him and then hastily look away.

“Oh... yeah... I had a meeting today, so I couldn’t nap at lunch like ususal...” You grab at the strap of your gym bag and give it a squeeze, not making eye contact with the figure looking down at you almost as if you had committed a crime against him and you felt guilty about it. But why? It’s not like you had an obligation to show up... right?

a/n: So that’s it for now. I’ve had this in my drafts for like a month and idk what to do with it anymore so I’d really like some feedback! I’m not even sure if I did this plot line justice or if readers are even interested in this plot line so yeah. Maybe if people are interested, I’d consider making this a series? But pls let me know! Thanks! -jewel

#jung jaehyun #jaehyun #nct127 #nct u #nct #jaehyun fluff #high school jaehyun #jaehyun au #student jaehyun #yoonoh #jung yoonoh #a nap for two #jewel-s-blog

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ddaddsprompts · 7 years

Note

Do you have any headcanons for the dads sleepwalking/sleeptalking/whatever?

Just as a warning, Joseph’s scene involves someone trying to kiss the narrator and to touch their chest while sleepwalking. Nothing happens, but I wanted to let you know beforehand, just in case.

RIP Martha.

🥃 “Hey,Robert, what are you—JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, PUT THAT DOWN!” You’ve never run so fastin your life. Your scream thankfully made Robert pause mid-motion, so you cantake the knife from his hands and chuck it into the corner, out of reach.Robert just looks at you in confusion. He doesn’t even put up a fight orcomplain as you push him down to sit on the couch. You flop down next to him,pressing a hand to your chest in hopes of calming down your racing heart. That’snot what you expected to see after waking up in the middle of the night to findRobert gone. “What are you doing? Why are you awake…?” Robert shrugs and throwshis arm around your shoulders. “Dunno.” The response itself isn’t alarming, it’sthe way Robert said it, as if he is just as confused as you are. “Why were youtrying to carve something into the TV screen? What did you want to carve?”“Our initials.” When all you do is stare at him blankly, he scoffs. “’sromantic. Isn’t that what you’re s’posed to do? Y/N and Robert, and a big heartaround it.” Talking about it seems to agitate him again and he tries to standup, but you quickly lie over his lap to stop him. He struggles, but for once,you have the upper hand. “Yes, babe, but not into your very expensive flatscreen TV. We can go find some random tree tomorrow, how’s that sound?” Robertdoesn’t reply. You look up to see his eyes closed and his mouth hanging openslightly as he snores. You deflate and sigh in relief.

🍸 You don’t even know why you’re stillsurprised at the strange things that happen in the Christiansen house. Justlast week, you woke up to find ‘REDRUM’ written on the door and now, it’sfinding Joseph wearing only an apron while baking at ass-o’clock in themorning. For a moment, you consider turning around and going back to bed, butthen you remember just how many dangerous things Joseph has in his kitchen and slowlywalk over to him. “Joseph?” He doesn’t react, just keeps on adding flour to thebatter-like substance in the bowl in front of him. And keeps on pouring. Youreach out and turn the box upright before the bowl can overflow. As in atrance, Joseph simply turns and picks up his electric whisk. “Joseph, no, giveme that—“ After some struggle, you manage to take the device out of his hands.He frowns at you, then turns around and walks out of the kitchen. Hurriedly,you follow. He wanders around the living room for a bit, occasionally bumpingagainst the wall, before suddenly turning and stalking towards you. You backaway until your back hits the wall; the next moment, his lips are pressedagainst yours and he slips a hand under your shirt. “Joseph! Joseph, stop, what—“You once read you shouldn’t shake sleepwalking people, but wake them with loudnoises, so, thankful you had taken it with you, you reach for your phone andplay the loudest song you know. Joseph flinches. He releases his grip on youand stumbles backwards, blinking at you confusedly, barely awake. “Y/N?”“It’s a long story. Let’s go to bed…”

☕ You wake up to the smell of… something unpleasant. You scrunch upyour nose and turn on your side so you can peek at the clock, which reads halfpast four am. Slowly, you stand up and walk into the kitchen. The light is on, butthere is no sign of the perpetrator. No sign of Mat, whose side of the bed hadbeen suspiciously empty. A strange noise coming from the living room attractsyour attention, so, rubbing your eyes, you walk over there. To find Mat stand infront of the potted plant he got Carmensita as a test to see whether she couldkeep another being alive before getting her a cat. You’re not sure what he’sdoing until you walk around him. “Um, baby, why are you applying nail polish tothe plant…” He must have been at it for some time, too, given how much of thelarge leaf is already pink and not its natural green. There was no salvaging thispoor creature, you think, taking a moment to mourn the plant’s inevitable death(you’d have to ask Damien if plants could survive nail polish). Right now,though, you have better things to worry about. Namely, Mat. He doesn’t react toyour presence, but keeps on applying the nail polish with shaky but rhythmicalstrokes. Half the bottle is already gone, most of it on his hands. You shakeyour head and take the bottle from him. “Come on, Mat, let’s get you cleaned up…”“But Martha…” You don’t even ask. “She’ll still be there when we’re done. Comeon, chopp chopp.” You thank whoever is in charge up in the heavens that Matobeys without any protest.

🌹”Dude, Y/N, you have to get up.” You groan andturn around to bury your face in the pillow, but the annoying voice won’t haveany of that. Its owner shakes you until you give in and look up, just to wakeinstantly. “Lucien,” you say, already jumping out of bed. His expressionactivates all your Dad senses. “What’s wrong? Where’s Damien?” The other sideof the bed, you only realised now, is empty. Immediately, your brain jumps tothe worst conclusions. It must have been visible in your face, since Lucienreaches and squeezes your shoulder. “Don’t worry. Dad is fine. Just…” His lipstwitch; you realise he’s trying not to snicker. “Just follow me.” You do, notso much worried anymore as utterly confused. Lucien leads you into the bathroomand flicks on the light. Your eyes adjust after a few seconds and you see…Unlike Lucien, you cannot stop yourself from laughing. Damien is lying in thebathtub, wrapped snuggly in his cape. Instead of water, there are marshmallowsin the tub. You didn’t even know you had some in the house. “What the…?” Lucienshrugs. “I think he’s sleepwalking. Well, sleepwalked. Looks like he’s asleepnow.” You shake your head and sit on the edge of the tub. “Should we carry him—“A knock on the door interrupts you and a voice calls out. “Um, hello? Is anyoneawake? There’s a trail of what I believe to be my stolen marshmallows leadingup to your front door…” You and Lucien groan in unison.

