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hello-im-not-a-possum · 3 years

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YEEHAW IT’S MIDNIGHT WHICH MEANS IT’S AUGUST 1ST WHICH MEANS INK DEMONTH SO I CAN FINALLY POST THIS NOW:

1. Pride

Diversity win! There is not a single cishet in the hivemind of ink creatures (To their knowledge) that you slaughter on a daily basis to make yourself beautiful! AKA: Possum has a fuck ton of LBGT+ headcanons regarding the BATIM cast and is happy to use this DeMonth prompt to indulge them. (Set before the loop starts, but after Buddy Boris meets/befriends the lost ones.)

Malice flicked through the channels of her cameras, trying to find more prey in her territory, and stopped when she saw a gathering of the lost and the searching (and exactly one Boris, the most perfect one she had ever seen.) in the Heavenly toy’s lobby, their prophet was brazenly sitting on the side of the waterfall as if he did not fear the ink when he should have.

Her ears steamed with anger as she saw that group, it was far too large for her to deal with on her own and too far away from the Projectionist’s grounds for her to manage to lure him to them. But on the bright side, she could learn some important information from them, after all, with how casually the prophet was sitting and gesturing and how the other freaks in the crowd were responding, this was clearly not one of his normal sermons.

(“I still find it rather funny that almost none of us are straight and that the few straight ones among us are trans, it’s like all this time we thought we were sheep hiding away in wolves’ clothing among wolves, unaware that the “wolves” were simply other sheep in hiding as well!”)

[Funnily enough, I’d rather be a sheep than a wolf, I think it makes more sense for me to be an animal that’s helpful to others but also easily scared.] The Boris wrote on a typewriter. [Or at least, I wish I had some kind of input on what I am, but I doubt I’d make myself an animal…]

(“Speaking of which...”) The lost one next to the wolf whispered in his ear as she looked over his typing. (“How are you holding up, Buddy?”)

Instead of typing, the wolf drew himself shrugging and put a bunch of question marks around him, then stuck the drawn-on paper in his typewriter and added to it.

[It’s hard to think most of the time, Boris always seems stronger when I’m alone, but I know the Ink demon will find us if I stay with you, this hunger is driving me crazy, and I just wanna go home. But on the bright side, I don’t have to deal with periods, chest pain from binding, or people condescendingly calling me ‘Miss Lewek’ anymore.]

She turned on the sound in that room, watching them like one would watch a Tv drama, but what she heard caught her off guard.

“So as long as we’re being honest about ourselves with each other…” The lost one stood up and pointed accusingly at Sammy. “Were you and Joey and a thing all along before the machine came into the picture!?”

If she was drinking water, she would’ve spat it right back out. Sammy, with Joey?! In the latter’s dreams, maybe! Even a few of the other lost ones looked shocked at the question, the Boris even gasped loud enough for it to be audible.

“Technically yes, but not by choice, mind you.”

“WHAT THE FUCK?!”

What the fuck indeed random lost one. The angel wished that she didn’t hear that, but now that she couldn’t unsee it, at least it made a little bit of sense in hindsight. After all, in her eyes, they were awful enough to deserve each other.

“...Why?”

“It’s just, well... somebody had to keep his eyes from wandering to the lambs- err- younger, more naive, less experienced employees, not children (to my knowledge). And at the time, I really thought that he did at least care about me beyond our work relationships, at least a little bit… But from what I’ve seen, I believe the only things he had ever truly loved were himself, and the idealized versions he had made of other people. His ‘dream versions’ of them, if you will.”

“And this whole time, I thought he was running off with Susie with all those lunch dates! Or where the three of you all… yaknow, *together* together?”

“Not knowingly… However I wouldn’t put it past Joey to cheat on people. As for Susie... I did like her, maybe even love her in a way, but I doubt I could ever love her in the way she wanted me to love her, and-or love her carnally. I don’t even think I could fake it like I could for Joey, she was never signing my checks and wasn’t holding that over my head so I’d be too disgusted to even try.”

Malice was almost about to march down there herself and push him into the ink, but she knew this troupe all too well, and knew that sometimes this place worked on story logic, he’s now going to say something that alters the context of that statement enough to not justify her going over there and slam dunking him into the ink.

“Now that I think of it, I don’t think that I’ve ever loved… anyone in that sense. I can’t think of a single person or situation where the idea of doing that is anything other than gross at best. In fact, there was someone who was close to me a long time ago, someone who, while I have long forgotten now, would perhaps even be what one could consider a soulmate. Even then, the mere thought of doing that with them still makes me queasy…” The prophet sighed. “I suppose I am simply meant to remain alone in religious celibacy. A relationship of that kind would interfere too much with my worship anyway.”

"Ahh fahr foehck's sake... I can't believe dat it's dis foehckin stupid..." A more lucid, absolute giant of a searcher in the back of the crowd slapped his forehead.

“It?” Malice repeated curiously. “Huh… maybe it and I had more in common than we thought.”

“You're clearly a sex-repoehlsed asexual, you doehmbass! literally everyahne who's ever been in de dark poehddles at de same time as you figured dis ooeht befahre you ded!” He shouted through cupped hands. “celibate people are people who WANT sex, boeht dahn't poehrsue it fahr variooehs reasahns, dey ARE NAHT people who are desgoehsted wit sex to de point where dey legitimately throw oehp and feel 'ahrreble after doin de nahrmal vanella stoehff! Stahp foehckin foehckin people when you're clearly naht cahmfortable wit it, and you and future partner..s? 'll be 'appier wit yooehr rahmantic poehrsuits!”

The searcher, upon realizing that he had furiously sworn at the Prophet, their leader, the one who does not fear anything within the studio, not even the deepest depths of the dark puddles, and most terrifyingly of all; the former music director, he slinked into a puddle within the crowd in fear of being the target of reawakened ancient wrath. Everybody else looked back and forth to the prophet and back at the searcher who spoke out as they remained in stunned silence, even their eavesdropper was worried for his fate, even if in her case she feared how the show would end rather than his outcome. Surprisingly, and luckily for him, the Prophet broke the tense silence by laughing in that caught-off-guard tone of it.

“While you were rather… crude about it, what you’ve said does make a lot more sense then Joey being so bad at sex that he turned me away from men altogether, even if it is funny to assume that he was.”

“A-aye… and I can't believe dat you wrahte an entire foehckin sahng abooeht it! 'ow ded you naht get fired fahr dat?!”

“Good question, I wish I could remember the answer…”

[Maybe you had blackmail on Drew?] The Boris typed out and handed to Sammy.

“Yeah, maybe because you used to be so close to him, you saw skeletons that Joey would want to keep in the closet” His lost-one friend added.

“Like HIMSELF!” A voice from the back added, making the others in the room burst into laughter.

With the tension in the room gone, the group just went back to talking about either journeys they took to become comfortable with themselves, or the various past relationships that they had, or wished they had or in some peoples’ cases, all three.

Malice continued to watch them bitterly. It was as if they had either forgotten what the outside world was like to people like them or they simply didn’t care, and she wasn’t thinking about the ink that made up their bodies. Part of her envied how freely they had talked about themselves and each other, part of her felt like she had been smacked across the face, and a third part of her felt lonely. All of them seemed so happy telling their stories and building each other up, and here she was hiding away with her own story that she had wished to bury.

However, there was no iron clad law stating that she couldn’t tell them her own story. In fact, maybe if she came out of her own cage, made Sammy understand that big part of why voicing Alice was so important to her, made sure that it understood that as the very first explicitly female character she voiced, that Alice Angel was more than a beloved character to her, that she was a part of her, the biggest symbol of her own femininity, then maybe it would recognize the error of its ways. Maybe it would see how devastating it would be to be shunted aside without notice in favor of someone newer, prettier, ‘more feminine’...

She shut off the camera and thought it over, and she made up her mind. While she still didn’t want to share her story with everyone, Sammy needed to know it. Whether the Prophet liked it or not, she was going to pay it a visit.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #ink demonth #pride #fanfic #Malice Angel #dot batim #buddy boris #sammy lawrence #lost ones batim #searchers batim #shawn flynn

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taurustony · 3 years

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The True Mighty Bison - Season V edition.

Some weeks ago, I had a very productive discussion on twitter with Steven Mane about the subject of this essay, and he brought up very good points, an alternative theory (not as out there as mine) and reminded me I haven't actually added the ACTUAL Seth info from his story and Arcade endings to this text. Now that even Rose is on the game (although she didn't bring new info on this front), Let's update this very wild theory about our favorite psycho powered dictator. For the day you discovered the truth about M. Bison was the most important of your Street Fighter fan life. But for them, it was only Tuesday. HEAVY SPOILERS FOR SETH'S SFV STORY MODE AND ENDING. and in a lesser intensity, Rose's. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is M. Bison. Bison is one first class A-hole who runs the biggest crime syndicate on the world (Shadaloo), wants to spark global destruction if not given global domination and has a tendency to kidnap 16 year old girls. Bison also wields something called Psycho Power. Through profane rituals (more of this in a bit), He is the biggest source/receptacle of it. this power is also destroying his body, which leads to the only thing he likes more than kidnapping 16 year old girls: Body Swapping. The body in the picture is not his original body, not even his first, but is the... model we are most used to see him using. This is how you would imagine him if one mentioned M. Bison. In SFV he finally got grey/white hair, but originally this body had black hair.

however...

These are Ed and Falke. They are CLONED Bodies of Bison, They are both spare bodies for M. Bison, created in a attempt to build a body strong enough to hold his power. They are both of the most recent attempt, the newer models so to speak. As far as we know, they are all biological (a point that will come up later) and since CAPCOM use the word CLONES, they share the same DNA as Bison. Physically speaking, they are around their late teens, although being much younger actually (both suffered from accelerated aging). They escaped Shadaloo due to the fact that an older model ended up destroying the base where they were being held. speaking of the Devil....

These are Seth and Abel. Also, spare bodies of Bison. But (un)fortunately, they developed a conscience and independence. While Abel ran away and joined the french army, Seth created a splinter cell from Shadaloo called S.I.N. and planned a hostile takeover of the syndicate. One interesting fact is that both Seth and Abel are the SAME MODEL of bodies, but Seth installed the upgrade of the Tanden Engine on his body. So Seth was once like Abel and if given enough time and the proper modifications, Abel could become like Seth. One recent release on Street Fighter V revealed the Seth was always more machine than man. If that is plainly due the Tanden Engine modification and what this means to Abel, its still unknown. both (Abel more than Seth) still have Bison’s DNA on them. Also, Bison considers this batch of clones a FAILED experiment Seth was the final Boss of Street Fighter IV, and Abel was the protagonist of that series. but, the older models are the more interesting ones.

These are Cammy and Decapre. Both are the oldest clone models player knew until recently. They are also fully biological and the first successful vessels for Psycho Power. Decapre is actually a “ Cammy Alpha“, a first attempt to create Cammy herself. Being fully biological, they ALSO carry Bison’s DNA. While Cammy became independent and joined the British Army, Decapre stayed brainwashed and a weapon for Shadaloo until recently (SFIV). Both Decapre and Cammy were part of a shadaloo project call “The Dolls project“: Most of the Dolls were the kidnapped teenage girls mentioned before, who were also test beds for Bison’s mind control via psycho power. There were 12 Dolls (Decapre and other 11), with Cammy being a 13th, codenamed Killer Bee. As of now, you probably noticed: 3 males, 3 females. We might be onto something here. But remember that profane ritual I mentioned? One of the results was this lady here...

This is Rose. In order to get full access to Psycho Power, Bison had to EXPEL ALL THE GOOD ENERGY FROM HIS SOUL. No joking. the good half of Bison’s Soul incarnated on a young Italian GIRL who was being born that moment and who grew up to be a incredible psychic and fortune teller ,plus the most powerful user of the SOUL POWER, the opposite to Bison’s Psycho Power. so Rose is the REINCARNATION of Bison’s soul, or at least half of it. After the events of SF Alpha 3, Bison even used Rose’s body as a vessel, to hide himself from the authorities. How she was freed and what happened to her during SFII is still unknown. Street Fighter V didn't really expanded on the relationship between Rose and Bison, as much as confirmed that as of the end of A Shadow Falls (SFV general story mode), Bison's is truly gone, at least as definitive as Rose can sense. Let's also remember that, until the interference of Rose herself, Cammy/Killer Bee was considered a succesfull attempt at creating the perfect body. If Rose hadn't freed Cammy's mind, which was as close to a blank slate and receptive as possible, its highly probable that Bison would be using her body instead. Still with me? STREET FIGHTER V: ARCADE EDITION added another point on this list: SETH was released in 2020 as a playable character, part of Season IV. HOWEVER, the FORM he appeared is quite the surprise.

THIS IS SETH! YES, THAT SAME SETH!! (a name tag on SFV confirms this is number 15, the seth that was at the center of SFIV events) After having all of his bodies destroyed during SFIV, his brain was placed by Juri on an old body known as DOLL UNIT 0. The interesting thing here is that Jury is doing this in behalf of a third party, identified only as voice on phone. This voice expected a male body, while Juri didn't even noticed (or cared) that Seth or DU0's had a gender. Doll Unit 0's body accepted Seth's biological brain without a problem. Seth's mind however, is on turmoil. When integrating with the DU0' original personality, something went wrong and Seth went completely batshit crazy. He only sees Psycho Power, and mistook Ed and Falke as being Bison himself, due to their Psycho Power energy. Some lines, such as this Seth is true perfection hints on a ongoing attempt of accepting the new body. The Arcade mode ending and an extra Seth on his Critical Art during his V-trigger 1 also hints that Seth's true power lies in the INTEGRATION with this new body. ALL OF THESE, ALL OF IT, are just canon facts from the SF series lore. now for the speculation. Bison is not using the original body. And psycho power, specially the levels Bison desires, requires quite the strong one, which factors on why his current body is failing these days. why he had to abandon his original body? My only guess is that the profane ritual either destroyed it in the process or damaged it beyond repair. but at this point, Bison already had gained the power to posses other bodies. Doll Unit 0, the prototype for the perfect vessel, is female. Bison’s soul incarnated on a female body and until very recently, when his clone technology developed enough to create more radical deviations, the clones were all female. While there is several attempts of male bodies they are a late development and not only there is only one almost successful male body, it is the one that requires constant replacing AND Bison is trying to upgrade from, because it's not enough. But, the creation of a male body is stiil on the table and being attempted. Considering CAPCOM’s own words, that Seth is more machine than man, we can guess that Abel is probably just the biological basis for Seth, who is mostly the Tanden Engine and a biological brain. This is what was implemented into Doll Unit 0, who was completely female at that point, maybe even fully biological since Cammy, the earliest successful clone so far is fully biological as well. If we compare to real world cloning technology, cloning someone of the same gender is easier and more direct than altering the gender. Then there is the not-satated-but-extremely-obvious-fact that DU0 was the true first attempt at the tech that would produce Cammy, meaning, Shadaloo’s cloning tech was tested with HER. This also means that Doll Unit 0 IS EXTREMELY SIMILAR, IF NOT IDENTICAL, TO BISON'S ORIGINAL BODY. in conclusion: Bison’s original body is FEMALE and something close to this:

Thanks BbbSFXT from Deviant Art for the Mod and the picture. On the last version, I considered Mistress Bison being blonde, but thinking it through, it was more wishful thinking, trying to make them close to Cammy. Clones being a blonde is probably a side effect of DNA manipulation. Blond hair is recessive, and putting on the simplest, almost insulting way possible, it means blonde only happens if both sides of the DNA have the same code for hair. Since Bison is using the same DNA over and over, it makes sense clones would end up blonde. This also fits with DU0 being a very early prototype, with almost Bison's entire DNA intact, including the code for them hair. And now let's talk mysticism: There is the whole Yin/Yang theme surround everything Psycho Power, explicitly shown in Seth's design, but it was already there, at least as early as the Alpha/Zero series. In the balance of the Yin/Yang symbolism, Yin, the black part, can represent a “feminine principle” and also, can be a suffix/preffix meaning shadow. While Yang, the white part, can represent a “masculine principle” and also can be a suffix/preffix meaning light. these are parts in all living beings, be them male or female.

Psycho Power, the shadow, is feminine. Soul Power, the light, is masculine. There is a inversion of the symbolism here, with Bison, the male body, using the yin and Rose, the female body, using the yang. But the catch is: Rose is not a traditional reincarnation of Bison (obvious reasons) but received Bison's yang, on top of her natural one. This counts on why Rose is so powerful with Soul power. And while she doesn't seem to suffer a physical instability like Bison, as fortune teller and psychic, seem to be incredibly sensitive to strong emotions and energies around her (How the mind of G affected her on SFV being a exemple), I would argue that this extreme sensitiveness is the side effect of that extra yang energy. Let's also consider that while Bison wants MORE shadow and went way beyond what his natural body could hold, Rose stayed pretty much at her natural levels, as far as we know. So Bison's instability can be accounted as using insane levels of pure feminine energy inside a male body. Seth, the genderless one, will only find harmony in accepting his female body. Rose, the female body, is the only of them to have any kind of control and estability. This all points towards Mistress Bison, and that's the hill I'm dying on. this also ties to the idea proposed by Steven Mane: Psycho Power is closely related to the feminine and can't function properly, or at all, with men. Bison forcing that is the base reason for the physical instability. Which leads us to... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steven Mane's alternative theory of Psycho Power

The main gist here is that there isn't really any indication that Bison's OG body is any different from the one he uses today (which is true. There isn't a single line about it on the canon sources). The initial lack of male clones is accounted simply as that we haven't seen enough male clones, and they might have existed since Killer Bee's times. In his views, everything so far points to Bison desiring a male body. However, Psycho power works better with women, or was meant to be used by women. There is another fighting game with a similar plot, Skullgirls, in which the main McGuffin for that story is a mystical artifact that only works with women, which is why most of the cast of that game is female. And after Rose's SFV ending, I wouldn't put behind CAPCOM to lift another game's plot point for their own, specially one that would fit well with the already stablished canon. However, Steven Mane's best argument for this comes from SFA3 itself, or rather, the PSP version of SFA3. But before we get to that, let's go down on the memory lane and remember the facts.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX, also known as Street Fighter Zero 3 Double Upper in Japan, is so far the last version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 released and it is an exclusive of the Playstation Portable console. The Alpha/Zero Series is the main focal point when talking about Bison and Psycho Power, as it's the series where Rose first appeared and in Alpha 3, we have the only canon appearance of Cammy as Killer Bee (on the intro of her first fight against Rose) and the first playable Dolls, Juli and Juni. SFA3 MAX is also, up to the publication of this, the only game in the series to have a guest character (the jury is still out on SFV last season V character). "Wait, Tony" you ask "Don't you mean 4 guest characters?" Eagle and Maki are not guests: They were always part of the Street Fighter franchise, and are contemporary to the events of the game . Yun makes a non-canon appearance which is explained by time travel (in his own quotes), since the events of Alpha series happen way when he was nothing but a toddler. But he is still part of the franchise, so not a guest, per se.

Ingrid, however, is a conundrum wrapped inside a enigma and kept inside a locked puzzle box missing some of its pieces. That is inside a cave inside a volcano under the pacific ocean. On the mariana trenches.

Ingrid is from a failed, unreleased CAPCOM game called CAPCOM Fighting All-Stars. Her first playable appearance is the ill-received crossover game CAPCOM Fighting Jam, known in Japan as CAPCOM Fighting Evolution.

In All-Stars, she was kind of a regular fighter, with a special importance to the plot and final boss. The very little we know about the plot hints on her being something beyond human. She carried a code Isis, is nicknamed the Eternal Goddess, and is said to posses the power of longevity.

