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goldenpixel · 3 years

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The scene with Wilbur in Quackity’s latest lore stream made me Think some Thoughts, and I wanted to get all of my SBI family headcanons together in one place, so here’s this post

First thing, this is their age order:

Philza -> Techno/Wilbur -> Tubbo -> Ranboo -> Tommy

- Techno and Wilbur were born on the same day, so most of the family refers to them as “the twins” but they are not blood related

- Philza did not know how old Techno was when they were ruling the Antarctic Empire, he thought that Techno was around 21 when he was actually around 14-16

- this is a fact that haunts Phil to this day, because he committed a massive amount of war crimes with an actual child, and also for reasons that will soon become very clear

Philza and Techno

- they’re married

- they got married with them each thinking that the other was close to their own age (Phil thought Techno was in his early 20’s, Techno thought Phil was in his late teens)

- for more on their marriage, check out this post

- despite Techno and Wilbur being the same age, Techno is mentally much older due to his past and his general status as the Blood God

- Phil did most of the work raising the older kids, but Techno did his fair share, and you can definitely see his influence when you look at the kid’s behaviors

- both of them are immortal

- Techno is a new immortal, the Blood God has only just come into existence, but he isn't leaving anytime soon

- Philza is an old immortal, he was there when the world was born, and he'll be there when it dies

Wilbur

- Wilbur and Philza are the only blood relatives in the whole family

- as much as he loves him, Wilbur has always been a bit bitter towards Techno, because when they were teenagers, Techno was off ruling and adventuring and having fun with Phil during the AE, and Wil was left home with a young Tommy to look after

- Wilbur’s hair is naturally blond, just like Phil and Tommy’s

- no one knows who Wilbur’s mom is (unfortunately mpreg is the norm on this server, so Phil carried him, and he’s got some ideas on who Wil’s mom is, but he honestly doesn’t care enough to look into it)

- Wilbur has wings

- they’re much smaller than Phil’s, he can barely fly with them, but they’re the same color and shape as Phil’s

- because of how fragile his wings are, Wilbur should not technically be able to fly, but he literally sheer force of will-ed it and threw himself off the roof of their house so many times that he can glide when he jumps from high places, and if it’s a really high place, he can get in a few good flaps of his wings to get him some extra distance

- Phil doesn’t learn that Wilbur can semi-fly/glide until one day they’re off adventuring together and Wil is being dramatic and theatrical and walking backwards while he talks, and he falls off a cliff

Tommy

- Tommy has been with them since he was a few days old

- because of his light features, most people assume that he is Phil’s son by blood, and he just didn’t inherit the wings

- (at ages 10 and 16, Tommy and Wilbur did the blood-brothers handshake where they cut their palms and then shook hands, so if you ask them, they’re blood brothers through and through)

- Techno taught Tommy how to sew

- Tommy is a young god, but he hasn’t grown into most of his powers yet

- Tommy is a god of death, the future Death himself, Kristen is his mother

- (this is how Phil comes into possession of him. Phil, being the Angel of Death, was really the only reasonable choice when it came to Death herself finding someone to raise her son)

- Tommy has light features, even though Mumza has dark features, because she purposefully made him out of the light, she wanted him to be good and kind, so she created him from the literal light that you see when you're dying

- because he was born from the actual moment of death, despite Tommy's eyes being blue, they hold the void itself in them

- if you look too closely into Tommy's eyes, it can be easy to lose yourself and fall right in

- sometimes Mumza comes to visit, these are very bittersweet moments for Tommy

- he loves his mom, and he loves seeing her and seeing Phil happy to see her, and she usually takes him along on her next trip, ever so slowly teaching him how to be Death, but he also hates that that is his future

- he doesn't want to be the next Death, he doesn't want to outlive all of his friends and his brother, he just wants to be normal

- because of this, Tommy represses pretty much all of his godly powers, trying to seem as normal as possible, the one he represses the most is his automatic healing, when he gets hurt, he wants to stay hurt

- he represses everything so well that its years before Tubbo finds out that his best friend is a god

Ranboo

- Techno raised Ranboo more than Phil did

- (because of this, he’s the only kid who actually views Techno as his father. Despite him literally being their stepdad, the others see Techno as more of a brother or an uncle)

- Techno found Ranboo when he was around 12 years old on the edge of a warped forest in the nether (if you want some more nether-boys hc’s, check out this post)

- at that age, Ranboo hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet due to malnutrition, so he was much smaller than the average human 12 year old, and everyone thought he was around 8-10 (because of his memory issues, Ranboo thought the same thing until Tommy kept pestering him about when his birthday was and he remembered the year)

- Ranboo is brought into the family when he’s 12, Tommy is 11, and Wilbur and Techno are 17

- as I said before, Techno may have been 17 when he took in Ranboo, but he was definitely a father to this anxious amnesiac preteen

- because of his height, Ranboo is constantly slouching to fit through doorways, inside houses, and to make himself appear smaller, so he grows to need a cane

Tubbo (and Dream)

- street cat

- they fed him once and he just kept coming back

- sometimes he’ll disappear for a few weeks, but he always turns up eventually

- boy’s got some family issues, some real bad family issues

- his dad is Schlatt, who left him and big brother Dream to fend for themselves when he and Dream were 6 and 11

- luckily Dream has an excellent sense of direction and memory, and got them to Aunt Puffy’s current port before she pushed off on her next adventure (but not before getting briefly separated and making some friends)

- (the few weeks they spend separated are when Tubbo first gets found by Wilbur and Tommy and forcibly adopted by Phil, and Bad lures Dream home with food and he meets Sapnap)

- both boys have ram features - floppy ears, horns, etc., Dream also inherited their Aunt Puffy's rainbow hair (he dyes it blonde semi-regularly. It's dyed when he meets sbi, and Wilbur and Techno have the exact same reaction to it when they finally see his natural hair: relentless teasing. Like father like son amiright?)

- Tubbo and Dream are half brothers (same dad, different moms), Tubbo is 1/2 ram and 1/2 human, Dream is 1/2 human, 1/4 ram, and 1/4 what he and Sapnap think is demon (basically Dream had a human-ram hybrid dad, and a human-demon(?) hybrid mom)

- when Tubbo introduces Dream to his new brother-in-law, Dream feels a bit of a kindred spirit, but he quickly brushes it off

- Dream spends most of his time either with Bad, Skeppy, and Sapnap, or on the sea with Puffy, so Tubbo mostly fends for himself

- Tubbo is more than happy to fend for himself, he actually prefers it most of the time. He doesn't like people fussing over him and sheltering him, so whenever his mood switches and he decides that he does, actually, want some family time, he just appears on sbi’s front porch

- Tubbo first meets Ranboo when he comes to visit after a few months away. No one told him that Tommy was with Mumza for the weekend, so when he arrived at 3am, 2 days before he told Phil he’d be there, he just let himself in and threw himself on top of the sleeping figure in Tommy’s bed, only to be met with a startled enderman screech that woke the whole house

- (Ranboo was in Tommy’s bed because he might not be a part of the official Clingy Duo, but the boy is as clingy as they come. He regularly sleeps in his family’s beds, both when they’re home and when they’re away, because his sense of smell is heightened as an enderman and he needs to be surrounded in their scent when he misses them or when he’s feeling sad (especially because these are the only scents he knows, he doesn’t remember any of the scents from before Techno found him))

Big brothers being friends

- one day, after Tubbo’s near-constant raving about how great the Minecraft family is, Dream agrees to visit with him

- this visit happens to fall during the AE, so the only ones home are Wilbur and Tommy

- Dream and Wilbur take one look at each other and their similar situations in raising their chaotic, problem-child little brothers, and never let go

- the four of them live together for a good 5-6 months before Dream gets a letter and he and Tubbo need to leave

- after this visit, Dream and Wilbur stay in contact, and they visit each other even without their brothers around to drag them along

- I know I said that Wilbur makes fun of Dream for dying his hair, but that’s only in public

- in private, Wilbur confesses to Dream that he also dyes his hair, that his hair is naturally blond and he dyes it darker. After this, Dream and Wilbur start dying their hair together, it becomes something scheduled that they both look forward to immensely each month

- the next time Dream and Tubbo visit together, Wilbur is off with a water spirit who stole his heart (I refuse to write about fish Sally, fight me), and Phil is showing Ranboo some cool builds in his current hardcore world, so it's Techno and Tommy who welcome them in

- Techno starts out pretty hesitant of Dream, but Dream almost instantly is like

- "I'm gonna annoy the blood god into being my best friend"

- and whatever Dream sets his mind to, he achieves

- so the visit sort of ends with Dream and Techno making Tommy and Tubbo promise not to burn the house down, and leaving them home alone to go off to cause some chaos together

Father/son relationships

- As I said earlier, Phil primarily raised Wilbur and Tommy, and Techno primarily raised Ranboo, with Tubbo coming in and out like a feral cat

- to Wilbur and Tommy, Techno is more of a cool uncle who brings them valuable trinkets from his adventures, and they want to be like him one day

- Ranboo and Phil’s relationship is almost exactly the same as Wilbur and Tommy’s relationship with Techno

- when Techno brought Ranboo home, Phil pretty much decided that he had his hands full enough with raising his two chaotic boys, and he declared that it was finders-keepers, Techno found Ranboo, so he gets to raise him

- after L’Manburg, Ghostbur and Phil learn sign language, because the explosion blew out Phil’s hearing in his left ear, and Ghostbur’s so soft-spoken that it’s sometimes really difficult for him to hear his son speaking

For more random hc’s I have about these characters and the characters of the smp in general, check out this post

Some quick tags for people who commented on my post asking who wants this post, thanks for the support guys :’) @anotherweirdohere @haveadayasgreatasyou @jupiterjordan

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stellocchia · 3 years

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Tbh the saddest part about Ctommy is that winning Lmanbergs independence will probably be the biggest achievement he's gonna make and he did that when he was 15 (or 9 if we wanna go for the best option) and in the end it really amounted to nothing because the country is gone and noone but Wilbur "cunt" soot probably appreciates what he did at this point and even that fuck probably doesn't appreciate it for the right reasons.

Like. He did something good that was supposed to outlive him. But because of fucking politics lmanberg is more of a bad memory than a good one for most people now and he's struggling to even keep up with just his personal business. Well. I say personal business despite it being about the GOOD OF THE WORLD? But it's not like anyone else has ever acknowledged that so I'm just gonna go with the flow and pretend that what Tommy is doing is totally just his personal life stuff.

Anyways. Like. I'm not gonna be all "you gotta make something that outlasts you" because that's bullshit and I am incredibly proud of all the shit he's accomplished and done post independence. Because I feel like essentially keeping everything under control during pogtopia, getting himself out of exile, getting himself out of bedrock Bros, trying to heal etcetfetcetcetcetcetc is a lot more demanding than having a bow duel with dream ever was but like. It's not like anyone around him seems to give a shit about that. So Ctommy will see that the only time people seemed to agree that he did something good. That he exceeded the expectations of the people around him in a positive way? That was when he won independence. And it's not like that amounted to anything good in the end.

Like shit. Ever since independence his life has just been going downhil.

Man.

Or hey. Maybe I'm overthinking that. But I just know that I want the people Tommy adores to validate his actions. To appreciate what he does.

Also if any authors are reading this please just write a lmanberg au where the elections never really happens and it's just domestic life in the new country. Please for the love of God I haven't seen a single one. A single fucking one. Pleeeease.

I mean, what he's doing lately isn't really for the Greater Good, he really is just taking care of his personal business. Like renovating his shack and its surroundings, tending to his therapy scam completely legitimate business venture, and casually hanging out with his friends when he can. And that's actually more than fine. Like heck! That's what makes him happy so there's literally nothing better he could be doing right now.

That said yeah, him receiving some validation from time to time would be good? Mostly because he has pretty serious self-esteem issues and it would be great if he could start recognizing his own self-worth instead of simply accepting whatever other people decide for him.

That said I don't think that gaining L'Manburg's independence was his biggest accomplishment. I think finding a way to put Dream behind bars was. Like, sure, Dream still managed to do damage that way, because he's the biggest asshole out there and because the prison system in there is flawed. But that one was still a big ass accomplishment! And, like, sure. It was something that the whole server did together. But Tommy was the one who sort of organized the thing and he was the one that ended up taking 2 of Dream's lives, so I still count it as a big personal achievement as well.

#ladycatland ask #dream smp #tommyinnit #long post #that said like #wilbur is definitely proud of tommy for multiple reasons #but the two of them are simply incapable of communicating #so the last time they actually spoke there was as much 'you changed the world' as there was 'everything he tried to do was a failure'#and we all know which one tommy's gonna take to heart...

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caelenath · 3 years

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The Ascension of Endymion

It's my first Sailor Moon fic! Comments welcome, concrit and otherwise.

Length: ~3000 Warnings: None Summary:

It took two lifetimes before Serenity and Endymion could finally say "forever" to each other, but his fate had been sealed long ago, the day a princess from the moon gazed upon the Earth and fell in love with him.