🎣 Maxwell’s excited barking is what wakes you up, though the lack ofbody heat from next to you had slowly started to unsettle your unconsciousnessby then. You crack open an eye and frown. A glance at the clock doesn’t help,either, and so all you can do is sit up and investigate. From under the bed youtake the plank Brian had given you after someone broke into a house near yours;you hope you won’t have to use it now. You turn around the corner and squint aslight assaults your eyes. It takes a few seconds for them to adjust, but oncethey do, you’re left just as confused as you were before. There’s Brian, onlyin his boxers, holding Maxwell’s leash in one hand and a banana in the other.He looks awake, but something doesn’t feel right. His voice sounds sluggishalmost, off. “We’re going on a walk, Maxwell! Are you excited? I know I amexcited! Walkies, Maxwell!” You rub your eyes, just to make sure you aren’tdreaming, but when the scene doesn’t dissipate you step forward and clear yourthroat. “Brian, what… what are you doing? It’s, like, five am.”“Taking Maxwell on a walk.” The corgi barks and jumps up and down. “That’sright, Maxwell, we’re going on a walk!” After blinking a few times indisbelief, you pinch your nose and sigh. “No, Brian, why don’t we go back intothe living room…” You take the leash from his hands. The banana, you let himkeep, even though you don’t understand what it’s for.

👟 You’re not sure what’s funnier: River’s confused face or Craig’s actions.In the end, you go for the most neutral decision, which is both. You had beenwoken up by River repeatedly saying “Pwane!”, like she always does when you orCraig feed her. Which, in itself, wouldn’t have been that weird and worthy gettingout of the very warm and comfortable bed for, but after you looked at theclock, you realised it was in the middle of the night. Also, the bed next toyou was empty. The sight you were presented with upon walking into the kitchen,bare-footed and very confused, explained some things, but also raised far morequestions than it could answer. Craig is standing in front of River, still onlydressed in his pyjamas, holding a spoon which he brings down to River’s mouthwhile making plane noises. There’s nothing on the spoon, but River isn’tcomplaining, and Craig doesn’t seem to notice. Amused, you sit down at thetable and rest your chin on your folded arms. With no knives or other dangerousobjects in the vicinity, there’s no reason to try to force Craig out of thekitchen. You doubt he’d let you, anyway, not until he finishes feeding his babygirl. Craig starts making engine noises again and brings down the spoon; River,clapping excitedly, opens her mouth but Craig misses by several inches. Youwatch the same thing happen two dozen more times before you scoop River intoyour arms and herd Craig out of the kitchen.

📖 You find Hugo trying to button up his vest.Half the buttons he managed so far are wrong and upon looking more closely, yourealise that it’s because the vest is on backwards. Which shouldn’t be thefirst thing you notice that’s out of order, but then, you’re still half-asleep,so you feel like you can cut yourself some slack. You rub your eyes and stiflea yawn. It’s five in the morning, it’s still dark outside and while night owlslike Robert might still be awake at this point, you usually aren’t. “Hugo, whatare you doing?” At first it doesn’t look like he hears or even notices you, butthen you hear him whisper, so faintly you almost miss it. “Got to go to work…” Witha fond sigh you walk over to him and put your hands on his shoulders. “Hugo,dear, school doesn’t start for another two hours. Not that you have to go towork tomorrow, well, today, because it’s Saturday. Why don’t we go back to bed?”Thankfully, he doesn’t resist as you gently nudge him forward, back to yourbedroom. If he had, you’re certain you wouldn’t have been able to stop him. He’smuscular, much stronger than you, and the last thing you want is to be slammedon the ground by your sleepwalking boyfriend. You help Hugo out of his vest andtake off his shoes. Then, you push him to lie back down and settle in next tohim. This time, Hugo actually stays asleep and unmoving.

#dream daddy #dream daddy: a dad dating simulator #dream daddy a dad dating simulator #ddadds #ddadds imagine #food mention tw #allhaildaveeddiggs

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luci-in-trenchcoats · 7 years

Text

Broken Up

Request (summarized): Can i request one, where dean and the reader used to date but Dean turned into a demon and Sam asks for the reader's help? They find out about a strip club that he visits regularly and reader pretends to be a stripper that doesn’t know Dean. He asks for a private show and urges her to admit that she’s the reader who denies it, but tells him a story of how she used to date this one guy, but they broke up and she is dating his brother now to make Dean jealous, ending up in smut?

Pairing: Dean x reader

Word Count: 2,700ish

Warnings: language, smut

A/N: This one...oh boy...

“What’s up baby Winchester?” you said into your phone with a smile, slamming your trunk shut after wrapping up your case.

“Y/N seriously? You’re still calling me that?” asked Sam, the laugh in his voice.

“Forever and ever baby Winchester. So you’re too happy to be calling me and say that the ex has finally met his end. What’s up?” you asked, sliding into your front seat. “Dean get himself in some trouble again?”

“I never understood why you two broke up. You love each other,” said Sam, the sigh heavy in your ear.

“Loved, Sammy. Besides, you said you’d never make me talk about it,” you said, letting out a sigh of your own. “If Dean’s feeling nostalgic-”

“I guess since you don’t love him anymore you won’t be willing to help me save him then,” said Sam, whining a little. “Not even for your baby Winchester.”

“Don’t give me puppy dog eyes over the phone,” you groaned, feeling them on you. “How much trouble is he in?”

“He’s a demon,” said Sam.

“Shit. I’ll be at the bunker in four hours.”

You hated to admit it but you were glad to have found out Dean was a regular at a strip bar in Nebraska. It got you away from the bunker which was starting to feel too much like home again after just two days. You missed home. You wanted home again. But home meant Dean and you weren’t ready for that.

“Can you really do this?” asked Sam, grabbing your arm before you slipped out of the car for your first shift. “It’s...I mean it’s a strip club Y/N.”