On Fighting Jam, she has to solve some issues she had with Pyron, the final boss of that game and an alien who is basically a living sun and is hinted to be what ended the dinosaurs (i swear this is Darkstalkers Canon) Her ending there is... weird.

I brought this up because it adds a tiny little bit of context to her SFA3 MAX ending.

youtube

Ingrid claims ownership of the psycho power. Notice that its the power itself, not the Psycho Drive Bison's uses. And Bison is aware of that. Roses recognizes both as users of Psycho Power, even though she doesn't recognizes Ingrid. Also note at 00:59 that the focus point of the psycho drive carries Ingrid's Seal, the same one on the cups on her head AND the one she summons on her Fighting Jam ending. Oh, and she is capable of time travel. but no mention if she was the one who brought Yun to SFA3 time, though. What this all mean? Speculation time: According to Steven Mane's theory: With Ingrid being the creator of psycho power, Psycho power works better with women. You can even explain Bison's obsession with 16 year old girls: They are the ones who closely resemble Ingrid, who he knows is the original source of that power. This also explain why Bison's desire of a male body directly conflicts with psycho power: It was never meant for such body. and why there is so much female clones: It simply the result of experiments to see what fits better. But Bison is trying to get around this: He has been experimenting on both, noticing that male bodies deteriorate way faster, confirmed that female ones fit better, but for reasons only known to himself, this was not enough. The genderless Seth, a sentient machine build to gather psycho power, was Bison's latest attempt of circumvent the body type limitation, but it still didn't work (as stated by Bison himself) This is where Steven Mane's theory ends. But from that, we can jump to other conclusions: Ingrid is a goddess and is the source of Psycho Power energy. Notice that she is not the source of soul power though, so behind her innocent face, behind those red eyes, lies something sinister and evil. (Or maybe, Soul Power is simply Psycho Power with another name? Rose might be the one hiding something...) [Small June/2021 update: After a lazy Sunday re-reading the SF30th's bios, its is clear that Soul Power is not just Psycho Power with a different name. So if you want to follow this line of thought through, you have to consider that Ingrid is EVIL, or at least deals heavily with negative energies (closer to Akuma than Bison). and it opens the possibility of a God/Goddess of Soul Power somewhere out there on the SF Universe. but that is speculation for another time.]

Ingrid is time-travelling to specific points in time to collect parts of her power. Bison was one of those who stole it. Pyron probably did it too, and in 201X, Ryu has something to do with it.

Oh, extra fact: SFIII, the last game on the timeline, happens in 1999. SFV, the game that was released on the 10's, canonically happens during 1998. So the Ryu she is supposed to meet next is YET to appear (maybe in SF6?).

And because she is a time travellng goddess, not a dimension hopping one this means a direct connection between the worlds of Darkstalkers, Street Fighter and Red Earth, the three franchises from CAPCOM Fighting Jam: Darkstalkers' Human World could be considered to be Street Fighter's Earth, and Red Earth is literally another planet on the same universe, hinting a bigger CAPCOM shared timeline then we expected. We can also speculate that Bison ultimate goal would not be just global domination but to replace Ingrid as god/goddess of psycho power. And she took Yun to 1989 just for the LuLz. Why I didn't mentioned Ingrid up there in MY theory? because of CFN Portal. The Capcom Fighters Network Portal is essentially the final word on who is canon in Street Fighter. Released together with SFV, its a well documented, weirdly organized and deep source of any street fighter or final fight character you can imagine. Those 2 guys fighting on the intro of SF2 got bios there. As well as Hakan's daughters and Elena's Family. Heck, CFN Portal is the place that finally settled Chun-li's father name as Dorai.

There is also relevant guest characters and characters who appeared in other games but that CAPCOM consider part of the franchise and canon, such as Blade from the Street Fighter: The Movie game (now part of the North American operations of Shadaloo) and... Ruby Heart from MARVEL vs CAPCOM 2 (a version of her actually, before the events of that game). Ingrid is clearly shown as a guest character and NOT part of the street fighter franchise, as she does not have the SF franchise standard background. the only ones who this happen are special guests from, such as the ones from Street Fighter EX and Street Fighter 2010. Ingrid is also described there with her bio from CAPCOM Fighting All-Stars, rather then her own story on SFA3 MAX or even CAPCOM Fighting Jam, in a way making her role on SFA3 MAX similar to Evil Ryu's: A what-if non-canon scenario of the events of the game, that has no bearing on the main plot. Evil Ryu's ending are always Ryu kills everybody and wants more blood, never really explaining anything. Evil Ryu is more important as a visual representation of the dark side of Ryu rather than a character itself'. and because of that precedent, when CAPCOM itself gave her non-canon status, it's better to err on the side of caution and not consider her direct influence and acts when speculating about the plot and lore, unless they are the only source of some kind of hinted information. And there is one very canon character who has a situation like that. Killer Bee. As I mentioned before, the ONLY time Cammy acts as Killer Bee in canon is on her SFA3 arcade/story mode: In her intro against Rose, her very first fight, She initially starts under control of Bison. Rose actually recognizes Bison's Power and frees her, even before the fight starts. The fight itself is actually framed as a violent reaction to being freed. but there is a game where we can see Killer Bee Cammy in all her brainwashed glory: X-men vs Street Fighter. Released before Alpha 3 and the first game where Cammy is shown with her Alpha design. Her quotes there shows a profound reverence to Bison AND some are mechanical in nature. Goddess Ingrid (to differentiate a bit from Code Holder Ingrid) could be one of these instances: Canonically speaking, we know very little about Bison: What are his motivations, why he desires such levels of power or anything that would elevate him from one dimensional antagonist. Sagat started as that and became one of the most developed characters of the franchise. Gill is from the straight go good intentions that will end up bad. Seth is the whole reason of this essay, so I don't need to show you anymore how he turned out a interesting character. and there is G, who is either a suicide cult leader still looking for followers, or the savior of mankind. Not to mention that most players thought as a good guy until Rose's ending. like, holy psycho powered cow... Bison is still just the dictator who wants to rule the entire world. And the only character that deals with Psycho Power in a way that is not just evil power for the evil dictator is a character that, as far as CAPCOM is concerned, is not even acknowledged as the relevant version.

#street fighter #Street Fighter V #CAPCOM #Lore #M. Bison #Ed #Falke #Seth #Abel #Cammy #Decapre #Rose #Ingrid #Body Swapping #Street Fighter Alpha #Fan Theory

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marleneoftheopera · 3 years

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10 Underrated Christine’s!

Was asked by an anon to do this and I absolutely love the idea! Figured I would give it its own post. I also made a companion podcast episode about this topic, which you can listen to here.

Also put links to some audio/video of them, so those who haven’t heard of them can have a listen! There are definitely other clips of all of these Christine’s online, and on Tumblr some gifted audios. And of course, all of these Christine’s I have a recording of, so I am always open to trade for them.

There are so many I think are underrated, so this was a hard list. But here 10 I will put up for now (in no particular order).

1. Charlotte Page (London 1999-2000):

I wish she had stayed with the show longer. Stunning all around. Lush, full, operatic voice. Some great acting chops, with some little touches in there. She vocally was different from the Christine’s they had at that time, in the best way. While we only have 2 audios of her, we do also have a full video. Praise.

Here is her Wishing.

2. Sarah Pfisterer (US Tour 1991-95, Broadway 1999-2001):

Was Christine for quite some time, and yet there are no videos of her. Maybe 3 audios, and a handful of photos. i hear she was pregnant a few times, so her being out on leave might explain why. But has such a gorgeous, porcelain look. Beautiful voice, with a perfect balance of vibrato and operatic sound. I sometimes call her the Charlotte Page of Broadway because 1) they were in the show at the same time and 2) I think they had similar voices in terms of that bigger operatic quality. I always liked her vocally and look-wise, but I sat down a few months ago and really listened to her, and she has become such a favorite of mine.

Here is her Wishing, and here is the only video we have of her actually singing in the role.

3. Corinne Cowling (London 2019-2020):

Had a lot of shows as the understudy since the principal and alternate were out or doing too many shows. I would love to see her get a principal run, as it seems do a lot of other phans. Pull a real-life Christine. She reminds me a lot of Holly Anne Hull; this really strong voice full of emotion. She really proved that not only was she able to step into the role when needed, but that she could do it well. Her sister Morgan was Meg in the Restaged US Tour, and I dream of a world where they play Christine and Meg together.

Here is her Wishing, though I definitely recommend getting a full audio. It is well worth it.

4. Jan Hartley Morris (London 1988-89):

Another Christine I wish would have stayed with the show longer. But we do have a video of her, albeit being not of amazing quality. Looks so lovely in the part, and has an absolutely gorgeous voice. Full, lush, reminded me a tad of Amy Manford in how she seemed able to just twist each word out just the way she wanted to. Total control.

Here is her Think of Me and Angel of Music.

5. Adrienne McEwan (US tour 1993-94 + 1996, Broadway 1998-2003):

Was in the show for some 9 years, including being the alternate for the 10th anniversary on Broadway. Had such a beautiful and unique voice, and not a ton of vibrato like some of the US Christine’s at this time had. So pretty in wig and costume. There are a few videos of her, and a decent amount of audio. And yet, we don't talk about her nearly enough.

Here is her Wishing.

6. Maria Listra (Estonia 2015-16, 2020):

A non-replica Christine! She just looks so lovely in the part and sounds gorgeous. There is a video of her in ‘All I Ask of You’, and she is wonderful in it. I would love to see her do the original version someday. A hidden gem.

Here is her Think of Me, but I would definitely watch the ‘All I Ask of You’ of her on YouTube in the part. She’s so good and the Estonian Raoul and Christine are adorable.

7. Astrid Giske (Oslo 2018-19):

Another non-replica Christine! And a blonde one too! The Oslo production remains a favorite in my book, and Astrid is one of the main reasons. She had a real-life Christine moment, being the understudy Christine, but having to take over for Mira Ormala, who had to depart the production early on due to health reasons. Astrid got a bunch of pictures, and a feature on a Broadway site, and did every show afterward until the production. Besides the very last show; Astrid herself got sick and could not go on. Looked so lovely in the part, and has such a strong and angelic voice. I wish someone would put her in another production.

There are quite a few videos on YouTube of her which you should all watch (including the pro-shot clips from the production), but I put her “soar” here because I just adore it.

8. Julie Goodwin (World Tour 2007-09):

One of the youngest Christine’s; I think she was only 19 when she did the part. Absolutely stunning voice; reminds me a lot of Claire Lyon. That full operatic glory. From pictures and one video we have of her, she seems to have been pretty nice acting-wise. Looks really pretty as well.

Here is her Wishing.

9. Elisabeth Berg (Stockholm 1989-91):

For a Christine who was the principal in the first ever Swedish production, and is featured on said cast recording, she is really not talked about at all. I figure it’s mostly due to her being in Sweden and not in one of the flagships in the pre-Internet days. But still, a Christine on a cast recording I would think would have a bit more notoriety. Anyway, absolutely stunning voice. Like, beyond amazing. I would listen to her sing the alphabet. Such control, so much emotion, I adore her. When they invent the time machine I am going back to see her.

Here is the Swedish soundtrack.

10. Isabel Schwartzbach (Copenhagen 2018-19):

I love how clear and light her voice is. To me, she is the perfect ‘modern’ Christine. Meaning she has that lighter, almost pop sound to her voice, but without the squeaky-ness that we sometimes get. I really wish she would have gotten some promo shots or something. But she looks really pretty in the role, and from what I have heard she was quite good overall.

Here is her Wishing.

There you have it! I could add at least 50 more to this list, so don’t think that these are the only ones I think could use more love. But this is a nice way to experience other Christine’s with varying kinds of voices in different languages. Especially for newer phans, who have probably only heard Sarah, Sierra, Emmy, and/or their first live Christine.

Again, if you would like more clips of any of these Christine’s or some more actresses to have a listen to, feel free to message me!

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ashintheairlikesnow · 3 years

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Guns Ain’t a Plague

I wrote some version of this story over and over. This is the version I apparently emailed to a friend in 2013 and just rediscovered in my inbox. I am staring at this and realizing how long ago 2013 was now. Oh my gosh.

Background: I was already very much all about post-apocalyptic stuff, but this takes place in a world entirely unlike - and yet strikingly like - our own. In a world where war and disease once tore the land apart, an isolated, caged city of children struggles to survive.

Until one decides to leave.

Oh man somewhere in my stuff I have all my old maps and descriptions of the different countries and the war and... I wrote so much stuff for this universe/storyline...

The young woman crouched where the last of the road crumbled into broken stone. It had been crushed when they exited the city, taking their horses and carriages, doctors and soldiers and history, with them. Her feet were bare and she dug her toes into the warm red earth between the cracked rock. The muscles in her legs tensed, she placed one hand for balance on the ground.

She would have to run like wind if she was going to survive this.

“Don’t,” came Tor’s familiar voice behind her. She jumped up, wondering why she was even surprised he had followed her. She had, after all, been the one to teach him how to do it. She turned around, to look him in the eye, heart aching at the idea that if she didn’t time this just right, she would never see him again.

“Ed,” The boy said in the same pleading tone, hands held out to grab her, “don’t. You can’t even think it. You’ll die, same as they all do!”

Ed rolled her eyes and shot him a baleful glare, but she was bluffing and they both knew it. The toughness fell off of her face almost immediately, and she grabbed the much younger boy, pulling him into a fierce hug.

The two of them looked so alike that they seemed mirrored, almost, the teenager and the adult just barely ten years older than him. Ed’s skin was the same dusky red-brown as Tor’s, their hair the same rich black. It even hung in the same small twists, cut short and close to their heads, although Tor’s was cut a little longer. The only difference was in their ages and in their eyes. Ed’s eyes were a deep, rich pure brown, but Tor’s were green.

Ed thought she was somewhere near twenty-five; no one was completely sure on ages here. She knew Tor had been something like two when she’d found him; herself a ragged orphan, hearing him crying from two buildings over and simply taking him home. It was better than letting him die.

“I should’ve known you’d follow me,” She said, shaking her head. “And if you’re here… Jedder came too, didn’t he?”

“I run faster’n Jedder,” Tor said, clinging to her even harder. His arms around her waist felt like they were crushing her organs and she attempted to try and loosen his grip, with no luck. “Don’t die, Ed!”

“Won’t die, Tor,” she replied. “Don’t think I will anyway. How long they been standin’ there, those towers? Ten years now? Every gun’s got to run out of bullets sometime, right?”

“Not those guns.” Torrin gestured at the small turret towers stationed every twenty feet or so as far as they both could see around the place designated as the ‘edge’ of the city. Wherever roads had gone any farther, they had been smashed to bits until the towers were up. It felt like a river of grass, weeds, broken rock and bone surrounded them, surrounded this whole ruined city, a city that no living person had ever seen before it was a pile of ghosts and disease.

Ed, for a moment, allowed her grip on Tor to be as tight as his grip on her.

“Besides,” he continued with his face still pushed against her shoulder, head still tucked just under her chin. “who’s gonna feed us if you’re dead? Who’s gonna take care of us? You always take care of us, Eddi! Always. Since everybody died you take care of us. You can’t just stop ‘cause your feet got itchy.”

“Tor, you know damn well that ain’t why I want to try this time. We can’t stay here forever. This place is full of us, we can’t keep enough food to go on livin’ like this. It’s been over a hundred years since this city fell, by my parents’ reckoning, since they just left everyone to die. Left a city full of kids with a bunch of dead bodies and bullets, fat lot of good it’s doin’ us now. The Oracle and her folk may like this place, an’ the Keepers may think we’re stuck here carin’ for the dead, but I think… I think somebody needs to get out and prove we still exist.”

There were footsteps behind them and they turned, almost as one, with Tor’s hand still twisted in Ed’s shirt.

The sweaty, fast-breathing young man who came running up to them was not like them in the slightest. His skin and hair were the same flat and dull gray-white. Compared to Tor and Ed, his arms seemed too long, he was too skinny, his hands and feet just a mite too big to be human. His eyes were unsettling to everyone but his little chosen family; wide and far apart, set on a diagonal line in his face, they were black. He broke into a relieved smile at seeing them both standing there. “Eddi! Tor caught up with you then. He runs faster’n me!”

“That’s what I said!” Tor was entirely too proud of himself. Ed bit her lip to stop from chiding him for it.

Jedder stopped, leaning over to lean his hands flat on his thighs to try and stop gasping quite so much.

“’Course he does. Plesalka never could run to save your lives,” Ed said with a responding smile and managed to extricate her shirt from Tor’s grasp. She turned back to survey the turrets again. Old and rusting over time, evidence of Plesalka scientific genius, the kind of machines and creations that neither Letenje like Ed and Tor or the Teci had ever been able to match. Their last apology for their part in this before the Exile began.

She knew about the reason those turrets existed only her parents had hoarded the scribble writings of their own ancestors; her great-great grandmother had been alive to witness the Plague and the death, had survived long enough to make sure her children were as protected as possible.

In the end, there was only so much protection to give; scarcity of food and resources meant that no one had a very long life span here.

It was one of the reasons she was so aware of her need to leave.

“I’m going to try whether you two like it or not. I’m going to try on my own, got it? And if I make it over that rise to the other side, I will shut those turrets down somehow. I’ll bash ‘em in with one of those twisted hunks of metal lyin’ all over the damn place. Once they’re broken, you two can get over and we can leave together. We’re not gonna die here where they left all of us, thinkin’ we’d be gone eventually.” Old grief twisted in her heart; she’d lost both her parents when she was 12, when they had gone out scavenging and been caught in the middle of a battle between the old Oracle’s gang and other Scavs like them. It had been a long, lonely, horrible year before she’d found Jedder.

She crouched down again, curling her fingers around one of the broken pieces of the road here at the edge. It was heavier than it looked, warm from the constant rays of the sun. Even with the lean muscle she’d picked up in ten years of scavenging everything she ate she left out a small grunt of effort as she threw it straight at the closest turret. She missed by a long arc. The gun did not respond or move to follow the stone’s movement. “They’re gettin’ worse. They used to shoot the rocks, too.”

Jedder and Tor shared a look behind her back, unsure of what to do. Jedder, at fifteen, was still nine years Ed’s junior and Tor at twelve was a full twelve years younger. She had been as much a mother to them as a teenage girl could be when she’d found them. Jedder had been found first, a little Scav just barely staying alive by stealing from the gangs, unwelcome like all Plesalka were… Tor just two years old, crying inside a makeshift nursery, his parents dead on the floor and all their food stores stolen. She had taken them in, even knowing Jedder being Plesalka would make it harder on them.

No one ever stopped being angry, especially since in a century the stories to explain what had happened had gotten weirder and more elaborate as told by the remaining survivors. Even the truth made it hard to forgive either the Plesalka or the Teci for what they had created, what they had done in their war on each other… even if kids like Jedder were so far removed from those events as to be a whole separate people by now.

“Eddi,” Tor said, and now his voice was starting to take on a edge of nagging worry, “Eddi, what if this doesn’t work and you die?”

“Then you and Jedder go on livin’,” Ed replied without looking back at them.

She was surveying all possible obstacles between her and the turrets. Rocks. Weeds.

Bodies.

The last made her shudder, made the already roiling pit of nervousness that was her stomach threaten to riot up her meager lunch. Some of the bodies out here weren’t even bodies anymore. It was mostly bones left for her to look at, though now and then she could see evidence of newer deaths. Some kids still went crazy and made a run for it. She herself probably counted as crazy, just to be thinking about it. Still. There was a lot of bone out here. A lot of dead people dumped here at the edge to warn away anyone who might see them, to keep visitors out, to keep the descendents of Pohroma citizens in.