Cross-posted to FFN.

* * *

I also want to share some of my thoughts behind this piece. Read on if you are interested in author commentary (hidden below the jump because it's kind of long).

This fic began with a relatively simple idea—I wanted a definitive transition of some kind for when Endymion gained the extended lifespan of the Silver Millennium Royal Family. Traitorous as it feels, I happen to agree with the Black Moon Clan's sentiment that such longevity is unnatural for humans, at least in their current state, and so I didn't like the idea that Endymion just stopped aging one day and went about his business as usual for the next thousand years exactly as he is. Along with societal implications (what would retirement age be?), there is some psychological evolution that needs to happen for people to live that long without going insane.

I also didn't like how that longevity was kind of a throwaway detail in the canon, seeming to serve no purpose other than to let our OTP miracle romance it up in an Elysium-esque mineral utopia without having to be dead. It's more common for immortality/extreme longevity to have a sad or sinister tone whenever it does appear in fiction. If only select individuals have it, loss is usually part of the story—loss of those they outlive, or loss of themselves if they went through some kind of transformation (usually into something Other) in order to gain it.

If a whole population is immortal or long-lived, they are usually framed as "superior" in some way to those with normal lifespans—think Greek gods f*cking with mortals all the time, or cosmic beings trying to keep the human race from destroying themselves as a sign of their immense benevolence. Benevolent or not, these populations usually possess some degree of aloofness or empathetic disconnect from the lesser population. That's not to say they are un-empathetic, but just by virtue of being other, they can't fully identify with the lesser population.

Speak of Greek gods, I leaned into the inspiration behind Serenity and Endymion's names—the myth of Selene, goddess of the moon, who loved the mortal man Endymion. Usagi's various forms are pretty explicitly depicted (and named) as a goddess/Savior/Messiah figure, and that goddess/mortal dynamic reminded me of the significant power imbalance that exists between Usagi and Mamoru for most of the series.

Combined with Mamoru's utter devotion to her, which goes unquestioned, it started to take on a darker light. What if, because of that power imbalance and her goddess nature, he was never free to choose otherwise once she had chosen him? To be sure, their love is sincere, but it has taken him completely, and now he is bound forever. (Insert intelligent mumblings about free will, etc., here.)

I've also borrowed some ideas from Christianity, namely the part where Mamoru only has to accept Serenity's love to be one with her, and that in doing so, he will be made like her, e.g. "in Her image." (Note: I have a layman's Wikipedia understanding of such things. I am not and do not claim to be an expert on religion.)

So...yeah. I don't know if what resulted from all that was a confusing, bland mess, or a fic that gave adequate weight and an angsty edge to that throwaway longevity that really should be a big deal.

Whatever the case, thanks for reading!

(If you'd like to chat with fellow Sailor Moon fans and content creators of all types (fic, art, video, cosplay, etc.), check out the Moonlight Legends Discord server! https://discord.gg/Ye6d8rXt7Z)

#sailor moon #fanfiction #sailor moon fanfiction #mamoru chiba #king endymion #neo queen serenity #usagi x mamoru #my fic

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wayward-wren · 3 years

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What up lads new Philza Lore dropped

Been thinking about this since it's been revealed that c!Phil is immortal, or at least centuries old. I like analysing things, and my brain has been chugging away analysing c!Phil since this new revelation and I finally found time to sit down and get my thoughts out.

Unless specified, I'll be talking about the character Philza from now on! Let's get into it. Putting a cut in because it gets long. Also most of this is gonna be from memory because it's getting late and I'm not digging through 4+ months of vods!

remind me to never use the new Beta posting layout it gave me a word limit and then yeeted like 800 words i hate it here lets see if i can remember what I wrote

I’ve moved a lot in my life. I think on average about one new city every four years. This has meant a lot of goodbyes, a lot of meeting new people and breaking into new circles. When this new information was revealed, I instantly felt things click - I could relate to Phil suddenly.

Being centuries-old would create similar emotions, I think. Constantly being around people you know you will outlive, constantly finding yourself in new circles and groups. It takes a toll.

Being centuries old effects how Phil views relationships, people and countries.

Because I’ve moved a lot, I’ve noticed that I’m starting to get the attitude of ‘I can’t be bothered.’ I can’t be bothered going out of my way to meet new people, to make new friends I’m likely to move away from in a few years.

I’d imagine Phil would feel much the same way. Making close connections to people is impossible for him, really. He knows he’s going to outlive those around him and so the effort to put into growing relationships seems pointless.

I think this is most seen in his and Wilbur’s relationship. Wilbur clearly wants his attention - his pride - and clearly hasn’t gotten it to the extent he wants. (“I wonder if Phil would be proud of me” comes to mind. Plus I’m sure there’s something there with his relationship with Fundy and that cycle of bad parenting. And yes, it likely contributed to his spiral into madness, but this post is about Phil, not Wilbur.) But from Phil’s perspective, he knows Wilbur isn’t going to live as long as he is.

It explains why he’s so quick to kill Wilbur as well. Wilbur is too far gone, and Phil makes the decision to kill him before he does more harm. He’s long ago accepted the fact that his son will die before him, and so he is able to kill him.

Likewise, his relationship with Tommy reflects this. He doesn’t reach out to Tommy because there’s no point in making a new bond with someone who he will outlive. (especially with Wilbur’s death so fresh). However, he does make it clear that if Tommy reached out to him, he would have answered - more on that later.

His age also means he’s always looking at the big picture. He’s likely seen countless countries and empires and kingdoms rise and fall and he knows that they’re all temporary. He doesn’t see the importance in them like those who live and die within the lifespan of a nation.

He doesn’t see the small details. He doesn’t understand why Ghostbur is so upset about a simple sheep’s death - one with unlimited lives as well. In his mind, it’s just an animal. In Ghostbur’s mind, Friend is a friend, an important small thing. Phil is so used to moving on from things, he doesn’t understand the importance of pets and nations and a home.

This is all temporary in his mind, and lives are more important to him than a country. L’manberg was corrupting people (Tubbo, quite possible Wilbur in his mind) and thus it didn’t serve its purpose and needed to go before it hurt more people. (plus I wonder if there were some underlying anger and frustration towards L’manberg for the loss of his wings. It’s basically canon now (everyone say thank you Sadist!) that Phil’s wings were damaged during the explosion, and I would imagine for someone so old, losing limbs like wings and being grounded would be a shock and some of that may have been projected onto L’manberg)

(I also want to talk briefly about his and Techno’s relationship. While we haven’t had any canon confirmation, I don’t think Techno is fully mortal and it makes sense for Phil to gravitate towards other ancient beings. Plus my friend pointed out another theory in that Phil could be a patron of some kind for Techno, something Blood God related, I don’t know we need more information Techno please give us character lore I beg of you)

OKAY! I rewrote what I already had sometimes I hate Tumblr anyway onward let’s write this out before I pass out I’m tired.

Phil is willing to create relationships - but on his terms.

I said Phil is distant and hesitate to create bonds with people but this isn’t necessarily true. I want to point out Fundy and Ranboo and talk about his interactions with them and then talk about Tommy.

At the start of season two, Fundy, Ghostbur and Phil were really driving the lore. Phil seemed to be trying to bond with Fundy, and I think a lot of that likely had to do with guilt from what happened to Wilbur but there’s something deeper to it. He makes an effort to be there for Fundy and to help him.

Likewise, he went out of his way to save Ranboo from lava (though the overlap for in character and ooc is large there, I think it still applies), and brought him home after Doomsday, saving him from his own mind.

Phil seems himself as a benevolent being. He sees himself as right, and part of that is being there for his grandson, or helping out a hybrid in trouble.

However, it’s important to note - this is on his terms. He’s lived so long, he doesn’t want to put energy into relationships that won’t give him back something. For Fundy, I think a lot of it was making up for what happened with Wilbur and family responsibility, but he enjoyed spending time with Fundy (it’s been a while I need to rewatch some of those vods I think).

With Ranboo, again I feel like there’s a small part in fulfilling some need of Phil’s to feel like he’s being ‘good’ and plucking this kid out of a warzone makes him feel good. But at the same time, Ranboo is polite, quiet, generous - the perfect kind of person to put energy into building a relationship with. Plus, I would not be surprised if Ranboo reminds him of Techno.

If a relationship takes too much, or isn’t worth it - Phil drops it and doesn’t bother trying to fix what is broken. Why would he? He’s just going to outlive whatever the problem is. He lived in L’manberg, but he was never a part of it. He dismissed Tubbo so quickly when he saw Tubbo was being corrupted by his power and position. He didn’t follow up on Fundy or check that he was okay or make any effort to reach out to him when things started to go down.

And that brings us to Tommy. We’re all upset at how Phil reacted to Tommy’s exile and the following, but I think it makes so much sense. Like I said before, he doesn’t put the effort into reaching out to Tommy, but he would have gone to the Beach Party if Tommy had reached out to him. He was happy to see Tommy at Techno’s place, he was willing to create that relationship and bond.

But from Phil’s pov, Tommy was thrown aside by his home, found shelter with Techno, and then betrayed Techno by siding with the people who threw him aside. (and Techno is loyal to the few he trusts, so a betrayal like that will hit hard and Phil can see that). It makes sense that Phil decides that isn’t a relationship he wants to put energy into fixing.

(Also to clarify, I’m not saying Tommy was wrong to side with L’manberg and Tubbo, or that Techno was right in lashing out like he did. I’m just saying it’s a complex issue, and seeing all sides of it is important - they were both betrayed that day).

Living so long means Phil only cares to put effort and energy into relationships that benefit him, in whatever way. If someone is too difficult or needs too much effort, then in Phil’s mind there’s no reason to pursue that relationship.

Being so old makes Phil overly confident in himself.

Philza is always in the right. Full stop. End of story.

He’s lived so long and has so much more experience than anyone else that he thinks he is in the right all the time. His fatal flaw is his pride and - much like Techno - he refuses to see anything from anyone else’s point of view.

He saw L’manberg’s corruption, saw that it as a nation was hurting people and made the decision that it was doing more hurt than good so of course he joined Techno and Dream in destroying it.

He sees the big picture and so of course Friend’s death doesn’t matter, Friend was just an animal. Ghostbur is too naive and foolish to understand that now.

Unless he learns to listen and see someone else’s point of view - which will be very hard, because he’s so old and connecting with people is hard for him - he’s going to continue to think he’s always in the right.

Conclusion

There’s a few things I want to see/think might happen with Phil’s character, one more likely than the other.

First off - Karl.

If anyone knows how to look at the big picture, if anyone knows how insignificant the simple things are and how pointless it can be sometimes it’s the server’s resident time traveller. But where Karl differs from Phil is that he cares.

Karl goes out of his way to help, risks his memory and sanity to make things better for his friends. Pours time and effort and energy into relationships that may be onesided or temporary - heck, have you seen how much effort he goes to to be liked by everyone? Sometimes too much.

I’d love to see some Karl and Phil interaction. Maybe in a Tales episode (young Phil? Backstory? Maybe?) or even in regular canon. It’s unlikely probably, but I think it could be an interesting discussion. Someone write a fic.

Secondly - death.

CC!Phil has made it no secret that his character is probably going to die at some point (if only for ghost WINGSSSS). Honestly? I think it could be a great direction to take the character.

If Phil could find something worth dying for, could find the joys in the small things, could focus on the little details enough to realize - ‘oh. This does matter’ I honestly think that would be cool. A sacrificial death, maybe even for something as ‘insignificant’ as a pet (although pets can be important on this server). I’m not sure, but I think making peace with death would be a great way to take an immortal character’s arc.

There’s more I could talk about - for instance, I haven’t even mentioned the ‘not as painful as what I inflicted on their enemies’ comment and Phil’s whole ‘angel of death’ vibe, or the fact that he’s always only had one life. But it’s getting late and I’ve been writing this for like an hour and a half and I’m really tired. Feel free to add on!

#dream smp #dsmp #mcyt #philza #philza minecraft #this was fun #please reblog i put a lot of effort into this and i'd love people to see it!#let me know what you think ^-^#i'm going to have to find some songs and write something at some point probably #anyway sleep time #this is nearly 2000 words guys #im putting my highschool english essay skills to very good use

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shipmistress9 · 3 years

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FTLOAP: Interlude 7: Secrets And Plans

For The Love Of A Princess Masterpost

Alpha/Co-author: @athingofvikings

Taglist: @drchee5e @hey-its-laura-again @thepixiedustfactory

AN: Originally, I'd wanted to post this update on my birthday last week. But that didn't work out, too much RL chaos. Ah, well, have the update now. ^^Another interlude? you may wonder.

Yep, it's another interlude. And not the last one coming during the next chapters. There are a lot of things happening behind the main viewpoint of Hiccup and Astrid, and they need attention. This one contains some hints that are important to me. And I finally got around to write some Dagret fluff. :D

Also, many people commented guesses about what's happened there to Hiccup at the end of the previous chapter. I'm sorry, but we're not returning directly to Hiccup here, so you still won't get an answer. All I can say is... that so far, nobody guessed right. O:) Also, there's a hint I gave on the ATOV-Discord server, so it only seems fair to give it here, too. I might be pulling a WIMTBC here...