“I can handle my own Sam. This...this is the only way I get close enough to him to catch him and none of us end up dead,” you said, Sam’s grip relaxing.

“I’ll be in the back trying not to watch you just in case,” said Sam, watching you shake your head with a smile. “What?”

“You really never were attracted to me in the slightest, were you?” you asked, knowing you’d seen Sam as a brother from day one.

“You’re very beautiful Y/N. But I could never love you like that. Only one Winchester ever could,” said Sam, catching your glare. “I’m never going to stop trying to get you together again. He misses you like crazy, after all this time.”

“I’ve got my shift in ten minutes,” you said, sliding out. Still, it made you feel a bit better to know you weren’t the only one who’d had their heart broken.

Or that it’d never healed fully.

Why the Hell were there so many men in this strip club on a Thursday afternoon? Did they not have jobs or things to do? Why were you even participating in this convoluted plan? You’d be better off trying to take Dean on in a dark alley.

Sam gave you a tiny smile from way in the back at the bar, keeping his word and not staring at you in the skimpy outfit you wore as you walked out. As soon as your eyes wandered and you caught sight of blonde hair that was longer than Dean liked, you were glad for the nerves. Dean was there, for the first time in years you were looking at him and you had to fight the urge to watch him the way he watched you.

You spun around and dipped, thinking of anything other than your ex in his blue shirt and you thanked Chuck it wasn’t that red one that got you riled up every single time. Your back arched as you moved your hips, pretending that this was the most attractive thing you’d ever done when it felt all kinds of awkward. Except for Dean. It felt like it’d always been with him and you reminded yourself why you were there in the first place.

Dean was a demon and you were going to take him home to Sam. Not you.

You only danced a few more times that night, every single one of them feeling Dean’s gaze on you like fire, each time feeling more relaxed and like he was the lone person you were doing this for.

“Big tip from the big guy,” said your manager when you were getting dressed at the end of the night. You titled your head as you took the money. “Blue shirt, comes here everyday. You’re the first he’s asked about if you do private showings.”

“If he tips like that he can have as many private shows as he wants,” you said, your manager nodding.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said before leaving. You took the money and shoved it in the group jar, exiting quickly and hopping into Sam’s car.

“How’d it go?” asked Sam. “Dean seemed interested.”

“He wants a private show,” you asked. “I’m going to need those handcuffs.”

“He’ll be pissed when he finds out you aren’t just a sexy cop,” said Sam, pulling them out of his pocket.

“He’s a demon. I’d expect nothing less.”

You felt like you were on the most important hunt of your life as you stood, waiting for that door to open and Dean to take a seat on the couch in front of you. If you messed up...things wouldn’t end well, for either of you. You had to hope that you’d plastered enough make up on and that your hat and aviators would hide your face this close up.

Dean quietly but confidently came in and took a seat, not saying a word but waving a hand. He wanted you to get things going so you didn’t bother making him wait, swinging around as you dropped your skirt, showing off your barely covered ass.

“I thought I recognized you, Y/N,” said Dean. Your heart stopped and you kept moving, ignoring the panic and just acting like a stupid person.

“I’m Officer Cherry Pie,” you said, moving and undoing one of the few buttons on your shirt.

“No. I don’t think you are. I’d know that ass anywhere,” said Dean. You shook your head innocently and undid another button.

“Sorry, I don’t know any Y/N. You on the other hand sound like you are just begging to get in trouble,” you said, holding up the cuffs, the only ones that would be able to hold him and hoping he was interested.

“Why ever would I want to do that?” he asked, his gaze following your shirt hit the floor, leaving you in a dark navy pushup bra and matching undies with black lace. “Shit, you’re fucking hot.”

“Want to touch?” you urged, curling a finger, flashing a flirty smile. Dean licked his lips and stood, taking a step forward before your hand was on his chest, pushing him back in his seat. He always loved that. “I asked if you wanted to, not that you could.”

“Sorry Officer,” said Dean, smiling as you straddled his lap, wrapping your hands around his neck as you started giving him a lap dance. You fought the urge to do all the things he liked. He was already suspicious and if you knew just how to roll your hips, he’d be on you in a second.

“We aren’t supposed to let customers touch but...I think I can make an exception for you baby,” you whispered in his ear, running your hand down his arm.

“Are you sure I don’t know you Cherry Pie? I think I used to be your boyfriend,” asked Dean, smiling as he roamed over you, wanting to savor it now he knew he got to play.

“If you were my boyfriend I would have never let you go baby,” you said, proud that you kept your voice strong. “Although...” Well, might as well fuck with him if he was hell bent on pushing this. “I did date someone that looks a little like you. I’m with his brother now.”

“Oh really?” asked Dean, keeping his eyes on you as you slipped one of his wrists into the cuff slowly, keeping things easy and not like Dean was about to be locked up in the dungeon very soon. “This other guy you date now, his name wouldn’t happen to be Sam would it?”

“Small world!” you said with a giggle. “I love my Sammy. He’s so much better for me than his brother. Better cook, better driver, stronger, funnier, smarter. Boy can screw your brains out and make you sore for a week. Makes his brother look like a joke. I still can’t believe I ever slept with that guy.”

“Really,” said Dean, reaching up his free hand to your sunglasses. You moved your hands quickly, catching his other wrist and snapping the lock in place just as he pulled your glasses and hat off. “I knew it was you. I didn’t know work was that hard, Y/N. You could have come home to Daddy if you’re strapped for cash.”

“Guess who’s in charge today demon boy,” you said sliding off and taking a step back, Dean glancing down at the cuffs and dropping his hands. He huffed, feeling his weakness now that his arousal was backing away.

“Let me go,” he growled, trying to stand up but your hand easily pushing him back in place.

“I’m taking you home Dean,” you said, walking over to your pile of clothes to pick up your phone. “You’re free as soon as you’re human again.”

“You didn’t fuck Sam did you?” demanded Dean, his fists clenched as he stared up at you.

“Do you think I did?” you asked, dropping the phone back down and crossing your arms.

“I don’t give a shit if you did. I just know I’m better,” said Dean. You laughed as you walked over to him, looking down at his face.