Barefoot, you want to run through a burial ground, she thought, wondering if it would be the last thing she did. “I’ve taught you both how to live if you lost me. If you think you can’t stick it out just the two of you, well, the other Plesalka that’re still alive would take Jedder in, if he went to them. Tor, you know the Oracle or the Keepers would have you. They could keep you safe. Don’t you dare join up with any of the Scav gangs, though.”

“We want you,” Jedder said stubbornly. “Besides, even if you died we’d just stick together. We don’t know any other way to be but the three of us.”

“Then you better be prayin’ to somebody’s god I don’t die now, because I’m going to do this.” She didn’t wait for their response but just launched herself forward with all the speed her legs could give her. Not being able to crouch down and prepare first had only cost her half a second, but nonetheless she felt a rush of fear that it would be a half-second too many.

She felt Tor’s fingers clutch the back of her shirt, but he couldn’t get a grip and she twisted away from him easily, running like the devil was at her heels.

There was a rusty shrieking coming from turrets that had been left abandoned, not repaired or even touched in almost twenty years. The sound filled the air, coming from nearly ten turrets who were all slowly, inexorably pointing in her direction as she ran. Birds, having made nests in the openings, took to the air in a sudden frenzy of wings and shrieking birdcalls. For a moment, the sky was dark with them.

Ed ran.

She dodged larger rocks and the corpses of both people and animals shot dead by the turrets. Dogs, rats, foxes, cats, people… all just empty bones, she told herself, trying not to let her feet even brush them as she went past.

She ran.

She caught a glint and looked up, realizing that she could see the sun shining off all the metal casing on the ground for every bullet these huge guns had ever fired. She was caught by the shine of them just long enough to distract her.

And she tripped.

She had to have tripped on a rock, she could feel the rough of it scrape all the way down from mid-calf to her ankle as she fell and went rolling, coming to a halt only when she hit another big chunk of rock a few feet away. The breath was knocked out of her and she could only gasp, frozen, realizing that the horrible groaning of the moving metal had finally come to an end.

She looked up, and was looking directly up the barrel of one of the turrets, and it was aiming at her. She could not move. She thought of her parents, long dead from the violence in this city. She thought of finding Tor at two years old, Jedder at the time the only one who keep the little toddler from crying all the time. She thought of how they had lived the last ten years as a family, kept each other safe. She thought of every time she had ever seen a wild animal gunned down by these turrets, ripped to absolute shreds by the bullets.

She flinched at the sudden click of the gun.

Click?

It echoed, bouncing off against the walls and back again and at least twenty of the turrets were clicking in a chorus and Ed began, despite the aftermath of adrenaline still pumping, to laugh.

The sound of her laughter was something just below a scream, hysterical and echoing, bouncing off against the old stone walls behind Tor and Jedder, making them jump.

It took some effort and her ankle ached in a way that told her this victory wasn’t coming to her without some price to pay, but she began to hobble back to Jedder and Tor, arms out to them, spread as wide as her smile.

“They’re empty!” She called out above the noise. “Every single one!”

Only a moment of hesitation, a look of pure relief shared between the two boys, and then they came pounding across the earth until they could throw their arms around her, the both of them at once.

“They’re empty,” she whispered, pressing a kiss to the top of Tor’s head, to the fuzzy twists of his hair, before turning to lean her forehead against Jedder’s cheek. “I knew it. They never did come back to replace ‘em, not since before I was born, at least my da said. They had to run out sooner or later.” She squeezed the two of them even tighter, then finally let them go. Reluctantly, they let go of her as well.

“Empty,” she said one more time, savoring the taste of the word.

“So we can go,” Jedder breathed out. “We can leave. I don’t. I’ve never been outside the city. No one has. We don’t even know if there’s other people out there or if everyone died in the Plague, if it hit other places, too.”

“I don’t think it did,” Tor said, thoughtfully. “Cause otherwise why would they have had to send people to keep us locked in by replacin’ bullets, ever?” Curling his fingers in Ed’s patched and worn shirt, he shook his head. “Bet there’s a whole world full of people out there. Maybe they don’t even know about us.”

Ed smiled, but it was a smile entirely without humor.

“Let’s go show the bastards we’re still alive.”

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commentaryvorg · 3 years

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Digimon Savers Commentary Episode 5 - Break into the Digital World! Drimogemon’s Trap!

In this episode, both Tohma and Masaru separately enter the Digital World to resolve unfinished business with the Digimon they failed to stop last episode. While there, they meet up in a perilous situation and end up bonding, learning to respect each other and work together at last.

Since this episode follows on directly from the events of the last one, we start with a recap of last episode. This is a rare thing for now as most of these early episodes are self-contained events, but it’ll soon become very regular once we get into the series’ overarching plot.

There’s nothing particularly interesting about the recaps; the narration is done by a non-character narrator, and they sometimes tend to show far more clips than necessary to remind people of the relevant things that happened. I often just skip them, though since for the purposes of this commentary I’ll be obligated to watch every single part of an episode to comment on the full experience, I will probably end up moaning about how unnecessarily long they eventually shift into being.

Narrator: “To fulfil his duty, Tohma went to the Digital World to chase down Drimogemon.”

It’s interesting that the narration frames it this way, since disobeying very strict orders isn’t exactly what one would usually consider fulfilling a duty to the organisation that gave him those orders. And yet, this also is to do with Tohma’s very strong sense of duty and need to complete every job perfectly.

Anyway, as we get back into events happening in the present, please appreciate this Very Done Yoshino Face as she realises that Tohma’s gone and endangered himself by going to the Digital World alone and she’s going to get in trouble for it.

As it happens, Masaru and Agumon have got the exact same idea into their heads of disobeying orders and sneaking into the Digital World to finish things with Drimogemon. While Tohma was legitimately very good at the stealth aspect of this plan, Masaru and Agumon’s idea of stealth is, uh… not so great.

Masaru: “Successful infiltration!”

Agumon: “We’re so smooth, Aniki!”

Yep. The smoothest.

Yoshino: “What are you doing.”

Naturally, Yoshino has very much noticed them. The subs put a question mark here, but I’m using my judgement to not include it, because her voice is so deadpan and I love her.

Masaru: “Tohma did a Digital Dive? Damn it, he got away before us!”

Yoshino: “Before?”

Agumon: “Nothing, he’s just talking to himself.”

Yoshino does seem to be genuinely rather wrapped up in trying to deal with the Tohma situation and bring him back, because she doesn’t appear to pick up on the obvious implication of Masaru’s slip-up here (and the obvious only reason they’d be sneaking in in the middle of the night like this in the first place).

Yoshino: “Doing a Dive when the equipment hasn’t even been tested on humans…”

Huh, interesting. I guess this particular version of the Digital Gate equipment that DATS has is newer, then, which tracks.

Yoshino manages to detect the signal from Tohma’s Digivice, but before she can use that to bring him back, the signal is lost.

Masaru: “Really. Well isn’t that a pity.”

Masaru sounds so incredibly (not) concerned here. Though I’m sure this isn’t him genuinely not even caring if Tohma dies; he just assumes Tohma can handle himself and doesn’t see this as his problem at all.

Yoshino: “Listen to me! It’s dangerous!”

Masaru: “That doesn’t matter! I’m just going there to settle my fight!”

Yoshino: “Who cares about your fight? You’re just going to make things worse!”

I mean, it seems like Tohma cares about this fight just as much as Masaru does, actually, if in a somewhat different way. We have two stubborn idiots refusing to let this go here, not just one.

Masaru wanders into the Dive chamber, and, naturally, doesn’t have a clue how to start it up. Yoshino seems quite willing to leave and not help him with this, until he and Agumon start the appropriately Masaru approach of hitting the machine to try and get it to work. (We saw how successful that approach was last episode.)

Masaru: “You think I’ll just sit back while that guy gets all the action?”

Obviously, Masaru is not exactly thinking this through here; he just wants to somehow get to finish his fight before Tohma can do it for him, damn it!

Since Masaru and Agumon are clearly not about to be sensible and stop trying to break the equipment, Yoshino has no choice but to give in.

Lalamon: “Yoshino, are you sure about this?”

Yoshino: “Letting him have his way is better than a broken machine and Tohma stuck over there…”

It really is only because Tohma went first that Masaru is able to get his way here. A broken machine that can be fixed later would be better than Masaru throwing himself into the unknown, but a broken machine while Tohma is stuck over there is not okay at all.

Yoshino: “Listen! I’m sending you the co-ordinates where we lost Tohma. Make sure to bring him back, okay?”

Masaru: “Whatever, just do it!”

Yoshino is making the best of this she can and at least using Masaru as a way to try and ensure Tohma is safe. Masaru acts like he doesn’t care – but note he also isn’t explicitly saying he definitely won’t try to help Tohma and will leave him to fend for himself no matter what.

Yoshino: “I can’t help you when you get to the other side.”

Masaru: “Like I even need it.”

Yoshino: “Oh, really.”

Obviously. Masaru is a tough independent fighter who can definitely throw himself into a completely different world without a clue what he’s doing and manage just fine. Being a liiittle cocky there, Masaru. (Exactly as much as Tohma was when he sent himself over knowing he’d have no backup.) And I love how Yoshino isn’t buying it for a second.

Yoshino: “Return to where you first entered by 0500. That’s where I’ll bring you both back.”

Apparently they need to be in a specific location in order for the Dive equipment to work in reverse (since there isn’t a big handy machine with a chamber in it on the Digital World side). Yoshino was briefly attempting to pull Tohma back earlier before she lost his signal, so I guess that was when he was still within the range of the reverse-transport?

Masaru: “Bah, it’s like having a curfew.”

Haha. Something Masaru is probably quite used to, since he is only fourteen and his mother must worry about what he gets up to a lot. He did mention having to sneak out of the house to come to DATS last episode, which I surmised was not because DATS was a secret to Sayuri but rather just because it was late.

Masaru looks at his Digivice, which has a clock feature telling us it’s 0:33 right now. Yoshino apparently expects him to navigate a completely unfamiliar world, find Tohma (and also defeat the Drimogemon because she knows he’s going to want to do that even if she’d rather he didn’t bother), and get back to where he arrived, within four and a half hours. That seems a little bit tight – why couldn’t she just let him have as long as he needs and just wait to pull him and Tohma back whenever they appear back in range?

The reason, I imagine, is that she’s really hoping she can get this all wrapped up before the morning shift at DATS starts and Satsuma finds out what��s been going on here. I don’t blame her.

Agumon: “Aniki, I’m kinda nervous…”

Masaru: “Don’t get scared now, idiot.”

I like how Masaru is admonishing Agumon for getting scared not as if he’s being a coward or anything like that, but just as if he’s being an idiot. Obviously if they let themselves get scared and hesitate, that might get in the way of them winning their fight! It’s like Masaru is thinking of “getting scared” less in terms of the initial emotion that you can’t help feeling, but in terms of whether you choose to let it control you, or you just push it aside and press on anyway. Anyone who wouldn’t want to do the latter is an idiot, right?

Agumon: “You sure this is okay?”

Masaru: “You think I know?”

As the countdown to transfer gets close to zero and the energy starts swirling around them, I love the tiny little hint that Masaru is actually just as nervous about this as Agumon is – he has no idea if this is gonna be okay or not either! – and is just very stubbornly refusing to show it.

As we briefly see here, moving from one world to another involves travelling through a trippy computery in-between void. Future trips to and from the Digital World in the series will (usually, with one notable exception) skip over this part, but we can assume that it’s a thing that happens every time.

The opening also contains a shot of the characters going through this void between worlds. Yoshino doesn’t head to the Digital World herself in this episode, of course, but she will in time.

Masaru: “This is the Digital World? Cool… The sky and the ground are upside-down!”

I like how Masaru is totally willing to buy that the Digital World really is this weird.

Agumon: “Aniki… You’re the one who’s upside-down.”

Masaru: “I knew that.”

…Rather than the much more likely option that he’s just a huge ridiculous dork.

(The subs say “I knew that” like Masaru’s trying to save face, but the word he says in Japanese could also translate as “Oh, I see,” as if he isn’t even trying to hide how he genuinely thought the Digital World was upside-down for a second. That doofus.)

Agumon: “It’s my first time seeing it, too.”

Masaru: “But you’re a Digimon, aren’t you?”

Agumon: “Yeah, but I’ve been in DATS all my life.”

Yep, just like he said in the first episode about not remembering anything but being in DATS. Seems like, unlike the rampaging Digimon they deal with, Agumon came to the human world while he was not exactly “alive”, as such.

They wander through the Digital World for a while, marvelling at some of its weirdness. Circuit board patterns in the sky! Pixelated rivers! All sorts of Digimon walking and bouncing and flying around!

Masaru: “We’re looking for that mole thing. If we keep walking, we should come across a clue or something.”

Man, Masaru, you sure thought this through and planned things out real good.

Agumon: “What about Tohma?”

[cut to the DATS control room]

Yoshino: “‘Leave him, he’ll figure something out on his own.’ …If he said that, what’ll we do?”

Lalamon: “You’re overthinking it.”

[cut back to the Digital World]

Masaru: “Leave him, he’ll figure something out on his own.”

Oh dear. Yoshino has already got Masaru pretty figured out and knew full well he wasn’t likely to take looking for Tohma that seriously. Though, to be fair, it is pretty reasonable to assume that Tohma can figure something out on his own. Masaru wouldn’t admit this just yet, but this is him having faith in Tohma’s capabilities! If Masaru had reason to believe that Tohma was definitely in life-threatening danger he couldn’t get out of by himself, I’m sure he wouldn’t be so nonchalant about this.

As Masaru and Agumon explore more Digital World weirdness – more stuff in the sky! Digital plants! A crystalline colosseum-looking thing that’s actually a Chekhov’s Gun for this episode! – a particular piece of BGM is playing that evokes a sense of grand exploration and discovery, as you’d expect for this moment. This piece happens to be called Savers’ “Main Theme”, which was a little surprising to me when I saw its name on the soundtrack. You’d expect this series’ main theme to be something more actiony, in fitting with all the focus on fighting and the way Masaru is. But maybe a more discovery-like piece is actually quite appropriate for what the overall themes of this story are.

Agumon: “But it feels kinda nostalgic.”

An interesting comment from Agumon here. Though he doesn’t consciously remember anything about the Digital World because he was born in DATS, it seems like he has a subconscious sense of familiarity with it. As we’ve seen every time DATS defeats a Digimon, they don’t die and are simply turned into eggs and “reborn” – so maybe this is a sign of Agumon’s previous life, in which he did live in the Digital World, still vaguely there with him even though the conscious memories of it are lost.

As fun as showing off Digital World weirdness is, we soon get to the point as Drimogemon happens to pop out of a cliff face nearby. Which, yes, is kind of arbitrarily convenient. But I will take this any day over them wandering aimlessly having unnecessary filler adventures for episodes on end before getting to the actual point that the story is here for.

It also may make some reasonable amount of sense, actually. Masaru was sent to where Tohma was last seen, and it’s likely that Tohma deliberately sent himself somewhere near where he could detect Drimogemon. Tohma sending himself over here with absolutely no idea where to find a single Digimon among an entire world would have been incredibly stupid, after all, and I don’t think he could have justified that to himself even with his determination to fix his mistake. Given that, it’s not so unreasonable that Masaru would have run into Drimogemon at some point, since it was going to be somewhere near to where he arrived.

Also, while the other Digimon they’ve seen were just kind of wandering around naturally, the Drimogemon straight up crashed out of a cliffside. It’s still rampaging, exactly as they were worried about last episode, and therefore it’s even more likely that Masaru would have noticed it sooner or later with all the commotion it’s making.

Drimogemon tunnels into the ground, so naturally Masaru heads straight after it – and back at DATS, Yoshino loses his Digivice signal just like she lost Tohma’s. So apparently these signals can be picked up through the boundary between worlds, but not if someone is in another world and also underground. Uhhh, okay then.

This also means that presumably the reason she lost Tohma’s signal is because he went underground while trying to track Drimogemon, not because he was necessarily in any severe danger.

Lalamon: “This may be the worst…”

I’m amused by Lalamon borrowing Yoshino’s catchphrase, but hedging her bets on it a little bit. Maybe it’s not actually the worst! Maybe.

Satsuma: “What are you doing?”

Yoshino: “Searching for an idiot! Geez, why me?”

Yoshino is so focused on frustratedly searching for Masaru’s signal that she doesn’t even register that Satsuma and Kudamon have shown up at first, which is probably the exact thing she was really hoping wasn’t going to happen until Masaru and Tohma were back. Nope, turns out this definitely is the worst.

Back in the Digital World, Masaru’s tried-and-true strategy of tracking Drimogemon down by simply following it through its own tunnel has led them into a huge underground cavern.

Masaru: “Doesn’t matter where this is! Let’s go, Agumon!”

As before, Masaru doesn’t care about the location so long as he gets to fight! Or, perhaps, he’s trying to tell himself the location doesn’t matter, because on some level he’s realising that Drimogemon is very much in its element and has the advantage here. Which it does, as Masaru and Agumon quickly learn they’re not very good at Whack-a-giant-Digimole.

Bear in mind that Drimogemon is not saying a word, just like it hasn’t since it grew bigger last episode. It’s still in that mindless rampaging state, and so it seems to have no issue with straight-up collapsing the ground underneath Masaru and Agumon. That would be going a bit far if this were a Digimon that was still properly in control of itself.

Agumon: “Aniki!”

Masaru: “Idiot, don’t get scared over something like this!”

Masaru is still trying to set an example for his follower and insist that there’s no point in getting scared, even though being in an underground cave-in is in fact a pretty legitimate reason to be scared right now.

They both fall into a pretty deep-looking chasm but manage to somehow land reasonably unhurt, because shounen anime. Agumon’s awkward legs-in-the-air pose he landed in is pretty cute.

It turns out that Tohma and Gaomon are down here too. Seems like Drimogemon took the same approach when it was faced with them.

Masaru: “What’s this? Does that mean the same thing happened to you?” [he and Agumon burst out laughing] “I see, you’re just like us!”

I really like Masaru’s reaction here. He’s not trying to be mean-spirited; if you listen to the tone of his laughter, there’s nothing malicious or mocking about it. It’s just such a huge relief for him to finally be seeing proof that Tohma’s human. He can fail sometimes and mess up in ways as equally ridiculous and undignified as Masaru. He’s not actually some kind of infuriatingly perfect walking supercomputer who can never do wrong like Masaru’s kind of been resentfully seeing him as. He’s just a person.

The relief of that realisation comes out as laughter not because Masaru’s really trying to mock Tohma for failing, but just because of the elation of finally being able to see Tohma as an equal. “You’re just like us”, indeed.

Tohma’s response is also great. He’s not getting frustrated and snapping back at Masaru like he often would in the previous episode, because he must be able to tell that Masaru isn’t actually trying to insult him here. He’s just embarrassed to be unable to deny the fact that he really is more of a fallible human person than he would have ideally liked Masaru to see him as.

Gaomon, meanwhile, the good dog that he is, has been carefully excavating rocks and found a potential way out. As Tohma heads towards it, he stumbles, because his leg was injured from the fall.

Masaru: “Hey, you’re hurt!”

Tohma: [grimacing] “This barely counts as an injury.”

Tohma clearly doesn’t want to give Masaru even more reason to think he’s human and fallible and might need help or something. But Masaru doesn’t care about Tohma’s stubbornness and immediately moves to put himself under Tohma’s arm to support him.

Masaru: “Here.”

Tohma: “Stop that. I don’t need you to help—”

Masaru: “When you’re a man… When you’re a man, there are some things you just have to *do* despite yourself.”

