#Mass Effect's canon ranks are a MESS

[shadesofmauve]

Fire the headcan(n)on: Problems with long-term management of biotic resources for maximum strategic potential in the Alliance military

It is obviously not ideal* for a ship's CO to be running risky ground missions, but the issue demonstrated by Commander Shepard actually brings to light a larger dilemma that's been discussed within the upper echelons of the Alliance military for years. Biotic personnel are a huge asset as front-line troops, and any still able-bodied biotic moving off the front lines is considered a net loss. This poses a potential retention problem, since the usual route for advancement would remove them from where they're considered most valuable.

A trail of internal communications dating back over a decade (recently acquired by Westerlund News) documents how the Alliance instructed recruiters to push biotics to enlist (with exorbitant sign-on bonuses) rather than attend school for a commission.

It's worth noting that when faced with a similar recruitment-and-retention problem for pilots, the Alliance chose to offer commissions, while technically-skilled Specialists can be brought in as officers or warrant officers, depending on their pre-military career and level of education.

Alliance military doctrine suggests preventing a "Shepard Problem" not by restricting a biotic CO to their ship, but by making sure they'll never command a vessel in the first place. If at all possible, biotic personnel should not be given the opportunity to advance to senior command positions until they are physically unable to serve on the front lines.

*Understatement

[sunset-embers-warriors-designs]

I have several ideas about how I would have written Starclan’s function in warriors and I MUST write them down I must express them. I have two different ideas, one in which I maintain the canon fact that Starclan cats can fade/be killed, and another in which I do away with the fading thing.

First, a few things I would want for Starclan regardless of whether or not the spirits can fade: 

- All cats, regardless of the age they die at, are given a full warrior name. Kits or apprentices who die early are either named by their leaders at their vigil and carry that name to Starclan, or they’re named by Starclan spirits. 

- After a leader dies, the -star suffix is removed and they return to using their warrior suffix as a Starclan spirit. Perhaps the -star suffix is given up right at the moment of death, or the -star suffix is given up after the leader ceremony of the succeeding leader to indicate an official transfer of leadership.

- The point behind everyone having a warrior name in Starclan as opposed to any of the “determined by status” suffixes (kit/apprentice/leader) is to further express that all cats are equal in Starclan. There aren’t any clan borders in Starclan’s hunting grounds, and neither should there be different ranks.

No Fading Starclan:

- Cats in No Fading Starclan are given otherworldly wisdom upon entering Starclan, regardless of the age of the cat. All of Starclan shares the same knowledge of the past/present/future.

- However, this knowledge takes a form such that Starclan aren’t able to express it to the living in clear and understandable ways, which is why they speak in riddles when delivering prophecies. Like Starclan is trying to translate some kind of language of the universe into meows and at most it does like a google translate quality.

- Individual Starclan cats each have a limited amount of spiritual/magical energy which they can use to interact with the living world. The longer the clans all exist, the more manpower Starclan has, which explains why their abilities from arc 1 to arc 4 grow from “clouding over the moon during gatherings” to “entering the living realm to fight a ghost battle.” 

- Similarly, the Dark Forest spirits have their own kind of energy that grows the more cats they have in their realm. However, as a punishment for their sins, they don’t get their godly wisdom, and their ability to reach out to the living is a little foggy. They ARE, however, able to latch on to cats who have negative energy surrounding them, and will try to bring troubled souls into their ranks prior to their deaths so they can gain more energy when those cats DO die.

- In this AU, spirits can’t be killed, so the Starclan/Dark Forest battle ghost casualties (Tigerstar, Hawkfrost, Spottedleaf) will not have died. Instead, the buildup to the battle is the Dark Forest attempting to take power from Starclan by reaching out en masse to the troubled living cats with the end goal of “replacing” or at least being on par with Starclan in terms of power, in order to maybe fight their way into the good afterlife or continue reeking havoc as revenge on Starclan/the living. The battle itself is then the Dark Forest’s attempt to overthrow Starclan and gain control over the living clans to ensure they stay in power. Ivypool’s role of convincing her fellow Dark Forest trainees to fight for their clans/Starclan instead then takes away the power the Dark Forest had built up for itself, and having this rejection of the Dark Forest’s influence become a part of the clan’s history/culture keeps the Dark Forest from rising back up. Not to mention, the Dark Forest having used to much energy to manifest and do battle will have left them drained, especially after their defeat, and even if Dark Forest cats have the ability to replenish their individual powers somehow, it would take a long time to do it.

- Spottedleaf continues to exist, as previously mentioned, but as a general rule in every single one of my AUs she and Firestar aren’t romantically interested in one another at all. The only interest Spottedleaf would ever have had in Firestar was because the “Fire Alone Will Save Our Clan” prophecy was Her prophecy, she was the one to interpret it, and she felt responsible to see it through even after her death. When Firestar dies in the battle, Spottedleaf feels that her role in that prophecy is finally through and she just does regular Starclan cat things like climbing starry trees and eating ghost mice.

- In the case of the great battle, spirits who have manifested on the physical plane I think should still have the ability to kill the living, so the deaths in the great battle still happen just for the sake of being consistent with who’s alive in what arc.

- Also regarding the great battle, perhaps Tigerstar’s spirit can kill Firestar’s mortal form, gloat about it, but then Firestar’s spirit rises up and with his Starclan Spirit Powers he takes Tigerstar down. I just think that would have been cool.

Fading Starclan:

- In Fading Starclan, there are actually two levels of Starclan, but the living clans only KNOW about one. The living clans know Lower Starclan, the Starclan made up of recently dead/not-faded spirits who impart the prophecies onto the living. Lower Starclan are Also recipients of the prophecies they then translate to the clans, but they don’t fully understand them and believe these premonitions to be coming from some essence of the universe. 

- In fact, the prophecies are first foretold by Upper Starclan, which is made up of the energies of the faded spirits. Upper Starclan spirits, since they’re faded, lack the identities they had in life and are more accurately interpreted as a hivemind. Like a God with a million faces. Upper Starclan are the ones who block the moon with clouds, control the weather, and do stuff like set fires in the living world to impart prophecy.

- Lower Starclan functions more like a transitional spiritual plane. It’s a place for the spirits to rest from their mortal lives, and then eventually shed their previous personalities and ascend. Lower Starclan being given the prophecies first to then give to the living gives the living cats more reason to listen, because these messages are coming from spirits who are still personable and likely cats who the living interpreters knew and respected in life.

- The Dark Forest is a place to hide away the spirits of cats who would impede on the goals of Upper Starclan. They eventually fade away too and are permitted into Upper Starclan because they’re no longer a threat without their mortal memories/personalities getting in the way of their roles as God(s). 

- The Tribe of Endless Hunting’s spirits also fade away into Upper Starclan because the two groups have the same origin. Like Endless Hunting and Lower Starclan manifested because of the split in the groups and Upper Starclan just said “Okay We can work with this”

- True Reincarnations only occur when an Upper Starclan spirit returns to a mortal form. Jay’s Wing, Lion’s Roar, and Dove’s Wing’s spirits had all faded into Upper Starclan but were reborn as new mortals in order to fulfill the Power of Three Prophecy. This also explains why they have “the power of the stars”, they were part of the Cat God Collective prior. Cinderpelt/Cinderheart was a “reincarnation” that was NOT sanctioned by Upper Starclan, which is why Cinderpelt and Cinderheart have separate souls. 

- The reason the Power of Three thing happened was because Upper Starclan saw their Dark Forest Timeout corner spirits being naughty and worried that those spirits weren’t as out of the way and not hurting their goals as previously presumed. The battle was orchestrated to reinstate faith in Starclan and have some of the more troublesome Dark Forest Spirits fade so they would stop causing trouble. Technically, Tigerstar, Brokenstar, and Hawkfrost are all part of Upper Starclan after the great battle, but none of them have those identities anymore, or at the very least, those identities are not “in use.”

- The only spirits that can walk in Both Upper and Lower Starclan are legendary/historical figures like the clan founders and probably other significant cats who have legends made of their life experiences. 

- Goosefeather, by some mistake or intention(?) was granted a mental connection to Upper Starclan instead of just Lower Starclan like other medicine cats, which is why his visions were so intense and so far into the future, and just the sheer number of them. He could see Lower Starclan spirits as well like Beetail because I guess if you can connect to Upper Starclan than Lower Starclan is just a side effect. 

- Spiresight and Shadowsight might also have this connection to Upper Starclan? Idk I can’t decide. Shadowsight did as a kit at least, but perhaps Upper Starclan decided to chill after seeing how poorly Goosefeather’s connection turned out for him.

- Upper Starclan’s concept otherwise is very vague. Their goals seem to be to ensure the continuation of the clans, which ensures their growth and power, but power for what reason? idk what to do with that

Since the Broken Code arc isn’t complete at this time I’m not sure what direction I wanna take for either Fading or Not Fading Starclan to explain Starclan’s disappearance or Ashfur’s ability to mess with other spirits... perhaps in the Fading version, Ashfur is the one Lower Starclan cat to discover Upper Starclan and figures out how to tap into his full spiritual ability before shedding his mortal personality and uses this to cause chaos. idk what to say for Not Fading rn tho

[queerfictionwriter]

Trauma in Fic

I've been kicking around in fandom for a long time, and one of the beautiful things about it is that it doesn't hesitate to give characters who've Been Through Some Shit the PTSD they absolutely should have in canon. Or exploring what that means when the PTSD is canon. The same is true for other mental illnesses, but I need to talk about the PTSD for a minute, here.

Trauma is not a superpower, okay? It's not. I keep seeing it depicted that way, and as someone with PTSD, it's frustrating and sometimes even hurtful to see these depictions. I know it doesn't come from malice, just misunderstanding. I know that no one is obligated to do research before writing fanfic, and that the freedom from having to research is part of the draw for some people--it's just a hobby that people are doing for fun and sharing for free, and they don't owe anyone even more of their time and unpaid labour doing research on medical conditions.

But.

There's nothing romantic about being a strung-out, jittery mess because you're coping with the after-effects of an adrenaline dump post-threat. Or post-perceived threat that turned out to be a false alarm, which happens fairly frequently if symptoms are severe. There's nothing particularly attractive about losing weight and muscle mass as your body eats itself because of the amount of stress you're under, and as dramatic as fainting spells and touch-starvation are, they are real problems with real physical and psychological consequences. If the trauma symptoms are dialled up to 11, you need to understand that this character's body is tearing itself apart, because going for days without sleep, or even just trying to survive on 3-4hrs of sleep out of every 24 does not make your character a ninja. It makes them a messy drunk with slowed reaction times and a rapidly-rising risk of brain damage, in addition to more-or-less assuring that they're going to hallucinate, have memory problems, and are constantly sick and aching because their immune system is in the toilet.

Human bodies need sleep to function, to heal minor injuries and recover from normal day-to-day activities, and human brains need sleep for everything in the grey matter to work properly. Without that, injuries don't heal--or they don't heal correctly and suddenly, you've got chronic pain. That kind of stress also triggers inflammatory responses, which spikes your blood pressure and puts you at risk for heart disease and stroke, and the longer the stress goes on for (and that can be the traumatic events themselves, or the unchecked symptoms afterward), the more likely it is for the trauma-fried character to develop an autoimmune disorder or other chronic illness. The cumulative effects of ongoing traumatic stress + not enough sleep also raises the risk of dementia/Alzheimer's, including early onset.

No matter how severe the symptoms--no matter how much sleep disturbance and insomnia, nightmares or night terrors--there comes a point where the body pulls rank and makes you sleep because your system just can’t cope with the deprivation anymore. And that is true regardless of the amount of stimulants your character might be on, the situation they’re in, and how much practise they’ve had at coping with the effects of sleep deprivation.

And that's just exploring the consequences of sleep deprivation, never mind everything else that goes along with PTSD. Because of course there's more. There's the way that trauma impacts libido, often shutting it down completely for days or weeks or sometimes months at a time, even if the trauma that caused the PTSD wasn't sexual in nature, simply because the nervous system does very specific things when the fight-or-flight response kicks off. And, even if desire is present, trauma can cause all sorts of other sexual dysfunction: through dissociation, inability to orgasm because the body reads it as a loss of control, or having severe mood swings during that mean your character is ugly sobbing or possibly having a panic attack because the intimacy and intensity of the moment triggered something big emotionally. Having sex isn't some big sign of healing, and isn't necessarily healing in and of itself. Sometimes, it’s a coping mechanism (which can be relatively healthy, especially when stacked against certain other options that are self-destructive, like substance abuse), and sometimes it’s a distraction. It can also be a way of grounding, or returning to the body through positive experiences--or, at least, experiences the character can control.

The big point I want to make here is that humans have very real limits, and there are permanent consequences to pushing past them--PTSD is, itself, a consequence of being psychologically pushed to the breaking point and then beyond it in the absence of compassionate care and time to recover after trauma. The human body’s limits are often unforgiving--it’s very easy to wind up permanently disabled by chronic pain or illness after pushing too far, or simply having your abilities be reduced to a fraction of what they once were, especially when PTSD is wreaking havoc on the body and mind. There are consequences to severe, untreated PTSD, and “gaining superpowers” isn’t on that list.

Of course, all of this is addressing and aimed at the depictions of severe, untreated PTSD, which is what I’ve most often seen in fandom. But symptoms don’t have to be dialled up to 11 out of 10, and your character doesn’t have to display every symptom listed in the DSM to both have PTSD and to have symptoms bad enough to interfere with daily life. Even symptoms that clock in at a 5 or 6 on a scale of 1-10 is still representative of a lot of struggling in and disruption to day-to-day living, and is a lot more accurate to what people actually living with PTSD experience.

Sincerely, Someone Who Studied Psychology & Has PTSD

[revoide]

                        A PLAYABLE ARC BASED ON CHARACTERS BY MARVEL COMICS                                             SEMI - EXCLUSIVE WITH @𝙰𝚁𝙰𝙲𝙷𝙱𝙸𝚃.

rather than a separate marvel verse,  this arc follows A CONTAINED STORYLINE that flows from charlotte’s current development and will have lasting impact her characterization after this arc ends.          simply put,  this marvel-based plot will not play out in an alternate universe;   i have directly embedded and blended the marvel canon into charlotte’s development for the duration of this arc.          however,  while i never revisit a portion of charlotte’s timeline once it has “passed” as her development has always happened in real time,  this arc will be the first exception to this rule.          with it having a definitive beginning and ending,  revisiting and maintaining plots locked into this storyline will be more manageable!          what follows are very brief summaries of the THREE CHAPTERS of this arc.          more information & drabbles will follow for arc expansion. . . 

𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙶𝚄𝙴.          after several months of working for a nameless criminal organization based in new york city,  charlotte has risen in the ranks to become one of the head lieutenants in the organization.          this organization aims to join in equal competition with the likes of other nyc syndicates such as those belonging to THE KINGPIN and HAMMERHEAD.          in the months following charlotte’s recruitment,  it seemed like they finally might be able to call themselves equal when suddenly,  the head of the organization is found dead in the backseat of his town car.          there is no obvious cause of death and the body inexplicably vanished from under police custody before an autopsy could be performed,  leaving the fate of this nameless criminal organization uncertain,  seemingly just another fallen young syndicate.