“Jealous?” you asked, just in time for Dean to trip you and cause you to land right in his lap. His arms wrapped around you, a hold you could break with him in this state but you caught those eyes.

“Finish my show at the very least. You don’t have to be an all around bitch,” he said. You glared and shook him off of you, your hand grabbing him by the collar and tossing him on the floor. “A little rough aren’t you?”

“Lay on your back,” you said. He turned on his bottom, sitting up for a moment. “You want to get some? Follow my orders.”

“Bossy,” he said, laying down, looking up with eyes that told you he’d never hand it all over, even if you had him cornered.

“If you touch me, I stop and call Sam,” you said, tugging his pants down and kicking off your underwear.

“Wouldn’t want Sammy to know you screwed your way into tricking me,” said Dean, glaring at you with lust and hate.

“I want you to shut up now,” you said, straddling his lap, getting a nod of approval from him before slamming down fast on his hard cock, squeezing yourself around him.

“Y/N,” he whined. You smiled and he groaned. “I didn’t say that.”

“Just remember,” you said, starting a grueling pace, ripping whimpers and moans from his pink lips. “Remember what you had and threw away?”

“Fuck you,” said Dean, bucking his hips, your hands pinning him in place. Dean stopped trying immediately, preferring your angry pace to anything he could come up with. “Y/N, slow it down. I won’t last.”

“That really sucks for you,” you said, pushing harder and harder until you were coming, forcing Dean into his own orgasm he bit back through gritted teeth.

“I hate you,” said Dean, chest heaving as you climbed off and cleaned up, dressing and then texting Sam.

“Not the first time you said that to me,” you said, wiping him off and pulling up his pants. You sat in silence until Sam came in, the younger Winchester looking relieved and then a little scared.

“When I get out, it’s my turn to play. Trust me, you don’t want to know that is,” said Dean, Sam pulling him to his feet.

“Yeah, death threats got it.”

“You okay?” asked Sam, your feet slipping into your boots at the bottom of the stairs. “You aren’t even going to say goodbye? Check on Dean or anything?”

“Sam, I-”

“It’s a good thing I’m bigger than you,” said Sam, grabbing you by the waist and throwing you over his shoulder, you boots falling off as you flailed.

“Sam! Put me down right now!” you shouted at him, pounding on his back until he was setting you down somewhere new.

“She a demon too?” you heard a tired voice say from his bed. You spotted Dean just in time to hear Sam slam the door shut behind you.

“Work it out!” he said, locking the door before you ever had a chance. You growled and stared at it, feeling Dean’s gaze on your back.

“What,” you said without turning around.

“Thank you for helping me,” said Dean, the bed creaking as he went to sit up but you didn’t hear it finish. You spun around to see Dean wincing, frozen in place in pain. Carefully you helped him sit back down, Dean breathing in relief.

“Well, Sam said you were in trouble,” you said, walking away, getting caught in Dean’s grasp.

“I was awful to you,” said Dean. “I don’t deserve your help.”

“No your cheating ass doesn’t,” you said, shaking him off. “Why’d you have to screw another woman Dean? You weren’t a demon then. You were you and you tore my heart out and fucking stomped it into the ground.”

“Is that why you slept with me when I was a demon? So I’d know how it felt?” he asked, no bitterness in his words.

“Yes,” you said. “It still felt like you though and I wished I hadn’t done it because now I just...”

“You can’t forgive me, no matter how much you want me. I understand. I wasn’t expecting you to stay,” said Dean, ducking his head down.

“Why did you get so mad at me when I tried to talk about this before? Why did you say all those awful things to me?” you asked. “You were in the wrong and you knew it.”

“You’re a good and kind person, Y/N. You would have forgiven me for my stupid fuck up because you would have said I was drunk and you got hurt on the hunt because of me and that I was blaming myself and that I only did it to push you away to protect you. You would have seen through that. You would have seen how I just wanted you safe. But if I truly hurt you, said things I’ll never be able to live with...maybe then I’d make you hate me enough to keep your distance. It worked,” said Dean.

“What the fuck is wrong with you! Why do you hate yourself that much that you would hurt me, destroy us, to protect me?” you asked. Dean smiled and you felt your heart hurt all over again.

“It’s not that I hate myself Y/N. Some days, most days, yeah I do, but not how you think. I always loved you more than I love myself. You were always first, not me. Now if we’d been together, the first thing my demon self would have done was rip you to shreds because that is exactly what I was thinking about doing the second I realized it was you. I broke your heart but I didn’t break you. I can live with that. Actually hurting you...I don’t know what I’d do honestly but it wouldn’t be good,” said Dean.

“You don’t even understand that you broke me far worse than anything, anyone else ever could. All I ever needed was you. Maybe my body is okay but my head, my heart, they can’t be fixed. Not all the way. You broke me, Dean,” you said, walking around the room to grab his lock pick and work on the door, shimmying it open in no time.

“Y/N,” said Dean, watching you open the door with fearful eyes.

“I'm glad you’re okay Dean. But I’m not. Please, if you ever cared about me, don’t come and try to fix me. You’ll only break me more.”

@anokhi07 @xxwinchester-22xx @charliebradbury1104 @everyday-supernatural-af @squirels-angels-and-moose @youwerelikeadream @drugpug@darkx143 @kristaparadowski @tom-is-in-my-tardis @tanithlowisabamf @smoothdogsgirl @dancingalone21 @ktrivia @demonic-meatball @oaisara @feelmyroarrrr @cojootromuelle @gallifreyansass@fangirl1802 @itstheprincess @casgetoutofmydiddlydarnass @mogaruke@secretlyfurrydragon @perpetualabsurdity @ria132love @heycassbutt-67 @aingealcethlenn @docharleythegeekqueen @missmotherhen@smacklesandstretch67 @ceeceewinchester @tumblinwith-me @xfanqirlinq @heaven-is-aplaceonearthwithyou @hey-um-misha@bennyyh @acreativelydifferentlove @imissyoualittlemoreeveryday @lovelife-tothefullest @under-general-asthetics @tardis-full-of-fallen-angels @missdestiel67 @evyiione @jensenackesl @xxxdevine-demonsxxx @ayeeitsemry @mac5323 @bellastellaluna @atc74 @captainemwinchester @lemonadegazeelle @nanie5 @idalinette @maximoffangel-girl @quiddy-writes @sassyspn67 @brillianne