I love Masaru so much. This is the first time we’re getting to see that his manliness thing is about a whole lot more than just fighting. It’s about honour, and integrity, and simply being a good person. The “despite yourself” is because he still doesn’t really like Tohma just yet and there’s a part of him that stubbornly wants to continue to be irritable and contrary towards him for the hell of it – but since Tohma’s injured and needs help, Masaru’s principles about doing the right thing in this kind of situation are more important to him than anything, so he can put that petty stubbornness aside. And these principles of Masaru’s come from exactly the same place as the reason he always gives it his all in fights!

(All those parts earlier in the episode where I confidently asserted that there’s no way Masaru actually wouldn’t have cared if Tohma had got himself killed, and that if he’d believed Tohma was in genuine danger then he wouldn’t have just left him to his own devices? Yeah, this is why. Masaru is Good.)

Masaru’s manly speech was mostly about himself, but it also works as advice to Tohma in this situation. He could continue to try and be stubborn and prideful and insist he doesn’t need help from anyone, but when there’s someone right here offering to help him – someone who was until recently at his throat, no less – what kind of a dick move would it be to reject that offer? Accepting Masaru’s help is the right thing for Tohma to do as well, despite his own pride. And he does.

Agumon: “You’re making me cry, Aniki!”

Agumon also approves of his aniki’s manly principles, like a good follower should. Aniki is teaching him so much.

Masaru: “Let’s get outta here first. Then we can think about other things.”

Implicit in Masaru’s statement here is “then we can get back to arguing with each other if we want” – but I like how he isn’t even mentioning that here, because right now it isn’t about that. Their lives are in danger, they need to help each other and work together to get out, and so nothing else matters for the time being.

This turns into a brief cute montage of the four of them helping each other make their way through the tunnels, which turn out to be quite the underground labyrinth. A lot of time implicitly passes here, and while I doubt Masaru and Tohma are saying very much to each other, this is no doubt making them bond a bit. They’re finally spending some time seeing each other as a person and an equal, rather than as some kind of infuriating representation of everything opposite to their own approach that brings out all their insecurities.

Meanwhile at DATS, Yoshino is indeed getting fiercely chewed out by Satsuma.

Yoshino: “But that was all I could do…”

It really was, or Masaru would have broken the equipment and left Tohma stranded there! She did the absolute best thing she could under the circumstances! Alas, Yoshino doesn’t seem to quite have it in her to stand up for herself and more clearly express this.

Kudamon: “Instead of berating them, we should find out where they are quickly!”

At least Kudamon has the right idea. And I imagine Satsuma understands this, too – he’s probably only so furious at Yoshino because he’s worried about Tohma and Masaru. He likely would have chewed them out if he could, since this is absolutely far more their fault than Yoshino’s. But they aren’t available for him to yell at, so poor Yoshino got the brunt of it instead.

Masaru: “Hey, why didn’t you evolve Gaomon and break out?”

Back in the Digital World, Masaru asking this suggests he’s been thinking himself about, naturally, the most straightforward way to get out of here – he’d just evolve Agumon to GeoGreymon and smash their way out, if only he could!

But it says a lot that Masaru is then also applying his mindset to Tohma and assuming that he’s probably thought of the same thing, hence asking why he hasn’t done so, since Tohma can evolve his partner more easily. Masaru’s starting to empathise with Tohma and see him as a person!

(I guess technically Masaru might be able to get his Digisoul by turning around and punching Gaomon in the face? But it’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t work against a Digimon that’s not actively trying to fight him. Or, even if it did, that’d be a dick move to suddenly punch someone who’s not ready to fight and defend themselves, so I doubt Masaru would want to do that.)

Tohma demonstrates why he didn’t just evolve Gaomon by asking Gaomon to punch the wall, showing how dangerously unstable these tunnels are. Which is, uh, something he really could have just explained with words rather than taking a risk like that. But then again, Masaru is definitely someone who learns things better through actions rather than words, so maybe this is Tohma beginning to appreciate that!

They reach another fork in the tunnel and disagree on which path they should take. Tohma explains that the path he’s choosing isn’t random; he’s been dropping coins on the ground as they’ve been moving, and the path Masaru picked has a coin in it, indicating that they’ve been that way before.

(This is a 100 yen coin, by the way, which is roughly equal to one US dollar, and Tohma’s apparently been dropping loads of them. Could he not have used, I dunno, just 1 yen coins? Someone has more money than he knows what to do with.)

Masaru: “Hey, you’re pretty smart!”

I like how Masaru remarks on this like it’s the first time he’s noticing this, as if he wasn’t already infuriatingly aware that Tohma’s a straight-up genius. This is Tohma displaying his smarts in a low-key, down-to-earth way that a regular person like Masaru can understand and appreciate is a useful way to go about things, rather than a way that makes him just come across as incomprehensibly, unreachably perfect.

Tohma: “As I said, I’m not like you.”

Tohma’s still taking a little longer to warm up to Masaru and acknowledge that they might actually be similar to each other in a lot of ways, since he insists on stressing this point. Come on, Tohma! Masaru’s already started to admit that maybe you’re more like him than he would have liked you to be a day ago; you should start closing that gap, too!

Masaru makes a face in response to this comment. Apparently he’s agreeing with my sentiment about Tohma being a little too unnecessarily uptight here.

Agumon: “Aniki… When are we gonna get outta here?!”

Masaru: “Don’t worry! Keep up your spirits and we’ll use it to work this out somehow!”

Tohma: “Spirit has nothing to do with it, but we *are* heading up.”

I love the contrast between Masaru’s baseless emotion-driven optimism, and Tohma preferring to base his optimism in actual facts. Both are good ways to be optimistic!

Masaru: “You’re really unbearable.”

Tohma: “You too.”

They say this, but they both sound a lot less vitriolic about it than they did in the previous episodes. They still have huge differences in their approach to things that inherently frustrate each other, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be beginning to respect each other anyway!

Masaru and Tohma reach an opening into a wider cavern, but they’re too high up for it to be safe to drop down into it. They’re about to turn back when Drimogemon shows up in the lower cavern.

Masaru: “He’s out of luck to meet us here! Let’s go, Agumon!”

Yes, out of luck, this is definitely the least advantageous possible position that Drimogemon could be meeting them in. Masaru is still being Masaru and paying no heed to the environment; he sees Drimogemon as being out of luck to meet him at all, because hey, this means they don’t have to go searching for it later!

Tohma points out the incredible disadvantage they’re at, including reminding Masaru that it’s not safe for their partners to evolve in here, and insists they should keep heading for the surface and leave it be for now. But Masaru is having none of it.

Masaru: “Not gonna!”

I absolutely adore his ridiculous grumpy walk towards Tohma. It’s so perfect for getting across his stubborn attitude here. No. Masaru is gonna fight the thing and no amount of logic or safety is gonna stop him.

Masaru: “I’m not gonna run or hide! A man takes his fights head-on!”

Also, running away at a time like this isn’t what a man does, according to him, and it’s already become pretty clear just how important sticking to that principle is to Masaru.

So he pulls Tohma with him to the edge of the tunnel and straight-up leaps down onto Drimogemon’s back, with Agumon and Gaomon frantically jumping after them.

(Tohma grimaces in pain as he lands on its back. Yeah, considering his leg injury, ouch.)

Masaru: “Yo.”

Masaru climbs forward onto Drimogemon’s head and has this delightfully audacious moment.

Then, realising they’re there, Drimogemon goes mad trying to shake them off. When they keep clinging on, it rushes towards the nearest wall trying to tunnel away. Masaru tugs on its fur like reins to redirect it to tunnel where he wants it to – in a more upwards direction, since they soon emerge out on the surface.

(It’s a little questionable how Masaru and co. aren’t just utterly crushed between Drimogemon’s back and the earth as it digs its tunnel, but then again it’s questionable how Drimogemon’s drill even manages to drill out a tunnel big enough for its entire body through what seems like not earth but solid rock in the first place. Shush, it’s anime physics; it’s fine.)

Tohma: (He… Did he plan all of this from the start? But wait…)

And here’s Tohma applying his mindset to Masaru, imagining that Masaru might have planned this! He’s, uh… not precisely correct on that one, but it says a lot that he’s even considering it at all.

Rather than jump off its back and fight it here, Masaru keeps pulling on Drimogemon’s fur to direct its panicked running.

Masaru: “Yahoo! This is just like a rodeo!”

(And he’s having a whale of a time while doing it, too, the huge dork.)

Tohma: “Where are you taking us?”

Masaru: “You’re the one who said to think of a good battleground!”

Look at Masaru actually thinking about this and applying a decent amount of strategy! He’s really not that bad at doing so when someone prompts him to actually consider it; he’s just usually so raring to jump straight in that it doesn’t occur to him to do so.

The “good battleground” in question is the crystalline colosseum Masaru noticed earlier – just the kind of place where Drimogemon won’t be able to dig. Inside the crystal arena, Masaru gives it a nice big punch before leaping off its back, and its evolution time.

…Except, it turns out, it’s also about to be evolution time for Drimogemon. For some reason. It starts twitching and shaking like it’s having some kind of adverse reaction to something, but I cannot come up with any possible reason why it would be doing so. The robbers who may or may not have been (read: they definitely were) responsible for it growing bigger and rampaging in the first place back in the human world are long gone and out of the picture. This does not make any sense to me. Maybe this is just something that happens if a Digimon that’s grown bigger but not evolved is left to rampage unchecked for long enough? I don’t think we see any other instances in the series that would contradict this, but this is definitely me reaching here.

Meanwhile at DATS, Miki and Megumi have also been called in to help search for the two reckless idiots, and they finally manage to relocate their signals – probably because they’re above ground again now. But they also detect Drimogemon evolving, which, for some reason, activates DATS’s alarm. You know, the one that’s supposed to be for Digimon appearing in the human world, because it’s hardly like a Digimon evolving back in the Digital World is usually anything they need to worry about.

Drimogemon finishes evolving, and it’s now… a Digmon. (Dig, without the second “I”; yes, this is very easy to awkwardly misread as just Digimon, I know.) And, uh, Digimon evolution level facts: this shouldn’t be a stronger Digimon.

If Drimogemon, an Adult-level like Gaogamon and GeoGreymon, had evolved upwards like you’d expect into the next proper evolution level, it’d have reached Perfect level. And, as I’ve mentioned with regards to evolution levels, they are each ridiculously exponentially stronger than the last, to the point that even GeoGreymon and Gaogamon working together would not have stood a chance against even a single Perfect-level.

So, well, obviously that couldn’t actually happen here, because Masaru and Tohma need to win this fight. Instead, Drimogemon just evolved sideways into a bonus gimmicky evolution level called Armour level, which, from its appearances in other series, seems to be roughly just as strong as Adult. This is not actually any significantly more of a threat at all.

Tohma: “It’s Digmon. He’s far more powerful and has a higher mobility than Drimogemon.”

I guess we’re meant to assume that Armour levels work somewhat differently in this Digimon universe and are in fact just a little bit stronger than Adult, while not nearly as much so as Perfect? Sure, I guess; the general mechanics of Digimon don’t always work exactly the same in different universes.

(Still, Tohma conspicuously does not mention Digmon’s evolution level and explain the fact that it just evolved more sideways than upwards, because the writers don’t want you to notice how awkward this is.)

This whole thing, nonsensical DATS alarm and all, is a hilariously transparent attempt by the writers to inject more artificial tension into this situation, and, I dunno, to maybe showcase a different Monster of the Week since we’ve been dealing with Drimogemon for two episodes now. It’s very silly. Drimogemon should have just stayed as a Drimogemon and everything would have been fine.

At least this does mean, thanks to Digmon’s apparent higher defences and mobility, we get GeoGreymon not winning the fight in a single attack. (Though my brain looks at Digmon and sees something that’s clearly a Bug/Steel-type and is very bothered by how an obviously Fire-type attack like Mega Flame doesn’t harm it at all. Shush, I was raised on Pokémon; I can’t help but see things this way.) It puts up a decent fight for a while, dodging or withstanding their attacks and hitting back, which at least is a refreshing change from the one-attack victories we’ve seen before – because there’s a narrative point to be made in this fight that wouldn’t work if they won straight away.

…I still think this could have been made to work just fine with Drimogemon turning out to be tougher and have more mobility above ground than they’d been expecting, though. It shouldn’t have needed to evolve sideways for this fight to be a challenge.

So anyway, after a little bit of them not getting anywhere in defeating it, Tohma reminds Masaru of the part last episode where GeoGreymon and Gaogamon’s attacks collided from opposing directions and cancelled each other out.

Tohma: “But what if the opposite happened?”

Masaru: “What’d happen?”

Tohma: “Let’s find out!”

Look at Tohma getting into the Masaru spirit of things! He has an idea, but unlike his usual carefully-calculated strategies, he doesn’t know exactly how this one’s going to play out. And yet he’s going for it anyway!

Tohma: “Isn’t that your style?”

Masaru: “Now you’re getting it!”

Not only that, but Tohma knows this is him pulling something Masaru would pull, and he’s okay with it! And of course Masaru enthusiastically approves.

Believer kicks in here, by the way, not earlier when they were evolving. We’re still hearing it every episode for now, but even then, the music directors know better than to just blindly throw it in the moment an evolution animation happens, regardless of context. They’re deliberately saving it for the actually triumphant moments, like all “evolution” songs should be.

Masaru: “The timing has to be perfect.”

Meanwhile, Masaru is taking a leaf out of Tohma’s book and caring about little strategic details like timing! Look at them both go.

On their command, GeoGreymon and Gaogamon fire their Mega Flame and Spiral Blow attacks together in the same direction at the same time, which turns them into a huge flaming tornado that engulfs Digmon and overwhelms it.

Tohma: “The opposing attacks didn’t clash… they fused! Their combined powers enhanced each other and became amplified to more than before!”

Which, though I don’t know if Tohma himself quite realises this or not, is also a very fitting metaphor for his and Masaru’s methods, just like what happened last episode. If they oppose each other, all they do is get in each other’s way and achieve nothing at all, but if they work together, they can each complement the other’s skills to become something greater than either of them could be on his own!

Masaru: “Who cares about that? All that matters now is… he dies!”

Meanwhile, of course Masaru doesn’t care about figuring out the sciencey logistics of how this is working (and he certainly cares even less about possibly making some kind of metaphor). He just knows that it’s awesome and it means they win.

(The “he dies!” is, uh, rather dark, especially considering it’s only being turned into an egg, but I’m pretty sure that’s a subs thing and that Masaru doesn’t actually directly reference death here. The subbers were probably just going for something that sounds a bit snappier than “he’s defeated”, which I imagine is closer to what Masaru actually literally said.)

As Masaru starts celebrating their win like the adorable excited dork he is, GeoGreymon and Gaogamon give a small smile to each other, and it’s cute.

Tohma, meanwhile, isn’t quite the type to join in with Masaru’s loud celebrations, but he has a smile to himself and is obviously happy about this outcome as well, in his much more subdued way.

We cut to sun…set? Huh, now that I think about it, I guess this part of the Digital World runs on a different timezone to Japan in the human world, because it was daytime the whole time over here while it was night in Japan. Maybe this world even has an entirely different day length.

Masaru, Tohma and their devolved partners are heading back to the recall point – with Masaru still supporting Tohma’s walking, because he is still good and Tohma probably still needs it.

Tohma: “When you jumped down towards Drimogemon… Did you plan right from the start to use him so we could get to the surface?”

Tohma only asks this now even though they’ve been implicitly walking back from the fight for a while. It seems he tried to tell himself that it probably was all planned, but the thought kept nagging at him – was it really, though? This is Masaru, after all – that he eventually just had to ask and confirm it.

Masaru: “Nah, that was just spirit! But the result was great, wasn’t it?!”

Aaaand of course it wasn’t all planned from the start. Of course not. But, hey, there was still deliberate intent and strategy involved as it was happening. It seems Masaru can be pretty good at the whole seat-of-your-pants, make-it-up-as-you-go type of strategising when he needs to be!

Tohma: (I hate to admit it, but I can’t analyse his ability with my intellect.)

And that’s okay, Tohma! This is Tohma acknowledging that Masaru’s approach is nothing like his, but that it still works just as well and is just as valid a way of going about things. He’s opening his mind to more than just his very rigid way of thinking!

Tohma stops in their walking and… offers Masaru a fist-bump. I really like how he’s the one to offer here, after Masaru was the first to offer support to Tohma earlier and Tohma was still being kind of hesitant about fully accepting Masaru as being similar to him. He’s making up for that now and closing the rest of the gap himself, just like he began to do in the battle when he suggested a Masaru-like risky strategy!

Masaru accepts it without question, of course. He probably already felt like they’d grown enough of an unspoken bond from their experiences that it didn’t need to be said, otherwise I imagine he’d have already made this gesture himself sooner. But I like that it didn’t occur to him, so that we could see Tohma be the one to choose to initiate this.

They are friends now and it is good!

Agumon: “Aniki’s got himself another follower!”

That’s, uh, not quite what this is, Agumon. But it’s adorable that Agumon jumps to seeing things that way, because to him his aniki is just The Coolest and he can’t imagine anyone else ever being his equal. So if Aniki’s gained the respect of someone new, that must mean he’s also become an aniki to them, right?

Gaomon: “Master is no follower!”

Meanwhile, maybe Gaomon feels pretty similarly about his master, too. He is, after all, a very good dog.

Safely back at DATS, Masaru and Tohma and their partners have the grace to look appropriately sheepish about this whole thing as Satsuma yells at them. Yoshino is also there and also looks like she’s getting yelled at along with them, which seems unfair to me – she already bore her share of the blame earlier, and it was far less her fault than theirs!

Kudamon: “You were able to make it back this time, but did you think about what would’ve happen if you’d failed? You still know nothing of the Digital World!”

It’s pretty interesting that Kudamon says this to them, considering that he knows far more about the Digital World than anyone else in this room and yet hasn’t ever thought to inform his agents about it in case something like this ever happened.

Satsuma drops his anger and turns his back to them before finally complimenting them on managing to return. Despite his sternness, he does care about his subordinates! I really do think he was only so angry because he was worried about them never making it back. Going there in the first place was monumentally reckless on both their parts, but Masaru and Tohma did at least handle things quite impressively while they were there, and that deserves to be acknowledged.

(Speaking of worried, I imagine Masaru is very much not planning on telling his mother about how he nearly went and got himself stranded in another world, which is definitely for the best. Poor Sayuri would be terrified just thinking about how close that came to happening.)

Overall thoughts

When I first watched Savers, I think there was a part of me that expected the Masaru-Tohma rivalry to drag on unnecessarily long, like for ten episodes or more, and probably become kind of stale and tiresome before it finally got resolved. But no! Savers doesn’t waste any time with this mini-arc. We’ve seen Masaru’s insecurities brought out by Tohma; we’ve seen Tohma’s insecurities brought out by Masaru; now it’s time to shove them into a situation where they can learn to get along, so that the story can move on with them actually working together.

And, really, it was never going to take Masaru and Tohma that long to reach this point. They always had so much in common along with their differences, and they’re both fundamentally decent people despite their tendency to be very stubbornly insistent about their own way of doing things. All it took was putting them in a situation where they can come to see the other as a person and not have their own issues brought out by the other’s very presence, and each one was always going to see that there’s plenty about the other that he can respect.

So I like this episode a lot, because I think it pulls this off really well. There’s a lot more to it than just the basic premise of “put them in danger so they’re forced to work together” – there’s all sorts of little moments I’ve talked about here that show each of them is slowly beginning to see the other as human and come to understand and respect his different way of thinking. The writers really thought about this, and about these characters. Savers’ character writing is great.