Read on AO3

. o O o .

???

His steps echoed off the empty corridors, hard and deafening. He had to hold himself back from outright running toward his goal. It wouldn’t be appropriate for a man of his rank. But even worse, such a run would surely draw the attention of a guard or servant, and secrecy was vital to his every action.

But, oh, he couldn’t wait to get back to his private room! The piece of paper he carried hidden in his inner pocket seemed to weigh as much as a millstone, seemed hot like a coal, burning a hole right into his skin. If anyone knew about this message…

But no. Who was left to notice, anyway? A smug smile tugged at his lips. As much as he loathed the latest developments, they’d still given him the perfect excuse.

Once he’d reached his room, he narrowed his eyes at the servant hustling about. The young woman was only cleaning dust, but still. That was more company than he was comfortable with at this moment.

“Thank you, but that is enough for today. You may leave now,” he dismissed her in a composed voice.

The young woman looked up in surprise, then hastily bowed. “As you wish, your Grace.”

He wandered over to where a carafe of wine stood, and poured himself a glass, watching the serving girl from the corner of his eyes. He put on a show of not paying her any attention as she left, but as soon as the door closed behind her, he placed the glass back onto the sideboard, the wine untouched. This was not the time to cloud his mind with a drink.

Impatiently, he rushed over to where a fire was burning in the hearth, low but consistent, and threw a fresh log in. Then he pulled out the piece of paper from his pocket. It was small, the writing clipped.

“We agree with your assessment of the situation. D.M. has outlived their usefulness. You may dispose of them however you please.”

A satisfied grin spread across his face. Finally! Content with the content of this message, he went to get the glass of wine from earlier and watched as the note burned to nothing but ash in the hearth. This person had been a thorn in his side for years on end, but now, he could finally use his influence to do something about that. Their days were numbered.

. o O o .

Dagur

Dagur tried to be as gentle as possible, he really did. Even so, he couldn’t prevent Eret from hissing and wincing at nearly every motion. And he felt sorry for it, he really did! He didn’t want to cause his boyfriend pain, not like this, at least. But most of all, he just found it hilarious.

“I can’t remember you ever being so whiny,” he said in a cheerful voice as he applied the healing salve Fishlegs had given him for the wound on Eret’s chest.

Eret grunted. “I wouldn’t be complaining if you were just a little more careful,” he threw back, but Dagur didn’t buy his overly offended attitude.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” he replied. “I mean, come on! Do you remember the brawl we once started? In that little tavern in the middle of nowhere?”

“You mean the brawl you started,” Eret threw in, but Dagur opted not to listen to him, lost in fond memories.

“And do you remember how that coward called over some twenty of his friends because he didn’t want to face us both? Okay, maybe one against two wasn’t exactly fair, but… twenty? Talk about fairness.” He cackled. Oh, that day had been fun.

Eret rolled his eyes. “But you remember they didn’t actually beat us up, right?”

“They didn’t?” Dagur’s brows furrowed. “Huh. I could have sworn I woke up the next day with a pretty mean headache. Didn’t someone smash a bottle on my head?”

Now, Eret chuckled. “Yeah, you woke up with a headache alright. But not because we lost a fight. One of them eventually realised who we were, then they apologised and every single one of them insisted on ordering a drink for us. And while I was sensible enough to quit after four or five beers, you insisted on drinking them all, mine included. Hence the headache.”

Dagur frowned, but then just shrugged. This didn’t line up with his memories… but he couldn’t say he had anything to dispute Eret’s version, either. However, ultimately, he didn’t care either way. “Whatever,” he said cheerfully. “That’s not the point, anyway. The point is, that you’re awfully whiny, and this wound isn’t even that bad. When did you become such a wimp? Or…” An insinuating grin spread across his face. “Or is it just that you enjoyed it more when it was Hiccup tending to your wound? He sure seems to have some gentle hands.”

At that, Eret laughed. “Wasn’t it you who made joking comments about how he might end up with Hiccup if Swanja and I were to get married? I think I recall hearing something like that. And it didn’t sound too sorry, either.”

“Eh,” Dagur waved Eret’s words off, knowing it was nothing but lighthearted banter, anyway. "Well, I won’t deny that Hiccup is cute in his own way. I mean, Thor, that boy has an ass! Wait… did I say that out loud? Ah, whatever… Yeah, he’s cute, but he’s not my type.” He threw Eret a wink, which made him fondly roll his eyes in return. “But back to the point! I can’t remember you ever being so whiny when he tended to your wound, and this time, I was sober. Mostly.”

Suddenly, a smirk played around Eret’s lips, making Dagur cock his head in curiosity. “Maybe I was just hoping you’d put in the extra effort and kiss it better.” He peered up at Dagur, a twinkle in his eyes.

Dagur laughed. “Oh, all right. I see.”

Without warning, he jumped onto the bed, tackling Eret and pressing him down into the sheets. Play-fighting and wrestling for positions was always great foreplay, and also this was an excellent test of how sturdy the bed was. If it couldn’t hold up with them, they were better to replace it now instead of in the middle of the night.

Eret grunted as if in complaint, but didn’t really resist and even placed his hands on Dagur’s upper arms, rubbing over the fabric of his tunic to feel the muscles beneath.

“If this is what you want…”

Dagur shifted until he was straddling Eret’s hip, and with a grin leaned down to kiss the skin around Eret’s wound. He was more gentle than their usual energetic making out, but Eret seemed to appreciate it. He was humming, the rumbling in his chest pleasant against Dagur’s lips, and he placed his hands on Dagur’s shoulders, caressing, feeling him.

Content with the slower pace for once, Dagur enjoyed this form of treating Eret’s wound far more for a while before he eventually moved further down. His lips found a pert nipple, circling around it teasingly before they closed around it in some fun mixture of a kiss, a bite, and suckling.

“Nng, Dagur,” Eret groaned. His hands grew tense around his shoulders, fingers digging deeper in obvious longing.

“You all right there, Chippy?” Dagur mouthed against Eret’s skin, grinning when he felt something poke against his thigh.

Before Eret could reply, however, a knock came from the door, making them both groan in annoyance.

“That’s got to be the food Hiccup ordered to be brought here for us,” Eret muttered. He rubbed his face, then reached for his tunic after Dagur had climbed off him.

Dagur waited until he was dressed again—even as he internally bemoaned not being allowed to ogle his half-naked lover any longer—then opened the door. Just like Eret had predicted, it was a servant carrying a heavy-looking tray with three portions of roasted meat and vegetables.

“Your meals, Sirs. Hopefully, they will be to your liking,” the boy said cheerfully. There was a hint of awe on his face. It was an expression Dagur had become used to, even as he couldn’t understand where the fuss about his person was coming from. He might have gotten born into an important position, but that didn’t mean he was automatically special.

“Also, the inn-keeper wanted me to ask whether the accommodations are to your satisfaction,” the boy went on.

Dagur had to suppress a smirk. It would have been way more satisfying if you hadn’t interrupted us, he thought to himself. Outwardly, he nodded and gave the boy a—hopefully—easy smile. “Aye, everything is all right. Thank you.”

The boy nodded, awkwardly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, but then excused himself.

The food turned out to be surprisingly good. Not as well-seasoned as the meals they’d got at the castle over the past months, but still better than what he’d expected. Which was good. They had to eat enough to cover for Hiccup’s absence, after all. But then, how much would a scrawny guy like him eat?

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” he asked a little while later, chewing on the last bite of tender meat from Hiccup’s plate.

With a slight grimace, Eret put down his fork and sighed. “I hope so,” he muttered. “If it doesn’t, if this plan doesn’t work… then I don’t know what to do anymore.”

For a moment, those words dampened Dagur’s mood as well. Yeah… If they couldn’t get Hiccup into a position where he was eligible for Swanja, then she would have to marry Eret after all. The thought on its own didn’t hurt as much as it did in the beginning. Strategically, Eret and Swanja would still make a good match, he could admit that much. And the reminder that his and Eret’s relationship couldn’t last had only made him appreciate this small reprieve even more.

But for Swanja… If she and Hiccup couldn’t be together, then it would break her, break both of them; the past weeks had shown that clearly enough. And watching her wilt and die inside would be so much worse than to eventually give up on Eret. For one, he was prepared. For the other? Never!

But then, sitting here and brooding wouldn’t do anyone any good.

“Eh, I bet he’s already found one of those beasts and is just about to build a trap or something. He’s smart. And motivated.”

Eret snorted, a weak smile tugging at his lips. “That’s certainly true. And I don’t really have doubts, you know? If there’s anyone who can pull this off, it’s that stubborn idiot of a Haddock. I just wish… I don’t know, I wish we’d already be back and everything’s clear. I want these uncertainties to be over.”

“Ah, but that’s life.” Dagur leaned back in his chair, a wide grin on his face. “If you already knew how everything turns out… where would be the fun in that?”

Eret snorted, but shook his head. “As much as I agree; in this, I wouldn’t mind a little less excitement.”

Dagur threw his boyfriend a thoughtful look, then jumped up on his feet and sauntered over toward him. “Maybe it’s just that this is the wrong kind of excitement.”

With a wide grin, he sat down on Eret’s lap. It made the chair groan beneath their combined weight, but Dagur couldn’t care less. Wasn’t that what people expected of them? For the high lords to trash their rooms and pay handsomely to cover it up? Surely some people thought like that, right? Better not disappoint them.

“I have an idea,” he purred into Eret’s ear. “How about we accept that there’s nothing left for us to do but wait, and make the best of it? And if you keep worrying… well, I can be very distracting, you know?”

He ground down against where he could feel Eret’s cock through his trousers, quickly growing hard in excitement. And at first, he thought he’d been convincing enough to persuade Eret so he would let go of his worries. His large hands landed on Dagur’s hips, bucking up against him as their lips met in a searing kiss. The same strength that on other occasions could reign in even the wildest of horses now held him tight, helping him move as breathing and thinking became secondary.

“We should… nnng, fuck! We should get to the bed or this chair is going to be nothing but firewood in a minute.”

There! He could be sensible. Sometimes.

But as proud as he was of this fact, in the next moment he already regretted having said anything.

Eret grunted, something like a pressed laugh, then used his strength to hold him still instead. “Actually, we should take care of a few other things before we get carried away like this.”

“No, no, no. Moving over to the bed is enough sensibility for now. Everything else can wait.”

Now, Eret laughed for real and even leaned up to kiss Dagur once again. “Mmh, I know why I love you,” he hummed, but then sighed regretfully. “But as much as I’d like to go along with this plan of yours… I know where these usually lead us. And without Hiccup being around, we need to take care of our horses. We can’t let some unassuming grooms risk their lives feeding Crusher or Squish now, can we?”

Grudgingly, Dagur had to agree. “Okay, fine,” he grumbled, and pushed himself back up on his own legs. He held his hand out to help Eret up as well. “Let’s get that over and done with and then—”

He broke off when Eret grabbed his arm but then grunted, his face twisting into a pained grimace and his free hand flying to his injured chest.

“Oooor... how about I go and take care of the horses while you stay here and rest. No, no talking back here,” he said as he put his hand over Eret’s mouth when he attempted to object. “I can do that, okay? And I’d rather have you not constantly in pain afterwards. Now, shush! Lie down. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Not giving Eret the chance to object, he turned and left the room without a pause. As he got to the door, he rolled his eyes a little as Eret called a reminder to be cautious with the horses. Of course, he would be cautious! He could be responsible—if he wanted to. Maybe he would never be like Eret who always had the well-being of those depending on him at the forefront of his mind, but he could try. He had to…

Once in the corridor outside their rooms, Dagur cursed under his breath. Too soon, he chided himself. He at least should have waited for his erection to go down again. Well, it couldn’t be helped now. He would not go back in there and admit his mistake. He could just wait here, right?

Sighing, he leaned against the wooden wall. He really wasn’t good at this, was he? At being responsible and all that? There was no doubt in him that, one day, Eret would become a great leader to his House, no matter how much his grandfather, the old goat, complained. He was smart, reliable, sincere. He truly cared for those around him and surely was going to work hard to do whatever was necessary to make the life of his people better. He always knew what to do.

Dagur, however? He wasn’t like that. His father had never voiced even the slightest complaint, but Dagur knew. He knew that he would be a poor leader at best. It wasn’t that he didn’t want this kind of responsibility. He would just never live up to it. If there was just any other way, he’d abdicate and leave the title and responsibility to someone else, anyone else.

Except that the only other candidate was Heather’s unborn child.

With a suppressed groan, he let his head thump against the wall. Yeah, if there was anyone else… But he would not take away his sister’s baby. He’d given his promise, and there was no way he would ever break it. No, he just had to do his best and hope that it proved to be enough.