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝙾𝙽𝙴.          in the aftermath of their boss’ demise,  the members of the criminal organization feared for their future and safety,  knowing that they would be targeted by other gangs and syndicates;     they looked to their lieutenants for guidance,  but as expected,  a number of these lieutenants would balk against the chaos of being left without direction,  a plan,  protection,  and a leader while the threat of their enemies loomed over them.          CHARLOTTE,  ON THE OTHER HAND,  KNEW THIS CHAOS WELL.          while the rest of the organization suffocated on their fear and allowed the chaos to blind them like a wild fog,  charlotte quickly took control of the organization’s resources and insisted that the momentum they had built before the boss’ untimely death was more than enough to keep them going past this period of uncertainty.          AND SHE WAS RIGHT.          without asking,  but also without meeting much resistance,  charlotte stepped in as the head of the organization:     a newer,  much stranger,  much more dangerous crime boss than ever known before with a wickedness in her bones that bordered the unnatural.....

NOTE:     even once charlotte had become the head of the organization,  she did not make this information widely known either outside or even inside the organization.     most people believe that another one of the lieutenant,  a man named COLIN BRADY,  had won the title.

charlotte uses colin as a frontman and mouthpiece while continuing to pose as his lackey,  controlling and running the organization from the ground level among the others.

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝚃𝚆𝙾.          as charlotte’s criminal organization rose in power and influence,  charlotte herself sought to expand her prospects and set her sights on OSCORP INDUSTRIES.        with a series of underhanded and manipulative tactics,  charlotte inserted herself into the social and business circles of new york’s science and innovation industry,  posing as a young,  up - and - coming,  and well - to - do business woman.          she was eventually introduced to HARRY OBSORN,  who she worked to grow close to and inevitably,  in the light of norman osborn’s death,  became his natural confidante over their shared concerns about oscorp’s future.          admittedly,  taking over oscorp took a lot more work than it had taking over the syndicate,  but charlotte had laid her plans out with a deep - reaching and patient precision that even the scientists at oscorp would appreciate if only they had any idea about what had transpired.          the company would experience strange incidents,  mysterious disappearances,  and several turnovers in staff and board members,  but this was all also expected following the passing of a CEO.          to some,  it was a shock to learn it would not be harry that would become the new ceo;   to others,  this was no surprise at all.          at this point,  charlotte olesen was hardly a stranger any longer around these parts,  and although she might still be somewhat strange,  so had been their previous president.

NOTE:     although charlotte’s presidency at oscorp began as a probationary title with the clear intention to eventually vacate the position once harry osborn felt more prepared to take up the mantle,  her new and creative approach to the work being done at oscorp lead to several early substantial successes that to some of those on the company’s board to suggest that her probationary period be shortened and even,  until time when mr.  harry obsorn proved himself similarly effective,  made permanent.

ADDITIONALLY,  it should be noted that charlotte continues to head her underground crime syndicate at the same time as she appears as oscorp’s newest ceo.

𝙲𝙷𝙰𝙿𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝚃𝙷𝚁𝙴𝙴.          despite her success as the new ceo at oscorp,  her winning of the title did not come with losses;     more specifically,  the losses of other people.          one such person was a head research and senior executive named ZACHARY JONES,  who had been vying for the same probationary CEO title charlotte won and was subsequently demoted to an admittedly insulting position in the analytics department as a result of her coming into power.          infuriated,  jones confronted charlotte during a board meeting and screamed that he would kill her,  resulting on his expulsion from the campus.          having worked at oscorp for over two decades,  however,  he was familiar enough with the building to sneak back in,  find charlotte working late in her office,  AND ATTACK HER WITH A STOLEN VIAL GOBLIN FORMULA.          given the uncontrolled conditions and the undiluted dose of the formula,  charlotte should have died and when she collapsed to the ground after a moment of agony,  jones thought she had died.          BUT CHARLOTTE IS NEVER WHAT SHE SEEMS,  IS SHE?          this,  zachary jones learned the hard way.          rather than kill her or corrupt her the way it did norman osborn,  the formula reacted unpredictably with the dark matter inside of charlotte,  wherein the dark matter destabilizing the formula to the point where it could harmlessly absorb it,  change it,  welcome it into the entropic,  chaotic system of charlotte’s being.

AND SO THE BLACK GOBLIN WAS CREATED OUT OF THE NOTHING.      waking with a scream,  the black goblin grabbed at the throat of the man attempting to drag her body away,  and behind the closed doors of charlotte’s office,  pummelled the man to a pulp,  SHRIEKING WITH LAUGHTER THE ENTIRE TIME.          bloodied and half - crouching in the mess of flesh and bone,  the black goblin laughed herself back to sleep.          her new friend,  charlotte,  could deal with the mess in the morning....

NOTE:     it is important to know that this first awakening of the black goblin will be one of the very few times when the black goblin is in complete control of the vessel;     otherwise,  the dynamic between charlotte and the goblin is marked with a high level of communication,  conflict over method as opposed to morality or goals,  and the balancing of charlotte’s work as the head of a criminal syndicate and the ceo of a company with the black goblin’s strong but general desire for mass destruction and the ceaseless tormenting of one,  FRIENDLY NEIGHBOURHOOD SPIDER - MAN.

[trulycertain]

fic writer interview

Tagged by @skogrr Thank you very much! It's a while since I've done one of these, and I've missed them.

Name: Tru/"Oi you" Fandoms (that I write for): Dragon Age, mostly. Still the fandom of my heart. Mass Effect, Deus Ex... uh, accidentally GreedFall? I don't know how or when that happened. Two-shot: Hmm... The actual last two-shot I wrote was Terms & Conditions, a very silly Dorian/Inquisitor modern AU where Gal is the guy Dorian hires to stop his late father's house falling apart. Recently? I suspect that's going to be Driftwood, which can stand on its own as a sort of weird post-canon first-meeting AU, but is trying to tempt me to continue it. (Vasco ends up going looking for Tír Fradí, which has disappeared - and finds it. He also finds De Sardet as a highly avoidant tree god of the island, post-Bad Ending, who transformed against her will. And he ends up falling in love with her anyway.) Weird tree gods! Pining by literal pine! An eventual happy ending! More grumpy commentary by Vasco!

Most popular multi-chapter: Either An Unquenchable Flame or Distraction, probably - both juggernaut pairings, the former close to the game's release and the latter with some fancy forbidden romance, so not so surprising. But surprisingly, Prague, 10:42 PM has done really well, considering it's for a small fandom (Deus Ex) and a rarepair age/rank-difference pairing that I thought would be a one-off experiment? I get it, guys. I like sad repressed stoics too.

Actual worst part of writing: Editing - which can be fun, but that "over and over" stage when you're about to post, especially in a longfic if you fear you've lost the spirit of the thing and the character voices and you can't see the wood for the trees. And when I have to remove a whole scene which Jenga-unbalances the fic, and then I have to redux from the top. Basically, most things to do with pacing. How you choose your titles: I like double-meanings and one word titles. If that fails: quote from a song. If that fails: quote from poetry, but very rarely. Do you outline: Only a little. A bulletpointed list of events or noted-down major lines of dialogue, that's usually it.

Ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: Uh... oh god. I blame so many people for some of these.

Post-Destroy ending where John is attempting to build a shed on Rannoch because that's the kind of thing retired people do, right? and Tali is far better at it than him, and it's just... disgusting fluff.

Actually, just reduxing the early John/Tali stuff with a bit more nuance and a stronger style.

Eva and Kaidan, and their mutually wary first meeting. ("Wow, that's a lot of pomade." "Wow, that's a lot of death-glare.")

AU where Gal and Dorian never met in DAI, and after everything went down, Gal tried to fade into the shadows and leave. He ended up working in Tevinter as an occasional informant/odd-jobs guy the way he was pre-Inquisition. He ends up being a gardener for a bitter, wry magister who seems to hate the entire Magisterium, has recently lost his father to political scheming and murder, and wants to take down the entirety of the remaining Venatori with one staff and maybe his teeth if he has to (hi, Dorian). But first, Dorian's going to drink his own body weight in whiskey and be a recluse for a while and start thinking about time magic again. Gal is trying to keep his head down and should definitely not be falling in love with said magister. Who's someday going to end up at one of the more southerly ports, come across a statue of the great Inquisitor, and go, Oh.

Stuff on Jensen's PT and rebuilding himself post-augs. More of Proprioception, basically.

Mer-AU where Marie De Sardet is still a diplomat attempting to make new connections, just not a human one, and it's a disaster. An awkward disaster. Highlights include her being framed as the beast trying to drown their best captain; her attempting to wobble about on brand-new legs and Vasco's coat while everyone assumes the dear captain has had a few too many; her asking Vasco if his "fascinating markings" glow; them getting into a duel, and her (fondly) getting punted off the side of the ship going "Woo-hoo." OK, I wrote a bit of that, but only a 1k doodle I'll probably never return to.

Non-Naut court AU where Marie gets promised to Bastien D'Arcy, because he's a bit of a layabout but he's also rich, popular at court, and amenable to bribe - [cough] suggestion, and the D'Arcys have prominent trading links with the Alliance. Instead she falls for his far less of a social butterfly, tired, worried-numbers-guy brother Léandre, who's pretty damn uncomfortable around Nauts because he's well aware he nearly got sold to them and he is not the favourite.

Straight-up role-reversal AU (another thing where I've put down 1k that I'll probably never return to), where Marie's Naut name is Paz, and she's a fed-up second-mate who's tired of noble idiots and feels a little strange and conflicted about her mark (and has context for it, because they make frequent crossings to Tír Fradí). Also a little more jaded, without the love of her mother, and not nearly as much of a tryhard as Vasco in canon; she ended up here because she had nowhere else to go and the Nauts were like "Ooh, free kid," and she's well aware. She gets stuck escorting the D'Arcy brothers to Tír Fradí for their new venture and is not looking forward to it. Except one of them is intensely bright and wry and keeps asking questions about the ship and noticing shit he is definitely not meant to notice, and they keep ending up in strange conversations, even if he seems really, really wary and uncomfortable about Nauts.

Some vague stuff about Vasco's thoughts on Jonas and that whole side quest, considering he's also a sea-given and implies sea-given take some shit in the Nauts, and also how damn difficult it must be watching a sea-given's parents endeavour to get their kid back when he knows full well his didn't do that for him.

Actually, just more Vasco POV in general, even though he's damn hard to nail down. I've written much pining for him from Marie's perspective, and I'd like to try things from the opposite. This guy's idea of wooing someone perfectly normally is to panic and then recite Baroque poetry. You know he's sappy as hell in the privacy of his own head, even if he's trying not to be.

Jean and Síora having the "I'm a sad healer who just lost my mother and I'm trying so hard not to crumble under the weight of assisting the leader" mutual talk way too late at night around the campfire and maybe him crying on her shoulder a little, with mutual kindness and the beginnings of attraction, and her finally getting past his jokey-smug facade to understand him.

More stuff about Jean's past in general, and how he wanted to be a doctor before he was dragged away from it by looking after Constantin and being nobility.

Síora and Eseld and the ways they changed over the years; something like an exploration of grief and growing her own will and the ways they very differently view the renaigse. Also maybe more about the en ol menawi magic, if I can worldbuild well enough?

I'd also love to do a GreedFall soulmark AU - it's generally not my kind of trope, I'm not into biological determinism type tropes - just because names and aliases and assumed identities are such a mess in GreedFall and it's a repeated plot point. That said, I feel like it's been done so beautifully in this fandom before that I wouldn't have much to add.

Callouts @ me: So. Many. Commas. So much over-explaining everything. If they get out of the car, your readers do not need a five-page manual of "and then he undid his seatbelt and leaned over to grasp the door handle, and then pulled it, and then stepped a foot out before he almost thought better of it - but no, he was going to get out of this car. The other foot joined the first, and he nearly banged his head on the doorframe."

Best writing traits: People say I have a head for finding small-but-important moments. I'm also told I write likeable protags. People have more than once said my writing makes them feel safe or makes them smile, and I really couldn't ask for more than that. I'll take those.

Spicy tangential opinion: I don't think I have any, really? Oh god, that makes me sound so very boring. Oh! Um. There should be more tree body horror in fandom. And body horror in general. *thumbsup*

No pressure tagging: @artemis-crimson, @eridanidreams,@rainypixel, @aphreal42.

[mrscullensrutherford]

Chapters: 16/? Fandom: Mass Effect Trilogy Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Female Shepard/James Vega, Kaidan Alenko & Female Shepard, Jack | Subject Zero & Female Shepard Characters: Female Shepard (Mass Effect), James Vega, Jack | Subject Zero, Liara T'Soni, EDI (Mass Effect), Jeff "Joker" Moreau, Kaidan Alenko, Hannah Shepard, Garrus Vakarian, Thane Krios, Kolyat Krios, Aria T'Loak, Miranda Lawson, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, David Anderson (Mass Effect), Grunt (Mass Effect), Jacob Taylor, Nyreen Kandros, Samantha Traynor, Samara (Mass Effect), Urdnot Wrex, Urdnot Bakara | Eve, Armando-Owen Bailey, Ann Bryson, Steve Cortez, Steven Hackett, Legion (Mass Effect), Maya Brooks, Illusive Man | Jack Harper, Kai Leng, Oleg Petrovsky, Donnel Udina Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Slow Burn, Explicit Sexual Content, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Female Character, Hurt/Comfort, previous shep/jack, past shep/jack, Past shenko, previous shenko Summary:

Altea Shepard has saved the galaxy twice now but that doesn't help when she's blown up an entire system, including the Batarian homeworld. Forced to turn herself over to the Alliance, she ends up confined to a jail cell, stripped of her rank and her ship with only James Vega to keep her company.

James didn't know what he was signing up for by becoming Altea Shepard's jailor. He had respected her, looked up to her for so long. But she isn't quite what he thought she was. The image the Alliance presented of her was always stoic, respectful and the girl he met the first day, anything but.

This story will follow Shepard's confinement, then move to in-game content.

**Will update on Sundays. *** Schedule may be off for a little while due to quarantine. It's messing with my brain and I do apologize.

[jackals-ships]

OKAY SO

cracks my knuckles. Barghest time ty @scottyadores for enabling me uwu

under a cut for length bc i tend to ramble and there's a good amount of backstory type deal, Cerberus rlly should be it's own warning tbh, no graphic things but vague discussions of "hm. that's probably not ethical science bro?"