And yeah, the Drimogemon evolving into Digmon is pretty silly, but that’s only a small thing. The conclusion of the metaphor started last episode with GeoGreymon and Gaogamon’s attacks is a narratively appropriate way to end the fight, at least.

---

[Dub comparison]

#digimon #digimon savers #masaru daimon #tohma h norstein

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winryofresembool · 4 years

Text

Things We Lost in the Fire, ch 24

aka Caleo uni au

Fic summary: Calypso starts studying at a new university, but to her annoyance her new flatmate is a loud mouthed mechanic who also likes to sneak his dog in whenever. But as she learns to know him better, she realizes they might have more in common than what she first thought. Eventually, even the darkest secrets come out…

Chapter summary: Halloween chapter, part 2.

A/N: Yay, an update! I think some of you are gonna be happy about the characters that are being introduced in this chapter... Also lots of Caleo dorkiness (and canon references) in it! And you'll get to see if you were right with your costume guesses :D

Also like I already mentioned last week, this is the last chapter that I have written so far (when I started posting this fic I tried to make sure I'd have at least 7 chapters ready so I wouldn't have to stress about deadlines... and here we are now) so it is possible that updates may slow down a bit, at least if the chapter wants to become long. But I am still /trying/ to keep up with the regular updates the best I can :) So worry not!

Now, enjoy and let me know what you think!! Ps. somehow we’ve managed to pass 50k words already :O

Words: 4040

Genre: romance & hurt/comfort

Warnings: none

previous chapter / AO3

…

“Hi, you guys!” Piper, who was dressed as Wonder Woman, greeted Leo and Calypso first when they arrived, gesturing for them to come in.

“Hello! I was afraid Argo II had decided to stop working because you guys are late,” Jason the Superman noted as he offered to take Calypso’s coat and put it in a hanger by the door.

“I’m not going to lie to you, Jason, that possibility did cross my mind as well,” Calypso said, casting Leo a meaningful look. “But no, not this time.”

“We’re only 10 minutes late!” Leo protested, checking the time from his phone. “I was busy finishing something… and Calypso took her time preparing herself as well. She probably did her wig for like two hours.” He gave her a not so serious side-eye.

“I did not!” Calypso said defensively. “Yeah, I straightened and combed and braided it but that took me maybe 15-20 minutes so he is highly exaggerating.”

“Don’t worry, Calypso, we know he does that a lot.” Piper smiled at her reassuringly. “Speaking of your wig, though, you look very cute! That hair reminds me of the style you had before my makeover. You’re dressed as the mythology Calypso, right?”

“Yes, I am,” Calypso said, pleased that Piper had figured that out so fast. “I thought it would be fun to be a bit self ironic for once. I haven’t really had a good reason to sew recently so this was a nice excuse to do that as well.” She made a small twirl to show the dress better.

“That dress really looks great!” Piper told her. “I would gladly commission you to sew me clothes; it’s so hard to find anything nice from the clothes stores these days. But Leo.” She turned back to him. “I see someone hasn’t bothered to get a costume. I wasn’t expecting that from you because you’re always so excited about them.”

“No, you got it all wrong.” Leo wagged his finger at her. “I do have it here, but as I told Cal, it would have been too difficult to wear in the car.” He dropped his bag on the floor, causing a loud thud as it hit the ground.

“Alright. Care to give us any hint what it is?” Piper asked curiously. “Seems heavy.” Calypso wondered if this was something they did every year.

“I’m just saying that it’s inspired by some movies that united us three,” Leo noted mysteriously. “But that’s all, you’ll see soon!”

“My mind is blank now,” Piper said. “Jason, what movies have we watched with him?”

“The first one that comes to my mind is Star Wars,” Jason reminded her. Suddenly both Jason and Piper’s eyes widened in realization. “Could it be?”

“Oh no, Leo you didn’t!” Piper doubled over in laughter when it occurred to her what Leo’s costume most likely was. “I can’t wait to see this!”

“I hope you took pictures with Festus!” Jason couldn’t keep his poker face either, and Calypso watched their reactions with confusion.

“Don’t worry, I will show them later.” Leo grinned, unperplexed by Jason and Piper’s laughter. “Now, where can I change?”

Piper showed him an empty room where he could get into his costume in peace, while Calypso started looking around the house on her own. Even though the place seemed rather fancy, Jason and Piper had managed to make it cozier with their personal objects. A lot of them had seen life and were worn but somehow they still fit in with the newer decorations.

As Calypso reached the living room, her focus went to the guests who had already arrived at the party. She waved at Annabeth and nodded awkwardly to Percy. Even though she and Annabeth were friends again, she wasn’t quite sure how she should act near Percy so ‘reserved’ felt the most natural reaction. She couldn’t help but smile a bit, though, when she registered their costumes: Annabeth had a Chiton just like her, although grey instead of white, with some silvery accessories and a beautiful owl shaped brooch over her chest. Perhaps the most impressive part of her costume was the Greek styled helmet that was used in battles and that hid most of Annabeth’s curly ponytail. Calypso was quite certain she was dressed as Athena, the Greek goddess that according to her was the one she identified herself the most with. Percy on the other hand was wearing sandals, shorts, a tropical shirt, and a belt with fishing equipment and he was holding a fishing rod in his hand. Calypso couldn’t quite figure out who he was supposed to be, other than some sort of fisherman.

“Hi,” Calypso greeted them as she got to hearing distance with them. “You guys look nice. You’re Athena, right?” She asked Annabeth. “Matches my theme, don’t you think?”

“Sure does,” Annabeth nodded, eyeing Calypso’s costume. “You look pretty much exactly like how I imagine the mythology Calypso.”

“Thank you. Coming from you it’s a big compliment.” She turned Percy. “I can’t figure out who you are, though. You don’t seem like a Greek god?”

“I am, though,” Percy replied. “I’m Poseidon.”

“Ooh, so that’s why the fishing gear!” Calypso realized. “But I don’t think the Greeks had tropical shirts quite yet.”

“No, you’re right in that.” Percy shook his head, smiling a bit. “But I’m basing this on the version in the Peter Johnson series. That’s how he was described in it.”

“I didn’t know you have read that too,” Calypso said, “But makes sense. Um, the Poseidon and Athena of the mythology hated each other, though. Not that it’s really my business, but I hope you two are doing fine…?” She asked a bit nervously, not wanting to be the reason for their issues.

“Oh yeah, we are,” Percy confirmed immediately. “It’s just an old joke – back when Annabeth and I were reading the Peter Johnson books I used to say Poseidon is my godly parent and Athena Annabeth’s, and that just kind of stuck with us.”

“Alright.” Calypso accepted Percy’s answer, turning her attention back to Annabeth. “By the way, where did you get that helmet? It definitely looks fancier than most of the plastic ones you see at costume shops.”

“My father collects these things,” Annabeth answered, lifting the helmet from her head for a moment. “I’ve told you he’s also a historian, right? Well, one of his friends wanted to make a replica of the ancient Greek helmets with some modern machines and dad bought this from him. I’m not saying this is 100 per cent accurate but it looks pretty cool, in my opinion.”

“It does,” Calypso confirmed.

“You came with Leo, right?” Percy asked then, to which Calypso nodded. “Where is he? I can’t wait to see his costume; he usually goes for something that is way over the top. Last year he was Hiccup from How to Train your Dragon and he had made a Toothless costume for his dog. I’ve also seen pics of him as Iron Man. Yes, with a full iron costume.”

“I can believe that of him,” Calypso chuckled, imagining Leo in the said costume. “He just went to change into his costume because apparently he couldn’t drive in it. He didn’t reveal what he was going to be, but it does sound like something extravagant.”

“I missed his costume last year but I’ll be sure to have a camera ready when he shows up this time,” Annabeth said happily. Calypso was relieved that the conversation was going this well; she hadn’t known what to expect beforehand because this was the first time she was in the same room with Percy since the ‘incident’. Talking with him now, though, made her realize that holding a grudge wouldn’t be smart and he seemed to think the same way.

“I just realized,” Calypso decided to change the topic, “that I’ve never heard the story of how you guys know Jason and Piper. So how did that happen?”

“It’s a funny story,” Percy started, smiling at the memory. “Jason and I used to be the captains of rivaling soccer teams when we were around 16. Well, one time Jason’s team was visiting us but we were playing in an arena that had just been renovated so I hadn’t been there before. I may have been a bit late from our team meeting and I was a bit lost so I decided to ask one staff lady where I was supposed to go. Somehow she got our teams mixed up and I ended up in the locker room of Jason’s team. Some of Jason’s teammates said that my expression was worth seeing when I realized the mistake but I dunno about that. The funny thing was that somehow the same thing had happened to Jason; he had also been late for the meeting because of traffic or something and he had gotten into my team’s locker room. Well, after the game we had a good laugh about it together and ended up talking about other stuff as well and noticed we have a lot in common. That’s how we became friends. When we moved into the same town, we started training together at least a few times a week.”

“Piper and I didn’t learn to know each other until Jason and she started dating a couple of years ago and they invited Percy to some party where I went with him. To be honest, I was a bit suspicious about her at first because we seemed very different but eventually we learned to respect each other’s qualities. And here we are,” Annabeth added.

“Those are some cool stories,” Calypso said. “It seems like a funny coincidence that somehow we all ended up in this city even though most of us are from somewhere else. Like Leo is from Texas, I am from Greece…” “Speaking of him,” Annabeth had to muffle his laughter with her hand, “I believe we are finally getting some answers about his costume.”

“Oh… my gods” was all Calypso could say when she turned to the direction Annabeth was looking at. “You’re really something else.”

Leo was completely hidden inside his costume, but Calypso could practically hear him grinning at their reactions. The costume looked very much like in the movies; golden (just painted, not real gold, because there was no way Leo could afford something like that) plating forming a droid with big round eyes and an ability to speak lots and lots of different languages: C-3PO from Star Wars.

“Holy shit, dude, that looks so real.” Percy gaped at Leo. “I’m starting to understand why you spent so much time in your room the past few weeks.”

“Why C-3PO, though?” Calypso asked once she managed to put her poker face back on. “Does that have some story behind it?”

“Because, duh, it looks cool!” Leo exclaimed with a mechanical voice from inside his costume. “I dunno, ever since I first saw C-3PO as a kid I thought it would be cool to be able to build something like that. And hey, his ability to translate like all the possible languages is pretty neat. Me? I just know 3.”

“Isn’t it uncomfortable in there, though?” Calypso asked. “That thing must be heavy.”

“Sunshine, I’m always uncomfortable. But this was a childhood dream of mine so I sure as heck am not backing off now,” Leo said with determination.

“A stubborn one, aren’t you?” Calypso stated. “Even I have to admit, though, that you have certainly done some thorough job with it. Hey, I should take photos before I forget! You don’t get to see this every day.”

The others dug their phones up as well and for a while Leo just made silly poses while they took pictures, clearly enjoying the attention his costume got. Eventually he started demanding that Calypso should join him for the photos but she was a bit hesitant at first.

Leo argued: “Come on. Greek mythology meets Star Wars? You don’t see a crossover like that every day.”

“Can’t argue with that, I suppose,” Calypso said and went next to him. “Well, do we have some kind of story for Calypso and C-3PO’s meeting?” she asked as Percy and Annabeth waved at them to look at the camera.

Leo considered her question for a moment. “Oh, how about this? C-3PO somehow ends up on Calypso’s island - because duh, Calypso is cursed so she can’t leave the island…”

“You seem to know surprisingly much about Greek mythology, just saying…” Calypso noted while trying to smile for the photos, resting her hand on the metallic shoulder.

“I told ya, Sunshine, you can blame tía Callida for that…” Leo reminded her. “Anyway, I imagine those two don’t really like each other at first because they’re so different but eventually they learn to respect each other’s skills; C-3PO can translate basically any language and Calypso is good at all kinds of handiworks, which is hard for a droid.”

“And? What happens after that?” Calypso asked curiously.

Leo considered it for a moment. “C-3PO doesn’t really wanna leave Calypso’s island but he has galaxies to save with his friend R2-D2 so he has to go but he promises to come get her afterwards.”

“Aw, Leo, that is kind of sweet,” Calypso commented, suddenly aware of the metal arm that had snuck around her waist. “Does he… does he ever return, though? Shouldn’t that be impossible?”

“For a human, maybe, but he’s a droid,” Leo noted. “Unfortunately during a big battle he blows up badly but the ever so faithful R2-D2 collects the pieces and finds someone who can rebuild him again. And boom, he makes it back and lives happily ever after with his goddess.”

“What’s the term you use when you enjoy a fictional relationship a lot?” Calypso asked. “Shipping?” Annabeth nodded at her. “I don’t know, Leo, to me it sounds like you ship those two. Isn’t that a bit weird?” “What, why would that be weird? I’ve seen people ship…”

“I see these two have gotten into a full on nerd mode again,” Annabeth said quietly to Percy while they were waiting for the flatmates to stop their bickering so they’d be able to take the photos. “Not projecting themselves into their characters, right?”

“No, definitely not,” Percy agreed.

Eventually Leo and Calypso stopped bickering and Annabeth was able to take the pictures. Even if Leo was mostly hidden by his costume, Calypso felt a bit self conscious about the fact that these were the first photos of them together. They did a few goofy poses because Annabeth and Percy told them to, but Calypso thought she probably looked more embarrassed than funny in them.

Once they were done, Leo went to Annabeth who was going through the photos and bowed his head a bit to see them better. “Hey, these do look pretty cool! It’s probably just the lighting but here you look like you’re blushing to some funny comment C-3PO made.”

“Show me!” Calypso yelped nervously and took the phone from Annabeth. When she saw it, she could immediately tell Leo was not wrong; she really was blushing. “Yeah, it’s definitely those candles in the background that do it… And I think it’s pretty warm in here, maybe all the people here heat this room…”

“OK, if you say so,” Leo said but Calypso imagined that he was looking at her suspiciously through his costume.

Trying to get the others’ attention to something else, she said: “So, who else has arrived so far?”

“Nico and Will. I think they went to get some snacks from the dining room,” Piper, who had just entered the room, answered.

“Leo told me that Nico is Jason’s relative, but what about Will?” Calypso asked her.

“Will is Nico’s boyfriend. This is the first time we’re meeting him but they seem very good together. At least he seems to have a grounding effect on Nico, and he actually listens to him, unlike most of us. Um, sorry, it’s a long story, one that I should probably save for another time. Nico may be a bit hard to approach sometimes but he is a very nice guy when you learn to know him. Just… been through a lot. I guess like many of us here. But he seems way happier now,” Piper said, and as if on cue, they could hear some distant laughter coming from the dining room.

“We should start a traumatized college kids’ club,” Leo attempted to joke, and the others hummed in agreement. Maybe she did belong to this group after all, Calypso thought. If only they knew, though…

“This just got cheerful,” Percy said, interrupting Calypso’s thought process. “Who’s up for blue candies? Get them before Will and Nico eat them all.”

“I heard that, Jackson!” Nico entered the room without a warning. “No offense to you or your mom but blue candies aren’t exactly my thing.”

“Hi, Nico,” Percy greeted him, seeming a bit flustered after Nico’s comment. “You haven’t met Calypso, right?” He pointed at her.

“No, I haven’t,” Nico took a quick look at her and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Alright, in that case, this is Calypso Astal. And Calypso, this is Nico di Angelo,” Percy introduced them to each other.

“Nice to meet you,” Calypso approached him, but he seemed to evaluate her for a moment before he took her hand.

“Likewise,” Nico said finally. “I think Jason has mentioned you a few times.”

“Oh. That’s nice,” Calypso said a bit unsurely, like every time she met a new person. The lonely years still had a toll on her, and even though she liked spending time with her friends, meeting new people was always a bit nerve wracking to her. “You’re his relative, right?”

“A distant cousin,” Nico answered. “Yeah, our fathers are related, but I have my mother’s last name and Jason has his.”

“I take it your mother has roots elsewhere, based on the last name?” Calypso asked.

“She was Italian,” Nico shrugged. “I lived there my first years too. But now I can barely remember those times.”

Calypso noticed the use of past tense, but she thought it was probably better to not ask about that in the middle of a party. “Oh. I’ve been to Italy a few times. I’m originally from Greece.”

“What brought you here, then?” Nico asked.

“Dad’s work,” Calypso responded in a tone that told everyone she wouldn’t elaborate on that topic more. It seemed to have become a habit to her.

“Anyway,” Leo, who had managed to stay quiet for a surprisingly long amount of time in Calypso’s opinion, stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Nico, a little bird told me,” he looked at Jason, “that your boyfriend is a Star Wars geek. Is that true?”

Nico took one look at Leo’s costume and his mouth twitched when he realized why Leo was asking. “He is, but don’t let him get started on it, or else he will never stop. Besides, he’s not my boyfriend, I prefer calling him…”

“A significant nuisance?” Will showed up from the dining room, carrying a plate full of food. “Don’t mind him, he just warms up a bit slow.”

“Yes, this is Will,” Nico sighed, addressing those who hadn’t met them before. “Sometimes he’s a nuisance, sometimes he can be quite OK. When he’s having a good day.”

“Same back at you, dear,” Will laughed. “Did I hear someone mention Star Wars, though?”

“You did,” Leo said, stepping forward so Will could see his costume better. Needless to say, Will looked beyond thrilled.

“Oh boy, here we go again,” Nico said quietly before Will even had time to comment on the costume.

“Woah, that must be the best C-3PO costume I’ve seen. And yeah, I’ve seen a few so I don’t compliment you for nothing,” Will assured.

“Thanks, man, I did spend quite a while with it,” Leo said, high fiving Will. “Glad someone here appreciates good things.”

“I still hope you’re not one of those fans who have only seen the most recent movies and not the originals,” Will noted.

“Heck, no!” Leo exclaimed immediately. “The original three for the win! Mom and I used to watch them a lot… um, when I was little. She was a big fan. But the newer ones just don’t feel the same.” Calypso had a feeling Leo had almost said something else, but he had changed his phrasing at the last moment.

“You have a pretty good taste,” Will said approvingly. Then he finally realized he hadn’t even asked Leo and Calypso’s names before getting into the geek mode.

“So, who are you two? I already met Percy and Annabeth earlier but I don’t think I know you guys yet.”

“I’m Leo Valdez, and this is my, um, flatmate, Calypso Astal,” Leo introduced. Calypso hoped there was a better word to describe their relationship than a ‘flatmate’ but at the moment it was probably the best and the safest option there was.

“Flatmates, huh?” Will repeated. “How did that happen?”

“I was in a hurry to find a roof over my head so I put in the application that I also accept mixed flats,” Calypso replied. “I didn’t meet Leo beforehand because, um, that would have been a bit difficult to arrange in this case, but it worked out OK.” Calypso noticed Leo was looking at her from the corner of his eye, and she realized she had never even talked about that option before. The truth was that she had had to plan her leaving very thoroughly so her father wouldn’t notice and she had driven to Indianapolis as fast as possible, with no time for second guessing.

“And my flat happened to have a room free because our boy Jason decided to move in with Beauty Queen,” Leo added to that story. “It’s really no stranger than that.”

“Oh, right, someone must have mentioned that you and Jason used to be flatmates,” Will recalled. “I just didn’t connect the dots.”

Jason had apparently finished welcoming the rest of the guests because he joined the group in the living room. “That reminds me, I don’t think I’ve asked you, Calypso, if Leo still leaves his dishes undone and if he has empty milk cartons in the fridge.”

“He used to do that?” Calypso asked with amusement. “After seeing his room that’s not so hard to picture, but no, he’s been pretty tidy in the common area. Although one time he bribed me to do his dishes for him in exchange for some of his food.”