If only the stupid law would allow for one of his siblings to take his place. There was no doubt at all that they were their father’s children, his blood. And especially Aren, who was only short of a year younger than Dagur, would be a much better choice. As a Prestr of Odin, he was studying politics and strategy, and in general was so much better at ordinary things like just plain dealing with people. Or keeping his temper...

Dagur let out another sigh. At least Aren had agreed to become his advisor one day. So there was hope that Dagur wouldn’t ruin the entire Grand Dukedom within a year.

“Well, at least these gloomy thoughts served one purpose…” he muttered to himself, glancing down along his body. He pushed himself off the wall and finally headed for the inn’s stables where the grooms welcomed him with a mixture of surprise and relief.

“Sir Dagur! You’re already here, good,” one of the younger grooms exclaimed as he grabbed his arm and pulled him along. It made Dagur smile; the carefree straightforwardness of the boy was refreshing. “With all the visitors that are coming, we wanted to move your horses to other, more secluded boxes, just like Sir Eret had suggested. But we couldn’t find his squire anywhere, and—”

“It’s all right, I’ll help there,” Dagur interrupted him. “Sir Eret’s squire is taking a well-deserved break, better leave him to it.” Eventually, people would notice Hiccup’s absence, but it couldn’t hurt to cover up his departure for as long as possible.

He followed the boy to where Crusher and Squish stood next to each other, and with the usual combination of cooing and humming, he entered Squish’s stall without any complications.

“Right, buddy, it’s just me,” he murmured, and patted his neck as the large stallion greeted him with a nudge to his chest. He wasn’t sure whether making those noises was even necessary for him anymore or whether Squish recognised him by now without them, but he rather stayed on the safer side. “We’re going to move you to another stall, somewhere where it’s a little quieter. How does that sound?”

Squish gave a snort as if in agreement which made Dagur chuckle. Calmed down now, it only took a few minutes to guide him to the other stall, where Dagur left him with an additional apple as a treat.

“Don’t go in there unless there’s no other option,” he warned the grooms. “Better get me or Sir Eret… or his squire. He didn’t get the nickname Squish for nothing.” Suppressing a grin at the almost scared looks on the boys’ faces, he walked back to get Crusher as well. This wasn’t so hard, he pondered as he opened the black stallion’s stall, again cooing at him to keep him calm. See, he could be responsible when the situation called for it. These were only two horses and not an entire Grand Dukedom, but still. He could do this!

Dagur realised his mistake too late.

He heard the apprehensive gasps from the grooms behind him and even saw how Crusher moved restlessly as he entered the stall. But, too sure of himself and his skills, he hadn’t paid it any mind. After all, he knew the noises to calm these horses by heart by now.

Except that those didn’t work on Crusher.

It happened in the blink of an eye and Dagur barely caught any of it. Crusher whinnied, the grooms shouted, and pain exploded in his right foot. It raced up his leg, momentarily rendering him blind, unoriented. He didn’t even know how he’d made it out of the stall.

There were screams around him, calls for a healer. People were running around everywhere. Dagur only registers it throughout a weird haze as every time he tried to get up and tell them he was fine, a fresh wave of pain washed through him and let black spots explode behind his eyes.

“Oh, by Odin’s balls, how did that happen?”

Eret’s voice. Dagur would recognise it everywhere.

“Wrong noise,” he pressed through gritted teeth. He wondered when someone had sent for Eret or how he’d got here so quickly, but didn’t really care either way.

Eret snorted. He was careful as he cut Dagur’s boot open, but it still hurt.

“That doesn’t look good.”

Another voice. Dagur blinked up and saw a woman in the robes of Freya’s order. Her face looked younger than her greying hair made her seem to be.

“I saw what happened,” a young boy volunteered. One of the grooms, presumably.

“Good, Jimmy. I’m listening,” the Gythia said in a calm but clipped voice as she knelt down by Dagur’s foot. Slim hands touched him, gently, but it still made Dagur hiss in pain.

“The black stallion didn’t grow calm like the buckskin earlier. He grew even more restless when the Lord went in, and then stomped on his foot.”

“Crushed is more accurate,” the Gythia muttered.

Dagur cackled, a little hysterically. “Made good on his name then.” Wow, did that hurt!

“This is not funny, Dag,” Eret grunted, and kneeled down on his other side. “How bad is it?”

The Gythia sighed. “There are at least three broken tarsal bones. We’ll bring him to my house so I can put a cast on it as well as give him something against the pain, but…” She bit her lip, then shook her head. “I don’t know if I’m fit to treat such an injury correctly; those bones are small and hard to set.”

“Aye. Sadly, it’s a fairly routine injury among horsemen,” Eret said, frowning. “If he doesn’t get them set right, he might need a cane for the rest of his life.”

“You’re probably right there, milord. All I can say is that he needs to rest his foot now. No putting weight on it at all, for two or three weeks, maybe more. And the best bonesetter you can call for.”

“We should bring him back to Oramond then,” Eret said. “I know that my House has healers experienced with this injury.”

She nodded. “I agree. Jimmy, go and tell Gordan to get a stretcher ready. Can you gather what he needs, sir?”

Eret nodded in confirmation, then the Gythia hurried away, probably to do some preparations or something.

“I really can’t leave you alone for even ten minutes, eh?” Eret murmured.

Dagur let out a chuckle through gritted teeth. “Just imagine how boring your life would be without me.”

“Sometimes, I wouldn’t mind a little boredom.”

Again, Dagur chuckled. He knew how to take this comment. “Well, you’ll get your wish. I hope the next few days will be sufficiently uneventful now.” He paused, then added more quietly. “I’m sorry. I thoroughly ruined these days for us, didn’t I?”

Eret gave him a small but true smile and said in a low voice, “I don’t know. Generally, you just make everything better for me.” Then, before Dagur could reply anything to that sudden outburst of sappiness, he stood up. “Make sure to stay off that foot, you hear me? This is serious, okay? Be careful or you might end up having problems with it for the rest of your life. So be a good patient and let the healer do her work, and I’ll go and gather our things.”

Dagur accepted the advice as serious, but perked up in surprise at Eret’s last words. “You’re what now?”

“Well, I’m not staying here all alone with nothing to do when you need help with that injury.”

Dagur’s lips twitched into a smile, and if he hadn’t been in love with this idiot already, he most certainly would be now. But then, he shook his head. “As much as I appreciate the thought... you have to stay here. Just think about how much it would fuel the rumours about us.”

“You know that I really don’t care about these rumours, right?” Eret scoffed.

Dagur nodded. “I know, and neither do I. But you know as well as I do that they won’t make your lives easier in the long run. So think about it from the other side. If we separate now and you stay here, that would quench at least some suspicions. Besides,” he went on before Eret could protest. “If you leave now, Hiccup’s absence will become obvious immediately. But he needs the head-start. You have to stay here, if only to cover for him and to wait for his return.”

Eret’s mouth was already parted, ready to object. But instead of saying anything, he closed it again, lips pressed together, and shook his head. “By Frigga’s piercing glare, since when are you the responsible one here?” He chuckled at Dagur’s triumphant grin, then let out a heavy sigh. “You’re right, though. I have to stay. But when you go back anway, will you look after Swanja? To keep her company. That is, if you can.” He gestured at the swollen foot, but Dagur refused to look at it. If he ignored it, the pain was almost bearable. “I fear she’ll have a tough time getting through these days.”

Grimacing, Dagur nodded “Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll have an eye on her. Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.”

. o O o .

In the day since his accident, Dagur had been hauled back to Oramond on a stretcher slung between two horses, which had been ‘fun’. He was of the opinion that it was probably a great way to train sailors against seasickness, especially when the village Gythia’s potions against the pain had worn off. Once he was back in Oramond, he’d had his bones set—a ludicrously painful process, to say the least— and now had a cast made of flour and egg whites wrapped around his foot and calf, reinforced with birch rods.

As he was made to sit and wait for his cast to dry, his father kept him company. He didn’t say much, just sat in a chair next to him and had a weirdly satisfied expression on his face. It irked Dagur to think about the reason, even as it was a welcome distraction against the pain.

“Glad to see my misfortune makes you so happy, father,” he grumbled between pressed teeth. Who would have thought that a stupid foot could hurt so much? “But I shouldn’t be surprised. This way, I at least can’t cause any skandal, eh?”

His father measured him with a long and thoughtful look. Then he sighed and stood up to place a hand on Dagur’s shoulder. “I care about you, son, so I don’t like seeing you in pain. And given our family—” his face twitched into something between a smile and grimace. “—you should know that I also don’t care much about gossip or scandals. Emotions are not something we can always control or direct, so as long as you don’t let them influence your duties and responsibilities, I don’t have issues with who you love.”

Dagur lowered his gaze and pressed his lips together. This was the first time his father acknowledged in any way that he knew about him and Eret, and his reaction was far better than what he’d anticipated. But still, the reminder of his responsibilities stung.

“Anyway,” his father went on. “This is not why I’m glad you’re back again. It simply means… that you’re safe. There are far too many hidden knives out there for my taste...” He squeezed his shoulder again and then turned to leave, not pausing even as Dagur called after him.

Some hours later, he was still thinking about the meaning of those words. Hidden knives usually meant assassins. But… whose assassins were they if his father knew about them but also was worried about his safety? It made no sense…

After the cast was finally dry, he’d badgered the healers into giving him some crutches. They’d dithered, but eventually had given in after his father had given his permission. So long as he accepted a minder, who was a middle-aged Temple lay sister who was clearly wanting to make sure a ducal heir didn’t get more banged up under her supervision.

Grumpily, Dagur maneuvered the crutches and hobbled along the hallway to the rooms where Astrid was quartered here in Oramond. His foot itched, which the Gythia here said was a good sign. But it itched. Still, with at least some of his mobility back, he was going to fulfill his promise to Eret and check in on Astrid... and to give himself something to think about other than the throbbing pain radiating up his leg.

Upon his minder’s knock, his own hands occupied with the crutches, he could hear voices inside, one female which clearly was Ruff and one male which belonged to… Snot? Confused, he waited until the door opened and Ruff’s face appeared in the narrow gap.

“The Princess welcomes no visitors. You better—” Ruff’s eyes grew wide as she recognised him, then a worried expression crossed her face. “Dagur? What are you doing here? What— Did something happen?” She opened the door a little wider, glanced around, and then hurriedly ushered him in after making his minder wait outside, ready to escort him back to his room.

Even more confused—had she not heard that he’d been injured? The servants’ gossip was usually much faster than that!—Dagur manoeuvred himself inside, then stopped in bewilderment when he spotted Snot sitting by a low table at the side of the room, also looking surprised.

“Snot, you’ve really got to leave now,” Ruff ordered in a stern voice. “Get it into your head, Astrid won’t receive you. And I have no patience to chat with you, either.”

Given the history between these two, Dagur wasn’t surprised at the hurt expression on Snot’s face. Ruff’s rejections had always stung him more than those of others.

“No, I’m not leaving,” he grunted stubbornly, even crossed his arms in front of him and settled back on the cushioned sofa he was sitting on. “I want to know what games you’re all playing. I have just as much right to know as he does.”

Dagur grimaced. What he had to tell was not something Snot couldn’t know about. But he would have to be careful not to accidentally spill Astrid’s and Hiccup’s secret.

However, his own reluctance was nothing against what he spotted on Ruff’s face. Her expression grew more and more desperate, her movements fidgety. Why was she so nervous?

“I’m back because I got injured,” Dagur began, indicating toward his bandaged foot. He hoped to ease the tension at least a little. “Horse stomped my foot, my fault. But since I’m back here anyway, I thought I could update Swanja on… on her husband-to-be’s current state.”

Snot snorted. “What, did you bring love letters from Eret? Come on, you really don’t have to keep up that act for my sake. Besides, they’ve only seen each other yesterday morning, even for pretend yearning, that’s a little too thick, don’t you think? Besides, good luck with getting past Ruff. ‘The Princess doesn’t receive visitors’ is all she’s been saying all day.”

Dagur threw Ruff a measuring glance. Snot being so far off the mark was funny, in a way, but he didn’t miss how tense and uncomfortable Ruff was. And somehow, Dagur doubted that was merely because of her former lover’s presence.

“Is everything okay with Swanja?” he asked cautiously. “Is she hurt? Sick? Is there anything we can do for her?”

“She looked fine to me when I spotted her taking a stroll through the gardens earlier,” Snot muttered. “But even then, Tuff wouldn’t let me near her.”

Ruff grunted. “Sure, she’s fine. You can go now. Both of you!”

Dagur narrowed his eyes. He was too used to this tone from her and her brother. It always meant that they were hiding something, and in this case, it was probably more than just evidence of yet another prank.

“Argh, you’re getting on my nerves.” She threw her hands up in annoyance and stomped back towards the entry door. “As I said, she’s not receiving any visitors. Now, go.”

“Ruff?” Dagur growled, alarmed now. “What happened? I get her annoyance with random visitors, but why would she not even want to see me? Why would you not even ask her?”

Her expression grew even more tense. Her eyes darted from him to Snot and back again, both who were glaring at her with the same stubbornness. Whatever it was, Dagur would not leave until he knew what was happening here. And eventually, Ruff gave in.