SO Zander is my mass effect trilogy self insert (their full Legal name is Zander Lycaon Shepard Victriril-Maxxion, they have a human mom, turian mom an turian dad+mostly turian family! i think many thoughts abt them) i project. like a LOT on them and the Barghest akdj

the Barghest came about bc of the fact that me and canon hold each other at arms length. and i was thinking "okay what if. Cerberus didn't get got mildly at the beginning of me2 and they could fully rebuild Shep" and then i remembered oh hey Cerberus like. SUCKS. like sucks sucks so what if. we Winter Soldier the lil shit

so in the Zander Cinematic Universe the timeline is vastly changed, I'm still working out exact details like dates and stuff, but zan wakes up post death and has 0 memory of wtf is going on. the only things they remember are a) how to hold a gun and b) something Bad happened so Cerberus decides to run with that. they inform them that they died, it was a v important job, and they always worked for Cerberus

this ofc doesn't sound? right? but so far nothing seems weird so they don't press too hard and focus on recovery. joker and chakwas and the few people who were conned into joining up w Cerberus are banned from bringing up anything that might give them back their memories under threat of death or worse

the first few years are fairly normal, they're sent out on recon jobs, a few diplomatic missions, some jobs that require fighting, and they're given the code name Icarus. everything btw is hidden from them to an extreme degree. as far as they're aware Cerberus is a fringe group but it's not yknow. That

during this time period they're also outfitted with some body mods. they basically just upgrade the alliance muscle weaves already in them. it makes them stronger and faster +boosts up their biotics (think Cora levels of "I could rip apart an ATV with them" kinda boost lmao)

it's a few more years until there's an accident on a job causing Zander to lose both legs below the knee AND someone fucks up and let's loose "oops! actually we're a terrorist organization" under the assumption that they were totally out of it. understandably they throw a fit! they threaten a lot of things and end up attacking a doctor, it's a whole mess

so this is where things get "that is not ethical science". there's an in game revelation you can have where Miranda explains that she initially wanted to put a control chip in Shepard and that is exactly what happened way way before all of this went down. Zan comes around awhile later and is explained to that they're not allowed to leave. Cerberus brought them back, they owe them a debt, etc etc there's a lot of threats an they Can't Leave Essentially

now before Cerberus Zander was. well Garrus and Kaidan and Ash were Basically 70% of their impulse control and that comes back heavily. they start getting v v reckless and Cerberus figures they can do some..science if the lil shithead is gonna try and get got anyways. Zander ends up about 6ft 5in vs their original 5ft 8in, their biotics get a Massive boost, their original pointy teeth are made a much larger threat etc

this is where the name Barghest comes in bc there's a job that causes them to lose their sense of balance and they outfit them with a cybernetic tail that helps fix that issue (my thought process was cats use tail for balance what if. human have tail) (also im a furry. and i have mild vertigo. i would like a tail to fix that akhdjs) and they get sent on many more Murder Adjacent Jobs

there's actually a mission where they're sent after Nihlus who narrowly avoids dying (nihlus internally: first my husband now my protege. OKAY I GUESS) and a few other high ranking individuals. the Barghest becomes v v v infamous during this time period bc the way they take care of people is done in a way that's meant to send a message

they also get a crew called the Wild Hunt (Cerberus likes their thematics. I mean fuck project Lazarus?? really?) composed of themself, The Grim, The Wraith and The Dullahan! i have designs for them. somewhere on this blog. all of the Wild Hunt holds hands

it's a while longer before they're sent after Archangel who in this version has become a much more prolific, going so far as to work with Aria and become a very annoying threat. he almost gets got by the Barghest, they only stop because it's not until he's halfway dead that they realize "oh. wait. I know him?" and have a mini breakdown and drag him to a hospital where his original crew is like "what. the FUCK-"

I wrote a thing awhile back about it actually, it's all v heart touching when he comes around and explains Yeah. That's Shepard and Zander goes :o while the rest of the crew is "they tried to kill you. they're literally a murderer what the FUCK Vakarian" "you don't have all the facts" "which are?" "I love them"

and then they slowly begin getting back their memories from when they Weren't the Barghest and honestly it's a lot of me and my memory issues going "..i would like to have someone who is that nice to me when i don't remember what a spoon is called"

then y'know mass effect 3 happens except when the alliance tries to arrest them they go ":) no thank you im busy" and the council gives them semi sort of immunity bc it's shown that theyyyy rlly didn't have that much of a choice AND they want to do better AND technically their Spectre status was never revoked? plus y'know. reapers. those exist and Zan by this point is a mini tank filled with rage who wants to rip apart every Cerberus building they encounter with their bare hands and if they can't do that then reapers are also a good target

tldr: Barghest. pointy. i have placed my issues onto them but via the lenses of sci fi. they could bench press garrus. they probably did once they stopped trying to kill him. the archangel crew has been given 30 heart attacks via them eating cereal on the kitchen counter at 3am with their weird glowy cat eyes

[a-productive-manor]

APM’s Cabin Fever Reading List

Cloistering got you down? Need somewhere better (or worse) to escape? 

APM will be offering a rotating reading list of stories: for now, by APM authors, but we’ll be adding reading recs more widely as we update.

Do you need a massive longfic to get lost in? No problem, we got you. 

Don’t have the spoons for anything longer than a one-shot? We have those too. Different genres, pairings, and fandoms.

[[[~Multichapter~]]]

The Voidling Dragon Age Inquisition; Explicit; F/M; MGIT; Solas/OC @othanas​

Having awakened in a different time, place, and reality- the Earthling Andromeda's introduction to the brutal landscape of Ferelden is a quiet and suspicious one. With no known language to readily communicate, an arcane resistance that halts all magical intervention, and the forcible implant into a culture so vastly different from her own, Andromeda must accept that her tale on Earth has come to a violently abrupt end. However, unknown to Andromeda and those within the ranks of the Andrastian Inquisition, her story lights anew with a cosmically malformed and hungering purpose. Pray for planet Thedas.

Rara Avis  Dragon Age Inquisition; Mature; F/M; MGIT; Blackwall/OC, Cullen/OC @convenientcoma​

When Dr. Alberta Marieve Shaw left work on Christmas Eve, she was planning on a quiet evening at home before heading off to sit on a beach in the Caribbean for a week, but, things do not go according to plan. She finds herself in a completely foreign world, unlike anything she has ever experienced. At first, it seems that nothing in her past or training could have prepared her for this, but perhaps she is better suited to this world than she initially thought. She must navigate a war between mages and Templars, the brutality of Thedas itself, and the whims of a powerful Inquisitor to survive and find her way home.

The Slightly Tragic yet Very Inspiring Story of Casien Yedlin, Orphan, Scholar, and Mage TES V: Skyrim; Teen and Up; M/M; Ulfric Stormcloak/M!OC @curiousartemis​

Casien Yedlin is newly arrived from Solstheim. Unfortunately, Windhelm is not the paradise his aunt and uncle hoped it would be. It's funny what you learn to put up with to avoid dying from starvation and frostbite. (Or, the one where a young Dunmer servant befriends a Nord king, and somehow, against all odds, love begins to bloom.)

Scions of Lavellan and Untold Tales of the Inquisition Dragon Age Inquisition; Mature; F/M, M/M, Multi @eranehn​; galacticatart

After the needs of their clan took them in different directions, estranged twins Avril and Era'nehn find themselves embroiled with the Inquisition. Thrust into the turbulence of unfamiliar politics and burdened with unearned power, they each must individually navigate the straits of newfound friendships and enmities, all while finding their footing amidst agency, powerlessness, and slowly developing romantic attachments. This story follows their successes and failures through the official timeline, blending canonical events with original interludes told through the eyes of their friends, advisers, companions, and Inquisition agents.

In Violation Dragon Age II; Mature; Multi; Ser Agatha/Orsino @fandomn00blr​

Ser Agatha was sent to Kirkwall in 9:30 to help the Circle there with the influx of refugees from Ferelden, a few months before the new Knight-Captain, Ser Cullen Rutherford arrived.She was a serious woman who conducted herself with propriety, for the most part just preferring to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. She rarely let her guard down or allowed her emotions to show through her heavy Templar armor. Few of her fellow soldiers ever saw or appreciated the subtle sense of humor she had, her quiet rebellious streak, or the anger she felt deep within her at the things she'd had to bear witness to as a Templar in Kirkwall before the Rebellion in 9:37. But when the time came, brought on by an apostate revolutionary's devastating attack on the Chantry, she stood firmly against Meredith's orders to annul the Circle, with Cullen and a contingent of Templars who still remembered the part of their vows that Agatha held most dear: their duty to protect the mages. Now, along with whoever's left in Kirkwall, she'll have to pick up the pieces...

Dead Bitch Walking Dragon Age Inquisition; Mature; Multi; Alistair/OC @grumpkinvicky​

She was dead, she’d accepted that the moment she’d woken up, looked at the night sky seen two moons and the stars. Having accepted this fact she was living life to the fullest. She had no skills whatsoever, or no usable ones in the middle of the Hinterlands.Breaking into places before the templar/mage rebellion had made things a little easier to loot old treasures. Knowing where there were rarer herbs helped too, after she’d watched a couple of other people picking them.Now she had some bombs, she had some more weather-resistant clothes and more importantly, she had a map to Therinfal where the greatest treasure of all would be found.

The Inquisition’s Dragonborn DAI/Skyrim; Explicit; Multi; Rylen/Female Dragonborn @inquisition-dragonborn​

Gwenaëlle, the Dragonborn, has completed her final challenge and defeated Alduin, the World Eater, but on her way home from Sovngarde she seems to have taken a wrong turn and ended up in Thedas where a fledgling group, led by a man with a glowing hand, struggle to save their own world. Does the prophesy of the Last Dragonborn still have more to play out? Will the Inquisition accept her or destroy her? A tale of action, adventure, dragons, and love.

Threshold Dragon Age Inquisition; Explicit; F/M; Delrin Barris/OC @sarenkascrawls​

Non-magical Thedas. The Inquisition has reached the stalemate in the war with Corypheus because of the expansion of Hasmali regime in the Free Marches, threatening the safety of their allies and the trade routes. The only way to negotiate with an authoritarian Hasmal is through an offer of a familial bond. Ser Delrin Barris sends out a marriage proposal in an effort to secure a truce. It seems a sacrifice worth to help end the war, even if it changes his life forever. Mira Surma, the daughter of voivode Surma, a Hasmali military general, has spent the last seven years serving as a lay person in the Chantry. One night her father’s henchman arrives to take her, and she knows nothing will ever be the same. Her entire life, Mira has tried to carve out an existence free of her father. His entire life, Delrin has tried to follow his duty. Their marriage acts as a political tool, but it is real. Amidst the war, they try to build a life together with the best intentions. 

A Prince to Call Mine Vampire the Masquerade, Bloodlines; Explicit; F/M; Sebastian LaCroix/F!OC Crystal_Grace

What if meeting the man of your life meant dying? Marjory Sartore used to be completely oblivious to the true nature of the world, only worrying about climbing the ladder at her company and balancing her expenses. That was until a storm made her stay late at work and she saw the most alluring man right in front of her. Obsessed with a man nobody seemed to know, her attempts to find him again leads her to the most important change in her life: death. Made into a vampire and thrown into the middle of a power struggle, could she learn to survive in a much more violent world and come closer to the man of her dreams?

The Reluctant Alchemist’s Guide to Thedas Dragon Age Inquisition; Mature; F/M, Multi; Solas/F!OC @paraparadigm

Margo Duvalle likes her quiet academic life just fine. Her research on the history of botany is going well - until she finds an odd manuscript in the local special collections library. What starts as a promising source for a new article leads to a series of unfortunate events that hurl Margo into an unfamiliar world - and into a stranger's body. But a PhD in history doesn't prepare you for surviving in a world on the edge of collapse, especially when the organization that seeks to fix things is itself a sordid mess. As she tries to unravel the mysteries lurking behind young Evelyn Trevelyan's apparent incompetence, Margo is led into a tangled web that weaves multiple worlds together — and what waits in the shadows might be much bigger than whatever strife plagues Thedas.

[[[~One-Shots and Short Works~]]]

In My Heart Shall Burn Dragon Age Inquisition; Teen & Up; M/M; Delrin Barris/M!Levellan @curiousartemis​

Wine, Women, and Song - A First Day Story Dragon Age Inquisition; Mature; F/M; Blackwall/F!OC @convenientcoma​ Green for Hope Mass Effect; Gen Crystal_Grace

Is it Fate or Chance Dragon Age; Gen @fandomn00blr​ Just Another Night At The Hangman Dragon Age II; Teen & Up; Fenris/Carver Hawke @grumpkinvicky​

The Sleeping Dwemer’s Guide to Tamriel TES V: Skyrim; Teen & Up @inquisition-dragonborn​

Love Song for a Dying Man Dragon Age Inquisition; Teen & Up; Bastien/Vivienne @sarenkascrawls​

Memories of the Grey Dragon Age Inquisition; Explicit; Blackwall/F!Cadash @paraparadigm​

[kaasknot]

fox/wolffe anon here - that, is a rlly, rlly great take. and i guess it does depend on what canon/headcanon infrastructure everybody's working with, and while i'm not trying to convince you or behoove you or invalidate you, one too many times of rabbit hole deep-diving on wookieepedia turns up links to the old sw databank page where it's listed (albeit with discrepancies) that fox did train wity the other cc's under alpha's arc program.. then again, i did get into sw late 1/2

so i might've missed out on the heyday of the sw/cw fandom and when said sw databank was still up and running and decidedly Not obsolete 2/2

eh canon's a mess anyway, i'm not so much trying to be Perfectly Canonical so much as to find a happy medium between being canonical enough and pleasing my own sense of internal logic. it made sense to me for the CG to be trained separately, so i didn't question it overmuch.

but if fox WAS trained with the other CCs... i see a couple of options. first is easiest: they're batchers, they rolled around on the mats together as babies. in this particular scenario i don't think i'd see them in a shippy way. they might trade a handjob once or twice if they were hard up and not feeling overly picky, they might make fun of each other's mastubation techniques, but i don't think they'd be High Romance(tm) unless something deeply traumatic happened to them like what happened to fives and echo, and forced them to turn to each other for comfort.

the other option would be they were in separate squads/companies. but THAT drags in a whole bunch of other questions about how the CCs were made. are CCs the same genetic cocktail as line troops but with different training? if so, there could be an absolute shitwhack of CCs out there, more than enough for wolffe and fox never to have seen each other as children. same deal if CCs are mass-produced from an optimized "CC only" cocktail. but there's a third option: the kaminoans made a prototype first batch of CCs after the alpha-ARCs proved too independent and unruly, to see if they could perfect the gene cocktail. eventually they decided the prototype CC cocktail was good, but less than optimal for a full army for XYZ reasons, so they altered the genome again and came up with the eventual baseline clone genome, which all other clones were then developed from.