“It was a good deal!” Leo protested. “You didn’t have to cook and you also got to taste some Valdez’ sizzling hot quesadillas so I’d say it was a win-win. Besides, you didn’t seem to have anything against that.”

“Alright, I will admit the quesadillas were pretty good,” Calypso conceded. “But a true gentleman offers them without even asking. Well, other than that he’s been OK,” she told Jason with a playful twinkle in her eye.

“I guess he really is able to change his habits, then,” he replied. “At least when the flatmate is someone he...”

Before Jason had time to finish his sentence, Leo intervened: “Folks, do we really have to be talking about my cleaning habits in front of people I don’t know? The first impressions are important, especially when it comes to Supersized McShizzle!”

“We’re just being honest, Repair Boy.” Calypso couldn’t resist booping his metal covered nose. Apparently she just didn’t know how to not cross the line with this boy, she sighed in her mind.

“Is that all? Where’s the feisty Sunshine I know?,” Leo said in a low tone, so the others could barely hear his comment, coming out almost flirty.

“Shut up,” Calypso answered equally quietly but held her gaze at him.

“Ahem,” they suddenly heard Piper’s voice behind them. “In case you’ve stopped with the flirting, I’d like you to meet a couple of people.”

Calypso turned to see the newcomers and as she recognized the Hunter badges both of them had attached to their shirts, something in her mind just suddenly turned off.

#caleo #leo valdez #calypso #heroes of olympus #percy jackson and the olympians #trials of apollo #my fics #caleo uni au

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astro-anton · 4 years

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ONCE MORE

Another bland morning in the Iron Union, I awake from my station. The glowing sun hits my arm through the window, I miss being able to feel its warmth. I put on my conservative looking one-pieced suit I got, when I joined the flying eyes. I then head for the “cantina”; they always serve the best on Tuesdays. I step into the tent labelled “cantina”. I see Aida, standing there in her elegant deep blue uniform, on her left breast she has her 3 medals she’s been given by the general. Around her neck she has a turquoise satin handkerchief. I love how the sun reflects off her. I love how she’s build, I love the way she carries herself from the counter down to our table in the corner, our table, I’ve never thought of it as our table. I blush. I wonder if Aida think of it as our table. I seem to catch her eye as I approach, and she gives me a wonderful little smirk.

As the clock strikes midday, we make our way to assembly, the General, Eve, is going to make an announcement. On my way there I pass the download station, I’ve only ever been in there once before, and it’s not a pleasant memory. They keep a tight security detail on the tent, and you can understand why. It is rather important for our success.

We are launching an attack on enemy lines, this is going to be one of the most important battles for the control of the English isles.

I remember every summer in my home town of Dover, we would go down to the English canal for a quick dip, I miss the white cliffs, I miss that amazing ice cream down on the corner of Tower St. and Dickson Rd. “Harry’s Custard cone & ice cream parlour”.

It was here I met Aida, I saw her standing behind the counter, in that pretty and colourful uniform, she looked so sweet, red cheeks and freckles. I hope we can return to how things were, once more. I miss the old days, but my work here will help the Union bring the peace we once had, a better peace perhaps.

I start getting ready, I’ve got a bad feeling about this, I am supposed to be their eye in the sky, it is my job to keep an eye on the assault and make sure they do not get ambushed or cut off on any front.

I am scared for her, Aida, her being the captain of one of the infantry battalions. I don’t want her to go through the pain of dying once more, and the pain of being downloaded into another body. I remember my first and only download, one of the perks of being a flying eye, it was one of the most hurtful thing I’ve ever experienced. First the pain of dying, and then the pain of being forced into the newest metal chassis. But it had to be done if I wanted to be with Aida. She had been caught in one of the many riots that had broken out at the start of the war. And the only way to save her was joining the Iron Union. Still, it’s better than being without her.

I see Aida’s battalion rush towards the enemy base, with the rest of our army behind them. Suddenly I hear an explosion from my right, and my fellow flying eye is no longer by my side. More and more of my fellow flying eyes explode, and I look towards the ground, as two armies begin surrounding Aida and her battalion, they are cut off. I WILL NOT LOSE MY AIDA. I head for the ground; I don’t want her to go through the pain once more.

I get there as the two armies meet, cutting Aida and her battalion off from the rest of our allies.

A turquoise handkerchief catches my eye through the red sea of the battlefield. Aida and her battalion don’t stand a chance; they are extremely outnumbered. I try to keep the enemy at bay by emptying rounds after rounds into their ranks, but to no avail. They move as an endless ocean, one wave after the other. Another battalion, led by Mo, manages to fight their way to what remains of Aida’s battalion, but they are too late.

I can see the relief in Aida’s eyes as she sees them through the waves of enemies. The split second pause is too long, and she gets riddled by bullets. I hover there, above this sea of death, as some kind of fraudulent messiah, watching my loved one die before my very eyes. Once more.

I know she is still a part of the mainframe, I know she is not truly dead, it was merely her cage that died on the battlefield. After a hard fought battle, we return to base camp.

I head directly to the download tent. There in front of the tent opening is my Aida, at least she is wearing her uniform and handkerchief. She does not look like my Aida. Her new body is a newer model, its slimmer.

It’s harsh not recognising your loved one.

I hope this war ends soon, so we may return to Dover and continue our life together. Maybe we could open our own “Aida & Marv’s Custard cone & ice cream parlour”.

I had specifically asked to join the flying eyes, because I never wished for this war. But I yearn for peace and I want to help Aida get the revenge she so wishes for. I understand her, being killed by the ones she called allies. I’m just glad I’m by her side and able to see her every day.

As we load into our stations once more, after a successful mission. I feel like I’m losing Aida more and more. She got shut down today, so she was downloaded into a new body. She looks less and less like my Aida; she no longer has red cheeks or freckles. I don’t want my Aida to be a slimmer newer version, I want my Aida to have long blond flowing hair, to wear a pretty colourful uniform and to sleep in with me.

It feels like she’s being turned more and more into a machine for every time she gets downloaded.

I miss my Aida.

I miss my old Aida.

I look forward to being with the Aida I know, once more

#writing #short story #dystopia #love story #writing prompt

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ts1989fanatic · 4 years

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You Belong With Me: How Taylor Swift Could Still Get Her Masters Back

While Taylor Swift made headlines Monday with news that Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings had potentially doubled its investment in her early catalog with a reported $300 million sale to investment firm Shamrock Capital, the superstar’s strategy to regain control over those recordings is still unchanged: If she can’t own them, she'll copy them. Since June 2019, Swift has been saying she’ll re-record her first six albums, which were released between 2006 and 2017 by Big Machine Label Group, and the process is apparently already underway. "I can't wait for you to hear what I've been dreaming up," she told her fans in a lengthy Twitter note on Monday.

By re-recording and re-releasing these albums, Swift intent is to undercut Shamrock’s investment (and Ithaca’s before that) and reduce the value of those old masters, while creating more value for herself. The simplest way to do this is to deny uses of those old recordings and only approve uses of her new recordings once those are ready. Swift can do this because she controls her publishing, through Universal Music Publishing Group, and has the right to veto any (potentially quite lucrative) uses in movies, TV shows, commercials and video games. She could even prevent use of her original masters on newer streaming services like Twitch, which currently has no label licensing deals and must take down any copyrighted content at a rights holder's request, or the next generation of platforms like Peloton or TikTok, which all require licensing deals as well.

Per her original Big Machine contract, Swift can re-record all her old masters as of early this month. Promising "plenty of surprises in store," Swift says she recently began this process. But, assuming she follows through, what can we expect? Never mind that the 30-year-old megastar will no longer sound like the hungry and empathetic teenager she was when she first sang "15." (Although today's Taylor Swift may do a better job of imitating, say, 1989-era Taylor Swift.) How will she drive listeners to stream the new versions of her songs when classics like 2014's "Blank Space" have drawn nearly 2.7 billion YouTube views and more than 436 million Spotify plays? While her passionate fans have pledged to support her here (“We all will be deleting all of her old music from our playlists and apps and will only be streaming Taylor's art owned by Taylor,” tweeted one fan earlier this month), the answer, as always, really comes down to money.

Swift will need her powerful label, Universal Music Group-owned Republic Records, to aggressively market her new recordings through advertising, social media and search-engine optimization. When a Spotify user, or even one of Spotify's own curators, adds a Swift hit to a playlist, she'll want them to choose the new recording, not one owned by Shamrock; when a music fan googles "Fearless," she'll want the new recording to lead the results, not the 12-year-old original; when somebody asks Alexa to play "Speak Now," she'll want the new version to come up, not the 2010 original.

he people at Republic are skilled at doing all these things. But there's a catch. A different Universal division continues to distribute Big Machine's recordings, even under the new Shamrock ownership, and those include Swift's early catalog. That creates competition within the same company: One side potentially working to ensure the 2010 "Speak Now" is Alexa's choice and another trying to change the default to the new re-recording. Who will win? The short answer: Universal. The label will continue to profit from just about everything involving Taylor Swift, including publishing. The more nuanced answer is that Republic's CEO, Monte Lipman, and his boss, UMG's CEO Lucian Grainge, are likely to go along with anything their biggest-selling star wants to do.

Still, if all this comes to pass, the result will be... confusing. Artists including Def Leppard, Squeeze, Blue Oyster Cult and JoJo have re-recorded their originals over the years, and while some of JoJo's newer material has generated big streaming numbers, none of these re-recordings are major hits. Then again, none of these acts are the world's biggest pop stars, and they haven't come close to matching Swift's ability to generate sales, streams and attention.

The new owners of Swift's master recordings seem unfazed by the singer's long-stated goal to undercut her early catalog with new material they don't own. They know she despises the guy who continues to have some kind of stake in them: Braun, who manages Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande and once represented her nemesis, Kanye West. Braun's company bought Swift's first label, Big Machine, in June last year and took over ownership of those early recordings. This week, Braun sold them to Shamrock, which offered Swift a partnership. But because "under their terms [Braun] will continue to profit off my old musical catalog for many years," the idea was a "non-starter," she tweeted.

"While we hoped to formally partner," Shamrock said in a statement, "we also knew this was a possible outcome that we considered."

In the end, Shamrock is betting Swift's original recordings will always be more valuable than any re-recordings. They may be right. No matter how formidable 2020 Taylor Swift and her team may be, no matter how righteous her cause, no matter how lovingly and authentically she recreates her original songs in the studio, it'll be hard to overcome the power of clicking on the original "You Belong With Me" by 2008 Taylor Swift. But then again, if Swift can cause a big enough headache or drive down the value of those early masters enough, she could wind up in a better position to make the kind of deal she’s been looking for all along.

ts1989fanatic this is pretty much bullshit look at the highlighted section above, saying that @taylorswift will need the full might and resources of her label too promote and new album is already disproven.

Her label knew next to nothing about folklore until the day it was released and it has been one of the most successful Taylor albums to date.

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abybweisse · 5 years

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@gkrosental Oh, I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s split between various posts. So, it might be hard to find. You can check my blog, though, for #advanced technology, #medical technology, #technological advances, #medical advances, #reaper technology, etc. Oh... and stuff like #george and #giygas....

For one thing, that’s not Sebastian’s mobile; it’s the one Vanel’s thugs have. He just takes it from one of them to talk to Vanel.

The other thing is that modern technology shows up in the manga quite frequently, and Yana-san explained once that it’s an alternate universe to begin with, and these things are, therefore, only... slightly anachronistic. Let’s not forget that our earl has some kind of television; it’s been vaguely mentioned by our earl and Finny, and much more directly mentioned by Soma. Funny thing about the TV is that our earl must not be the only one to have one, since John Brown mentions the same TV program to the crowd at the Crystal Palace; he promotes the rumor that the show is based on Queen Victoria! But yeah... some of them are definitely still anachronistic, even for the Kuroverse.

The reapers (and their superiors) have advanced technology. We know this for a fact; even ages ago, when Othello was newer to the reaper organization, he’s seen carrying around a box of computer parts, like a keyboard. Othello says that humans can get ahold of such knowledge through demon contracts, etc. Even though Sebastian hasn’t been told (that we know of) to “invent stuff for me” by our earl, we can pretty well assume that Funtom’s innovative toys come from a combination of our earl’s imagination and Sebastian’s demonic abilities. Funtom is best known for its Bitter Rabbits and candies, but they also sell video game consoles... with game controllers connected by wires. Indeed, Funtom sells a few things that you’d only expect the reapers to have. But it doesn’t end with Funtom, not even regarding video games. How else would Chlaus show up in ch1 with that game cartridge packaging for “Mouse3”? It was actually full of the drug evidence he’d brought back from Italy... but the packaging is probably legit.

I suspect that reapers, like Undertaker, also have an effect on the advancements that humans make... accelerating the process of innovation. Those dialysis machines are a perfect example. I’m not sure yet who actually built them. Perhaps Druitt, since he has a medical license? And because Undertaker saved him on the Campania for REASONS...?

At one point, during the murders arc, Charles Grey makes a comment that Germany’s about ten years ahead of where it should be; I’m not sure how he learned that (perhaps from John Brown?!?), but this means that the Kuroverse is dealing with an accelerated timeline for its technological advances. Characters like Grey and Othello acknowledge something is amiss. But, it’s complicated why it’s happening. Germany might have some reaper or demon/angel intervention, too, but they also have/had prodigies, like Sieglinde Sullivan. She managed something her parents, with all their learning and training, had failed to do. SuLin was the result. Idk how they got the rest of the advanced technology they are using, like radar and tanks. Divine intervention? Other geniuses? Since coming to Great Britain, Sieglinde has continued to shock and amaze with her latest inventions... which seem to be financially backed by the queen....

The reason I mentioned #george and #giygas is because of my main theory regarding Black Butler... that’s it’s largely based on a Nintendo game called Mother3. I mean, that’s what “Mouse3” by “Ninkyodo” refers to, after all. But, as I’ve said in many of my posts about this, it’s not just Mother3 being used for the manga series; it’s the entire game series. And this topic is one of those situations that requires going all the way back to the first installment: Mother. In the US, it was titled EarthBound: Beginnings.

In Mother, a young alien, named Giygas (the translation varies, but this is one of the common ones), is traveling from their home planet, populated by this technologically advanced civilization. Their spacecraft crash lands on Earth and they are taken in by a couple, named George and Maria. They raise them as their own, and they later manage to travel with Giygas back towards their home planet, and Maria stays there... but George returns to Earth... with stolen technology, which he continues to research... and spreads around to other humans. Giygas is sent by their superiors to stop George, because the alien race is worried that humans will eventually use their own technology against them. However, George has died by the time Giygas returns to Earth, so they decide to target George’s descendants. Humans have started to incorporate the knowledge that George brought back; it’s even showing up in some humans’ natural abilities, as if it’s being genetically inherited. We meet one of those descendants, Ninten. He, with the help of friends, has to collect melodies from a song and sing it to Queen Mary, who is... kind of like Maria... but on another plane of existence, called Magicant.

Later, Ness (in Mother2, aka EarthBound) and his pals have to fight people who are under Giygas’ power, including a rather bothersome and wholly self-centered boy named Pokey Minch. By now, Giygas has been driven mad by his futile attempts to stop the spread of this stolen technology and knowledge. Then they have to fight Pokey Minch again, but Pokey has been drastically changed by time-traveling equipment he stole from a human inventor (Dr. Andonuts). Ness and his friends have to fight not just this futuristic version of Pokey but also an unhinged and unleashed version of Giygas; the alien has lost their physical form and now exists as an evil force of immense power. Through prayer (mostly), Ness and his friends are able to banish ... perhaps truly destroy... Giygas, but Pokey escapes to cause problems yet another time.

With Mother3, which never got a worldwide release (which is why Chlaus says in Black Butler that “Mouse3” [and the drugs] were hard to get ahold of in Italy), mirror twin brothers Claus and Lucas get separated after their mother is killed (and their father is too full of grief to help them). Claus ends up missing (he’s dead at the bottom of a cliff), and Lucas and the family dog, Boney, go on a quest to avenge his family. Lucas, Boney, and friends they make have to defeat King Porky; King Porky is what the time-traveling Pokey Minch decides to call himself when he travels to this future setting and settles down to become a tyrant. Giygas seems to be gone, but King Porky still follows Giygas’ destructive life path. King Porky is obsessed with popularity and technological advances. And, at some point, the lifeless body of Claus gets turned into a Fascinating Chimera, and the mirror twin brothers have to compete to fulfill a prophecy... of waking the Dark Dragon. Dr. Andonuts was previously forced to help King Porky, but even he eventually gets revenge.

I have a lot of posts about Mother3 theory, and I’m trying to focus here on a particular aspect, so here are some parallels, particularly regarding technology:

Our earl — Lucas

Real Ciel — Claus

Sebastian, under contract — Boney, the loyal family dog

Sebastian, aka the “Black Butler”, once the contract is fulfilled — Dark Dragon, particularly once the prophecy is fulfilled

Undertaker, bringing otherworldly technology to humans — George

Reaper superiors and/or John Brown — the original manifestation of Giygas and that alien race

Reapers, in general — Magypsies, in general

Prince Soma — Pokey Minch

Prince Soma with the Right Hand of Kali — Pokey Minch with the unhinged Giygas (This parallel would be further strengthened if Prince Soma ends up stealing anything out of Sieglinde’s lab or convinces her to make any sort of contraption for him.)

Queen Victoria, who demands unwavering loyalty and is trying to increase Great Britain’s power through technology and new infrastructure — King Porky, who demands the same and is also focused on infrustrucfure, technology, innovation, etc.

Queen Victoria with John Brown — King Porky drunk on unbridled power, basing his actions on what he thinks Giygas would want of him.

Undertaker, inventor of Bizarre Dolls — Dr. Andonuts, inventor of Fascinating Chimera

Sieglinde, chemist and inventor of various contraptions — Dr. Andonuts (also his younger version, Lloyd), inventor of various contraptions

There are so many other parallels, not just in characters and plots, but also in their timelines. However, like I said... I’m trying to focus on your ask regarding technological anachronisms.

TL/DR: It’s definitely supposed to be the Victorian era, but it’s an alternative universe to our own, so it took some different paths along the historical timeline. Add to that the fact that reapers and demons/angels (or other supernatural beings, like gods) have been intervening in human lives, and advanced technologies and innovations have been introduced along the way because of it.

There are lots of examples of this throughout the series, including the mobile phone used by Vanel’s thugs (Sebastian grabbed theirs; he doesn’t have one of his own). Other examples include TVs, video game consoles, war tanks, radar, and all the contraptions Sieglinde makes for herself and for others, like the Phantom Five.

This all works just dandy with my theory that the manga series is largely based on Nintendo’s Mother game series, since both deal quite a bit with “stolen” technology and runaway technology/innovation.

Thanks for the ask and for letting me screenshot the message to answer in a post. 😊

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the-wlw-cafe · 4 years

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[E]nnui - a 2BA2 fanfic

Warnings: Self-harm, self-destructive behaviour, heavily implied suicidal ideation - there’s comfort in there too I swear!

Read it on ao3 here!

Another piece of her skin had come loose near her hips. It had to have happened a while ago, judging by the dust and dirt clinging to the adhesive on its underside. She hadn’t noticed it back then, being occupied with fighting for her life, the misery, the toil and pain and the war . But now, after the end of it all? Nothing would take her mind off it. She’d catch herself absent-mindedly tugging at the loose piece every now and then, or rather, Pod would catch her and admonish her in his usual robotic manner.

Alert: Continuing to irritate the area will cause further damage to unit A2. Proposal: Stop.

And he was right, of course, but that just made her want to throw a brick at him all the more.