“Oh, by Loki’s balls, I knew this wouldn’t work,” she cursed. She stood there with her hands balled into fists at her side and with her eyes screwed shut, as if waiting for the moment to pass by. Then she let out a deep sigh. “You have to swear, okay? Swear, that you won’t say a single word to anyone outside these rooms. Got it? Astrid’s life might depend on it.”

Alarmed, Dagur exchanged a quick glance with Snot, then they both nodded. Swanja’s safety was always a top priority for them.

Ruff hesitated for yet another moment, then went toward the door that led to the more private part of the suite. When she opened it, Tuff was the first to step through it.

“What did I say?” he exclaimed as he threw his hands up in the air. “This was a stupid idea. Completely hair-brained! And that means a lot coming from me!”

Dagur had to agree there, a bad feeling spreading in his stomach. Then someone else entered the room behind Tuff, and Dagur could do nothing but gape. With that elaborate dress and her blonde hair intricately braided around her head, she could have fooled him at a first glance.

But she was not Astrid.

. o O o .

Cami

(Three Days Earlier)

Curious as to why she’d been called to the Fyrir’s office, Cami greeted Mala with a light courtesy. “You wanted to see me?”

Mala waved for her to sit at a table in front of her. “I did. I just received a message from the castle, someone asking for your company.” She frowned. “And even though it came unexpectedly and on such short notice, I don’t think it would be wise to decline it without further consideration.”

“Oh?” Cami cocked her head. “What is it then? Which of the high lords is so bold as to request my company in the castle?” She smirked. She knew she was playing her role well, but this hadn’t happened so far.

However, Mala shook her head, bemused. “None. They explicitly asked for you, but I doubt they’re interested in your skills as an Ástir. Not directly, at least. Here, see for yourself.”

Mala handed Cami a letter and she started to read. Upon seeing the name written at the bottom though, she paled.

“Would you rather I decline the request?” Mala asked, one eyebrow raised as Cami looked up at her, the distress on her face obvious. “I can do that, for now at least. Offer another opportunity for a meeting, at another time, maybe?”

But Cami shook her head. “No, it’s all right. I’ll go immediately.” No matter what this was about, a delay wouldn’t help. Besides, the message contained a certain sense of urgency. As if something bad would happen if she didn’t respond.

“Very well. I’ll send for the stables; they’ll have a carriage ready for you.”

Only half an hour later, Cami reached the castle. And even though she wasn’t exactly scared, she still couldn’t help but wonder about this request. Why would the princess of all people send for her on such short notice? They’d only met a few times, and even though those had been pleasant enough, it wasn’t as if they were friends. Sure, it wasn’t uncommon for soon-to-be-brides to have this informative talk with a member of Freya’s Order, and maybe it even made sense that the princess summoned her specifically to have this conversation. But why now? Why in the middle of the night when everyone was trying to get a full night’s rest for the journey to Oramond in the morning?

Or... did she want to talk about something else entirely?

“Only one way to find out,” Cami muttered under her breath as she left the carriage.

The young man who’d delivered the princess’s message jumped off the coach box and waved her to follow him. “This way. We have to hurry. And if possible, make sure nobody sees you.”

Cami followed him with a frown, pulling the collar of her cloak tighter to somewhat hide her identity. What was happening here? Was this somehow about Hiccup and his involvement with the princess? Was she in trouble? But she’d already learned that questioning the princess’s servant had no use; he barely seemed to know more than she did.

They reached what had to be the family wing of the castle, with plush carpets covering the floor and paintings or tapestries on every wall. The man led her through the corridors in a hurry, nervously looking left and right, and then ushered her into what had to be the princess’s suite without even knocking.

Inside, Cami stopped by the doorway. In the middle of the lavish sitting room stood the princess, pristine and sublime as ever. From Eret, she knew that Princess Astrid wasn’t as stiff as people perceived her, that her cool front she showed at every public event was just that, a front. And the few times they’d met in person, Cami’s impression of the other woman had been similar, that she was kind and funny when in private. But right now, with how tense she stood there, eyes burning into Cami’s, she wasn’t so sure about that anymore.

A few tense seconds passed before the princess spoke.

“You know. Don’t you?”

Just those words. Cami bit her lip, nervously. Yes, she knew about a certain secret, about one that involved the princess and a certain squire. But right now, it didn’t feel safe to know about that. Was she going to get rid of Cami? To make sure the truth stayed hidden forever?

“I… I’m… I have no idea what you’re talking about, Your Royal Highness.”

The princess huffed in annoyance. “Oh, drop the act, and the title as well. We don’t have time for that.”

Gulping at her sharp tone, Cami reflexively bowed her head. “As you wish, Milady. But I don’t—”

The princess groaned, causing Cami to fall silent again. “I know that you know.” She looked at Cami with narrowed eyes. “About me and Hiccup. I know that he told you about us.”

So this was about Hiccup and his idiodic infatuation. Great! What had he got her into? But playing dumb wasn’t an option anymore. Taking a deep breath, Cami straightened, her eyes meeting those of the princess. “I do.”

The princess seemed to relax, her shoulders a little less tense now. “Good. Because I don’t have the time or patience to be vague. I need your help.”

Cami blinked. “My help?”

“Yes,” the princess said bluntly. “He told me how you always helped him, with information or to get away so we could meet. So I assume you’re not impartial toward him. I need your help to save him.”

“To save him?” Cami blurted out. “But… why? Is he in danger?”

Now that the princess apparently didn’t want to execute her after all, Cami felt a little more at ease around her. So this really was the woman Eret had told her about. And she had asked her to act normal. But it still felt surreal.

The princess hesitated, then gave a helpless shrug. “I think so, yes. I…” She paused, thinking, and then nodded as if to herself. “I really don’t have time, so I’ll be blunt. He’s going to partake in the Dragon Hunt, to earn himself a title so we can get married.”

Cami’s eyes grew wide.

“But I know he won’t make it alone. I can feel it!” She paused again, her hands balled into tight fists and her lips and eyes pressed shut. “I have to help him. So I’ll go after him, whether he wants it or not. But I don’t want the guards rushing after me as soon as they notice my absence. That would ruin everything. So… do you remember us joking about you taking my place now and then? That’s exactly what I need you to do now. My servants will do the major work, and you just have to be there. When visitors come to see me, let them see you from behind while my maidservant declines their request. Take a walk through the gardens while my warder keeps everyone at bay. Let them think I’m still there until we return.”

Unable to even blink, Cami could only gape at the princess. Was she serious? “You… you want to do what?” Eret had said that she liked being outdoors, but… she was still the princess! She couldn’t just… “Go out into the wilderness of the forest and hunt some elusive dragons?”

In the back of her mind, a tiny voice screamed at her to be cautious. For all of Freya’s love, she was still talking to the first lady of the entire kingdom.

Luckily, the princess didn’t seem to be angry though, and merely shrugged. “Into the swamplands, actually.”

“The swamps?” Cami shrieked, growing pale. “But… but that’s madness!” The swamps were no-man’s-land, dangerous, deadly. She couldn’t be serious!

“Maybe. But I don’t care.”

For a moment, Cami was speechless. The plan alone was pure insanity already, though the expression on the princess’s face was deadly serious, tense even. She was serious. But what baffled Cami even more was that she was willing to go to such length in the first place. And all that just… for Hiccup?

“You… would really do that?”

From one moment to the other, the princess’s features shifted into a soft smile, warm but distracted, her eyes cast unseeingly right through her. “For him? I’d do everything!” She paused, her lips twitching into a wider smile, as if she remembered something funny. But then she looked back at Cami again, sincerity radiating from her like a powerful wave. “Hiccup told me you don’t believe we share a true soulbond. I don’t have the time or energy to argue with you about that, believe what you wish. But I know it is real. Nothing will ever separate us. I will follow him. The question is just… Will you help me?”

Cami was reluctant to admit it, even just to herself, but she might have been wrong before. The princess clearly meant what she’d just said; she was set on going through with this mad plan of hers, whether Cami helped her out or not. But no matter whether this was just some intense form of first love infatuation or a true soulbond after all, the princess was right. What Cami believed was not important right now.

Right now, she had to make a decision. Logically, she should get away, alert the guards of the princess’s plan and do everything in her power to keep her safe. But… Someone—Princess Royal or not—had asked for her help, had placed great trust in her by even doing so. And a dear friend was in danger.

Cami squared her shoulders and gave a resolute nod. “Okay. What exactly do you need me to do?”

. o O o .

Dagur

(Present Time)

“And you just let her leave?!”

Dagur all but shouted, starring in utter disbelief at Cami and the twins.

“Hey, do you even know your so-called sister?” Ruff retorted, hands on her hips and a scowl on her face. “Do you know what she’s like when she’s set her head on something? Of course, we tried to talk her out of this. But you know how she feels about… her future husband. She would have left anyway, with or without our help. This way, she’s at least prepared and has some support.”

Dagur gritted his teeth but couldn’t help but see Ruff’s point. Deep down, he wasn’t even surprised Swanja had gone after Hiccup, not really. In hindsight, it was even obvious that she wouldn’t let him leave on his own. But by Thor’s balls, what was she thinking!

“I don’t get it,” came Snot’s confused voice from behind him. “Why would she go after Eret? No offence, but I didn’t expect her to feel that passionate about their wedding? And why out into the wilderness? Doesn’t she know that you and Eret would only travel as far as you need to and then enjoy your days off? Or… at least I assume that's what you’d planned?”

He threw a questioning look at Dagur, but he ignored it. Right. When Ruff and Cami had given them a brief account of Astrid’s plan, they’d been purposefully vague about who exactly she was following.

But what to tell Snot now was the least of his problems. He had to do something about Swanja, had to get her back here safely—and preferably, without anyone noticing she’d been gone in the first place. He hobbled over to a small writing desk and rummaged around for a pen and a sheet of paper.

“What are you doing?” Tuff looked at him with a bemused expression, his head cocked.

“Writing a message,” Dagur grunted. There are far too many hidden knives out there for my taste… Once again, his father’s words came to his mind. If what he’d hinted at was true, then… “We need to send someone after her. She can’t be out there on her own, it’s far too dangerous, especially now.”

Ruff snorted. “Good luck with that. She’s travelling disguised as a messenger.”

Groaning, Dagur let his shoulders slump. “Why… why would you do that?”

But Ruff just raised an eyebrow at him and he didn’t need an answer anyway. Because if she wanted to catch up to Hiccup she had to travel as fast as he did. Too bad that also meant she was already out of reach by now.

With a grim expression, he reached for the pen and ink and started to write.

“Uh, and what are you doing now? Didn’t you listen to what we just said?”

“I’ve got to send a messenger to Eret,” he muttered, pushing himself up on his crutches.

Tuff snorted. “Why? He won’t reach her anymore either.”

“I know. But he still needs to learn about this.”

Oh, what a mess!

. o O o .

Uh oh... Astrid, what have you gotten yourself in to? How does this relate to Hiccup? And who was that person in the beginning? What was that note about? So many questions... *hides under rocks*

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#FTLOAP #For The Love Of A Princess #Hiccstrid #fanfiction #httyd #Hiccstrid Royalty AU #Royalty AU #Medieval AU #Medieval Hiccstrid AU #Dagret #fluff #Interlude #my writing

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paperanddice · 3 years

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Image ID: Two pictures of game stat blocks for the bluespawn stormlizard. The first is for 5th Edition D&D and the second is for 13th Age. Full text is available below the read more. End ID.

Mucking with dragon eggs to cause them to hatch creatures besides dragons is a long running tradition among many powerful people and beings. Those who want servants generally wish to capture the power and might of a dragon, just in a more controllable and directable form. Dragonspawn are the result of this, and there are many kinds that have gone on to become independently breeding species after their creation, often outliving their creator eventually.

Formed from blue dragon eggs, stormlizards are the size of a horse but significantly wider and more muscular, with a single jagged horn protruding from its forehead. It looks like a wingless blue dragon, and channels the lightning that blue dragons are famous for through its horn rather than exhaling it the way true dragons do. They have animal levels of intelligence and awareness, though nearly all can understand basic words in Draconic. This doesn’t mean they’ll listen to or obey such words without a lot of training, but they can at least be communicated with in some way.

Stormlizards are always born as twins, and these twins are deeply bonded for the entire rest of their lives. While they can channel their electric link with any stormlizard, they prefer doing so with their twin whenever possible, and anyone who wishes to train and raise stormlizards must do so in these pairs. If separated they become first exceptionally violent, then eventually listless and depressed. The only way to split a twin pair is immediately after birth before they’ve imprinted on each other, and doing so properly can shift this imprint onto the trainer or an intended future rider, but it’s a risky act. The stormlizard may not properly learn how to harness its innate lightning and unless the bonded creature is immune to lightning they will be bombarded with bursts as the stormlizard seeks to share the energy within it with its bonded “twin.”