(i can't just let this headcanon go because it takes A LOT OF TESTING to get an experiment to go the way you want it to, let alone cloning a wholeass person x 1 billion to get an effective, to-spec army.)

if you go with that last headcanon, then fox and wolffe could both be prototype CCs—but then they'd probably be batchers, because the group size was small. 100 alpha-ARCs, so 100 prototype CCs, maybe. that's more than enough to fill out the highest ranks of the clone army, with some spares. but two platoons' worth of brothers isn't enough distance to undo the westermarck effect, so if they're both prototype CCs that would cycle them back to scenario 1, brothers-with-benefits at most. if one of them was a prototype CC and the other a second-generation CC, though, that could make for some interesting dynamics wrt inferiority complexes and the shitty way kids hold age over their siblings' heads—"i'm older so i get to tell you what to do!" (to say nothing of adding actual military authority into the mix, god i'm glad i'm not one of the training sergeants).

i was literally griping to a friend abt this earlier, i don't have my headcanons nailed down for the CCs and it's driving me absolutely nuts. that means i can't decide how wolffe and fox might have met for scenario 2, where presumably they'd start banging :p

[ckret2]

tumblr you need to stop deleting the question when i edit an ask:

What characters can you think of, that you like, fall under unhealthy obsessive romance?

Sit down we're gonna be here a while.

God is anyone gonna be surprised if I cite the yandere trope? Is anyone gonna cringe away if I say Gasai Yuno from Future Diary? No? We're all good? Okay.

Yandere characters are really hit or miss with me. Too often, I've seen yandere characters portrayed like their bloodlust, their willing to kidnap their beloved or kill potential romantic rivals, is working in tandem with their apparent sweet, affectionate, self-effacing devotion—rather than in contrast. Like a yandere character who's willing to draw blood is an exaggerated romantic ideal. I'm not about that. To me, a proper compelling yandere is a horror character disguised as a cute love interest.

Yuno pulls that off. Even as Yukki gets used to her and even begins to grow attracted to her, he still remains very reasonably terrified of what she might do—and his terror is validated by her actions. What really sells her for me, though, is the series's awareness of the arbitrary nature of her obsessive love. She flat-out tells Yukki, the target of her obsession, with shocking coldness and self-insight, that she doesn't love him because he's really that unique or special, but because he was there and she needed someone. When it feels like so many generic dull lead boys "win" the attentions of the cool interesting yandere for no obvious reason as a sort of wishfulfillment, Yuno's open acknowledgment of Yukki's plainness and the arbitrariness of her own affections would be a great deconstruction of common yandere tropes, if it wasn't for the fact that Yuno was basically the codifier of the modern yandere archetype.

Another character who hits all the right yandere notes is Tarantulas from the IDW Transformers comics. Mad scientist who makes wicked inventions for a high-ranked military officer who's rattled by the brutality they inflict together and terminates their professional relationship by attempting to terminate the scientist; scientist comes back from the apparent dead to kidnap the officer with the help of a gang of terrorists, blackmails him by threatening to reveal confidential information about the officer's army that could tear it apart from the inside and that the officer has gone to great lengths to keep hidden, reveals that he's invented a way to make enemy soldiers effectively invisible and untraceable, and shows off his secret lab powered by a devastatingly powerful superfuel that he's invented... and then reveal he doesn't want revenge, but for the officer to be his partner in crime again, and all these wonders will be used FOR him instead of AGAINST him. He calls the officer his "muse," and feels like he can't reach his peak scientific potential without the officer there, requesting new weapons and acting as his inspiration.

He's willing to burn down the universe if his muse wants it or burn down the universe if his muse scorns him, he kidnaps him just to beg him to be his partner, and he does all this despite the fact that the officer destroyed his life work and tried to kill him. It's fantastically messed up.

Moving away from the yandere archetype: Venom—comics Venom, from their intro through the 90s and then again once Mike Costa got hold of them—is a fantastic obsessive love story, about two people who reject everything that both of their societies defines as normal and acceptable in order to be with each other, and are incredibly tender and affectionate and mutually supportive; but like, they also validate each other's worst beliefs and tendencies in a way that lets them egg each other on into oblivious villainy, and even if "live with and for one and only one person, literally in 24/7 physical contact," is normal and psychologically healthy for the symbiote's species, it's not for a human being. Impressively, they're SO obsessively codependently in love with each other, that they each independently decide that they want to be the best possible versions of themselves for each other, and violently wrest their relationship from the jaws of toxicity in order to become an emotionally mature couple with a support system, outside friends, and the ability to communicate about their fears and insecurities, and it's a beautiful thing. It's too bad nobody's written anything with Venom since Mike Costa's run ended, but I'm sure someone will bring them back around eventually.

The knight-in-love-with-their-liege trope is one that appeals to me in theory, but in practice I basically never see it written as zealously as I'd like, so I usually have to headcanon it up myself. Pearl in Steven Universe is the only solid canon example I can think of that hits all the right notes for me.

Not strictly canon but: Drift from Transformers, who goes from grim street rat survivalist to bloodthirsty mass murderer to repentant ninja vigilante to faux-spiritual warrior with weird flashes of extreme violence while under the wing of four different mentor/leader figures, I like to interpret as a serial zealot whose repeatedly shifting morals and loyalties have nothing to do with his newest leader actually convincing him of the righteousness of their perspective, and everything to do with Drift's becoming smitten with their charisma and being willing to reinvent himself completely to conform with his new beloved leader's worldview. Drift's last writer even ship teased him pretty heavily with leader #4 (for any of y'all that don't read Transformers: not like "ship teased" in a queerbaity way, Drift eventually hooked up with a different dude), and he's shown to go out of his way to perform roles that he thinks will impress leader #4; so like, there's some canon basis to read him like that—even if my main reason is "because I want to."

I also like to slip in shades of knight-loves-leader in how I write Zim being shipped with a Tallest; the unhealthy, destructive obsession with them is definitely canon, even if the romance isn't.

"Characters that are otherwise emotionless for scifi/fantasy reasons except for ONE emotion and that emotion is love and therefore they get really obsessed with their love because it's the only thing in their void of a life, but it's not portrayed in a cutesy 'robot learns to feel' or 'demon is saved by love' way but rather in a 'this is almost as unbalanced and unhealthy as not feeling anything at all was' way" is like... a trope that I keep writing but don't think I've ever actually seen done EXACTLY like that in canon. The Nobodies in Kingdom Hearts are good for this—I've written them as having meaningless sex to try to counter the fact that they can't feel emotions, on the justification that sexual arousal is a physiological sensation rather than an actual emotion but is still close enough that they can almost feel a feeling, and end up getting extremely attached to their cooperative let's-pretend-we-can-feel sex partners. (i realize that physiology and emotions can't actually be disentangled like that but like, it's fantasy.) Axel, you can argue, latched onto Roxas in what can be (and often is) read in a romantic way, also arguably sheerly on the merit of the fact that Roxas makes him feel anything at all.

Shockwave in IDW I've also used to played around with this idea, although I haven't published the main work I've done that with. Yet.

And from what I’ve seen, it looks like the main character in Yandere Simulator is gonna have a backstory kind of like that? I’m looking forward to that game, haven’t played any of the demo versions yet but what I’ve seen from the dev’s videos looks fun.

Also: very frequently, unrequited love. Especially secret unrequited love. "Unrequited-to-requited love" doesn't fit the bill at all. It's gotta be perpetual pining. There's NO satisfaction. The longing just builds and builds eternally, until the internal pressure causes something to shatter. I can think of ships I like to imagine this way (Drift w/ any of his mentors, Starscream/Wheeljack, Hashirama/Madara, Ψiioniic/Sufferer), but off the top of my head no canon ones that reach those dizzying heights of eternally unfulfilled yearning. Sure, plenty of stories have unrequited love—but rarely the all-consumingly obsessive kind, and even more rarely is that portrayed as—oh! I got a couple canon ones, albeit more villainous/predatory ones: the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera and that dude with his mouth stitched shut in the Abarat books, I haven't read those in years. And some spins of Dracula and Mina, although it's no fun if she loves him back. You can also do this with Hades and Persephone, although for this to work it's imperative that Hades still feel like he doesn't actually "have" Persephone even if she's contractually obligated to live with him so long as she doesn't love him, and just sort of wistfully watches her from afar whenever she's in the underworld. (But to be honest I generally prefer "Persephone and Hades: Hypercompetent Goth Power Couple" to spins that lean on Persephone being an unwilling unhappy victim.)

The further I go down this list the more obscure and/or headcanony these examples are gonna get, so I think I'm gonna stop here. But feel free to send any follow-up questions if u wanna hear me ramble more about my extremely specific tastes in romance.

Shoutout to "The Maiden and the Minstrel Knight" by Blind Guardian for being a song that captures peak romanticized out-of-control love.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

aeondeug replied to your post

“Tag Game: Post the last sentence you wrote and tag as many people as...”

MASS EFFECTYRATH???

So when I play ME sometimes my partner hangs out in my room with me and I commentate to him, and he was hanging out with me while I was doing the Reaper IFF mission in ME2. And if you click around during that mission you can find the journal fragments from the scientists who boarded the dead Reaper and fell under its indoctrination, which features one of the most DOWNRIGHT CHILLING lines of the entire series: "Chandana said the ship was dead....but even a dead god can dream. A god--a real god--is a verb....it's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does."

And I paused the game, abominations and husks all over my team, and turned to my partner who knew nothing about the Kencyrath, and said very intensely "I AM GOING TO WRITE A KENCYRATH AU OF THIS WHERE TORI IS SHEPARD AND THE REAPERS ARE PERIMAL DARKLING AND JAME IS THE VANGUARD OF THEIR INVASION WHO BROKE FREE AND RAN, AND I AM GOING TO TITLE IT 'EVEN DEAD GODS DREAM'"

And now I am doing exactly that. Some high points below the cut, in which I approach Mass Effect canon with my usual tender disregard for the rules and Kencyrath with an uncommon disregard for spoilers.

High Councillor Gerridon was one of a long-extinct, broadly human-like alien species, looked to as brilliant scientists and the creators of the mass relays and the Citadel by the current Council races.  His people, the Shanir, were wiped from existence mysteriously about fifty thousand years ago, and no one knows why.  The truth of the matter is that Gerridon betrayed the previous Citadel to the Reapers in return for immortality.  He sort of got it--he's the heart of the Master, a Reaper made from the genetic material of his people.  Jamethiel Dream-weaver was his twin and consort, who aided him in the annihilation of the Citadel and everyone aboard by using her species' natural biotic abilities to hold the entire populace in thrall until the Reapers came.  For this service, and for the potential she showed to be a weapon in future cycles, she was spared.  However, this massive expenditure of power began to erode her control over her abilities, and in turn her mind, and so Jamethiel was placed in stasis when it became too much for her to bear, until the next cycle came to an end and the Master decided to try a new method of harvest.

The new method of harvesting a cycle is named Jamethiel, for her mother, and when she's seven years old, the blood of her mother's ancient race finally comes to full bloom.  Jame sees her father, the disgraced general of the First Contact War who has been court martialed and drummed out of the Alliance for his recklessness that obliterated the Fifth Fleet, point a gun at her nursemaid's head, and without help, without an implant, without anything, she throws up a suddenly clawed hand and hurls Ganth into a bulkhead with a biotic shove.  The explosion of power is gone as quickly as it appears, and when Ganth picks himself up, he drives his daughter out into the void in an escape pod.  Aliens are less than animals, in Ganth's opinion, and while lashing out against him might be an unforgivable betrayal, it's the new, strange claws on Jame's hands that earns her exile.

Jame hasn't lost all her memories entirely, although they're horrifically hazy for the first decade and change after her escape pod is lost in the black.  Something about indoctrination at such a young age seems to have eaten away her ability to form memories at the time, although she's retained quite a few skills whose origins she's not quite sure of.  Somewhere in that fuzzy time period, she was given a biotic implant lightyears more advanced than anything the Council races can boast, so that she could focus her abilities with more ease--the splice of human and Shanir is dicey at times, and she seems to have gotten all the power and none of the biological road blocks that would normally keep her from becoming a living supernova.  It took a long time, the labor of years, for Jame to pull herself out of the endless black water of indoctrination.  One breath at a time, building biotic walls around herself.  It was impossible.  She did it anyway.  Then she heard that the latest cycle was almost ready for harvest....

Back on Ganth's ship of exile, Torisen grows up.  People die.  Torisen is not a biotic, is not an alien, is nothing like his sister.  He is a loyal and obedient son.  Until he's not.  Torisen Talissen, possessing the clothes on his back and not a single credit more, finds the turians before he finds the Alliance, and it's Primarch Adric Ardeth who sees to it that this young boy doesn't starve before he's old enough to become a soldier.  It's also Primarch Ardeth who gets him into the Alliance.  There are more strings on that arrangement than Torisen knows.

His father's name is Torisen Talissen's greatest secret, when he finally reaches Earth, the Alliance, because Ganth Knorth is a war criminal whose methods in the First Contact War were notoriously brutal, whose final stand with the Fifth Fleet cost thousands upon thousands of lives and left every ship under his command shattered and drifting.  Only a small handful of his commanders know the truth, and then Torisen is hand-selected for N-7 and half his life is classified anyway.  He's not a biotic, he's not an alien, he's a good soldier and the most stubborn bastard any of his comrades have ever seen, and the mystery of where he came from fades under the glamour of his exploits.  The Urakarn colony is the one everyone knows about.  No one questions why Torisen fights tooth and nail to take Burr, his most trusted lieutenant, and Rowan, the medic he dragged from the sand, everywhere with him, after Urakarn.  Even when he's assigned as XO on the Gothregor, second in command to Captain Sheth Sharptongue, they go with him.  

On the Gothregor's maiden voyage, they're assigned to Spectre Ashe, no last name given, an asari that Torisen knows as a friend of a friend (the friend is Harn, he's already on board because Ashe requested some muscle), and orders to take her to Eden Prime.

While the Gothregor plots her jump to the first mass relay, Jame steals a data chip and her armor and the first assault rifle she gets her hands on, and runs, not stopping even when she blunders into a Beacon that the Master has been experimenting with.  Her shuttle's navigation doesn't survive her rather explosive escape from the Master, so she slaves the thing to the first geth ship she sees and hopes for the best.

The geth ship is headed for Eden Prime.

Other highlights:

Tori actually super is a biotic, don't tell him, Shanir bloodlines allow limited biotic use without an implant and he's been unintentionally using it for years

I wanted Harn to be the captain of the Gothregor before she's given to Tori, but then I realized that the Best Outcome here is that Harn and Marc are both krogans but on diametrically opposed ends of the Self Control Spectrum.  Harn is your classic krogan berserker, Marc is a really good cook who is also prepared to fuck you up with a shotgun if you mess with Jame.  Also I just.  Really love Sheth and wanted him to be here.