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

Text

So I thought I had a nice easy DVD to just watch to kill a bit of the train journey before I ran out of laptop battery (fun fact: my laptop appears to have the battery life of watching an entire DVDs worth of episodes. Neat.) and I could have a break from all the nonsense I've been dealing with since Berens stomped through the entire show flipping tables.

uh anyway 3x05 ends the MotW part with pretty much the "i need you to see me" moment to reveal a kid was poisoned by a parent, has been trapped in a child-like stasis ever since, and required their suriving parent who had been innocently blind to this and accidentally feeding the ongoing trauma (caught up in those stories!) and not even realising there was something that needed to be heard, while the grown adult trapped in this stasis is represented as a child in the state they were when the parent last interacted with what they think of as them...

I'm back with an internet connection but I cba to go look at all the meta from previous rewatches people have done to see if people thought the step mother was a John parallel already, but if you look at it like she was getting a huge emotional benefit from harming the girl and probably was messed up enough to not consider how she felt (I mean, to the point of poisoning her into a coma so obviously) then John's messed up expectations on Dean by this point in season 3, in an episode Sam and Dean use as a battle ground mirror to their situation they can SEE is one about Sam letting Dean go or not in the same way, we know also that the only reason Dean is dying is because of John's messed up expectations on him - even in season 2 they knew John was asking too much and shouldn't have said his last words to Dean. Only he did, and so that's the final nail in the coffin, literally. Anyway, tops off a lifetime of John putting an emotional burden on Dean - some of his OTHER last words to Dean were how he would look after John instead of vice versa which I think was supposed to be a positive recognition finally of how much work Dean had done propping up the family and not a "wow that's fucked up sorry" :P Idk, bitter Dean!girl goggles against John - always have and always will be. So I can see a parallel by season 3 where the narrative is swinging around in clear recognition of this - Dream a Little Dream of Me is going to make this textual soon enough.

And in that respect the doctor, the father of the coma girl, was always a sort of benign Mary mirror, so it makes it even funnier to me that his role became literally a proto mirror to this scene WITH Mary and the vindication of the little girl getting her message across and being finally understood, and gaining closure and getting to move on as a result, just kind of blows me away because it's retroactively made the episode an incredible mirror out of what it already was, because previously there was no need for that scene to be a mirror until season 12 because Mary and Dean didn't have that relationship because it was so painfully one-sided that the doctor's role mirroring Mary's was a pretty pointless thing to talk about, since all the time she was off the map, it didn't even make sense to say she would need to understand Dean herself, because that requires us to be confident she has even half a chance of getting a POV in the story.

I can't tell if Berens did this deliberately or if the fact this episode has the exact same resolution as 12x22 is just coincidence, because that's some pretty obscure canon recollection for a MotW that doesn't seem to have a lot of notoriety that even, for example, the next one does for Kripke hating it so much and I thiiink was this on the list of episodes Chuck apologises for in 4x18?

Perhaps it goes right to the top and was a Dabb suggestion for how it had to go down, because watching these two episodes back to back you go from 12x22 to a feeling like in some other world I would be writing meta about 3x06 vs 12x13, 9x21 and 6x04 because of the concept of having a dead ship captain, summoning the ghost, and using it for the resolution of family drama by having them confront each other again (this is the episode where Sam invokes Cas as part of that spell which is always worth a giggle). I felt like 6x04 pulled on this episode loosely just for having a vengeful ghost out to get family drama resolved - specifically going after family members that killed each other, and watching season 10 recently plus comments in season 12 between Rowena and Crowley, they're dead set on killing each other, as part of the Worst Family parallel as they often are when their dynamic comes up. Unfortunately I just can't get my head around 12x13 enough to work out how this all fits together but I have to believe there was a serious intention to resolve some stuff thematically which never made its way onto the screen.

But this arc was always tied into the Cain & Abel stuff by bringing in "Seth" or Oskar, Rowena's favoured other son. (There was a lot of meta between 10x22 and 10x23 about "Seth" because of biblical connotations I think tying it directly into that family but I genuinely can't remember because I don't do Bible lore, like... at all. Anyway he was a spare 3rd forgotten brother from somewhere or other directly relevant, if not Cain and Abel's we-forgot-Adam comparison) and Oskar vs Gavin was something that... didn't really happen except for the comment that that was what it had all been about from Rowena. As the grand finale to the MacLeod family drama that Dabb started based on the model of 3x06, which specifically mentions that one brother killed the other in a very "Cain and Abel" way, I am kinda annoyed more than ever we didn't get a ghost ship 2 episode to show how things were all upside down and different in that dabb era way but... Ugh, I don't know. Some episodes you would suggest minor upgrades if you had the powers, others you'd just take back to the drawing board :P

But while we're on the subject of Cain and Abel, 3x06's last conversation also has a conversation that the "same circumstances you'd do the same" argument in 9x13 directly mirrors as in does backwards and to a completely different conclusion... Which I find fascinating especially as the episode namedrops Cain and Abel in the first place. And 3x04 (Carver's first episode) uses the phrase "brother's keeper", also from the Cain story, about Sam and Dean. I mean season 9 & 10 churned up a lot of season 3 and we went over most of this at the time... I have just somehow found a continuous ramble in something that makes enough sense to alarm me that I managed to segue between each subject of what was one line notes I made on the train. So, cool.