Originally from the 3.5 Monster Manual IV. This post came out a week ago on my Patreon. If you want to get access to all my monster conversions early, as well as a spot on the Paper and Dice Discord server, consider backing me there!

5th Edition

Dragon worshipping cults tend to create dragonspawn, and stormlizards are used as war mounts by such groups on rare occasion. Tiamat herself passes down the method of creating these dragonspawn, as they have such great use for her humanoid followers, and some blue dragons will give up eggs for such a purpose.

Bluespawn Stormlizard Large dragon, unaligned Armor Class 16 (natural armor) Hit Points 149 (13d10 + 78) Speed 40 ft. Str 19 (+4) Dex 9 (-1) Con 22 (+6) Int 2 (-4) Wis 14 (+2) Cha 8 (-1) Damage Immunities lightning Damage Resistances thunder Senses darkvision 60 ft. passive Perception 12 Languages understands Draconic but can't speak Challenge 6 (2300 XP) Blue Dragon’s Blessing. Each creature of the stormlizard's choice within 15 feet of it gains resistance to lightning damage. Charge. If the stormlizard moves at least 20 feet straight toward a target and then hits it with a gore attack on the same turn, the target takes an extra 18 (4d8) piercing damage. If the target is a creature, it must succeed on a DC 15 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone. Actions Multiattack. The stormlizard makes one gore attack and uses Electric Link if possible. Gore. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8+4) piercing damage. Electric Arc (Recharge 5-6). The stormlizard fires a bolt of lightning from its horn in a 100-foot long line that is 5 feet wide. Each creature in that line must make a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw, taking 21 (6d6) lightning damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. Electric Link. The stormlizard forms a line of lightning between itself and another stormlizard it can see within 100 feet. The line is 5 feet wide.. Each creature in that line must succeed on a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw or take 10 (3d6) lightning damage.

13th Age

The Blue created the first stormlizards, and has integrated them into the defenses of Drakenhall. Pairs of stormlizard riders patrol the city, threatening sparks of lightning reminding what happens to those who displease the city’s ruler.

Bluespawn Stormlizard Large 3rd-level leader [dragon] Initiative: +5 Vulnerability: Force Heavy Gore +7 vs. AC - 10 damage Furious Charge: This attack instead deals 25 damage if the stormlizard first moves before attacking an enemy it was not engaged with at the start of its turn. The stormlizard cannot make a lightning link attack if it deals this increased damage. Natural Even Hit or Miss: The stormlizard can make a lightning link attack as a free action. [Special Trigger] C: Lightning Link +7 vs. PD (1d3 nearby enemies between the stormlizard and another stormlizard) - 8 lightning damage Blue Dragon’s Blessing: 1/turn the stormlizard can give one nearby ally resist lightning 12+ until the end of the stormlizard’s next turn. Occasional Escalator: At the start of the battle, roll a d6 for each stormlizard in the battle. All stormlizards in the battle can add the escalation die to their attack rolls when it is at each of the numbers rolled. Doubles give no additional benefit. Resist Lightning 14+. AC 18 PD 17 MD 13 HP 110

#DnD #D&D #Dungeons and Dragons #5th Edition #13th Age #homebrew #my homebrew #monster #dragon

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beautifulterriblequeen · 4 years

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Breaking and unmaking

I’m stretching my Druids -> Assassins headcanon a little further today.

So far, I’m enjoying the epic angst that comes with assassins being blood-promise-bound to their duty for the last 1000 years, because the Oath of Féanor is one of my favorite disasters from the Silmarillion. But that means that even if Runaan is freed from his coin prison, he’s still bound to his duty. He’s not free enough yet.

S4 and S5 were hinted to contain some history to help give us a better look at exactly how everyone got to where they are in the present day. I know I’ve posted about hoping that Janai and Amaya work together to find out the Orphan Queen’s/Queen Aditi’s/Harrow’s ancestor’s secrets. I don’t have a strong opinion on how that all plays out, but I would love to watch them work together and learn stuff!

So, what if we get something like this for teaching us Moonshadow history: Rayla does find Runaan’s coin, but with his arm still bound, and him bound to his blood promise (maybe the same thing, maybe not), if he’s released, he’ll die. She can free Lain and Tiadrin--if she and Callum can learn how to--because her parents are not bound by a failed mission the way Runaan is, even if they are/were assassins and did give the Dragon Queen a blood promise, too. This will leave Runaan as the only elf trapped beyond reach.

Gosh, that seems familiar....

Okay, so this is Rayla we’re talking about. She just crossed half the continent to return a baby dragon during an actual war. If she realizes that Runaan is either going to 1) be trapped forever or 2) die if he’s freed, which will she want to pick?

Door #3. Runaan might be fatalistic enough to accept freedom just so he can die in Ethari’s arms, but Ethari wouldn’t want that if there were another way, and neither would Rayla. So: Rayla’s gonna rip up the 1000-year-old blood promise. And that means first learning the full history of the Moonshadow elves because someone didn’t pay attention in history class! which might be partly classified, partly lost, and partly hidden. Moonshadows be like. She’d quest as far as she needed to in order to save Runaan, but see... this quest isn’t just for him anymore. If all the assassins in the Moonshadow Forest are bound to this blood promise the way that he is, then none of them have ever truly been free. Maybe this is how Rayla saves her people, in a way Runaan never could.

She’s a hero, and that’s what heroes do. They save people. People.

But maybe she won’t be breaking that promise, exactly... maybe she can just unwrite it somehow. Balance it out. I’m not sure what that would look like, but it could take three very special components that were present during the initial oathmaking: 1) the blood of a Moonshadow assassin: Rayla. She keeps calling herself an assassin. Might be a clan thing, not a matter of actually taking a life?

2) the Moon Archdragon Luna Tenebris. Please let Rayla go on a dragon quest! lhfksdfhihfis That would be the coolest thing ever! Why haven’t we heard a peep out of Luna Tenebris, or even learned if she’s still alive or not? She’s definitely important somehow. Her reign lasted from the division of Xadia--aka the Merciful Compromise that split the land--until the Fallen Star. Those are some serious bookends.

3) a Moon primal stone. You’ve noticed that there are two different Moon primal staffs. The gathering from 1000 years ago, before the Border was carved, shows a Moonshadow elf holding a staff shaped like a shillelagh--a traditional druidic weapon.

But 300 years ago the leading Moonshadow elf has a different staff. Taller, more commanding, bearing a big stylized Moon rune, and looking a lot like Runaan’s chest marking, handle and all. Instead of a shillelagh, this staff resembles a sickle--another druidic handheld. Its larger cousin is a scythe.

Did they rework the staff? Possibly. If so, it’s probably to reflect the Moonshadow elves’ change in status, moving eastward and joining the Sunfire elves in active defense of Right Xadia,

But maybe that first primal stone is busy spinning some very big spells. I have two guesses what they might be, and there’s no reason they can’t both be going at the same time. ahaha Moonshadow duality Maybe it’s running the blood promise that binds all of the assassins to their word on pain of death. Maybe it’s running Aaravos’s ghost program on a dedicated primal server.

Maybe breaking the blood promise will break the mirror spell on Aaravos’s prison. Wouldn’t that be interesting! Rayla having to choose to free everyone, or no one.

tl;dr: Maybe the Moonshadow elves we see today aren’t quite the heartless monsters we’ve kinda been suspecting, insta-ghosting each other and hating humans and all. Maybe they’re victims of their ancestors’ oath, just in a different way than the humans the assassins take. And if the blood promise can be undone, then they can all be free again. No more assassins, no more killings.

And now for the angsty side:

Ir Rayla’s questing to make it safe for Runaan to return to the world of the living, that means Runaan’s gotta stay in the coin until it’s safe to come out.

Ughhhh. If something like this has to happen, and if it does mean Runaan and Ethari can’t kiss and reunite properly, then I really hope they can talk somehow, and that Runaan can at least tell everyone what he knows and all his thoughts and anything important he wants to say. In fact, I would like it if he couldn’t shut up for a while. He can’t use his Moonshadow stealth language and just touch people from inside the coin, so he’s gotta use that lovely voice. Aww. Can you imagine Ethari curled up with his precious coin in his fingers and Runaan’s just spilling his heart to him? Fifteen or twenty years of words that he’s saved up, spilling out in case things don’t work out and they don’t get another chance? God.

And some further angst that I realized had to go along with this headcanon: if Lain and Tiadrin swore the blood promise too, it makes a little more sense why they’d go to the Storm Spire to guard Zym’s egg. Devon said in the Deluxe Elf Interview that little Rayla couldn’t understand how parents would have a bigger priority than her, and yeah, that’s rough. But if it’s a sacred blood promise that’s holding them... they kinda can’t say no. And if the blood promise takes you out if you fail in your duty... well. That explains Runaan’s emotional lockdown, yeah?

He thought Lain and Tiadrin had run... and then perished. He thought they were dead. His dearest friends. Their honor and their lives, gone in one fell swoop. It caught him completely off guard because he trusted them so much. No wonder he got all eyeshimmery when he saw them in the coin. They were alive! Yay! And they were trapped! Boo! And they never broke their promise! Yay! And the village ghosted them for no reason! Boo!

Speaking of the village... if the assassins uphold the honor of the whole Moonshadow race by serving the dragons according to their oath--if the whole Moonshadow identity of stoic service is tied up in that blood promise--then of course the village ghosted Lain and Tiadrin. The sacred oath guides their entire culture, their values, it dominates their history. They’d yeet themselves as far away from such a breach of the ancient trust as they could. They all wanna be the Sworn, never the Forsworn.

They’d ghost Rayla too, not because she’d sworn the oath and then failed it--since she probably hasn’t made any blood oaths yet--but because not breaking the blood promise is so vital to who Moonshadows are, and Rayla ran away on a mission to take a dangerous human. That’s the entire purpose of the assassins according to the blood promise: Spare the humans’ lives, and then be responsible to correct every misstep they make from that point forward. An endless oath of guardianship that can outlive its usefulness and become downright dangerous and chaotic with changing times.

Dude, I’d really like to see Rayla unmake that promise somehow, save Runaan, and save her entire people from a good faith vow they made for the very best of reasons, far too long ago. And I’m loving the idea that she’d kill Viren, and then free Aaravos. Such a chaos child, I love her.

#tdp headcanons #tdp speculation #tdp #moonshadow elves #moonshadow assassins #rayla #runaan #oath of feanor #silmarillion #rayla headcanons #tdp angst #angst

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fanfictionconnectionwordpress · 6 years

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Mystic Messenger Fanfiction | SevenxMC Good Ending Continued | Ch.18 Indestructible

***Here we are! It's the end of this fanfiction. I went through so much personal stuff throughout the writing of this one, and I'm so grateful to everyone not only for being patient but for even reading anything I write in the first place. The Good Ending Continued Series project was something I started just to have fun and started posting thinking no one would ever read it, but boy have I been pleasantly surprised. Thank you. Really. For my patrons, there is a new hidden scene available to you of Seven and MC raising their teenagers. I'll be returning to work on posting up my commissions and focusing on Tagged again as we wait for the After Endings for Saeran and V. Thank you again to all of you. ~Let's Connect! FFC***

***You can support my writing on patreon and get access to my VIP Discord Server or other goodies like early chapter releases and hidden scenes. Chapter Directory – Other Fanfictions***

Why was my phone ringing at this ungodly hour of the night? I rolled over with a grumble, taking a few tries before I managed to actually get my hands on the item in question. After struggling all day with the boys not wanting to nap and the girls creating messes all over the house, I was not really in the mood for a phone call. Seeing the caller ID made me question just what crisis Yoosung could possibly have that would require my attention.

“Yoosung? What is it?” Saeyoung stretched lazily next to me, putting his arm around my waist and pulling me slightly closer to nuzzle my bottom. I swatted at him as I tried to make out what the blond was talking about. A lot of it didn’t make sense at first as he was talking about how he heard strange noises and that he’d seen something running around in his house. The only thing that did make sense was when he asked if Saeyoung was home.

I furrowed my brows and looked down at my husband. Had he been up to something? Yoosung started talking again about how he kept hearing Saeyoung’s voice in the house. A prank? Saeyoung still had his eyes closed, but there was definitely a grin on his face. With a sigh, I answered Yoosung’s question. “Saeyoung is home. He’s in bed with me right now.”

That seemed to perplex the blond further, but he apologized for waking me and hung up. Saeyoung’s phone must have been on silent. Now that I looked over at his nightstand, I could see the device flashing green because it had new messages waiting. “What are you up to, Saeyoung?” My husband just nipped my butt and I reached over to smack his before he yelped and rolled over, holding up his hands in defeat.

The grin on his face completely betrayed the lie. “Nothing, nothing! I haven’t been doing anything.” There had to be something going on. Even though I was tired, I was more intrigued than upset at being awoken. Though, my phone was going off again. I picked up much more quickly this time to find it was again Yoosung. “Are you sure Saeyoung is in bed with you?”