Pereden is Saren, the Ardeths are all turians, you know I'm right

Torisen is the first human Spectre

The first narrative arc here (the contents of the first game) mostly feature Tori's in-group as squad mates, ft: 

Lt Burr, a sniper/assault rifle specialist

Kirien J'ran, an asari biotic who specializes in the history of the Shanir

Harn Griphard, a krogan mercenary whose record is actually pretty legit, shotgun specialist and berserker

Lt Cmdr Donkerri Caineron, disgraced grandson of an Alliance admiral, assigned to the Gothregor as a spy, pistol/shotgun specialist, he dies on Virmire

Grimly nar Weald, an upbeat quarian machinist, a friend of Tori's who's been on his Pilgrimage for a bit, a shotgun/tech specialist

Not a squadmate, but in the whole first arc the pilot of the ship is very quiet and unwilling to talk but over the course of the narrative Bel-tairi warms up to people a little

Jame is not a squadmate, she and Tori are both main characters in the first arc and if this was a game you'd have to take both always, but Jame is a biotic powerhouse and Tori is an assault rifle/melee specialist, don't question me

Tori and Jame stop Sovereign the Horde and still no one believes them about the Reapers, even though they make Torisen a whole-ass Council member and Jame a whole-ass Spectre (she doesn't even HAVE a military rank, she's not even PART of the Alliance, everyone on her ship calls her "boss" or "Jame")

It somehow does not improve things, re: Jame and Tori's relationship, to be more or less imprisoned on a ship together fighting the geth, and they'd die for each other but also everyone learns real quick to keep their heads down when they start fighting, until....

The Gothregor is destroyed not long after the Horde, and Jame Knorth (Tori and Jame take their real last name again, after everything, might as well redeem the family line while they're at it) is one of the casualties, killed saving Bel-tairi.  Tori has two years to become intimately familiar with the fact that he may, actually, have fucked up.  Then his sister shows up in his office with a new ship called the Tagmeth, new scars lacing her face and shoulder, and new horrible information about the fate of the galaxy.

Admiral Caineron is not actually running nearly as much as he thinks he is, he is being puppeteered by Matriarch Rawneth of the asari, but he's the one bankrolling the Tentir program and technically speaking Brier and Rue are his spies.  In the second arc, squadmates include:

Marcarn, an unnaturally calm krogan mercenary who's an intermittent presence in the first game and takes an intense interest in making sure Jame eats regular meals, shotgun specialist and Local Tank

Brier Ironthorn, genetically engineered perfect soldier, stolen from her father by her mother at a young age, orphaned not that much later (Tori brought her mother’s tags back to her), Tentir officer assigned as Jame's XO who turns on Caineron pretty quick-like, biotic mostly specializing in your standard push/lift/slam assortment rather than Jame's more intense reave/warp/singularity skillset, she refused to place a control chip in Jame's implant during the resurrection

Rue Mindrear, Tentir officer and self-appointed quartermaster of the Tagmeth because Jame has no idea what she's doing, assault rifle/tech specialist

Bane, ex-prisoner with unusually erratic biotic abilities (Jack, okay, he's Jack, Ishtier tried to replicate legends of Shanir biotic powers and Bane hates/loves Jame enormously even before they figure out that they're related, he dies on the suicide run no matter what)

Grimly again, he and Jame are kinda tight by now and she politely pretends not to know that he's keeping Tori elaborately posted on their activities

Timmon Ardeth, grandson of the Primarch, looking to prove his father's ultimate innocence, sniper/electronics specialist, insufferable due to constantly hitting on Jame

Kindrie Walker, not a squadmate but the new medic, who grows a spine over the course of a year of yelling at Jame to sit down and let him look at her broken ribs, Rowan got a job at Huerta so she could be close to Torisen

Aerulan, a geth mobile platform named after the quarian word for Legion, sniper/electronics specialist

Probably some other people but Jesus this is long already

Tori comes back to the Tagmeth for the third arc, after the Reapers start to hit hard, because he's in some minor-to-moderate hot water with the Council on account of using his accesses to help Bel steal the Tagmeth and break his sister out of her own trial.  This is also where they finally get to make full use of the datachip Jame stole waaaaaay back at the beginning, because the Reapers are here and she is the only person in the galaxy who has a record of previous cycles, including some odd schematics they can’t unravel.

They find a Shanir in stasis, his name is Terribend, and while he's too weak to fight for them, he might be able to help decode some of those schematics...especially the one labeled as the Ivory Knife.

The third game includes a Greatest Hits squad assembly of those left living and also features Jame and Tori actually functionally working together for once.

Um...I have no idea if I'll ever write this whole thing because I’m realizing it would be forty bazillion words, but I'll probably yeet snippets of it into the void from time to time.

[electronicdelusionstarlight]

A brief recounting of the events of Elder Scrolls Legends, and of the Forgotten Heroes that saved the Empire when no one else could.

The Argonian, The Myth, The Legend...

SWIMS-AT-NIGHT!

SMUGGLER, WAR HERO... AND THE MOST LOYAL OF FRIENDS.

Self-Proclaimed "Greatest Smuggler in Tamriel," Swims-At-Night was just a simple smuggler during the Great War, stealing his cargoes from the Thalmor controlled Cyrodill, traversing the treacherous seas to later sell it off to either the resistance in Hammerfell or the Thalmor themselves, to them at 5 times the original value and at half the quality, not really out of any patriotic duty as much as for the cold and shiny siren call of gold. A daring, dangerous life, that made him make contacts with all sorts of people, that however ill fitted his true calling.

For you see, for while he was indeed without equal in his smuggling and his ability with poisoned blades was without match... Swims-At-Night was a lore nerd at heart. Especially if he could turn a tidy profit from said lore nerding.

But let's keep things in order.

Everything in Swims-At-Night's life changed one fateful night, during that same Great War he was profiting from... When he met two figures.

One, was Tyr.

This Beefcake of a Nord was one of the few remaining blades, captured by the second in command of the Thalmor Warlord and Daedric Follower Lord Narafiin, and left to Rot and fight for his life in one of his dungeons/daedric lair/underground arenas, only to one day escape with the help of another... mysterious figure.

THE FORGOTTEN HERO! WAR CRIMINAL! BACKSTABBER! MASTER OF DISGUISE! GENERALLY GREEDY ASSHOLE! THE WORST OF FRIENDS! DID I MENTION BACKSTABBER, LIKE, SERIOUSLY, THIS FUCKER BACKSTABS A LOT.

Basically TESL Robbie Rotten. At least he hates Nazi elves tho.

Anyway, back to that one faithful night. Tyr and the Forgotten Hero, from here on TFH, had recently escaped their captivity, and were searching for a lift to reach Skyrim, so to warn the emperor, who had retreated there after the fall of the imperial city, of Narafiin’s Daedric Dealings, and also so they could scoop up a friend of Tyr along the way, so that she could shine a Light upon this mess.

So, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a Port patrolled by Thalmor Justiciars searching for both them and the Argonian’s stolen Cargo, Tyr and TFH decide to steal Swims-At-Night’s boat...

RIGHT. FROM. UNDER. HIS. GILLS.

Needless to say, it was friendship at first sight.

After discovering the 2 vagrants trying to steal his shit and a quick sword fight with the Forgotten Hero, the Trio is found by one of the aforementioned Thalmor Patrols, and therefore, seeing how they too were being hunted down by the Nazi Elves, he goes “what the hell, the enemy of my nazi enemy is my new best friend, let’s go guys, this trip is on me!”, scoops them up on his ship, and departs from the port toward northern shores.

They later shipwreck. Because dude might be the “Greatest Smuggler in Tamriel,” but I challenge you to steer a ship during one perfect storm with one bloodthirsty Breton pirate ship trying their best to board them and sink his ship at the same time. Not even (spoilers) Sails-Trough-Storms herself could do it, I say.

Anyway, they shipwreck, have some zany adventures in High Rock with some mudcrabs and some spriggans, find a wolf cub TFH might or might have not abandoned to his fate rather than take in and nurture as his new pet LIKE THE ASSHOLE HE IS, and finally, in the middle of a ancient ruin, surrounded by angry goblins who had just come in and killed the cultists that were trying to kill her...

She appears, in all her majestic might...

LAANETH! MISTRESS OF MAGIC! SCHOLAR AND RESEARCHER AMONG THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS COLLEGES AND MAGES GUILDS IN ALL OF TAMRIEL, AND EXPERT IN DAEDRIC ARTIFACTS AND LORE!

Anyway, they save Laaneth from a Goblin assault straight out of Goblin Slayer, and she informs them that her latest research was around a semi obscure prophecy called The Culling (II), a cautionary tale about how people shouldn’t standardize and destroy their Battle Royal Games for greed and get rich schemes, and about how, during a particular cosmological event, the veil between worlds will be weakened, and will be easily breached by anyone committing a sacrifice big enough (Like, for example, the entirety of the Imperial City Population) to reawaken the now forgotten Oblivion Gates, so that the maws of Oblivion will be able to be opened one last time, to unleash hell upon Nirn, so to hasten the deterioration of reality and the breaking of the world, thus destroying creation and possibly but most definitely not allowing the Thalmor to ascend to godhood in the ensuing chaos.

You know, standard Nazi Elves plans.

This is even more concerning of Lord Naarafiin simply having Dremoras and other Daedras in his armies, especially after it is revealed that some major entity, perhaps even a Prince, must be edging their bets on this thing happening, so they decide to quickly reach the Emperor’s Camp all together to give him the grave news, and see what to do next.

(If i may take a moment, I would like to point out how Swims-At-Night, his ship destroyed and his cargo now in the seas, without a single prospect of coin in sight, is still there, ready to fight and die for his newfound companions and freedom, because he might be a scoundrel and a Smuggler, but he is a Honest Smuggler goddammit, mass genocide and daedric outbreaks are a big no no for him.

He also probably already knitted some new best friends sweaters already for him and his bros and is already probably preparing one for his new nerd elven friend, and probably didn’t want them to go to waste, so there’s that).

Anyway, our heroes got to Skyrim. Some more shenanigans ensue, a bar fight, some imperial deserters, a High Elf Merchant that was trapped by giant spider and had NOTHING TO DO WITH THE THALMOR TFH might have just been plain old racist too and left for dead rather than help, the ghost of another merchant asking for revenge against some other, human bandits that killed him and his family for their gold, and all that...

Anyway, they reach the Emperor’s Camp, where we meet the last members of this ragtag bunch of misfits...

GENERAL CASSIA! SECOND IN COMMAND DURING THE GREAT WAR UNDER EMPEROR TITUS MEDE II, AND MOSTLY THE ONE WHO HAD TO DO THE DIRTY WORK FOR HIM IN THE FORM OF DISCIPLINING DESERTERS AND ALL THAT NASTY SHIT.

Anyway, a plan is formed. Our Heroes must return to the Imperial City, disguised as Gladiators, and will use a secret passage near the Arena, the SAME passage the Hero of Kvatch used all those many years before to escape the imperial prison, courtesy of Swims-At-Night, the History Nerd him, to reach into White Gold Tower, and steal the greatest treasure of all.

THE ORB OF VAERMINA!

For you see, Lord Naarafiin indeed had the help of Daedric Princes, ready to spring up at the occasion of the walls of reality getting thinner, and Vaermina was among them. The Warlord was using the Orb to spy on the Imperial Troops movements and plans, easily outwitting them and laying waste along the country, committing one atrocity after the next, reading the field play for the final sacrifice, and our heroes needed to get the sphere away from him, so to better prepare a effective attack plan against the city before it was too late.

So, our heroes reach the Imperial Capital, passing as gladiators, and go into the secret passage, now swarming with perilous undead after many years from the 3rd era...

And with a mysterious altar, appeared out of nowhere, whose burning light, as bright as dawn breaking upon the fields, shone against the undead hordes, aiding our heroes in their time of need as it scorched them to a crisp.

For it seemed, not all Princes were in favor of Naraafiin’s plan of destroying the world.

Or maybe Meridia just wanted to scorch some Mummies, who knows with her.

Anyway, our heroes reach the highest floor of the Tower, where the Orb is left unprotected...

And where they are promptly ambushed by Naarafiin second in comand!

REIVE! THE BLADE MASTER! THE PAIN-SINGER! THE LORD OF THE ARENA!

He was him who had captured Tyr and TFH back at the start, and with a swift move, he has now taken Tyr Hostage, the gleaming point of his blade ready to slash the man’s manly and muscled chest at a wrong move.

BUT THAT’S NO ORDINARY BLADE I SAY!

(Yeah, only found this image for the card art, sorry)

THAT’S GOLDBRAND! THE SWORD OF BOETHIA, DAEDRIC PRINCE OF PLOTS! FATHER OF MYSTERIES! MOTHER OF SHADOWS! AND A BUNCH OF OTHER VARIOUS TITLES WITH OTHER VARIOUS GENDERS! AND THE REAL DAEDRIC PRINCE BEHIND THIS MESS!

For what better plot, than to plot to destroy the world, after all?

TFH has however been also fast, and has already nicked the Orb for himself, the kleptomaniac little shit. He is now presented with a choice. Keep the Orb, and watch his friend and companion die... or Give Reive the Orb, and get his friend back... “unscathed.”

And TFH, the absolute bastard and backstabber... chooses to keep the Orb.

(I mean, yes, technically, you can decide to spare Tyr... Except dude still dies during the ensuring fight as he shows his massive balls of nordic steel and SMASHES A DAEDRIC ARTIFACT TO PIECES RIGHT IN FRONT OF A ANGRY HIGHER DREMORA, and it is canon that TFH used the orb at least 10 times in his life if we go by Achievements, which he couldn't really do if he let Tyr smash it, soooo...)

Anyway, Tyr dies, Reive is Angry (And so are Laaneth and partially Cassia, like, dude was Laaneth’s friend more than he was anyone else, they had HISTORY, she is understandably angry with TFH, and he was working in close quarters with Cassia due to their ranks in the imperial army and shit...), and a battle ensues. TFH manages to overpower Reive and kill him, thus gaining the favor of Goldbrand and perhaps Boethia’s Themselves given their great betrayal and show of strength, since that’s how Boethia Rolls...

Anyway, They daringly escape the Imperial City, everyone a bit more somber after the whole ordeal, even despite the victory, and reach the Emperor’s camp nearby, reading for the next day siege, right in time for the Culling... BUT OH NOES! A Thalmor assassination deep cover team (which is composed entirely by Bosmer for some reasons... what, are Kahjiits not stealthy enough for your deep cover assassinations?) has attacked the Emperor in the night!

The assassins have been repelled, and Titus Mede II is safe, but the Emperor is now no longer fit to ride the next day. This will surely be a deep blow to the morale of the army, even now that has been bolstered by new and fresh recruits from Skyrim, and Cassia isn’t sure anymore they are going to pull it through...

And it’s here, that our “hero” truly unleashes his inner Robbie Rotten, as a dastardly plan is formed, I’m 99% sure after Swims-At-Night’s Counsel.

The emperor will remain in his tent, in the middle of the camp, unseen and unheard as he rests, as TFH wears his armor, and rides into battle on the front lines with his army, disguised as the emperor, keeping the Morale High as he valiantly fights of the Nazi Elven Scum, his Golden Blade in one hand, his mystical sphere of dreams in the other, as he conquers more and more ground, his friends leading 3 other different fronts in a 4 way attack on the imperial city, crashing trough to stop the massacre from happening...

And yet.

It’s too late.

Naaraafiin has already killed the entire population of the Imperial City, and the Gates of Oblivion are opened. He meets what he thinks is the emperor, his personal guard at his side, as all manners of Atronachs and Dremora are unleashed upon the city, and soon the world, as the Oblivion Gates open once more and the walls of reality are weakened.