(She also hadn’t noticed when she’d switched to referring to Pod as he instead of it, but he didn’t call attention to the change and she’d rather die than admit she th ought of him as anything but an annoyance.)

Well, Pod wasn’t here now. Being assigned to two units, he usually split his time between monitoring 2B and herself, or sometimes the pods just headed out by themselves to do God knows what. Maybe there was a part of A2 that wondered what they were up to, a part of her that might have been curious enough to ask about it lifetimes ago, but now? The task of having to ask and listen to a reply seemed insurmountable.

Shit, she really needed to trash something. Before, whenever such thoughts threatened to overtake her, she’d simply pick a fight with the first machine she saw, rinse and repeat until she was too exhausted to continue on or move or even think. But of course even that was taken from her as the machines were gone now. Not physically gone, of course, they were still dotted throughout the landscape, but they were empty. Just vacant shells, unmoving, staring off into space.

“They’re among the stars now”, 9S had said, as if that would explain anything. A2 hadn’t had the energy to ask for clarification. They kept their distance from each other anyway, since being in the other android’s presence dredged up emotions and red hot flashes of pain pain pain she no longer had a release for.

The sound of tools scraping and metal being torn and bent drifted to her from way down below. She came up here often now, to the window where she’d first awoken again. It was a long way down, and not for the first time she wondered whether the pods had placed her there intentionally. A second chance, and an easy way to refuse the gift. Again and again she found herself drawn to this spot, looking down until the instincts she was programmed with to keep her body safe flooded her system with dizziness that forced her to back away from the window. She used to feel so far away from everything here, but apparently, the real world had forced itself even into this space. The resistance had begun scrapping the empty machines down for parts, and even though she’d tried to help them initially just to have something to do, once she was actually faced with one of the shells, still faintly whirring with the machinery still ticking away in the rusty chassis but at the same time nothing going on inside, she felt like vomiting. An echo of the time she’d shared a mind with 2B, she supposed, she’d looked into the machine’s unseeing eyes and seen Pascal, seen the children, and she just couldn’t…

With an abrupt sting of pain she realized she’d been doing it again, finding that loose piece of skin and mindlessly tugging, only this time, Pod wasn’t here to tell her off. She gritted her teeth against the sting and began pulling, watching with an almost morbid fascination as the skin peeled to reveal more of the black exoskeleton underneath –

“Stop that.”

The sudden interruption startled A2 enough to actually obey, letting go of the abused patch of skin as if it had burned her. She turned towards the newcomer, one hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of her sword she no longer had a use for. She relaxed incrementally when she found that it was 2B who’d snuck up on her, her hand uselessly coming to rest at her side. She wasn’t at ease, she figured she hadn’t been at ease since the day she was fabricated, but something about the combat model seemed to calm her – a sentiment she would have laughed at weeks ago, given the many times 2B had been sent to execute her only for A2 to destroy her again and again, each time coming closer and closer to defeat as 2B profited from combat experience while her own body degraded. But there was no way of sharing a mind, memories and decades of pain with another person without retaining some familiarity after the fact.

It was difficult to see the unfiltered version of 2B she’d experienced through her memories in the carefully schooled expression of the android in front of her. The version A2 had experienced loved fiercely, cared deeply, and was hurt beyond measure, but the 2B she saw now let almost none of that show. Calm, collected. The very model of a YoRHa executioner. A2 didn’t have to ask why 2B still saw the need to guard her expression so thoroughly. After all, it was the same reason why A2 cleaned and sharpened her weapons every day with more care than she’d ever afforded her own body, or why 9S had taken to painstakingly record ing all of his memory, each minute detail of e very day he experienced with pen and paper and was keeping this treasury of memories hidden under his pillow.

“You need maintenance”, 2B stated, taking tentative steps closer and, when A2 didn’t object, sat down beside her. She didn’t look at her, instead fixating on some point in the distance, beyond the grey husks of concrete buildings leaning heavily against each other, as if they might collapse at any moment. Her voice betrayed no emotion, but the faint golden glow of the lunar tear tucked neatly above her ear said otherwise, said it’d suit your stylish looks, said thank you for the flowers, said desert roses are beautiful, aren’t they. The grief A2 felt upon these echoes flashing through her mind might as well have been her own. They’d both lost so, so many people, and yet they were still here, alive even after having literally died. It was almost funny. Almost.

“Nah, I’ll be fine”, A2 said, “I’ve survived this long even with machines looking to destroy me at every turn, I won’t fall apart now.”

2B made a non-committal sound, and a long stretch of silence followed. A2 had to stifle an irrational urge to laugh, because for two people who literally had their minds melded at some point, they sure were bad at communicating. But the silence continued, gaping, deafening, and a strange anxiety rose in A2, a compulsion to fill it with something, anything, even though she knew that no words could ever do justice to the things she longed to express, the things that bubbled and churned inside her like a vile acid she needed to expel.

“I miss it.”

A2 was almost surprised that she had spoken. She might have been inclined to believe it was a hallucination caused by one of the many glitches she’d contracted over decades of neglect of maintenance, if 2B hadn’t turned to look at her, head slightly inclined to the side, encouraging her to go on.

Well, shit. The rat was out of the bag now, or whatever the humans used to say, so there was no point in backing down. A2 leaned against the wall with a heavy sigh, craning her neck to stare at the webbing of cracks along the ceiling, because making herself vulnerable was hard enough without looking into 2B’s face and seeing whatever pity or disdain she might be too slow to hide.

“I mean, the fighting. Always being on the move. Never having a moment of quiet, never having a moment alone with your own thoughts. I was so busy surviving that I didn’t have the time to ask myself why I was surviving in the first place. I think it was spite, mainly”, she added with a mirthless chuckle that sounded hollow in the empty room. “But now, with YoRHa gone and the war over, there’s nobody left to spite, and that leaves me with…”

She didn’t voice the nothing that was on the tip of her tongue, but it hung over them like a heavy, suffocating blanket nonetheless. Truly, how selfish was she, to prefer the never-ending suffering of the war over this peace, this chance for Anemone and her people to build something new, something substantial. She didn’t dare to open her eyes and face whatever 2B must be thinking of her, and this was new too: She cared now, cared what others thought of her, because now she ha d people with opinions to care about.

And yet, the silence continued, the tension reaching a fever pitch until A2 could be ar it no longer. She braced herself and turned to face the combat model once more, no matter what she –

Oh.

2B’s gaze was trained on the horizon once more, but she’d placed a gloved hand over A2’s own, her thumb rubbing comforting circles over the exposed exoskeleton.

A2’s core temperature spiked with embarrassment as she cleared her throat. “Yeah, I…I can’t actually feel that, sorry”, she huffed. “I don’t know how it is with you newer models, but my more delicate sensors were located directly under my outer skin and I lost that ages ago. So, yeah, it’s gonna take nothing short of shoving my hand between two moving gears to actually generate some feedback.”

“Oh. I’m…sorry”, 2B murmured, removing her hand to clench it in her lap in a demure gesture that was so unlike her it made A2 feel even worse. She’d never felt self-conscious about the state of her body before. She’d been frustrated, sure, when she found her capabilities steadily decreasing the more time she spent on the run, but she’d never felt so outright ashamed that she could hear her black box whirring in her ears, but now that her deficiencies had been brought into such stark contrast against 2B, perfect, pristine 2B -

“A2.”

2B’s firm voice pulled the attacker model out of her spiralling thoughts. 2B’s eyes were focused on the spot on her hip where she’d been subconsciously scratching at the loose patch of skin again. A2 clenched her blackened fingers into a fist, fighting against the overpowering compulsion to just rip it.

“You need maintenance”, 2B repeated, with more insistence than the first time.

“Are you still on about that?” A2 groaned, running a hand through her hair.

“You’re literally coming apart at the seams!” 2B hissed, and there was fervour there, a real concern.

“Don’t I know it”, A2 said, throwing her head back and barking out a laugh that was devoid of any happiness. She just wanted this conversation to be over, she wanted 2B to stop wasting her concern on her, she just…wanted everything to stop.

Another pause, and then…a sensation, a touch, ever so lightly, ever so softly, a pair of lips against her cheek. The contact lasted a second at the most, before 2B pulled back an inch, her face still so close that A2 could feel her breath ghosting over her skin as she spoke her next words.

“Can you feel this?”

A2 didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to, not when the staccato beat of her pulse and the stuttering of her breath spoke volumes. 2B slid closer to her now, sitting directly next to her so close close close that their thighs were touching and A2 could feel it and shit, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been touched with care, like she mattered, like she deserved any of it. Pressure was building in her throat and she clenched her fist tighter until she could hear the joints of her fingers cracking. And still, she leaned into the contact, closed her eyes and held onto that moment while it lasted.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing”, 2B said quietly. A2 couldn’t guess how much time had passed, how long they’d simply been leaning against each other.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”, A2 lied without any conviction. She had no doubt 2B would be looking right through her.

“Refusing maintenance. Coming up here every day.”

A2 opened her eyes as an errant breeze blew in through the window. She squinted against it. It was a long way down.

“Anemone is worried about you. I – we all are.”

“Well, you’re wasting your time”, A2 bit out, her voice tight against that god-damn lump in her throat. Too much, it was all too much. She had to go, go…somewhere, anywhere. Away. Away from people who looked at her, saw right through her, right down to the very core of her as if she was made of glass. She made a motion to get up, but 2B grabbed her wrist and tugged her down harshly.

“A2, you deserve to be cared for.” 2B’s voice was still so quiet, but as unyielding as the concrete beneath them. “You deserve this”, she said, one hand coming to rest against A2’s cheek. The touch was nothing but gentle, and yet it felt scalding. She batted it away.

“You of all people should know how it feels. We’ve killed, more times than we could count, more times than can ever be forgiven, it’s the only thing we were made for and the only thing we’re actually good at, and you’re telling me I deserve anything?”

2B shrunk back as if she’d struck her, and immediately a cold wave of guilt washed over A2 and settled deep and heavy in her core. She knew 2B, she could still feel the disgust and self-hatred emanating off of her whenever A2 had addressed her as 2E, they’d shared the pain of killing her closest friend over and over and over again. A2 reached out, to touch 2B, to hold her perhaps, but she thought better of it. She wasn’t made for gentleness. Everything she touched fell apart.

“I’m sorry”, she mumbled, her words falling pathetically short.

“Appreciated”, 2B said through gritted teeth, her fingers clenched into the hem of her dress so tightly her knuckles were turning white. She was close enough to touch, and yet they were miles apart. A2 had broken them miles apart. She had broken them apart, and she had no idea how to fix this divide. She wasn’t made for fixing.

“Shit, 2B, that was a fucked up thing to say to you, I’m-”

2B silenced her laughable attempts with a single, stiff wave or her hand.

“You’re right.”

A2 immediately opened her mouth to protest, to silence whatever nonsense she’d put in the combat model’s head, but then she met her eyes, cold steel blue more fiery than ever, and any words she might have said wither ed on her tongue. She was fixed to the spot, unmoving.

“And if we really are one and the same, A2, then you’ll understand why I can’t bear another death.”

It was too much, it was far too intimate. A2’s first instinct was to deflect, this was her they were talking about, she’d hardly be missed by anyone, having outlived almost all who might at some point have cared about her. And 2B, especially 2B, whom she’d killed dozens of times…

Unbidden, the ugliest memories reared their head, flashes of deep, oozing slashes in 2B’s body as her teammates stumble over themselves in retreat, flashes of loosing herself in B-Mode when she couldn’t keep up with her opponent anymore, only coming to again when her form was beaten, bloodied and almost unrecognizable. The same nausea she’d felt when asked to dismantle the machine husks rose in her again, that feeling of wrong wrong wrong and she couldn’t stomach it, not even the thought of it…

This time, she caught herself. Her hand halfway to her hip, she froze, biting her lip to distract from the urge to just tear at pieces of herself. 2B noticed, of course she noticed, placing a hand over the damaged area. It was tender, and though every fibre of her being cried out that she didn’t deserve it she didn’t deserve it she didn’t deserve it she swallowed them down. Laid her hand atop 2B’s. Threaded their fingers together.

She watched 2B fail to hide a soft gasp, and it made something within her lurch in delight. She gave 2B’s hand a gentle squeeze, wishing now more than ever to be able to feel the warmth of her hand radiating through the smooth satin glove.

It was a stupid reason. It was as good as any other.

She allowed herself to rest in this moment for a few seconds longer, then she slowly rose to her feet, groaning under the aching of her stiff joints. How long had she been up here?

“Come on, let’s head back before Anemone sends out a search party”, she said, pulling 2B upright, and when she was standing, A2 was struck to the core when she saw her smile. It was a subtle, understated thing, barely even visible, but shit, if she could make 2B smile like that one more time she knew she’d be worth something more than the scrap metal she was made of.

She took one last look out of the window over her shoulder. She could barely stomach it – it was such a long, long way down.

Feeling 2B’s hand in hers.

Making her smile.

They were better reasons than spite, she decided.

#nier #nier automata #a2 #2b #working title of this fic was freddie projects their depression onto robots

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thebest-medicine · 4 years

Text

Steven Tag (2.0)

A/N: had this idea a while back, spoilers ish for the Steven Tag episode of SU future. I JUST WANT STEVEN TO SMILE AND BE HAPPY OK

Words: 1,869

AO3 link (x)

...

“I’m NOT playing! You guys CAN’T make me!” Steven insisted with a huff. Though the anger and annoyance didn’t really hold in his voice as he‘d hoped; he was busy running through the snow trying to avoid the multi-colored Stevens pursuing him.

Garnet, Amethyst, and even Pearl... They were being ridiculous. All three of them were shape-shifted to look just like he did years ago, a little kid version of Steven. Playing tag. Steven Tag. Of all things. He didn’t have time to just sit around and have fun like that anymore, and even if he did, he didn’t want the same kind of fun they had when he was 13... Though he had to admit he was a little impressed and a teensy bit flattered that Pearl shape-shifted for him.

Steven swiftly darted behind the shadows of a rock formation on the beach. He kept low to the ground, tried to slow his breathing and calm his jittering heart. Adrenaline coursed through him in a way that he wasn’t used to these days. Before, sure, he’d felt the adrenaline of a chase, a battle... but lately, he realized that most of the adrenaline rushes and stress he felt was related more to....thinking about all the things he had to do with school and the diamonds and his future and his friends and his family and the gems. This time, however, his brain could be totally focused something simple, hiding from the gems who were just being...silly. Maybe this wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t ready to admit that just yet.

A huge purple fist smashed down and crushed the boulders to the left of Steven. He jolted, his eyes nearly popping out of his head upon being discovered.

“I know you’re in there Steven.” Sugalite smirked as she bellowed out the damning information. “It’ll be easier on ya if ya just come on out now.”

Sugalite. Steven felt himself sweating as he thought. Gosh and even she was shifted to look like kid-Steven. Somehow ridiculous and terrifying.

He jumped up, suddenly making a break for it, when he felt Amethyst’s whip wrap around his ankle. “NOOOOO..!” Steven cried out.

“Come onnnnn! We’ve got you!” Amethyst teased having just separated from the fusion with Garnet as she pulled Steven to the ground and rushed toward him.

Steven twisted his leg free in a miraculous escape. He stood and turned to run just as Garnet!Steven appeared in front of him, a miraculous feat of her own. Steven teetered backward in surprise and landed on the sand on his back. Garnet peered down at him, and when Steven blinked he saw Amethyst’s face (or, more technically, his face) lean down over him.

“We’ve got you now Steven....” Amethyst grinned.

“That’s right.” Garnet added.

Steven rolled his eyes. “Whatever, you got me all sandy. Doesn’t mean I’m playing. And definitely doesn’t mean I’m turning into little Steven. You guys are-“

Amethyst put her finger out over Steven’s lips, making him glare at her for a moment as she cut him off. “Oh you’re playing. You’re gonna have fun! You’re gonna laugh! Don’t make me make you...” Amethyst smirked. “Actually, now that I’m thinking of it, I think I would like to make you.”

“What?” Steven narrowed his eyes at her.

“I know how to get him to do what we want...” Her eyes turned to meet Steven’s. “I know your weakness, Steven...” Amethyst teased ominously.

Steven watched her nervously, “Y-You do?” He knew he’d been having trouble controlling some of his newer emerging powers, maybe he had some diamond weaknesses he wasn’t aware of yet either...

“We do, Steven, I’m afraid it’s true.” Garnet hunched closer. Two small child-Steven frames boxed him in on the snowy beach.

Steven looked between the two of them, unsure of what would happen to him just as Pearl caught up to them. Her shadow blocked the sun from Steven’s face. The three gems encircled Steven entirely as he curled in on himself on the snow.

“That’s right.... you’re... TICKLISH!” Pearl proclaimed, immediately reaching her shorter-Steven-arms to poke and tickle all over Steven’s underarms and neck, just as Garnet reached out and did the same to his knees. Amethyst made short work of his stomach and ribs, squeezing and pinching all the most effective spots.

And right, they were. Steven may have grown taller, stronger, and older, but he also had grown arguably more ticklish. Maybe it was just that he hadn’t been tickled in so long? But something about it had him cackling beyond belief when they had barely even begun.

This had not been what Steven was expecting at all, and yet it somehow fit so well with how silly the gems were being. It was disastrously effective. Steven took a moment to thank the stars that no evil gem they had encountered had any kind of evil tickle machine, or had ever even tried tickling in general against him. Steven thought, for a moment, that would have made him lose.

Steven lost himself in giggles, thrashing around in the snow.

“Need a hand, Amethyst?” Pearl quipped.

Steven felt a brief respite as Amethyst’s tickling fingers left his torso. He opened his eyes to a scene of horror as Opal stood over him, shape-shifted to still look like Steven but with her four arms.

Two of those arms took Steven’s hands in theirs and held them up next to his head.

“No- NONONO guys plEHEHEEASE I’m TOO TICKLISH AHHSHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHGASHHS PLEASE PLESHEHEHE-“ Steven attempted to plead.

Opal tickled from his neck over to his underarms, then skittered her nails up and down Steven’s ribs for a while. She periodically switched up her spots, like getting Steven’s tummy and then neck, and then his armpits and then belly button, sides and then ears! So many places to tickle and tease. Much easier to do without Steven’s pesky hands getting in the way to block her.

Meanwhile, Garnet had been squeezing Steven’s knees and lower thighs, but decided she may want to get in on the more-hands party.

Steven didn’t even notice her un-fusing until he felt both of his shoes being untied and tugged off.

“NO AHAHAHAH GUYS PLEHEHEHEASE- FOR REAL!” Steven wailed ticklishly, “I’LL PLAY JUST PLEHEHEHEHEASS SE STOP ahahHahahahaHAAHHA!”

They all paused a moment, giving Steven a chance to catch his breath.

“That’s wonderful news Steven.” Sapphire assured him, patting his shin in approval.

Steven glanced between the three gems now still holding him. “So uh, are you guys gonna... let me go or...” Steven began.

“I’m sorry, Steven...” Sapphire sighed. “There’s no-“

“There’s no future where you just let me go without tickling me more first.... is there..” Steven felt himself shrink as he guessed Sapphire’s prediction.

“I could’ve told you that.” Ruby snickered.

They resumed their fun torture of Steven, Ruby and Sapphire pulling his shoes and socks off and wiggling their fingers around his soles, between his toes. Ruby tickled much harder and faster, while Sapphire scribbled mercilessly, somehow light yet unbearable at the same time. She could see the future of your reactions to different spots and thus tell exactly where to get you just right.

Opal unfused after a few more minutes of rib squeezes that had Steven arching his back off of the ground. Amethyst kept a grip on Steven’s arms while Pearl stood up and summoned a few feathers from her gem.