I looked over at Saeyoung who was starting to snicker and rolled my eyes. Whatever this was, it had to be a pretty good prank. “Yes. He’s in bed with me. Would you like to video chat?” It was easy enough to change the voice call into a video one and Yoosung’s eyes went wide as Saeyoung waved at him.

“Hey there, Yoosung. Why’re you waking my wife so much?” He’d managed to make the blond pale completely with that question - now starting to make apologies and again describe what was happening. Yoosung appeared to be getting more and more upset, even to the point where his chest was heaving so much that I was almost certain he was about to cry. That was when I saw it.

Something was walking up behind Yoosung on the floor space leading to his bed. The item in question looked an awful lot like a small doll of my husband that he’d once shown me. This only had me further furrowing my brows. Yoosung must have noticed me squinting at the screen, because he stopped mid-sentence. “MC…is something…?”

Almost as soon as he’d asked the question, the blond noticed on the small ‘preview’ window of his own video feed that there was something creeping up on him. He shrieked - dropping his phone and giving us a view of his covers but an excellent audio feed as there were crashing sounds and soft curses. Saeyoung burst out laughing, and I couldn’t keep myself from snickering either.

Obviously, my husband had been testing out a new robot creation of his. I felt bad for Yoosung being the victim of yet another of my husband’s little pranks and tests, but I couldn’t help finding it hilarious either. Yoosung returned on screen - the small robot clutched in his hand so hard that his knuckles were white. “You come get this in the morning Saeyoung or I’m going to smash it!”

The blond’s face was red with anger and probably some embarrassment as well before he abruptly ended the call as my husband only laughed louder. With the call ended, I could join him in the belly-aching laugh until our eyes were teary. Poor Yoosung…but my husband had managed to make Yoosung think that he was being haunted by the ghost of a living human being.

When our laughter finally cooled, we were still both staring at the ceiling with occasional small bouts of the giggles before I rolled over to snuggle into my husband’s chest. “What did you even build a robot you for anyway?” That was accompanied by a giggle of my own, but it died as I felt Saeyoung tensing below me - pulling me a little closer. Was it something worth tensing over?

“I wanted to make a version of myself that would outlive me. A way for me to be around after I’m dead.” That made me tense as well before I pulled back, my hands on either side of his head and hair falling around me as I looked down at my husband’s face. “Outlive you?” Saeyoung looked completely serious as he responded. “Yeah. I made one for you, too.”

This wasn’t exactly an easy topic. He tended to be a little on the eccentric side and obsessive about things I couldn’t even begin to understand like supernovas and the infinite cosmos, but having your husband preparing for your deaths was a lot more disturbing than that. “Why would you be making something like that? Is there something wrong?” My best guess was that Saeyoung was secretly a doomsday prepper, but that didn’t really make much sense, considering.

He’d started to chew on the inside of his cheek, probably because of the look I was giving him, but now he moved to push some of my hair behind my ear. “I just wanted…in case something ever happened to us, I wanted the kids to have a piece of us. They’re still so young…” My heart clenched painfully in my chest at the look on his face. His eyes were showing an intense pain beneath the surface. This wasn’t something he’d created just for fun or ‘just in case’, there was a real reason behind it.

“I grew up without my dad and with a mom who hated me. I was alone for so long…and I don’t want that to happen to them.” Now my heart absolutely crumbled, a tear I didn’t know I’d shed falling onto his cheek before I bent to kiss him long and hard. Saeyoung was creating these ‘outliving’ robots because of all the abandonment he’d suffered when he was young - wanting to keep that from happening to our children.

When I broke the kiss, I wiped my own tear from his cheek and gave him a light peck on the nose. “You’re a wonderful father, Saeyoung…” I gave a soft laugh before shaking my head and lying back down beside him. “I hope we’ll never need it, but you better go get that robot tomorrow before Yoosung throws it down his stairs.”

Saeyoung gave a little laugh of his own before rolling over and tickling me for a short while before I could grab his hands away. “Don’t worry, MC.” His smile was positively wolfish, almost the same sadistic one he gave when he was playing the dominant in our bedroom. “That robot is pretty much indestructible, so he can throw it wherever he wants.”

***

Their children could have run the RFA all by themselves if it weren’t for the fact that it needed some organization. Thankfully, Jumin had adopted a daughter who took over that aspect as well as Zen and Jaehee’s son. Only one of MC and Saeyoung’s children had any sort of danger filter, and it made for rather interestingly themed RFA parties after the old RFA retired.

Saeyoung and MC’s life was filled with activity all around, even in their last days. With as many children as they had, their grandchildren multiplied quickly, and rest was hard to come by. Neither of them really wanted rest - not when there was fun to be had as a family. Nearly every grandchild inherited the vibrant red hair, and that more than anything showed Saeyoung just how much evidence of his own existence he’d left on the world.

MC would always remember the night her husband passed as she drove him out for what he called ‘one last ride in my babies’ to a grassy area outside of Seoul. He’d been ill for some time, no longer able to walk as his body was reaching its limits. Saeyoung had never taken the best care of himself physically, and it was really showing in his old age. As they’d lain there under the stars, Saeyoung spoke of the emptiness of non-existence and the way MC had saved him from that life. He mentioned that he hoped the reset would start again so he could live this life over, but she simply hushed him and said that whatever came they’d always be together. That seemed to soothe him, and they laid there quietly until he breathed his last.

It was several hours later before MC found herself able to call the medics and let go of her husband. She was right to think that his robots would never be a replacement for him, though she still dug the little thing he’d once terrorized Yoosung with from its hiding place. She was found clutching the item when she passed - the little robot still singing her a lullaby and asking her if she’d fallen asleep.

In their time working for the RFA, they were able to help raise incredible amounts of money. Saeyoung gave up most of his hacking activity and lived a far more legal life than he’d had to before - able to be reunited with his brother and have his own family. The existence he’d never thought he’d have was now a permanent mark on the organization as well as their family left behind. Who could forget the eccentric redhead who’d once protected them from the shadows? His legacy was as indestructible as the robot he’d built.

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#mystic messenger #mysmes #mystic messenger fanfiction #saeyoung choi #sevenxmc #sevenxmc good ending continued

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pastryweasel7 · 2 years

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4 Ridiculous Guidelines About Minecraft Server Hosting

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#1 site #i don't care about miles per gallon #I only care about smiles per gallon

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Opinion: Living in the world of pants-on-fire lies From exhaustive fact checks to contentious briefing-room clashes over the administration’s “alternative facts,” debunking the whirl of lies became a full-time process and started derailing pressing long-term conversations. But as the past few weeks have shown, the mendacity that once seemed like a feature of politics in the age of Trump has outlived the former president’s Twitter feed. The past week alone has featured increasingly ridiculous false claims issuing from the right. There’s the one about the Biden administration taking away Americans’ hamburgers. And the one about the White House giving gift bags with the vice president’s book to migrant children — that one was effectively retracted by the New York Post and the reporter resigned, saying she was forced to write a false story. As those pseudo-stories suggest, while we may have dispensed with some problems unique to living in a country run by an inveterate liar, questions remain about how to deal with a continuing torrent of politically useful falsehoods. And they remain because the problem both predates Trump and was exacerbated by him; indeed, it goes to the heart of how journalists think about what they do. A key tenet of professional journalism from its earliest days has been exposure, particularly the mandate to thrust bad deeds into the spotlight that the doers had tried feverishly to conceal. Exposure also meant airing a range of ideas, more or less evenhandedly, so readers could sort through them independently to decide what they thought. That last instinct intensified in the late 1960s as politics grew more sharply ideological. Increasingly, media outlets sought to feature a voice from the right and a voice for the left in order to strike a pose of balance and objectivity. But what happens when the incentives change, along with the meaning of “exposure,” and the goal is no longer to persuade people of the merits of an idea but simply to expose as many people as possible to a false story? According to that huckster-like rationale, exposing the idea — even while debunking it or pointing out its ethical and logical flaws — plays into the hands of the people circulating conspiracies. That dynamic predates Trump’s rise. Since the 1990s, conservative media has developed a symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship with mainstream news. For all the talk of silos and bubbles and echo chambers, the real power of right-wing media outlets has been their ability to influence the coverage of non-conservative outlets. Conspiracies about then-President Bill Clinton regularly crept into the national news. In 1995, “60 Minutes” devoted a segment to the death of Vince Foster, a Clinton staffer who had died by suicide two years earlier. In right-wing circles, though, Foster’s death was treated as a conspiracy: a murder covered up by the administration. There, true believers could pick up any number of books and videos and articles all devoted to the Foster conspiracy, which had so much staying power that one of the most-watched national news shows spent time once again debunking it — not, as host Mike Wallace explained, because the facts were in question, but because the conspiracies circulated so widely. Fox News was founded the following year and would go on to expand its political influence largely thanks to the coverage its stories received on other networks. Over the years, the relentless and inaccurate flogging of pet issues like “Fast & Furious,” Benghazi and of course, Hillary Clinton’s email server, seeped from Fox News into other outlets. Matt Yglesias, writing for Vox in 2018, dubbed this the “hack gap“: the more outrage one is willing to perform, the more headlines one gets. And the right has been much better than their opposition at performing outrage. This prowess holds even, it turns out, when the outrage is powered by something simply conjured from thin air. That was the case with birtherism, an easily disproven claim about President Barack Obama’s birthplace. While mainstream journalism had no truck with birtherism, it thrived in the right-wing media marketplace, where politics, conspiracy and entertainment grew indistinguishable. Fact checks by mainstream media — including Obama’s decision to release a second version of his birth certificate in 2011 — had no lasting effect on belief in the conspiracy, which actually grew in popularity during Obama’s second term in office. The case of birtherism shows that debunking a lie, unless handled very carefully, doesn’t work. Exposing a lie for the falsehood it is can actually spread misinformation further by repeating the false claims. So the more journalists try to do their work — the work of exposure — the worse the situation gets. That dynamic has been amplified by two major media developments of the past few decades: the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which enable the rapid spread of misinformation, and the economic restructuring of journalism, which rewards vast amounts of content delivered at a rapid pace and encourages outlets to cover the outrage of the day. The remaking of the information environment means that journalists are not the only ones who have to adapt — the rest of us do as well. During the Trump era, things got trickier. Journalists felt they couldn’t turn away: after all, the primary source of misinformation was the president of the United States, and they had to cover him. But in a post-Trump era, it is clear that the problem is not an adversarial or polarized relationship between the press corps and the president. The problem is deeper and more structural: it’s the way non-conservative outlets get used to further circulate conspiracies. There’s not much that can be done about the proliferation of right-wing outlets. A new Fairness Doctrine won’t do it, and as long as there’s an audience hungry for the kind of content provided by right-wing talk radio and broadcasters like Fox News, boycotts and the other economic activism will have limited effects. So when it comes to misinformation, the approach should focus more on containment. For journalists, part of the solution has to be cutting the cord with Fox News and its fringier cousins. That doesn’t mean ignoring it all together — I’ve recently argued that we have to pay attention to people like Tucker Carlson, who uses his show to spread hate — but scaling back the overall coverage of right-wing stories. When outlets do tackle something like Carlson’s use of “great replacement theory,” they should do so in deeply contextualized ways, so the story is less about what Carlson said last night, and more about the ways unfounded xenophobic and racist talking points get woven into his prime-time show. For the rest of us, one of the most important things people can do is to resist the temptation of social-media dunking. I know: sharing outrageous clips to call them out comes with a surge of adrenaline and righteousness — as though with enough retweets, people will finally understand how poisonous and fraudulent the material is. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the misinformation winds up before millions more eyeballs, often without any real context or explanation. The problem of misinformation is a thorny one. It is particularly difficult to fix because it plays on the virtues of journalism, its commitment to exposure and fairness. But in an information environment in which exposure aids misinformation, the best approach is a deeply unsexy one: to ignore the shiniest, least reality-based objects — no stories or tweets on illusory beef bans, for instance — and to deeply contextualize the rest, to help people understand the incentives behind the spread of misinformation, and why it’s suddenly everywhere. That is slow, hard work that likely won’t be rewarded with prizes or film treatments or Twitter virality, but it can start the process of defanging misinformation in a post-Trump era. Source link Orbem News #Lies #Living #opinion #Opinion:Livingintheworldofpants-on-firelies-CNN #opinions #pantsonfire #World

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spacetimewithstuartgary · 7 years