TFH has to think fast, and so, attacks the Warlord, who easily counters TFH with his magic, now overpowered by the think layers between realms and his own, general overpowered Final Boss Magic, blasting shit left and right at a frankly insanely low magicka cost...

And yet, perhaps, this overpowered magic will be Naaraafiin’s Downfall, for the Orb of Vaermina cannot just enter the dreams of your enemies to spy on their plans, but can steal mirages of powers and creatures from your opponent mind, and use them against them.

And so, witnessing his prowess with the sword, and finally recognizing Goldbrand as Goldbrand, and the “Emperor” as the one who had killed Reive, as he steals one of his massive blast right from under Naarafiin’s mind, and uses it against its own master...

Naaraafiin falls. Pushed by his own arcane magick, perhaps still alive, perhaps not, inside one of the holes in reality his culling had created, the link between him and the fracture of reality severing, as the Dremoras and Daedras vanish into Oblivion, and the gates close.

The battle is won. The Imperial City is taken back, if destroyed and with little to no population left.

And the Thalmor are retreating.

TFH and his friend go back to the emperor, who congratulates with them about the victory, for the man really knows when the delegate, and gifts TFH his armor, as the 4 companions depart, each for their own road, perhaps to never meet again...

And so the story ends, with a empire saved from the brink of destruction, yet irreparably damaged, a friendship betrayed, and terrible memories people will never forget.

But when the story ends...

Another begins.

For to paraphrase Marvel:

SWIMS-AT-NIGHT WILL RETURN...

In Elder Scrolls Legends III: Return to Clockwork City!

(Tho there’s the Fall of the Dark Brotherhood first, probably going to do that first, gotta show you just how much of a Asshole TFH can be).

[twitchesandstitches]

The Ringers - Secret Society of War

“Life is endless struggle and war is the foundation of life itself. From the tiniest micro-organisms to the flow of the great beasts of an ecosystem, the story of life is one of endless struggle. The losers perish, those who adapt and grow mighty survive. This is the Cosmic Imperative: the strong will flourish and dominate those who will not. And I have seen what will come if they do not. The multiverse must be brought into order, or nothing will survive. I have foreseen it, and I will not let another disaster end all we have built!”

These words have been attributed to Javik, founder of a shadowy militaristic group greatly at odds with the MILF Fleet and those like them, and thus did he outline the purpose of this group.

Their origins are somewhat hazy, but groups like this have been seen throughout countless ages, even before memories of the cataclysm had faded from memory. They likely predate that terrible event, but in rather altered form. They have largely appeared the same, with vastly diverse soldiers of many species loyal to individual generals who in turn supported another and followed a mighty soldier commanding the respect and will of the entire organization through charisma and a right to lead, symbolized by a massive gauntlet that channels magical energy to boost their innate powers. They are also marked by their heraldry, which is always the same: a stylized spiral, surmounted by a waterfall of blood.

War is their their purpose. Conflict is their means. And conquest, directly or indirect, is their goal. More than waterfalls of blood rain in their wake.

This particular incarnation have been dubbed the Ringers by the MILF Fleet, owing to a misunderstanding; the group initially referred to themselves as the Casus Bellum, after a human term for a reason to go to war, but emphasis was put on the ‘bellum’, as in ‘bell’. One thing lead to another, and they were called the Ringers as a result. The group has embraced it, saying that they heralds a new age that will survive whatever comes its way.

They are not dissimilar from their predecessors. Their means is always the same: war. Endless bloody war, a conflict of such savage ferocity that it will shake the stars from their positions and unmake entire universes, drag down whole sectors of the multiversal branches into recursive conflict so violent and vengeful it will make shockwaves into the planes of magic, the emotions of the dead lingering as resentful avatars of warfare, leading to yet more warfare. How they do this varies. In the past they have spread weapons of many kinds and encouraged all sides to pursue bitter rivalries (whether those weapons were biological modifications, new superpowers, destructive technologies, or powerful artifacts) and marveling at the mess. They also conquered directly, forcing the conquered to fight back and taught them the power of violence as a solution, then retreating to the shadows to watch the new warlords battle other nations in order to become secure. And sometimes they just fought at apparent random, sowing unrest and chaos wherever they traveled. The modern one (that is, the one relevant to this AU) has done all of these.

The end of all this bloodshed? It’s purpose, the reason for so much destruction?

Hard to say.

Each variation of this group had its own motivations. Some wanted to conquer. Others felt it was necessary to force others to adapt and become strong. And still others believed that endless war was an end all on its own, profiting from it or simply relishing endless bloodshed for their own perverse reasons.

Prior to the modern era, the last one ruled a society dominated by the protheans (an ancient and powerful insectoid people with powerful mental abilities), whose leaders were a part of this group as a shadow cabinet. They fell in the cataclysm and preserved their people in an enclave, though most of them were remade into monsters by a later threat. One prothean, at least, remained, the last true general of their people. This was Javik, who conquered the remnants of his people (now calling themselves Collectors) and organized them into the beginnings of an army.

For a time, he traveled the multiverse and conquered what he could, and studied what he couldn’t. He laid claim to a powerful gauntlet that was once a symbol of power among his people, which has been translated as the Doomfist by others. It is unclear what he experienced during this time, but at some point he found something that gave him a terrible vision of a grave doom that will befall the multiverse within the next thousand years or so. He will not speak of this to anyone but his closest allies, and those who know of it seem haunted, broken by the weight of this terrible omen.

Whatever it is he saw, it brought a terrible fire in him. Soon, he said, the multiverse would surely die. All creation would be snuffed out, this seeming collapse a brief reprieve before the final darkness to end all living things forever. All art and culture, all accomplishments and wisdom, simply wiped away. Like dirt from a filthy window. He vowed to do whatever it took to prevent this doom.

To this end, he has taken this legacy of warfare, noting that it always stood for evolution and growth through constant conflict. If warfare bred stronger people, he reasoned, then their course was to engage in endless warfare, forcing the multiverse to be strong and fight off the terrible threat approaching.

This is a laudable goal, but they perform horrific and terrible actions. They have conquered entire universes and annihilated all opposition without even a shred of mercy. They have slaughtered anyone standing before them. And when they choose to work in quiet, it is to sow terrible violence and discord by inciting conflict across entire branches of the multiverse tree, so that the survivors will be stronger for it… at the cost of their morality and restraint. Their work is brutal, dirty and often times vicious.

They are brutal, merciless but above all else, they are pragmatic. They believe in war, for war’s sake, but while their soldiers and sub-commanders may embrace endless bloodshed, the leaders and generals themselves can be more sensible. Pragmatism, it must be stated, dominates their every move. They do nothing without cause, though individual members can be irrational and impulsive, but as a group they can be reasoned with. It’s just that their goals and purpose is reprehensible enough that one can wonder why to even try.

This faction is intended to be a hardcore antagonistic one; most likely suitable characters to join this group are villain-types with a hint of ‘knight templar’ or zealous behavior. Conquerors, despots who demand absolute obedience for the good of all, those who want endless war for the fun of it or even a rational goal; those can fit too. Rage-filled beings out for revenge on all existence can qualify, as lower ranked officers. Principled but doing horrific things in service of their goal or grand vision. Villains who go ‘just think of the potential!’ can go here, as do ones who obsess over control and power. They are, after all, conquerors. Assume that there are two broad tiers of generals; the first are those with more lofty and high-minded goals, and a less respected one which are concerned with their own goals and lust for power. The Zealots and the Overlords, basically.

Some potential members as a baseline to work off of:

Javik, from Mass Effect. This is drawing more upon what he might have been like without a Reaper invasion to halt his people’s imperialistic ways; he is a cold and absolutely ruthless Renegade who thinks nothing of imposing his ways upon all who meet him, openly disdains those he considers primitives, and has a pretty blunt hatred of robots and thinking machine-life. However he is not nearly as terrified and broken down as he is in canon, but is much more of a visionary. He has suffered terrible visions and will do anything to prevent the future he has seen. With his philosophy of conflict/war breeding strength and taking steps to make more wars to do just that, he is also been combined with Doomfist of Overwatch, with a gauntlet to match. Akande Ogundimu himself might be one of his personal supporters, as might be Erik Killmonger of Marvel.

Javik is technically a leader of sorts; he is the champion of the movement, their inspirational guide, and one of their mightiest fighters. However he is not their only leader, and may be ‘demoted’, narratively speaking, in favor of Sexy Ladies that can fulfill his role and be more plot-appropriate. (Alternatively; just have Javik be a prothean lady here?)

The Condesce/Meenah Peixes from Homestuck. As hinted in earlier posts, Beforus was destroyed in past days and one of the survivors was the new empress by default, Meenah Peixes. As years pressed on she grew more violent and enraged at her people’s misfortune, gradually developing into the canon Condesce’s mindless rage and conquest, but here it wasn’t to satisfy her ego or serve eldritch entity’s plots, but in a desperate attempt to carve out a safe haven for her people. Ultimately this was unsuccessful, and she has since founded a massive hyper corporation. Javik found her and told her of his visions, and inspired her to save the multiverse by beating the living shit out of it, with a promise of her people being on top once their plans succeed. Her battlelust ignited, she is now one of the biggest and most important figures in the organization… literally, as she is planet-sized at full power.

The Condesce is a hyper flirtatious and gourmand who delights in devouring entire worlds and possess all the powers of all troll castes (similar to Terezi, but with far more experience with those gifts), with her chosen elite blessed with similar powers. She is a much lighter character than in canon; Doc Scratch and Lord English have nothing to do with her, if they are even around, and her motivations are much less selfish. Granted, she is still a hedonistic glutton, but she DOES have higher minded goals. She might be romancing Javik, charmed by his capacity for violence and vision for absolute survival no matter what. (WHAT WOULD THE CHILDREN LOOK LIKE?)

Starscream, former Air Commander of the Decepticon Empire, defected when it was clear that Megatron had become nothing more than a vessel for the dreaded Unicron, taking with him those Decepticons with more high-minded goals of protecting Cybertron’s legacy. Always more concerned with his own ambitions, he was nonetheless repelled by Megatron’s increasing monstrousness and became rivals with Javik. Eventually, as the two of them carved out empires right next to one another (Starscream and Javik’s mutual disdain for organic and mechanical life, respectively, making for poor neighbors), they earned mutual respect for the other’s skill and Javik worked his way past his dislike and asked Starscream to join them. Starscream, eager to advance himself once more, agreed and is one of the most powerful figures of the organization. With him are a vast number of Decepticons (mostly jetformers and other aeriel combatants), many of them combiners.

Starscream is infamous for two things: treachery and incompetence. Neither apply here. He has no reason to overthrow either Javik, the Condesce, or anyone in a similar position because he technically already has the power he craves and the respect and admiration he believes he deserves. He will not betray them unless given a strong reason to. And while Starscream is a terrible judge of character, he is an excellent strategist on the ground and a terrifying combatant.

The first of them are technically a group: the Combaticons (all fembots, in this continuity), led by the armored guns-on-wheels monstrosity Onslaught, and her polyamorous band, who comprise this team. Vortex the helicopter (noted interrogator and smart aleck), Blast Off (rocket/jet analogue, super reckless and a sincere believer in Friendship), Swindle (con artist, schemer and war profiteer) and Brawl (tank, total brute and good-natured scraphead, which is like a meathead but with robots). Together they can fuse into the incredibly massive and powerful Bruticus Maximus, an absurdly stacked and powerful combination of their relationship; playful love with each other, death to anything else within range.

They are very much like an inversion of the Dinobots; they are all military-grade functions who were content with their lot in life, and signed up with Megatron before their people’s civil war in hopes of finding a more secure life for themselves, and like the Dinobots, their boisterous and cheery demeanor masks the finest strategic minds of the Decepticon Empire, a disguise that suits them fine. Unlike the Dinobots, they outright consider organic life as unworthy animals that don’t deserve to live, though sufficiently spirited organics can be considered ‘honorary robots’. They signed up with the Ringers after losing faith in Megatron’s long-term prospects, and hope to secure a future for robotic life such as themselves. They’re slowly learning to at least respect organics in general. The Dinobots and them have a fanatical hatred for one another; Volcanicus and Bruticus will invariably charge straight at one another whenever an opportunity presents itself, intent on ripping out the other’s sparks.

Other Decepticons to come along with the Combaticons include Strika (an infamously gorgeous and amazonian juggernaut) and Obsidian. At one point they brought Lugnut, a bomber plane desperately seeking someone to follow after the loss of Megatron, but he has since defected to the Cobalts and fanatically reveres Vriska.

The other Decepticon leader is a controversial figure: Airachnid. Technically a helicopter fembot, she is a rare subset of Transformers who can partially shift her robot mode into a spider-like shape, and is considered an Insecticon, which are a eusocial sub-type of Transformers that transform into insectoid beast modes. Whether through biological status as a hive queen or modifications to herself, she can command other Insecticons that are in her ‘hive’, and has since expanded this power to dominion over insectoid beings in general. She commands a massive army of enormous Insecticons (many of them combiners), xenomorphs (of the Alien series), bug-type Pokemon of all kinds, the flying variety of the svartalfar (God of War series), and more; if it has a bug-like theme or appearance, some of them have been chained to her will. At one point she did have Homestuck trolls in her ranks, but was convinced to hand them off to the Condesce in exchange for other favors.

And like Airachnid herself, each and every one of them is a vampire. Long since drained dry to feed her insatiable appetite, they in turn have become horrific monsters lusting for the lives of all around them, held back only by her will… though it seems that they are slowly regaining their sense of self and control, following gruesome experiments she has performed on them.

Technically she is a Terrorcon, an Transformer that feeds upon the lifeblood of their people, much like what the Decepticons still loyal to Megatron have degenerated into. Unlike them, she is rational (if horrifically callous) and aware of things. It’s unclear what she is, and she is deeply intrigued in this mystery herself. Also unlike them, she can feed on any being, so long as they have some kind of fuel or blood to feast upon, and she fancies herself a gourmand.

This version of Airachnid (who is a hyper hourglass, in terms of body shape, and is probably at least a hundred feet tall after feeding so voraciously) is a mix of the sexual sadist and serial killer from Transformers Prime, but is more akin to the IDW version. She was original a social psychologist and pioneer in the field of shadowplay, or surgical alterations to the brain to influence personality or the ability to only think certain thoughts. Never aligned to Decepticon or Autobot interests, she still sided with the ‘Cons as they gave her the freedom to perform gruesome experiments to test her theories on just what you could do to the processor and push its capacity to take abuse.

Even now she is fascinated by the mind and performs terrible experiments to examine her theories, under her auspices entire planets are used as control groups for social experiments, and she is in charge of developing potential models for the future societies the Ringers may one day instate.

She and Grimlock have an unspecified history, tied to extremely gruesome bite marks around her neck and horrific lobotomy incisions on his head; she is fascinated by him and wishes to study the mentality of a self-proclaimed monster that protects the weak. For his part, he really, really just wants her dead, and possibly to tear her head off and wear her exoskeleton as a cape. (That is, he wants to flay her and wear it like an accessory.)