#3x04 #3x05 #3x06 #I watched 3x07 as well but I was getting frazzled from being on a train #and didn't make any notes #also it's mostly about stuff that's season 3 & 4 relevant #the crossroads demon and gordon both spout season 4 Sam Problem Thoughts #the crossroads demon in particular literally sounds and looks a lil like Ruby #which also amuses me because that's the one who was an actess Jared dated right?#pfft #spn rewatches #weird rewatching #season 3 #12x13 #6x04 #dabb vs cars #buckleming appropriate wank for ts #did not expect a 'justice for the ghost ship episode!!!' stance this morning but here we are

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matcha-chocolate · 7 years

Text

I’m combining prompts again! These are from @samwichwilson Sam + cooking and samsteve + vodka

“It’ll be good for our spirits,” Steve had said. “I read that it’s good for forming closer bonds,” Steve had mentioned not-at-all-casually over breakfast. “Don’t you want some fresh air?” Steve had called loudly on one of their runs, as he lapped Sam. “We both have some time off coming up, don’t we?” Steve mused as he did chin-ups, barely sweating. Sam, breathing hard through his 64th pushup, finally snapped. “I’m not going camping, Steve. Shut. Up. About it.” Steve just grinned sheepishly. Sam groaned, because he knew a ‘I’ll drop it... for about 2 days’ look when he saw it.

“The mountains must be beautiful this time of year,” Steve had murmured against Sam’s neck late at night, his arm pulling the other man close to his chest. “This again,” Sam muttered sleepily. “Steve, why are you so obsessed with this?” “I never went as a kid,” Steve said mournfully. Sam made an unimpressed snort. “Me neither. Try again.” “It ...looks like fun?” “Paying good money to buy a tent and camping supplies, leaving my warm apartment-- which already HAS sleeping and cooking and showering amenities, might I add-- to get my ass bitten by mosquitoes and bears?” When Steve spoke, his voice shook a little from repressed mirth. “Are the bears and mosquitoes in cahoots, or--” “I’m leaving you.” “C’mon, Sam,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to his lover’s skin. “Please. I promise it’ll be fun.” “... don’t make me regret this, Rogers.”

Sam sincerely regretted meeting Steve Rogers sometimes. The object of his annoyance was currently trying without success to tie a tarp over their tent. Because it was raining (of course.) And their tent was leaking (fantastic.) And it was leaking because Steve Rogers was still a cheapass despite having a pretty sizable bank account (Sam understood why, but shut up.) “Okay, I think I got it!” Steve called, sticking his head into the tent and positively beaming. Nothing -- not the bad weather, not the shitty tent, not even the absolute swarm of mosquitoes that adored him-- nothing was dampening his spirits. He clambered ungracefully into the tent, dripping water, and then shook his head to get the water out, spattering cold drops of rain all over Sam and his sleeping bag. Sam shot him a poisonous glare that Steve totally missed. And what was the point of glaring at someone if they didn’t notice, really? “How you holding up, Sammy?” “Don’t call me ‘Sammy,’ Rogers.” “Aw, geeze. You’re grumpy, huh?” “Die.” “Great! Okay, let’s get some dinner going...” Sam tried to hold on to his bad mood, he really did. He was damp, he was cold, and he could only think that right at that moment, he could be home with ESPN and some good whiskey, but noooo. But Steve was... he was so damn happy to be out here with Sam, fussing over him and setting up their little heat stove, rubbing his arms to warm him up, making him hot cocoa... Sam softened a little. (Steve’s wet t-shirt being plastered to his ridiculous torso helped to cheer him up, too.) “What’ve we got to eat?” Sam asked, his voice slightly muffled from the sleeping bag being pulled up near his mouth. Steve rifled through their supply pack, pulling out a somewhat baffling assortment of food. “We’ve got... Spam, beef jerky, raisins, I think this is a potato, and... Skittles? You like Skittles, right? Oh hey-- a carrot!” “Rogers, did you just close your eyes and grab random shit off the shelves at the supermarket?” “Uh...” “Rogers, did you not go to the supermarket?” “I spent a lot of time looking for a reasonably-priced tent! I ran out of time!” “Oh my god, you just took whatever was left in our pantry.” “I was ... being resourceful?” “You were in the war, man, how do you not know how to pack supplies?!” “I wasn’t in charge of the supplies, I was in charge of punching holes in Nazi tanks!” “Ohhh. My god.” Sam shuffled out of his sleeping bag and made his way over to Steve, who was looking decidedly sulky (but only because he really had fucked up on the food.) Sam sat on his haunches near him and placed his hands on either side of Steve’s face. “I love you, but you’re an idiot.” “....you love me?” Sam blinked. He hadn’t meant to... “Well, yeah. Guess so.” Steve positively glowed, leaning forward to kiss Sam soundly on the lips. “Me too. The love thing, I mean. But about you.” “You’re a disaster,” Sam muttered, unable to keep the fondness out of his voice. Steve shrugged, still smiling like a dope as he watched Sam unzip a small section of their pack. “Lucky for you, some of us thought to go to the corner store yesterday.” “I read somewhere that raisins can go in stew,” Steve offered, trying to be helpful. Sam considered for a second. “Why not? Chuck ‘em in.” The beef(jerky), carrot, potato, and now raisin stew ... smelled surprisingly good. Sam had come through with a few ready-to-heat pouches of soup, and they’d decided to combine the things that seemed least troublesome into some kind of soup-stew-meal-thing. “I bet I can find some wild onions!” Steve said suddenly. Sam looked up, frowning. “It’s pitch black and storming out. Onions aren’t worth all that--” “I can see fine. I’ll be right back, okay?” “You don’t know how to pack for a camping trip, but you can spot onions at night during a storm?” “Yup. Not the first time I’ve done it.” Sam shook his head and went back to stirring the stew. Picking onions shouldn’t take two hours. Sam was damn sure of that. He chewed fretfully at his lip, glancing at his phone again. He’d called and texted Steve several times; the storm wasn’t letting up, and Sam was slowly becoming more and more worried. Rogers could take care of himself, but he was also a magnet for trouble. Sam heaved a huge sigh and squared his shoulders, coming to a decision. Turning off the heat of their little camping stove, Sam put on his jacket and shrugged into the heavy pack. Would he ever get a break from saving Rogers’ dumb ass? Sam was immediately soaked to the bone upon exiting the tent, the cold water trickling down the back of his neck. Camping was the worst. Sam used his hand to shield his eyes from the rain, squinting to see if he could pick out where Steve had wandered off. Using the flashlight in his pack, he swept the ground in front of him, looking for a familiar boot print-- and behind him, he heard the sound of tearing fabric. Whirling on the spot, Sam aimed the beam of the flashlight at the tent, and nearly had a heart attack when the cold flash of an animal’s eyes caught the light. Bears. Seriously. Bears. Sam was a brave man, but knowing that if he’d stayed another 5 minutes in the tent, he’d be a dead brave man made him feel a little faint. One of the massive animals gave an inquisitive huff and moved towards him, and Sam bolted the other way. Usain Bolt who?