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Filling the early universe with knots can explain why the world is three-dimensional The next time you come across a knotted jumble of rope or wire or yarn, ponder this: The natural tendency for things to tangle may help explain the three-dimensional nature of the universe and how it formed. An international team of physicists has developed an out-of-the-box theory which proposes that shortly after it popped into existence 13.8 billion years ago the universe was filled with knots formed from flexible strands of energy called flux tubes that link elementary particles together. The idea provides a neat explanation for why we inhabit a three-dimensional world and is described in a paper titled "Knotty inflation and the dimensionality of space time" accepted for publication in the European Physical Journal C and available on the arXiv preprint server. "Although the question of why our universe has exactly three (large) spatial dimensions is one of the most profound puzzles in cosmology ... it is actually only occasionally addressed in the [scientific] literature," the article begins. For a new solution to this puzzle, the five co-authors - physics professors Arjun Berera at the University of Edinburgh, Roman Buniy at Chapman University, Heinrich Päs (author of The Perfect Wave: With Neutrinos at the Boundary of Space and Time) at the University of Dortmund, João Rosa at the University of Aveiro and Thomas Kephart at Vanderbilt University - took a common element from the standard model of particle physics and mixed it with a little basic knot theory to produce a novel scenario that not only can explain the predominance of three dimensions but also provides a natural power source for the inflationary growth spurt that most cosmologists believe the universe went through microseconds after it burst into existence. The common element that the physicists borrowed is the "flux tube" comprised of quarks, the elementary particles that make up protons and neutrons, held together by another type of elementary particle called a gluon that "glues" quarks together. Gluons link positive quarks to matching negative antiquarks with flexible strands of energy called flux tubes. As the linked particles are pulled apart, the flux tube gets longer until it reaches a point where it breaks. When it does, it releases enough energy to form a second quark-antiquark pair that splits up and binds with the original particles, producing two pairs of bound particles. (The process is similar to cutting a bar magnet in half to get two smaller magnets, both with north and south poles.) "We've taken the well-known phenomenon of the flux tube and kicked it up to a higher energy level," said Kephart, professor of physics at Vanderbilt. The physicists have been working out the details of their new theory since 2012, when they attended a workshop that Kephart organized at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England. Berera, Buniy and Päs all knew Kephart because they were employed as post-doctoral fellows at Vanderbilt before getting faculty appointments. In discussions at the workshop, the group became intrigued by the possibility that flux tubes could have played a key role in the initial formation of the universe. According to current theories, when the universe was created it was initially filled with a superheated primordial soup called quark-gluon plasma. This consisted of a mixture of quarks and gluons. (In 2005 the quark-gluon plasma was successfully recreated in a particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, by an international group of physicists, including three from Vanderbilt: Stevenson Chair in Physics Victoria Greene and Professors of Physics Charles Maguire and Julia Velkovska.) Kephart and his collaborators realized that a higher energy version of the quark-gluon plasma would have been an ideal environment for flux tube formation in the very early universe. The large numbers of pairs of quarks and antiquarks being spontaneously created and annihilated would create myriads of flux tubes. Normally, the flux tube that links a quark and antiquark disappears when the two particles come into contact and self-annihilate, but there are exceptions. If a tube takes the form of a knot, for example, then it becomes stable and can outlive the particles that created it. If one of particles traces the path of an overhand knot, for instance, then its flux tube will form a trefoil knot. As a result, the knotted tube will continue to exist, even after the particles that it links annihilate each other. Stable flux tubes are also created when two or more flux tubes become interlinked. The simplest example is the Hopf link, which consists of two interlinked circles. In this fashion, the entire universe could have filled up with a tight network of flux tubes, the authors envisioned. Then, when they calculated how much energy such a network might contain, they were pleasantly surprised to discover that it was enough to power an early period of cosmic inflation. Since the idea of cosmic inflation was introduced in the early 1980s, cosmologists have generally accepted the proposition that the early universe went through a period when it expanded from the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit in less than a trillionth of a second. This period of hyper-expansion solves two important problems in cosmology. It can explain observations that space is both flatter and smoother than astrophysicists think it should be. Despite these advantages, acceptance of the theory has been hindered because an appropriate energy source has not been identified. "Not only does our flux tube network provide the energy needed to drive inflation, it also explains why it stopped so abruptly," said Kephart. "As the universe began expanding, the flux-tube network began decaying and eventually broke apart, eliminating the energy source that was powering the expansion." When the network broke down, it filled the universe with a gas of subatomic particles and radiation, allowing the evolution of the universe to continue along the lines that have previously been determined. The most distinctive characteristic of their theory is that it provides a natural explanation for a three-dimensional world. There are a number of higher dimensional theories, such as string theory, that visualize the universe as having nine or ten spatial dimensions. Generally, their proponents explain that these higher dimensions are hidden from view in one fashion or another. The flux-tube theory's explanation comes from basic knot theory. "It was Heinrich Päs who knew that knots only form in three dimensions and wanted to use this fact to explain why we live in three dimensions," said Kephart. A two-dimensional example helps explain. Say you put a dot in the center of a circle on a sheet of paper. There is no way to free the circle from the dot while staying on the sheet. But if you add a third dimension, you can lift the circle above the dot and move it to one side until the dot is no longer inside the circle before lowering it back down. Something similar happens to three-dimensional knots if you add a fourth dimension - mathematicians have shown that they unravel. "For this reason, knotted or linked tubes can't form in higher-dimension spaces," said Kephart. The net result is that inflation would have been limited to three dimensions. Additional dimensions, if they exist, would remain infinitesimal in size, far too small for us to perceive. The next step for the physicists is to develop their theory until it makes some predictions about the nature of the universe that can be tested. TOP IMAGE....This is a graphic depicting formation of flux tube knots in early universe. Credit Keith Wood, Vanderbilt University LOWER IMAGE....This is a computer graphic showing the kind of tight network of flux tubes that the physicists propose may have filled the early universe. Credit Thomas Kephart, Vanderbilt University

#space #science #Astronomy #astrophysics #cosmology #physics

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Smoke and Mirrorshades: Cyberpunk Aesthetics in Anime

Jacking In

Ask a dozen people what they mean when they say “cyberpunk” and you'll likely get thirteen different answers. Some folks emphasize the “cyber” element, pointing to stories of keyboard cowboys hacking into the Matrix to wreak havoc among the servers of faceless multinational mega-corps, or stories of street samurai who augment their bodies with military-grade hardware, turning themselves into chromed-out hybrids more machine than man.

Other folks emphasize the “punk” part, pointing to tales of disenfranchised individuals engaging in petty acts of rebellion in the face of socio-economic structures so massive that they stretch beyond the Earth's atmosphere, crushing the entirety of humanity beneath their weight.

Still others (such as Cameron Kunzelman at VICE) argue that the themes of cyberpunk run no deeper than the aesthetic level. If you'll pardon the tortured simile, cyberpunk is like obscenity in the legal sense; everybody recognizes it when they see it, but no two people are guaranteed to agree on what it means to be "cyberpunk."

Gearing Up

By my definition, “cyberpunk” describes a period of science fiction literature that can be bounded by William Gibson's 1983 short story “Burning Chrome” on one end and by Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash on the other. There's also the 1974 pre-cyberpunk novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree Jr. (the pen name of author Alice Sheldon) and numerous post-cyberpunk works, but the point of this post is not to offer an exhaustive explanation.

When I hear “cyberpunk”, I think of two phrases: “high tech, low life” and “the street finds its own use for things.” I think of the specific cocktail of economic anxiety, Orientalism, Cold War paranoia, expanding ecological disasters, and explosive, bewildering advances in computer and communications technology that made the world of the '80s and '90s feel like a smaller, faster, meaner, and more terrifying place.

Tuning Out

It's only natural that the Japanese take on cyberpunk offers a different perspective, one that is informed by a different array of cultural factors than those that birthed cyberpunk fiction in Europe and the United States. While the U.S. produced Blade Runner, Japan produced Tetsuo: The Iron Man. However, my concern here is the aesthetics of cyberpunk fiction and how they manifest in works of Japanese animation both popular and obscure.

When it comes to cyberpunk anime, I like to joke that it's all about the three 'M's: mohawks, motorcycles, and mono-filament wire, with the first being a visual shorthand for people who live on the edges of society, the second being semaphore for a rebellion against the status quo, and the third just looking really, really cool. But enough preamble. Let's dig a little deeper, with a look at the 900 pound cybernetic gorilla in the room.

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Signal to Noise

Ask fans of a certain age for an example of a cyberpunk anime, and one popular response will be Bubblegum Crisis, a series of original animation videos published from 1987-1991 with chief direction by Katsuhito Akiyama and animation production by Artmic and AIC. Renowned for its music and its often ludicrous violence, Bubblegum Crisis inspired numerous spin-offs (such as both the A.D. Police OAVs and TV series), sequels (Bubblegum Crash), and reboots (Bubblegum Crisis 2040).

But is Bubblegum Crisis cyberpunk? Kinda, but not really.

Bubblegum Crisis has rampaging robots (known as “Boomers”, ha ha) because Blade Runner had runaway replicants. It has a kick-ass soundtrack because Streets of Fire had the same. It has lesbian vampire gynoids on the moon because... well, why not? Bubblegum Crisis is a prime example of the paradox that is cyberpunk, because all of its cyberpunk elements—ruthless multinational corporations that are above the law, high-tech weaponry, punk fashion—are purely surface level. It's innovation through imitation. The street finds its own use for things.

A more pure example of cyberpunk anime from this time period is Cyber City Oedo 808, a 1990-1991 OAV series with direction by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and animation by MADHOUSE. Cyber City Oedo 808 has it all: career criminals forced to act as bounty hunters by explosive collars attached to their necks, malevolent AI, military conspiracies, laser-spewing cyborg saber-tooth tigers, space vampires—plus motorcycles, mohawks, and mono-filament wire. It's 110% style over substance, but it's also so cyberpunk that it hurts.

Other examples may offer a little bit of the “cyber” and/or a little bit of the “punk” elements, but the label doesn't always fit. For example, Megazone 23, a 1985-1989 OAV series that features the talents of such science fiction luminaries as Noboru Ishiguro and Shinji Aramaki, is almost cyberpunk. It plays with ideas of artificial intelligence, it proposes a paranoid worldview based on a massive government cover-up, and it also has motorcycles.

The 1993 Battle Angel OAVs (based on the Battle Angle Alita/GUNNM manga by Yukito Kishiro) lean heavily into trans-humanism and cybernetic body modification for both practical and aesthetic purposes, exploring what it means to be more human than human. It also has mohawks.

The various iterations of Appleseed (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow) have a bit of both "cyber" and "punk." Appleseed deals with issues of a class with the Bioroids being treated like second-class citizens and with economic disparity by exploring the massive difference between life inside cities such as Olympus and Poseidon compared with the rest of the world, which is ravaged by war. The 2004 theatrical anime film also has mono-filament wire.

But the ur-examples of Japanese cyberpunk anime—the works whose influence is as inescapable as the gravity well of a black hole—are the 1988 theatrical anime film Akira (directed by Katsuhiro Otomo) and the 1995 theatrical anime film Ghost in the Shell (directed by Mamoru Oshii). Much ink has already been spilled upon the aesthetics and themes of these landmark movies, but suffice to say, they are the total cyberpunk package, and their original manga incarnations are arguably meatier and more complex than the anime adaptations.

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Present Day, Present Time

It feels strange to phrase it this way, but one of the more recent anime series with a strong cyberpunk aesthetic is serial experiments lain, a TV anime from 1998 with direction by Ryutaro Nakamura and animation by Triangle Staff. Even over 20 years later, serial experiments lain is squirming with cyberpunky goodness with its exploration of virtual spaces, its interrogation of persona and personality, and its themes about the invasive, intrusive effects of technology upon our lives.

Another series that shares the same series composer (Chiaki J. Konaka) and character designer (Yoshitoshi ABe) as serial experiments lain is the 2003 TV anime, Texhnolyze. Aside from being dark, inscrutable, and borderline impossible to spell correctly without consulting Wikipedia, Texhnolyze is also extremely dreary and likely to appeal to nearly no one, but it checks enough cyberpunk boxes that it deserves at least a passing mention here.

Log Off

Time moves ever onward, but the particular anxieties and aspirations that cyberpunk as an art-form addresses remain frozen, a crystallization of concerns from decades long past. For example, while there are still anime that explore virtual spaces (such as the .hack/ series, Sword Art Online, and their many imitators in the “trapped in an MMO” sub-genre), they aren't engaging with the material in the same way as Case from Neuromancer or Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash.

Despite the occasional AAA video game title or post-cyberpunk Hollywood reboot, it seems that cyberpunk may have outlived its moment of cultural necessity, but that's not so much a matter of the shifting needs of fiction as it is an expression of what's happening in the not-so-romantic realms of reality.

With each passing year, reality grows more cyberpunk. Technology continues to outstrip humanity's capacity to embrace and understand it. Corporations continue to expand. Nation-states grow more indifferent to the needs of their citizens. The rich get richer, while the gig economy ensures that the marginalized will do practically anything to scrape by. Surveillance capitalism abounds. New markets are born from a vast sea of information. The demand is limitless. The product is you.

Nevertheless, humanity resists. While technocrats try to shape the future of society, grassroots movements seize their platforms for their own purposes. The institutions of power and privilege are met with massive protests. Mundane technologies are re-purposed to foil facial recognition software and disarm state-sponsored violence. The street finds its own use for things.

Are you living in the real world?

Do you plan to spend Cyber Monday racing down the Information Superhighway on your flash new deck? What other anime represent the essence of "cyberpunk" to you? Mirrorshades or mono-filament wire? Let us know in the comments section below!

---------

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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