A possible candidate for inclusion is Yellow Diamond; after the fall of Homeworld, she and her fellow Diamonds, Blue and White, were worn as jewelry upon the claws of Megatron, until a daring battle on their behalf from Mega Pink Diamond (the fusion of Rose Quartz and her son Steven) freed them. If she does wind up in these ranks, assume that Yellow has become almost corrupted from the proximity of spending so much time near Megatron, the voice of Unicron constantly pressing in on her mind and carving her sanity into horribly fractured chunks. She has received horrific visions very similar to Javik’s, and the nature of them strongly implies that Unicron may have something to do with the cataclysm Javik has foretold, but nothing is certain of yet.

Certainly she has been so badly affected she has been partially corrupted; her form is mainly in flux, held in check only by her iron self control, and when stressed she begins to degenerate into a horrific dragon-like thing without form or shape, only absolute fear and the all-consuming violence of that fear.

Nonetheless, she is extraordinarily powerful; even weakened, she is larger than an entire planet and her physical might alone eclipses anyone else in the entire organization save the Condesce, in certain respects. With magical infusions, she can be even larger than a gas giant, dismissively wiping out star fleets with a flick of her interstellar finger, and she can annihilate magical constructs and shaped fields with her dominion over magic, rendering her a walking anti-magic weapon of mass destruction when she chooses. In conjunction with the massive army she has of loyal Gems that still serve her, and bear in mind that even regular Gems are some of the largest and most powerful beings in the known multiverse, she has an enormous amount of power.

She’s learned much from eons of torment and humiliation, and she seeks to build a new world of absolute safety for all beings. She’s not quite as dismissive of organic life as she once was, but considers them amusing pets until they prove themselves to be nearly on level with mineral beings and magical entities. She hates Decepticons in general, but has struck up a very odd friendship with Starscream, on the basis of them both hating Megatron’s internals and suffering from his actions, in different ways. Theories suggest they have even fused on at least one occasion into a massive magical mecha called Silicate Energon.

(With all this in mind, and her status as a hyper curvy giantess, she might be slated to share co-’real leader’ status with the Condesce, with Javik narratively demoted to a prophet. Sort of like an anti-Optimus Prime.)

And of course, like many of the other factions involved here, there are various higher forces associated with them. Most of these are not gods… at all, save from a very specialized point of view. Many of them are demons; not cute monster girls but genuine actual demons, heartless embodiments of pure evil dedicated to the enslavement of the multiverse, and the Ringers have mostly entrapped them into servitude as a consequence of deals made with their various lords and masters (so any demonic character that could be a Thicc Demon could qualify here). One of these is Mephista, negotiating on behalf of her father Mephisto (or possibly IS Mephisto in a feminine identity), and she has given them access to summon many mighty demonic monsters and monster women in exchange for unspecified tasks that may prove to be good plot hooks.

Hela, of Marvel but with more attributes of her mythological source, is also assisting them, but her purpose is unclear. Various elementals of cold and monsters acting on her behalf are aiding them, and it is believed that she wants more war, and sees them as a useful means in that regard. Notably Hela contacted them through mortal avatars, which has the Ringers highly suspicious: what is her purpose and why does she care?

As for character suggestions, as stated before, any war-like characters can be suitable, if their moral outlook doesn’t lend them more towards the heroism of the MILF Fleet or the fun-loving glory of the Cobalts. Those who believe in things like ‘strength is the only thing that matters’, ‘the weak deserve to be dominated’, or otherwise have strong social darwinist outlooks are extremely ideal for this group!

Possible groups working with them/for them are the most pragmatic aspects of the Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40k (such as the Dark Angels and Imperial Guard), and the most savage ones (like the World Eaters). Orks following the 40k mentality, led by Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, are also perfect in a ‘do what the big bosses say’, as would Tolkien orcs. (In fact, any orc that is basically kind of a jerk fits.) The True Horde/Iron Horde of Warcraft would be positively ideal, with many goblins, blood elves and others rounding out the ranks. A MILF-tier Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender (with her size proportionate to her firebending prowess, possibly with some dragon monster girl traits) would also be a contender.

INTERACTIONS WITH OTHER FACTIONS

Naturally the MILF Fleet is at odds with them on an ideological level: the MILFs believe in evolution in a similar way that the Ringers believe in conflict breeding development, but they couldn’t be more different. The MILFs endorse gentle change, the development of transformative technologies, and understanding that flesh does not equal you. They are transhumanist paragons who want everyone to be happy and safe, and for love between all sapient beings. The Ringers are explicitly trying to conquer everything and institute their own absolute rule to prevent a nebulous threat. They do not like each other. At all. They might work together… but only rarely, and otherwise try to avoid one another. The Ringers are more likely to approach them, in order to get ahold of their mods or powers as part of their own plans, but more often than not it is full on war between the two factions.

Rumor has it that Sierra in particular has a deep resentment of Javik, due to their completely opposite temperaments: Javik is a biochauvanist, Sierra loves robots (sometimes in a VERY physical way). Javik believes conflict breeds character, Sierra thinks war is just pointless suffering. Javik dislikes cybernetics and excessive augmentation, and Sierra was already plugging in a new computer into her head before he could finish saying so. They are constantly fighting, and Javik is determined to be the one to beat her once and for all. Sierra just wishes he’d go away and stop being mean already.

The Cobalts are hired by them as mercenaries, but don’t care for them much. They’re just so… serious and not fun. The two don’t often come to blows as an ideological matter, but can compete over treasure scores, good loot, or competing over territory. The sheer power of the Ringer makes them both imposing threats, and an irresistible target to Vriska; she keeps seeing ‘SUCK ME DRY RIGHT NOW’ signs on them and she drools at the thought of having their powers and relics, all for her.

As for other factions, the Ringers are not a widely known group. They do not act publically, but through proxies, pawns and so on. When they do act directly, they do not give any sign they’re part of a larger group but individuals carving out their own empires. Consequently they might have allies and enemies among the many factions of the multiverse, but it is not widely known that they are one massive and very dangerous visionary organization.

[chaosbcrne]

I’ve made an extremely brief post listing a couple of things about this topic but it didn’t nearly cover how it all came together and everything it involved and still involves to this day, so here’s the long, detailed version of how Shadow came to work for G.U.N., why he does and everything else tied to it that I can think of

Do bear in mind that I haven’t read the comics. I’ve seen a couple issues that may have been hinting at a couple of things in regards to the work dynamic and I learned from them that the commander’s name is Abraham Tower, and that’s it. Everything else is my own interpretation based on what is seen in the games. 

That being said, without further ado, let’s dive into this mess.

First things first, let’s clear up what happened in the aftermath of ShTH, and more specifically how things were settled with the commander. The last time we see him in canon, he’s accompanied by the president who vows to honor Gerald’s legacy and create a partnership with the head of G.U.N. to do a better job at leading and protecting the world. 

Following this, I think the president’s first move was to offer a formal apology and pardon to Shadow. I like to think he suggested to do so publicly, even, but Shadow declined.

With that done, he likely arranged for Shadow and Abe to meet and clear things up as well, as he couldn’t exactly proceed with his wish if the two were still at odds. What could have been a very brief conversation involving a mutual apology and some unspoken promise that they’d never meet again turned out into something else entirely.

The cause of it being mainly the still very present hostility between them; after recovering his memories, it was beyond Shadow how someone who pretended he’d cared for Maria and other people killed during the raid could be working for the very organization that had carried it out, and even if Abe could admit to Shadow’s heroic actions in putting an end to the invasion, he couldn’t quite quell a lifetime of internalized blame overnight.

However, he did take the time to point out to Shadow that he didn’t work for G.U.N., he commanded G.U.N. I like to think, growing up and training with the military, Abe eventually got to speak with soldiers who knew about the raid; people who hadn’t been directly involved but who had heard of how things went down and how no one knew what they were doing or why they were doing it, that they were just following orders. Over the years, Tower came to understand that if anyone was to blame - aside from Shadow, of course - it wasn’t G.U.N. itself but rather the people in charge. He came to understand that those were the problem, and if the right people were in charge, tragedies like this wouldn’t happen. And that’s how he came to aim for a leadership position.

That explanation had a serious impact on Shadow’s perspective, who until that point would have gladly chased down every individual soldier involved in the raid. But he understood then why Maria made him promise to forgive the world and help it despite what it had done to her. Because Maria, even then, could see the big picture; she knew the soldiers weren’t to blame for the raid. It was the corrupted leaders, and the mistrust between the people - basically everything that ailed the world that Gerald had vowed to cure through science - that had driven people to be scared of the mere rumors of an artificial lifeform and potential weapon being developed out in space - enough to send people to destroy it all at any cost. Maria understood that it was because kindness and understanding and tolerance was lacking that such tragedies happened - and she believed it was by expressing more of those that things would change for the better - not by taking revenge after revenge for everything bad that ever happened.

His promise to Maria took a different meaning, that day; where he would have otherwise kept it just because it was what she wanted - and god knows he would have rearranged the stars with his bare hands if that’s what she wanted -, from then on he understood where she came from and I like to think it left him even more driven to keep this promise.

Shadow also developed a certain respect for Abe then, just because he had come to that conclusion all by himself; he’d managed to put his issues with G.U.N. aside to have a better chance at fixing the problem at the source by taking charge himself. In a way, it’s something Abe managed to do that Gerald hadn’t; forgiving the mass and throwing the blame where it was really due. 

The hostility between them never disappeared, but they did come to the conclusion that they were after the same thing; making the world a safer place and operating where power is so events like the raid would never happen again. That’s how the job position came into the picture. Although again, the two still couldn’t stand one another, Tower offered it as a sign of good faith after Shadow had proved his ultimately good intentions in saving the world, and Shadow eventually came to accept it.

It wasn’t without conditions, though, as he knew damn well he would be one of a kind in G.U.N.’s ranks and he had a vague idea of what that would entail. The first condition he established being - as mentioned in a previous post - that he would effectively serve as an agent, and not as some new test subject for the science division. His work would be on the field and never in any way near people who might have an interest in studying him for one reason or another. He was even reluctant to let them take a proper DNA sample for identification (more on this here[x] and here[x]), and only agreed to it under Abe’s assurance that he ‘didn’t want another one of him’. 

Another condition he set was that he’d never have to work on the field with other people except for Team Dark. Shadow’s not a leader, but he’s not a follower either; he works best alone and just so happens to have a team of people who also work best alone and whose lone-wolf qualities happen to mesh well with his own. He barely tolerates taking orders from Tower who, despite being on the receiving end of Shadow’s hatred, is the only one who Shadow would want to see at the head of G.U.N., for he knows Abe also suffered from the raid and therefore is the least likely to lead the organization into repeating past mistakes.

Of course, Shadow had to agree to his own set of conditions, mainly that he takes the job seriously and shows up when he’s called in, follows his orders and complies with the system of rules already established. He was never obliged to be happy about it, though, which leads to a lot of tension and arguments at work on the daily even if, ultimately, his operation as a member of the unit is perfectly functional. 

The reasons he’ll give just about anyone who asks why he’s working there are pretty objective and straightforward: it gives him easy access to very useful intelligence and equipment, it grants him an unstable but still ridiculously high salary, and it’s an opportunity to master all kinds of espionage, survival, technical and other miscellaneous skills that can come in handy in all sorts of situation. 

When it comes to actual interest, as stated previously, he needs to feel like he’s making himself useful - and ideally, by doing what he does best (fighting) while simultaneously working towards his goal (making the world a better place). Excuses and practical and emotional reasons aside, working for the Guardian Unit of Nations is clearly the best option he has.

On a more personal level, he puts up with the job because he does feel like he owes Abe, in a way - even if the two of them agreed to peg the blame of the raid on someone else, Shadow will always feel like those people’s blood is on his hands and this is how he can start making amends. Following that train of thought, it makes sense to him that the workplace and the people and his boss and everything about that working environment would make him feel like shit more often than not, since he’s technically paying a debt - he’s just enduring the slow, perpetual punishment for being the reason all those people had to die.

[fantroll-purgatory]

@kyuremus

FIRST: Alternia (slight au- she’s not only a sgrub player, but the age for troll banishment has risen.)

Name: Astium Umoora! As she’s a fairly new troll of mine, I actually remember her name reasoning! Astium comes from astigmatism, as her eyes are a main theme. Her smaller 4 suffer from a severe case of this. 

Umoora is pretty basic- Umora means fatigue in bulgarian. She’s pretty angry-tired thanks to a large mess of bullshit she deals with frequently.

I think this all works pretty well!

Age:7 sweeps.

Strife Specibus: Umbrellakind. Truth be told, she’s kind of scared of incredibly sharp objects. However, she needs some sweet, sweet long-distance, as an able-bodied Tavros might stand a chance in a fistfight. Umbrella kinda sounds like Umoora, but that’s something I only noticed right now. The second I’m typing this. The tip of it is rather sharp (because fear aside, she needs stabbing ability), but keeping it open usually protects her from accidentally stabbing an eye or three out. 

Oof… I’m almost tempted to recommend bbgunkind just to make a “you’ll shoot your eye out kid” joke. But given her fearful nature she might not be particularly fond of the idea of using that. 

Maybe a jaws of life/claw grabber instead? A not especially destructive jaws of life. It’s something that isn’t particularly sharp, has some range on it, and that she could use to restrict an enemy in order to give herself a much-needed advantage. It’s also a nice nod to her scorpion relation.

Fetch Modus: 

This is a weird one so bear with me, but Lotus Seed Modus. Basically a little grid that looks a bit like a Lotus Seed Head (Don’t look it up if you have trypophobia, because it’s basically the very common plant pattern that activates that response). She has to fill up the entire pod before she’s allowed to retrieve any items, basically. Pretty simple, but it ties into her interest!

Blood color: Teal

Okay… I do have to say that I might want to change her to Cobalt. If only because eye mutations are sooo common among that caste. I don’t see why it Couldn’t happen with a teal, but. Nothing in her personality Particularly sells me on teal, since she doesn’t have a particularly strong moral position. She at least has a little touchstone with the Cobalt bitterness towards people who are better positioned than her. Also the scorpion association. 

Symbol and meaning: Limini- Derse+Doom

You seem to be riding a lot on her doom power for her theme, so I feel bad about this, but… her personality honestly fits Rage just a little better for me? I usually wait until getting to the title section to address this, but I do want to talk about it here just to get it out of the way ASAP. 

Her anger, fear, paranoia, aggression towards others, dissatisfaction with the current reality… I do agree with her being a dersite, though. 

So depending on blood type, I might change her symbol to either… 

Trolltag: destinedTrypophiliac. Destined is a hint at three things: Her eventual playing of Sgrub, her doom aspect, and some of her specific lil doom powers that’ll be below! She truthfully enjoys trypo-things, due to the nature of her face, she’s both intrigued and comforted by the patterns of small holes.

I think this could still work out even with my change because of her fatalistic nature. She has this perceived terminality that goes along well with the aspect. I also like that it kind of implies she was destined to be super into small hole patterns.  