“Sam? You okay?” “It’s raining, you went missing and aged me 5 years, our tent got attacked by bears, and I just fell off a cliff.” “Yeah, that hill up there’s a doozy. Wait, bears?” “A doozy. I accepted my death on the way down, Steve. This is how I was gonna die. Running from bears, in the rain, falling off a cliff.” “The fall wasn’t that long.” “Let me be dramatic. Please. It’s been a shitty night.” “I-- you’re right. I’m sorry, Sam.” “Thank you. Also, fuck you for dragging me camping.” “Noted. I’ve got some good news, though!” “What could possibly be good news at this point?” “I see lights over that way,” Steve said, pointing. Sam noticed even in the dim beam of the flashlight (which had somehow survived the fall) that he was covered head to toe in scratches. Steve never got the hang of falling with grace, which was something Sam had had to learn fast during the trial runs of the Falcon wings. “If that’s not a decent hotel, I’m going to murder you,” Sam said matter-of-factly, offering his hand to Steve to pull him up. “Fair,” Steve nodded, leading the way towards the lights.

The front desk attendant looked terrified as the sopping, bloodied and limping men stumbled into the elegant lobby of the hotel. Steve’s patented Captain America Smile, Sam’s charming witty banter, and a Stark black credit card got them a pretty nice room. “Ooowww!” “Holy shit, Steve, you’ve been thrown off of buildings. You’ve been thrown through buildings. You’ve been shot more times than I can count. Quit whining, they’re just scratches.” “I gotta act stoic in front of the troops. I mean, the team. The serum made me stronger, not immune to pain. And there are a lot of damn scratches and you’re pouring vodka all over them.” “Gotta disinfect them,” Sam said cheerfully. He’d already tended to his own surprisingly few cuts (see? learning to fall properly paid off), but since his field kit had been lost in the bear attack (seriously. bears.) he had to make do with the overpriced tiny bottles of vodka in the minibar and the boxes of band-aids that the woman at the front desk had worriedly pressed into his hands upon them checking in. “I’ll heal up in a few hours, Sam, geeze.” “Sorry, did the serum make you immune to infection? Because I seem to remember someone getting a pretty nasty infection from a splinter because oh, the serum.” “Point.” “Damn right,” Sam muttered. He dabbed at the last (and worst) of Steve’s scrapes, gentle with his hands even as he grumbled about how foolish his boyfriend was. “Sam,” Steve said quietly sometime later, halfway through tucking into a hamburger mercifully provided by room service. “Hmm?” “I uhm, when I fell off the cliff...” “Yeah?” “I just. I thought of you. I was worried about you and-- and I thought, ‘What if I never see him again?’ It made me feel sick.” Sam looked at him for a long moment before putting aside his mostly empty plate and scooting closer to him. He took Steve’s hand in his, threading their fingers together. “Yeah, Steve. Welcome to being in love.” They passed the tiny vodka bottles back and forth as they told each other about their camping mishaps while apart. It turned out to be a lot funnier on the retelling than when it had actually happened. That, and vodka made everything hilarious.

“You still cold?” Steve asked into the darkness. Sam mumbled sleepily and Steve took that to mean ‘yes,’ because he was soon shuffling closer behind Sam, holding him and letting his body heat warm Sam. “I hate you slightly less,” Sam sighed, finally content. “Music to my ears,” Steve yawned. They would both wake up with the warm afterglow of love. And pretty nasty hangovers.

#I mek a post!#Samsteve #Freebird #fic #fan fic #writing #prompts #my posts: the posts that hurt the most...s

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totesmccoats · 7 years

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Batman #27

One man finds himself caught between the forces of the War of the Jokes and Riddles like a kite in a hurricane, being pushed and pulled between Joker, Riddler, and Batman; and his family’s safety hanging in the balance.

There’s been one character that’s popped up randomly but reliably since King started his run on Batman, and he finally gets an issue (at least one issue) all to himself. Ironically, King is using his focus on this character to give us a ground level perspective on the war, what it’s like to be a small time criminal with some notable skills in the middle of one of the most tumultuous times in Gotham’s history. It’s not only the opportunity to give pathos to someone who’s been a joke up until now, but in that pathos, we better understand the toll this war pays on even the D-listers of the city. And, of course, King handles it with the same poetry he’s handled the rest of the series, showing us the seeds of a flower that’s already bloomed.

Superman #27

It’s time for a Kent family vacation, and for the Independence Day (this comic is a wee bit late), they’re going on a tour of American memorials, with Clark and Lois teaching Jon about the history that makes them worth the trip.

I’m a fan of hokey and schmaltzy, but patriotic schmaltz is where I draw the line. After all, there’s history and there’s hierography, and it’s hard for me to tolerate any account of, for example, the founders, without bringing up their hypocrisies of slave ownership and genocide. Plus, there’s the general glorification of war that happens whenever you do this type of thing that sours even sweet scenes like the Kents treating a hopeless vet to dinner and standing up for his right to dine somewhere even if he may “disturb other customers.”

Superman is meant, in part, to represent the best of American ideals, and unfortunately, this comic doesn’t really touch those.

Green Arrow #27

Here, however, is a comic that discusses America in a way I can get behind.

Green Arrow’s search for the Ninth Circle takes him to Washington DC, where he runs into Wonder Woman, and the two foil a plot to increase America’s support of war, and thus military spending.

Green Arrow doesn’t even try for subtlety here, at times reading like a polemic against America’s hawkishness – which is incredible. Oliver waxes on about how the Ninth Circle uses fear to motivate people to their side by convincing the public that the only way to feel safe is to buy more and more weapons to protect them from an increasingly dangerous threat – a threat they engineer, of course. He even lectures about himself and his own ignorance of his privilege when he first began as the Green Arrow.