Steven’s eyes widened when he saw them, and suddenly there were two holo-Steven’s at either side of him, each given two feathers from Pearl herself. They reached down and pulled up Steven’s black star tee and began wiggling the feathers all around his sensitive tummy and sides.

“NOHOHOHO GUYS! I CANAHHAHAN’T- PLEAHAHES- OHmyGODAHAHA ahah DON’T SHSHSH Ahaha HAAGA STAHP-“ He couldn’t even feel the snow around them anymore. All he could feel was being tickled and tickled.

Amethyst almost jumped with joy at the tease Steven set himself up for. “Did I hear... don’t stop?”

Amethyst shape-shifted one finger from each hand to extend longer, twisting the two fingers up over Steven’s head and then slowly descending them toward the center of Steven’s armpits.

Pearl kneeled down beside Steven as well and began counting his ribs. Meanwhile, Ruby and Sapphire each really worked over his feet. At one point even having Ruby sit over his ankles and hold his toes back while Sapphire wiggles her fingers all over his soles, scribbling up and down around the balls of his feet.

Steven couldn’t even protest, just laid there giggling and giggling and squirming. For the first time in years, he felt himself just laughing and having fun, not thinking about anything else. It was driving him absolutely crazy, but he felt something in his heart warm as the gems spent this time with him. When was the last time he let himself be silly and just let go?

He found himself thinking about this until one of the holograms brought their feather to the center of his stomach and began twirling it around his gem. Steven felt his laughter going hysterical as the sensation on his gem tickled and vibrated through his entire nervous system. Coupled with the tickling on the rest of his body, it was practically unbearable.

After a few more minutes, they finally slowed down and let him up, all hugging him in the process. Maybe making some more time to play games and let loose was something Steven needed to work on... maybe it was something they all needed to work on!

Steven had a few residual giggles leftover as he let go of the gems’ embrace. “I love you guys, I just... I don’t want you guys to always think of me as Little Kid Steven. I know time is different for you and you don’t change as much as I do, but I’m growing up! I don’t wanna be reminded every time we goof around about how I used to be weak and young and naive....”

“Oh, what if!” Amethyst piped up, changing back into her normal form. “Instead of Steven tag....”

Pearl returned to her normal form as well just as Garnet re-fused and did the same.

They all glanced Amethyst’s way as she allowed for a dramatic pause. “We could play... TICKLE TAG!” Her fingers wiggled menacingly.

“WHAT?” Steven blushed, a silly grin creeping onto his face.

“Just like we just did... except I think we could get a lot more damage in if we don’t have to stay shape-shifted to look like Steven. It’s perfect!”

“N-No I don’t- haha- I don’t think that’s such a good plan Amethyst.” Steven put his hands up, giggling a little as he backed away from the group.

“Oh come onnnnnnn. It’ll be fun!” Pearl nudged Steven with her elbow.

He squeaked defensively and jumped back from her. “You’ve already tickled me enough for today... please...” Steven whined.

“That’s fair... but I like this plan. Next time!” Garnet announced.

Steven laughed nervously. “Oh noooo....”

“Oh yes. Can’t wait!” Amethyst winked. “Better watch outtttt Steven.” She sing-songed. “We’re gonna getcha again.”

Steven laughed. “You guys are ridiculous.” He couldn’t say he wasn’t at least a little bit looking forward to it.

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fermented-writers-block · 5 years

Text

Why I think the actual Angel is Noelle Holiday

After nine months of research, procrastination, and working out the kinks, here’s a little theory of mine that’s been floating around in my head ever since the end of last November about Noelle Holiday and her potential role in the future of the series. It’s a bit of a long read, but I hope you’ll be willing to indulge me and give this crazy theory a chance.

As a forewarning, the following points I will be bringing up are simply too hefty to make a TLDR for, and it’s quite a long read, but trust me, you’re going to want to read through all of it for it to make sense in the end

Part 1: The Possible Evolution of the Delta Rune

First off, I’d like to look at the Delta Rune itself and a few easily overlooked key lines Gerson says about it:

That emblem actually predates written history.

The original meaning has been lost to time…

All we know is that the triangles symbolize us monsters below, and the winged circle above symbolizes…

Somethin' else.

The meaning and design of symbols can change over time, and it’s likely the same has happened to the way the Delta Rune is currently interpreted compared to when it first came into existence. For example, take a look at these variations of the Delta Rune:

Of these variations of the Delta Rune, these may be some of the oldest or closest iterations of the symbol to the original design, especially the ones from the intro cutscene and Gerson’s shop. The former is presumably from long before the Human-Monster War and thus the oldest version, and with Gerson’s apparent age and how he implies that he studies history, it is likely that the variation in his shop is also as close as can be to the original.

As for how these particular iterations of the Delta Rune fit into my theory, look at the design and positioning of the wings in these probably older iterations compared to likely more modern interpretations:

On the more recent interpretations, the base of the wings are placed around the same level as the center of the circle, and the wings themselves are mostly realistically designed. However, on the older interpretations, the wings are more simplified and stylized with more of an explicit arc to them, and the ‘feathers’ are more blocky with visible and sometimes significant spaces in between. Now keep that in mind when looking at these pictures:

Taking this into account, I think it is possible that - through the help of time and redesigns becoming successively more stylized - what was originally supposed to be a reindeer with antlers slowly got distorted and misremembered as a ‘winged circle.”

And maybe, something like this might even apply to Deltarune’s version of the Delta Rune as well given how several of the depictions of the Angel throughout the game look like the transition point between the older and newer designs, what with the ‘feathers’ being much rounder and closer together while still on an arc-based stylized design instead of a realistic wing-like design:

Part 2: The Origins of Modern Christmas

Now, with that established, let’s take a closer look at Noelle and her family.

Besides the obvious exception of Lancer, she has the most dialogue of all the NPCs, gets two entire scenes to herself in the hospital with her dad and outside her house to flesh out her character and crush on Susie compared to several other NPCs getting only a few lines of dialogue at most, and it is absolutely required to talk to her at the beginning of the game in order to even progress and end up in the Dark World.

As many other posts than mine have demonstrated, this suspicious level of detail has led a lot of people to theorize that Noelle will be an important character and that she might even be playable later on, a theory which has certainly been helped by Toby Fox’s original concept art of “THE FUN GANG” showing that her character has been in development for a LONG time - perhaps even from when work on Deltarune was just beginning - and that she may have been designed as a main character from the start.

However, much like how the potential origins of Undertale’s Delta Rune point towards the importance of reindeer in the series, I believe the deeper origins behind the names of the Holiday family similarly point towards Noelle’s true role in Deltarune.

Obviously, the name Rudy is a clear reference to the famous Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Dess is most likely a reference to how Christmas is celebrated in the month of December. However, as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 for the Montgomery Ward department store chain, he is actually a relatively new addition to the list of Santa’s reindeer, whom in of themselves are early 19th Century additions to the image of Santa Claus - a figure tracing back to the 4th Century Christian bishop Saint Nicholas.

And on Jesus’ birth being on the 25th of December for Dess’ name, from what I’ve gathered with my google-fu, the event may have actually taken place less on December 25 and more during the fall or spring due to mentions of shepherds tending to their sheep in the scripture as well as from several attempts to connect the Star of Bethlehem with recorded astronomical events.

In fact, it seems likely that - in the 4th Century - the church might have actually chosen the date either because of coming to the conclusion that Jesus’ conception took place on the spring solstice - aka March 25, nine months before December 25 - or because they wanted to increase the popularity of Christianity through adopting and appropriating pagan winter solstice festivals like the Yule and Saturnalia holidays around the same time of year.

On the flipside, Noelle is a name that has a particularly distinct connection to Christmas; specifically, to the one for whom the holiday is named for in the first place rather than a recent secular addition or the general time in which said holiday is celebrated.

From what I’ve seen, Noelle as a name traces back to the French word ‘noel,’ which - alongside referring to Christmas carols - is a variant form of the word ‘Nael.’ This form comes from the noun use of the Latin adjective natalis, meaning of, or belonging to, one’s birth. The noun use (from natalis dies, day of birth) denoted a birthday, an anniversary, a commemorative festival, hence in ecclesiastical Latin the festival of the nativity of Christ, Christmas.

Basically, out of all the names of the Holiday family, Noelle’s is the one that most directly ties into the actual origins of Christmas in how the name’s origins heavily revolve around the birth of Jesus Christ, a major religious figure who was to be a sacrifice for humanity’s sins and to provide a way into heaven.

Considering Toby Fox’s attention to hidden details and deeper meanings and how angels are heavily associated with and are depicted in Christianity - particularly in relation to Jesus - there may be further significance to Toby picking a name that’s typically given to girls born around or on Christmas day. After all, even if it may or may not be the actual day of Jesus’ birth, it is widely celebrated and recognized as such.

However, as you’ll see at the end, I think there’s even another layer of meaning to Noelle Holiday’s name than just this one.

Part 3: Reindeer in Undertale

On a slightly different topic, while it’s hard to ignore how more prominently featured Christmas iconography and figures in the foreground of the series - what with the introduction of the Holiday family as well as several jokes about “Krismas” and Santa Claus in Deltarune, I believe it may also be important to pay attention to Undertale’s fair share of Christmas-themed details.

Namely, in how a significant amount of them owe their existence to one specific minor character; aka the rather unusually designed Gyftrot.

In contrast to the handful of implications that Asgore is the Underground’s Santa only being implicitly hinted at through extended dialogue and checking his bureau, Snowdin’s tradition of putting presents under decorated trees is blatantly and conspicuously out in the open.

And as Gift Bear explains if you talk to them, said tradition originated not with wherever Asgore’s Santa outfit and apparent moonlighting came from, but rather came about in the first place as a way to make Gyftrot feel better after some teens decorated his horns.

As to why I am calling Gyftrot unusually designed, it is because of his rounded head and sideways mouth - a trait only seen elsewhere in the DT Extraction Machine, Photoshop Flowey, and Sans’ Gaster Blasters.

Of all the conversations and theories I’ve seen about this strange detail, most people were only able to come up with the explanation that Toby simply liked the design and reused it for Gyftrot just for fun without any deeper meaning to it, or that Toby unintentionally gave it to Gyftrot while making Undertale.

However, a third explanation I found is that Gyftrot’s design may actually be foreshadowing for what Photoshop Flowey’s appearance looks like, what with how Gyftrot actually seems to have a second pair of eyes at the base of his antlers, and how one of the decorations he spawns with is a picture between his four eyes in a very similar position to the television screen on Photoshop Flowey.

To my knowledge, this explanation and comparison has only been made in conjunction by two people, with user u/Peridotthepie providing the explanation and and user u/pleasespellicup providing the following picture in the linked post.

While I can’t see any other possible parallels between the two to fully call this foreshadowing - especially with how the picture decoration isn’t guaranteed to show up on every playthrough and how obscure it is - I’d like to propose the idea that the DT Extraction Machine (and perhaps the Gaster Blasters by extension) may very well be based on Gyftrot or a relative with a similar design in-universe.

After all, not even boss monsters leave behind anything more than a pile of dust when they die, not even a goat-like skull that could be used as a reference, whereas Gyftrot is a living, walking example of such a design, complete with what even seems to be a SOUL-shaped hole in his mouth.

Not only that, but given how attentive to detail and deeper meanings Toby has shown himself to be as well as the increased prominence and importance of reindeer/Christmas themes in general for Deltarune, I find it incredibly unlikely that this design choice was made just for fun or as an accident.

On a bit of a side note, it is interesting that we first learned of the name “Rudy” in a post from September 17, 2017 on Undertale’s 2nd anniversary and alarm clock app.

Considering the apparent parallels between Undertale and Deltarune - for example, the potential connection between Susie and the ‘Suzy’ character mentioned by Clam Girl, who appears to have ties to Gaster - and the implications of the dialogue in that post, it’s likely that Undertale Rudy is also a reindeer just like his counterpart, and I would not be surprised if he was also related to Gyftrot as well.

As for what the exact deeper meaning or in-universe explanation behind Gyftrot could be, it’s too early to tell, but I have the feeling that it likely ties heavily into Noelle’s circumstances in Deltarune and some of the effects of the DT Extraction Machine on Undertale’s plot as detailed below.

Part 4: Determining Other Connections

To explain what I’m talking about, let’s take a closer look at a few key lab entries by Alphys, starting with this one:

ENTRY NUMBER 5: I've done it. Using the blueprints, I've extracted it from the human SOULs. I believe this is what gives their SOULs the strength to persist after death. The will to keep living... The resolve to change fate. Let's call this power... "Determination."*

While not explicitly confirmed, from the name and surrounding context, it is likely that the blueprints Alphys used were for the DT Extraction Machine and that DT stands for Determination, though it is unknown whether Alphys built the machine from the blueprints or if it was already constructed and she merely used the blueprints to operate it.

Either way, as we all know, things went horribly wrong from there. Alphys had accidentally turned those who had “fallen down” into the Amalgamates, created Flowey from the flower whose seeds Asriel had brought from the surface, and fell into a nervous downward spiral while wracked with guilt.

Now, I want to focus on just how the Amalgamates had been created, particularly with these entries:

ENTRY NUMBER 6: ASGORE asked everyone outside the city for monsters that had "fallen down." Their bodies came in today. They're still comatose... And soon, they'll all turn into dust. But what happens if I inject "determination" into them? If their SOULS persist after they perish, then... Freedom might be closer than we all thought.

ENTRY NUMBER 12: nothing is happening. i don't know what to do. i'll just keep injecting everything with "determination." i want this to work.

ENTRY NUMBER 17: monsters' physical forms can't handle "determination" like humans can. with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down. everyone's melted together…

Here, I’d like to draw your attention to a few things. Given the surrounding context, “falling down” seems to be a condition - one that potentially originates from age, injury, or some kind of illness - involving or causes monsters to enter a comatose state and eventually die.

And in Entry 17, there is the interesting wording of the line “with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down.” From how it’s phrased, it seems that, instead of melting from any amount of Determination in their systems whatsoever, monsters can handle Determination without having to fear of their bodies breaking down, though obviously there’s a cap to how much they are able to handle.

As for why I’m making this particular distinction, it’s because of Noelle’s situation with her father and how it may proceed beyond Chapter 1 in the future.

With the implication that Undertale Rudy had passed away a while ago, Deltarune Rudy’s conversations with and about Noelle, and Deltarune’s apparent theme of choices not mattering - or at least, not in the long run - it seems pretty likely that DR Rudy is suffering from a case of the foreboding coughs of death and that he may even “fall down” later on.

As such, it wouldn’t be surprising if his condition keeps worsening all the way until he ends up on his deathbed/in a coma/legitimately dead no matter what the doctors or Noelle and such do to help, and neither would it be surprising for her to be seriously affected and react in a severe way as a result.

I mean, Rudy openly talks about how everything scares her, even ironically Santa Claus, and as the classroom scene demonstrates, she has trouble mustering up the courage and confidence to assert herself to the point where even Alphys asks her to speak up.

Considering that her father openly talks about how defenseless she is and how he worries about not being able to protect her from his hospital bed, his death/apparently inevitable upcoming death would no doubt drastically impact her, especially if she attempted as much as she could to stop it to no avail.

Sometimes, one can be driven to desperation to do crazy things as a result of love and worry, and Noelle may very well do the same out of love for her father. If at least some of Undertale’s rules about SOULS and monsters also apply to the world of Deltarune, then there may only be one way - or at the very least, what she feels might be the only option left - in the end for Noelle to potentially give her father the strength to persist and the will to keep living, perhaps even after death.

Or in other words, potentially through extracting enough Determination from a human SOUL to inject into and potentially save her father/bring him back to life.

If the SOUL we the players control is or is close enough to a human SOUL to work, no other human characters/SOULS pop up later, and Noelle somehow finds out about the power of Determination and becomes resolved to use it, then there may be few - if any - things we will be able to do to dissuade her from going after Kris/wherever the SOUL we control goes.

Now, this is where what I think could be the second meaning behind Noelle’s name points would come into play, and in quite an important way.

For those that don’t know, if you enter Susie, Kris, or Noelle as the creator’s name in Deltarune’s introduction, you get the interesting following response:

“YOU ARE ABOUT TO MEET SOMEONE VERY, VERY WONDERFUL.”

With how anagrams appear to be a major theme of Deltarune in both a naming and worldbuilding sense, it's rather curious that of these three names, only two make any actually sensible anagrams. Kris and Susie can be turned into "risk" and "issue,” but Noelle oddly appears to buck the trend.

However, I think the answer for this ties back to Lab Entry 17. You see, in toxicology research terms, Alphys had injected more than “the highest dose at which there was not an observed toxic or adverse effect.”

Interestingly, this level of dosage is known as the No Observable Adverse Effect Level, or the term NOAEL for short. And sometimes, when describing and looking for an effect in general than just specifically adverse ones, the term used in toxicology reports is the No Observable Effect Level, or NOEL.

Basically, if Noelle hopes to save her father, she needs to make sure to not inject too much or too little Determination. Otherwise, she’d go below the NOEL, where Ruby would simply not have enough strength to keep living, or above the NOAEL, where Rudy would seem to be fine for a while at first before inevitably melting down.

And with that, Noelle’s strangely un-anagramable name can be reconciled with Kris and Susie’s, all three names relating to terms often used to describe something problematic in a scientific way.

In fact, one could even say that the terms their names correspond to sound like they would fit very well in a lab or experiment report, perhaps one involving interesting increases in darkness, like an imbalance in Dark Fountains…

Part 5: Conclusions

Of course, I do realize that that last bit is quite a stretch to suggest, even in comparison to the rest of my theory and particularly the latter half of the above section. As of now, there’s no real way of telling how these details actually connect in this way or if they really even connect to each other in the first place, let alone if they even operate on similar enough rules like my theory presumes.

Heck, with the shortage of clear definitive details about W.D. Gaster, the apparent differences between the worlds of Deltarune and Undertale, and how things may change or have already changed in development in between games and chapters, it’s entirely possible that the series will take a very different direction than the one laid out here.

Perhaps we haven’t even heard of the character who is the actual Angel and everything we’ve seen so far are just red herrings. Maybe Ralsei’s legend will be revealed to have been falsified and he and/or Asriel will turn out to be the Angel like commonly theorized. For all we know, the world of Deltarune might not even precede OR succeed Undertale’s, and it’ll turn out that both worlds are derived from a third, unaltered world/timeline.

But whatever it may be, at the point we currently are at now, I find that my most likely candidate for the Angel is Noelle Holiday. On their own, the details supporting my theory would be easy to disregard and aur tenuous at best when taken by themselves, but when taken together as a whole, it’s hard to deny that they VERY much look like they start to frame a pretty concerning picture about the exact role of reindeer across the entire series.

I mean, even if stuff like Determination turn out to not exist - or at least, don’t work the same way they do in Undertale at all - in Deltarune, the following general sequence of events seem likely to happen for me; that Rudy might get worse to the point of almost dying/actually dying, that Noelle might turn to something just as equally rather dangerous or desperate as extracting Determination in order to save/bring back her father, and that what she does may involve/cause her to somehow become the Angel.

Besides, like we can see from the introduction to Deltarune Chapter 1, it would be much like Toby to play with our expectations from Undertale and set us up to suspect that Ralsei or Asriel may be the Angel while he sets up the real Angel elsewhere.

After all, just about every good magic trick and literature twist relies on the art of misdirection at least in some part, subtly distracting the audience while the real clues are being built up in plain sight.

Like, for example, using the power of fluffy boys to deflect attention from the reindeer in the background.

#deltarune #undertale #deltarune theory #deltarune noelle #noelle holiday #delta rune #the angel #aka: toby’s bamboozled us again folks

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