Quirk: I’m that anon from before- her quirk is a pain in the ass, and she knows this. That’s actually the reason for a good chunk of it, however, she chose things that both kinda looked like holes+eyes. U=☋, N= ☊ and a=∴. She’s got hella vision, so reading this shitshow is a breeze. She talks in all lowercase unless HEATED, and uses punctuation. She also substitutes the word ‘eye’ into anything that rhymes, even if the end result is kind of silly. (reyeght, meyene, etc.) “yo☋ ∴ll f☋cki☊g s☋ck. ”

Haha I love it. It’s definitely a pain in the ass, but I’ve seen way worse. Honestly if you wanted to make it worse, you could replace o’s with ö‘s. Just litter that fuckin quirk with dots.

Special Abilities (if any): I’m sure I mentioned something about eyes. She doesn’t have vision Xfold, but rather, 20/20 eyesight to the highest power. While each small eye on its own is pretty awful, when every single one is open and working, she can make out crisp details as far as she can see.

I do kind of like this, because it reminds me of the nature of various insect eyes. Their smaller eyes tend to be less detailed and focus on things like light/dark, heat, or movement, but when used in combination with more complex eyes they help create a thorough image. Scorpions in particular have really light sensitive eyes. 

I think that’s something you should maybe play with with her. Scorpions can travel by starlight at night, so maybe she’s Really good at tracing light. But also make her really, really hate harsh light. She can still be great with Detail, though. 

She’s got underdeveloped doom abilities. As Terezi was able to use her mind abilities pretty well w/o god-tiering, I’m applying this here. It’s pretty basic, but she’s pretty good on picking up vibes. That’s about it. She has a dislike for a lot of trolls, but she’s only truly scared of some. She doesn’t understand how she makes this difference. 

I think you could still work this with my change- If you wanted to keep it for doom I might adjust it to her being able to sense impending threats in general? Not being able to note the danger surrounding particular trolls, just particular Moments where she or someone else is About To Experience Danger. 

If you go with my Rage change, though, you could have her be able to sense the threat inherent to each individual. Though her perceived threat might be slightly skewed by how much she was Already scared of them.

Lusus: Scorpionmom! Small, angry, the obligatory eye thing- but you can squish em if you’re fast. Astium is vulnerable behind all her yelling.

Personality: She seems like the kind of troll with anger issues. Moreso than most. She’s violently aggressive towards those above her in hemospectrum, but only when guaranteed protection behind a screen. All of this stems from a crippling fear she lives with, however- she is a mutant. It’s not the worst mutation in the world, her blood is teal, and she’s more than functional. Her four smaller eyes developed AFTER her lusus adopted her. They kind of.. burst through the surface of her face, and scorpionmom noticed those bumps. Otherwise, she probably would’ve been culled. (It also changed the pattern of her horn. This was initially just me forgetting which way the red-orange-yellow went, but I rolled with it.) She can’t compensate her mutation with physical strength or cool calculations, and her fear is at fault. There’d be no reason to spare her at the time of drafting. She’s aware that the wrong highblood could end her life in a second, so she tries to compensate this by coming across as impressively scary enough to ward them off. This is also just a side-effect of fear. She’s kind of a coward face-to-face, and she’s disgusted with herself for this. As a mid/highblood, she expects herself to have the natural anger and strength of somebody her caste, but is as weak as the rust spectrum, minus the cool psychic powers. 

Now here’s my least favorite part of having to step in- I think you have some misconceptions about Alternian culture. Since it’s an AU, you could definitely adjust things to suit your needs across the universe… But since you haven’t specified a particular change in this regard, I’m going to discuss this as we know it in canon:

Eye mutations are pretty normal on Alternia, it would seem. Her having extra eyes isn’t enough to have her immediately culled. It might even be common enough to not be particularly notable. In fact, most ‘mutations’ or even disabilities might not even be instantly cullable offenses- the only things we really know for sure result in culling is blood mutations and a failure to provide genetic material for the filial pails. 

Alternia definitely has a “the strongest survive” mentality, but it Also has an “adapt and live” mentality. Tavros’ paraplegia didn’t put him on the chopping block and he implied he still had hope of becoming a member of the cavalreapers. Terezi was completely blind and she was still gunning for the job of legislacerator without having to worry about being culled for her disability. 

Now, I DO… still want to work this for you. So I think you can definitely argue that if she’s particularly frail on top of her eye mutations she might be culled? 

I have two slightly more interesting options for you, though: 

1. She could survive drafting, and would get shipped off planet, but because of her various issues she probably wouldn’t get a high ranking position and would probably just be tossed out as cannon fodder. She’d be a low-ground grunt and her likelihood of survival wouldn’t be particularly high. So she’s still terrified of this fate- she doesn’t want to be some first wave scouting grunt that gets killed in the first fight. This still justifies her fear and anxiety around the whole thing. 

2. She BELIEVES that she’ll be culled at drafting time despite it being untrue. She really, really, genuinely is convinced of this being the case, and is terrified of it. People try to reassure her that this won’t happen and provide examples, but she is just REALLY, STUBBORNLY sure that it’s absolutely the case and that all of their examples are just Government Lies meant to placate the masses. 

When it comes to quadrants, she has the maturity of a grub. Astium hasn’t a CLUE how to healthily establish one- dealing with her feelings is confusing and absolutely terrifying. She’ll also go ham if she gets her “veyebes” from a friend’s quadrantmate, which can really hurt Astium’s relationship with the original troll. However, this isn’t too much of a focus. She’d rather be single for as long as possible. 

I love this. The idea of her trying to warn her pals that a quadrantmate has Threatening Auras is intriguing and the dynamic it could create w/ relationships is nice.

She can also be kind of an idiot about small things, with the stuff said above being prime examples. Covering her eye mutation is.. not her strong suit, despite her fear of being found out? Her eye-quirk is too natural, despite her multiple attempts to get out of the habit. Words feel wrong if not spelled with eye puns.

Astium pushes herself away from most, and this has wound up having her be quite needy and lonely, so she can certainly come across as overbearing and somewhat annoying to anybody who strikes her interest, platonic or romantic.

She loves the word fuck.

She’s a great character! I think if you want to keep her a teal, though, you need to give her a kind of moral touchstone… I think a fascinating one for her might be a sort of “might makes wrong” worldview as a contrast to Alternia’s usual “might makes right” way of doing things. Basically have her fundamentally distrust people who are strong and assume they’re in the wrong/always blame them.

Interests: 

COOKING SHOWS (it’s a small aspiration to become a chef.)

PLAYFUL SPARRING

TRYPO-GALLERIES

HOPEFULLY, A NONVIOLENT CAREER.

VIDEO GAMES ARE COOL SOMETIMES.

The idea of a troll having a nonviolent career aspiration is so fun. Good luck, baby girl, you live on Alternia… Maybe you could give her a theoretical interest in gardening just because of her trypointerest? Or you could make her like Mushrooms. Mushrooms are pretty easy to plant, so she could even grow them in her hive! 

You could also have her practice some escape artistry nonsense. Preparing to run away from the culling drones. Building a panic room. All kinds of fun stuff. 

She could also be interested in getting in Arguments Online. Yelly Online Personality Who Is Mad. An Internet Skeptic For Trolls.

[These are the ones I have the most trouble with?]

Title: Witch of Doom

Witch of Rage could be a fun title for her… The active changer of rage, allowing her to actively manipulate and change the negative emotions that others feel, altering the levels of pessimism, able to generate torment and worry while passively understanding optimism and figuring out how to flex her own negative feelings to the mold of reality… 

But I also think Knight of Rage might be a good possibility to consider? Starting out surrounded by and overwhelmed by all this anger and fear and paranoia. And then having to learn how to exploit and utilize those feelings effectively instead of allowing them to consume her and everything around her.

Land:Plush and Night. Plush is both her direct inverse and secret wish, and night is simply so she struggles to see- her one strength.

Trolls are nocturnal, so her having difficulty seeing in the dark doesn’t make much sense for her species! Plush and Day might make more sense, both biologically and with her having a scorpion mom and with the eye light sensitivity thing I mentioned. 

Dream Planet:Derse

Sorry if this is too wordy/comes across poorly, this is my first time ever submitting a troll for review!! 

Don’t worry, it was the prefect amount of wordy. Sorry my review got wordy in turn, haha! 

Now let’s have some design fun!:

So we have here a teal and a cobalt redesign. 

Horns: For the teal I shortened them a little just because with teals the horns never seem like the main attraction. They’re always relatively understated. I kept them the same on the cobalt, though. 

Hair: I kept it the same for the cobalt, too, but I wanted to make it messier on the teal. My concept when designing her was basically “really exhausted grad student who is a disaster mess and rarely leaves their room,” since teal designs seem to occupy a niche grad student genre. 

Eyes: They seemed just a little too small for the style. I removed the eyebrows to do away with crowding and then made the main set and the lower eyes larger. I also added eyelash definition. And, of course, the undereye bag shadows! 

Mouth: I wanted to give her some bigger, scarier fangs. Mostly so she’d fit the definition of someone looking like they have a temper more. It also makes her look a little like spidermom’s face which is fun. A nice arachnid reference. I gave her some black lipstick on the teal version and some cobalt on the cobalt. 

Shirt: I made her tanktop a little flowerier and less put together. I also adjusted the outline to be more visible. New symbol, of course. On the cobalt I just added a jacket over top of the tanktop. 

Legs: I edited one of fan-troll’s sweatpants sprites to again fit that exhausted image you wanted for her. I also turned her shoes into slippers, though I kept the blood accent on each.

Thank you for sharing! She’s pretty great!

-CD

[nilesdaughter]

Love Me Like You Do

Fandom: Mass Effect Characters: Ashlyn Shepard, Kaidan Alenko, Saren (Mention), Hannah Shepard (Mention) Pairing: Shenko Word Count: 991 Note: So...romancing Kaidan in ME1 was definitely an accident. However, it was a very sweet relationship while it lasted, so while it may not be the current ship in my Mass Effect canon, it still deserved a one-shot...I’m also posting this now because I’ve been working on this on-and-off for months at this point, and I’m just tired of looking at it, tbh. Plus, shoutout to @masseffectwritercircle for giving me a set time to work on this nonsense. Also, sorry for skimping out on the naughty parts haha

Ashlyn Shepard valued professionalism. Raised a spacer with both parents serving in the Alliance military, she preferred structure and following the rules. It made life easier, gave everything a sense of place and security.

Eden Prime had thrown that out the window.

While it was an incredible honor to be the first human Spectre, it had actually not been what she had wanted. In truth, Shepard had been planning to stay in the Alliance, wanting to rise through the ranks like her parents before her. She envisioned a long, successful career before retiring, and even then she hoped to continue serving the Alliance as a consultant or ambassador.

This wasn’t like her.

She sighed heavily and put her head between her knees. If they made it back from Ilos without dying first, it would be a goddamned miracle to not be court-martialed. Disobeying Council orders, stealing an Alliance ship…

“Mother will kill me,” she said aloud with another heavy sigh.

“Well, that’s a comforting thought.”

Ashlyn started, and practically jumped to her feet. “Kaidan…!”

“Sorry, Commander. I didn’t mean to startle you,” he replied, holding up his hands in placating gesture.

She grimaced and turned away from him, crossing her arms across her chest. “I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve to be called that right now. I probably shouldn’t even be wearing my uniform.”

“Hey, don’t say that.”

She quirked a brow at him and began to list off the things they could be charged with, ticking off a finger with each one. “Disobeying orders, stealing the Normandy--which, I might add, is an Alliance prototype--technically assault on an politician, and technically kidnapping.” She fixed him with a slight glare. “Would you like to add anything else, Lieutenant?”

“Well, when you put it that way, we’re a damn good example of representing the best of humanity.”

“Kaidan…”

“My apologies, ma’am. Probably not the best time for jokes.”

Ashlyn fixed him with a slight glare, but then lowered her gaze and hugged herself once more. “I’m...still trying to convince myself that we’re doing the right thing, but I don’t think I believe it yet.”

“For the record, none of us would have followed your lead if we didn’t think you were doing the right thing, Commander. No one else listened to us, so we can’t really be faulted for what we’re doing, you know?”

“The brass probably won’t share your way of thinking, though.”

“One can hope,” he replied with a shrug, which drew a slight laugh from Ashlyn. He grinned a little at that before continuing, “I don’t know what we’ll run into on Ilos, but I want you to know...I’ve enjoyed serving under you, ma’am.”

“And I’ve been incredibly lucky to have you on my team, Lieutenant. You’re a good soldier, and I’m sorry to have dragged you into this mess.”

Something in his expression changed and Kaidan stepped up next to Ashlyn, reaching out to take her hands in his. “Commander...Ashlyn...Please understand that I mean this as more than an LT to their commanding officer. I...think about losing you and my chest feels tight. And even though the galaxy and everything in it will keep going...the only things that are important right now are you and me.”

She averted her gaze. “Kaidan...I appreciate the sentiment, but the last thing I want to be charged with is fraternization.”

“I know, I know. Normally, I wouldn’t even bring this up. But...I don’t know.” He sighed, giving her hands a tight squeeze. “Neither of us know how this will end. I suppose I just thought...Well, this may never happen again. Us, I mean.”

Ashlyn remained silent even as she brought her gaze back up to Kaidan’s, blue meeting hazel. Earnesty saturated his expression, a glimmer of hope in his eyes as he seemed to will her to understand that he was sincere. Under normal circumstances, she would never entertain the idea, no matter what he said. She valued her standing with the Alliance too much, had been terrified to lead him on the whole time they had been chasing after Saren. And yet here he stood, his heart on his sleeve.

...Fuck it.

“I think we’re well past the point of caring about regulation, Alenko,” she murmured. “How about you meet me in my cabin in a few minutes?”

A smirk tugged at the corner of Kaidan’s mouth. “Is that an order, Commander?”

She snorted, shaking her head. “Not in the slightest. More of a request. I just...I think you and I might have some things to talk about.” She then kissed his cheek and pulled away.

x-x-x-x-x

As soon as Ashlyn opened the door to let Kaidan in, his lips crashed against hers, clumsy and desperate. She blindly reached for the sensor on the door to close it again, before she reached up to tangle her fingers in his hair. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her closer even as they began to shuffle towards the bed. When they hit the mattress, they broke apart for a moment, each of them gasping for air. Kaidan started planting kisses along her jaw and down her neck, his hands cold against her abdomen as he worked her T-shirt off.

She shivered and reached down to start doing the same, ignoring the part of her brain that kept trying to tell her this was a bad idea, this was going against all protocol, the last thing she should be doing on top of everything else was starting a relationship in the spur of the moment, she shouldn’t have encouraged him, and what would her mother--

Ashlyn moaned softly as Kaidan planted a soft kiss at the base of her neck.

“So...about that talk…?”

“Later,” she murmured. “Just you and me. That’s all that’s important right now, isn’t it?” she asked, echoing his own words back at him.

Kaidan laughed a little bit. “Yeah…You and me.” He smiled softly and kissed her.