But what’s so effective is that, despite how over the top things get in this comic, the results are all too familiar. A formally pro-peace senator being scared into supporting increased “defense.” Despite saving the day, Oliver and the comic believe that, regardless of political affiliation, all politicians are motivated by fear and eventually learn to support endless war for the sake of feeling secure. It’s all lies acted on for the sake of profit.

The Wild Storm #6

We’re 25% through this story, which, in Ellis time, means that it’s finally appropriate time for an infodump.

After an expertly scripted and executed fight scene, that reads like John Wick fighting Jaws from 007, between Cray and the two-person kill-squad sent to kill him ends with Cray accepting Christine Trelane’s job offer – Adrianna brings Spica to Jake Marlowe’s base in Brooklyn so she (and we) can get some questions answered about IO, Skywatch, and how this world is run.

The way the comic is put together, the fight in the beginning feels like having your dessert before your dinner; quenching our action-tooth before giving us some nourishing exposition. But I don’t want to give the impression that this is dry exposition. Ellis still writes some of the sharpest dialogue in comics (and TV and film), and Davis-Hunt still finds ways to make two people talking at a table graphically disturbing when certain reveals make it appropriate. Between this and Clean Room, he’s become my favorite comic artist for scenes of the grotesque and Giger-esque.

Secret Empire #6

While lost-Steve continues to be tortured by the Red Skull, and the heroes trapped in the Darkforce dimension do their best to keep Tandy’s light; Hydra unleashes a full-on assault on the resistance base. And inside their crumbling base, the resistance tears themselves apart trying to find their mole.

This issue is all over the place, not giving any of its developments any time to breathe. I’m not sure if this issue is supposed to end on a high-point or low-point, and I doubt that’s intentional. Through the issue is a narration that starts with Steve talking about how all heroes are hypocrites who fight only for their own pride and reputation, then goes to Hawkeye during the attack on the Mount where he seems to admit defeat before being reminded of why heroes really fight. And there’s a dramatic showdown between Steve and Tony that intentionally echoes the first Civil War. Hydra unleashes the Hulk on the resistance in what feels like it’s supposed to be the story’s lowest point, but this is right about the point in the story where Hawkeye’s narration tells us that this is where all the heroes regain their nerve…and then there’s a nuke and we’re supposed to believe everyone died even though we saw them all escape…?

Again, nothing has room to actually land and breathe before the issue hits us over the head with the next dramatic moment. While I’m normally against extending these events at all – and this one is already set to be 10 issues – this issue could’ve easily been split into two that allow for a better dramatic arc to unfold over the course of this one battle.

Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #2

After a brief misunderstanding with Ironheart, who eventually agrees to help Peter with the hacked Stark phone, Pete heads back to New York to summarize Amazing Spider-Man: Family Business to a confused Johnny Storm, and then go on his date with Rebecca…in full costume.

Like Zdarksy’s other books with Marvel, this one slows down and takes us more towards the ground-level with its characters, putting more focus on their day-to-day rather than whatever big criminal plot they’re gonna have to face. We spend a lot more time with Peter in his apartment chatting with Teresa and Johnny, or out on his date than we do following up on the hacked phone.

And Zdarksy writes the most natural sounding Peter dialogue in any Spider-Man comic today. Where Bendis’ writing can often feel like the characters are reading from a script, and many of Slott’s quips feel (appropriately) forced; Zdarsky’s Peter reads like someone legitimately saying the first funny thing that pops into his head, and is appropriately hit-and-miss. That feeling is also aided by the more normal situations that Peter’s found himself in this issue; as he’s quipping during a date, not while fighting supervillains.

I think, more than not mentioning his current status quo as a billionaire, the reason that this series feels like a return to form is because it’s focusing a lot more on Peter than Spider-Man.

Ms. Marvel #20

In this issue’s opening pages, Ms. Marvel establishes itself as the ideal of “the world outside your window” that all Marvel comics that choose to attempt that should strive towards. Aamir, who was arrested for no reason last issue, pleads his case explaining his innocence, and even explains who the authorities should look for if they want to find terrorists that look like him. It’s an eloquent and grounded explanation of who gets radicalized and why, delivered by a character in a situation that reflects our unfortunate reality. It’s a clear-headed and powerful scene, and more comics should strive for such relevancy.

Then, Ms. Marvel wakes up from being knocked-out last issue, and jumping back into action, finds herself in the middle of a Chuck Worthy rally. Worthy’s speech is reflective of the sort of conservative rhetoric of law and order and nostalgia that unfortunately wins elections; but presents it in a way that doesn’t necessarily hit you over the head with it, like a comic like Green Arrow would.

This arc – and this series overall – successfully puts it’s hero against clear analogues for real world issues, and makes them approachable and resonant. Yeah, you’re getting a story about a stretchy girl that punches bad robots, but Ms. Marvel has also told stories about gentrification, online-harassment, and islamophobia that confront each issue with the same tenacity that Kamala confronts her villains.

Bitch Planet: Triple Feature #2

And where Ms. Marvel tackles real world issues with a degree of allegory, Bitch Planet has always come at it from the angle of parody – ramping up the real world effects of white patriarchy to what are supposed to be ridiculous extremities. Like the last triple feature, this issue takes us off the prison planet and to Earth itself, where life isn’t that much better for women.

The first story, Bits and Pieces, shows us a child’s beauty pageant in Bitch Planet, where tween girls are judged on the beauty of a single body part, and has one heck of a final page. The second, This is Good for You, shows us a propaganda film. And the third and longest story, What’s Love Got to do With it?, tells the story of one woman’s quest to get married before her family is forced to pay an “Old Maid tax,” and explores how dating is done on Bitch Planet.

All of these stories are generally funnier than the main series, each acting as a short parody of a single aspect of what living in an uber-patriarchy would be that rather than telling the sort of wide-ranging story of the main title. This means that each story is also sharper, with single page conclusions finding inventive ways to twist the knife like the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Comic Reviews for 7/19/17 Batman #27 One man finds himself caught between the forces of the War of the Jokes and Riddles like a kite in a hurricane, being pushed and pulled between Joker, Riddler, and Batman; and his family's safety hanging in the balance.

#batman #bitch planet #dc comics #green arrow #marvel #ms. marvel #peter parker #secret empire #spider-man #superman #triple feature #wild storm

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