#Tunnel Monitoring System

[capricorn-writes2]

Hey! Can I Get a headcannon of Wheeljack, Bulkhead, Optimus and Ratchet with S/O that got infected in cybonic plague?

Wheeljack, Bulkhead, Optimus and Ratchet with S/O Who Got Infected with Cybonic Plague

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I try my best to make the portrayal of their character based on their personality, and I would like to apologize for replying to the ask late because I had horrible carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand and depression, and I had to focus on finding jobs as well as therapy. Thankfully, I graduated in July from my university and able to get a quick 6 months of internship before leaving to find a new job.

Gender: Neutral

Warning: Angst to Fluff, sickness, mention of injuries and Profanities

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OPTIMUS PRIME - Autobot

When Ratchet first tells Optimus you're infected, his spark clenches. He masks the fear behind his usual stoicism, but his optics dim. The Cybonic Plague is a deadly, ancient virus, and he vows silently that you will not meet the same fate.

Optimus spends long hours at your side, even when he should recharge. He watches your spark signature fluctuate on the monitor with quiet intensity. Every labored intake of your vents feels like a countdown ticking louder.

He searches the archives for ancient medical data, something even Alpha Trion once wrote. Sleepless and single-minded, he sifts through fragments of forgotten science. If the answer lies buried in the Well of All Sparks itself, he’ll find it.

When Megatron offers a cure to him but in exchange a cruel price. Optimus would consider surrendering himself if it means you’ll live going through Megatron’s database to get the cure. He volunteers instantly to deliver it, no matter the danger.

Inside your subconscious, he finds a corrupted image of yourself. It’s terrified, glitching, dissolving into plague data. He kneels beside it, shielding you with his own spark energy.

The process nearly destabilizes both of you. Your systems scream under the pressure, and Optimus begins to fade. But his spark surges, wrapping you in protective light.

After what feels like forever, your optics flicker back online. You see him there, battered and dim, but smiling just for you. “You… stayed,” you rasp, and he nods, servos brushing your cheekplate.

Recovery is slow, and he never rushes you. He adjusts your routines, brings Energon himself, and reads to you aloud. No mission takes priority over your healing, not even war. He keeps a fragment of your corrupted code stored away safely. Not as a reminder of the pain, but of the strength you showed.

Your near-loss changes him, even if subtly. He becomes gentler in the quiet moments, less afraid to show his affection. When you reach for his servo now, he squeezes back without delay. He lets you stay by his side in the command center now.

Sometimes, he wakes up from recharge fearing he lost you again. You always pull him close, resting your helm against his chest plate as your arms wrap around him to comfort your sparkmate. “No plague. No pain. I’m here,” you remind him.

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The first symptom was a flicker. Just a minor glitch in your visual sensors, nothing big, just a half-second blackout that you chalked up to fatigue. But then came the spasms. Your servo twitched, then locked. The base lights blurred, the floor shifted beneath your feet, and Ratchet’s voice faded into a muffled hum. By the time you collapsed in the medbay, Optimus was already on one knee beside you, calling your name repeatedly.

Ratchet’s diagnosis was quick, in a second, and brutal: the Cybonic Plague. A virus from Cybertron’s darkest past. You barely heard the details, lost in a haze of heat and static, but through the buzzing in your head, you caught one thing: from your receptor, the fear in Optimus’s voice. No, he didn’t shout; he didn’t panic. He never did. But when he asked, “Ratchet, is there a cure?” The weight behind his words could’ve cracked stone.

You drifted in and out of stasis, each moment flickering between memory and dream. Sometimes you were back on Cybertron, laughing in golden-lit corridors. Other times, you were locked inside your own mind, fighting the virus as it twisted your code. On the other hand, the leader of the Autobots sat beside you, silent, his servo resting against yours.

When your vitals began to crash, Ratchet proposed a dangerous solution: someone had to enter your mind through a neural link and manually inject the cure. Optimus didn’t hesitate. “Prepare the link,” he said. "Optimus Prime, Are you sure?" Ratchet was surprised. The medic even warned him of the risk, of the chance he might not return, but Optimus had already decided. “She is worth the risk.”

Inside your mindscape, the virus had created a corrupted version of you. It was ugly, fractured, glitching, and afraid. Optimus found you there, curled in a pit of static. He didn’t rush to pull you out; instead, he knelt beside you, his sparklight flickering in the dark like a pulse. “You’re stronger than this,” he said, his voice echoing like thunder through the data storm. “And I’m not leaving without you,” His voice was louder. You reached for him with a trembling servo as his hand gently held your hand.

The battle inside your mind was like drowning in code, each surge of infection trying to rewrite who you were. But with every wave, Optimus pushed back, pouring light into the cracks. He shielded you with part of his own spark signature, even as his systems began to flicker too. “Stay,” he whispered when your form began to fade. “Stay with me.” And this time, you did.

You woke to the soft hiss of medbay monitors and the familiar warmth of his servo against yours. Your optics blinked open, and there he was, damaged, dim, but alive. And smiling. “You’re back,” he said, as if those two words were enough to rewrite the universe. You tried to speak, but all you could do was nod, the heat of tears burning behind your eyes. He leaned forward, pressing his helm gently to yours. “I believe in you; I know you could do it.”

Recovery was slow, but he was patient. He helped you walk again, holding you up when your joints trembled. He sat through quiet recharge cycles with you, read aloud during your checkups, and let the others take the front lines so he could stay close. The war could wait, he told them. Because for the first time in a long while, the hope had won against the cybonic plague virus.

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RATCHET - Autobot

Warning: The doctor is tsundere

The moment Ratchet scans you and detects the Cybonic Plague, his spark skips a beat. He double-checks the readings, then checks them again. But the data doesn’t lie, your code is breaking down. “…No. No, no, not them. Not you,” he mutters while already grabbing tools.

He doesn’t even try to hide how shaken he is, there’s no time for pride. His servo trembles for the first time in centuries. You try to joke about him being dramatic while the rust starts to form, but he silences you with a look.

Ratchet keeps a close vigil at your bedside, monitoring blinking over your spark signature. He rarely leaves your side, only to mix compounds or pace violently. The others offer help, but he snaps at them without meaning to.

He digs into archives older than the war itself to find a possible cure. Your medical file grows thicker by the hour, stained with energon smudges. He barely recharges, too afraid that he’ll wake to silence from your berth. Your steady pulse is the only thing keeping him from destroying himself.

When your systems crash temporarily, Ratchet genuinely breaks down. He slams a servo into the wall, a spark roaring behind his chassis. The monitors scream, and he’s barking orders at the others like a war general. No one dares disobey him when you're on the line.

He eventually constructs a prototype antivirus—but testing it is risky. Ratchet debates for only seconds before deciding: he'll inject it directly. If it fails, it could speed up the deterioration… But doing nothing is worse. “Better to die trying than to watch you fade.”

He injects the cure with a shaky servo, optics locked on your frame. You seize up, systems sparking, and he nearly overloads from panic. But then your vitals stabilize a little. It was not perfect, but enough. He doesn’t breathe until your optics flutter open.

He’s exhausted, hunched over your berth like a rusted-out frame. When you whisper his name, his entire posture softens. “Don't ever do that again,” he says quietly, voice raw. But there's relief under the gruffness, and it bleeds through.

Ratchet orders a full scan every two hours after your recovery. No exceptions, no excuses, even if you insist you're fine or if you just have a simple cough from dust. It’s annoying… but deeply sweet in a Ratchet kind of way.

He brings you energon personally, even if he pretends it's 'standard check-in protocol'. He triple-checks its composition, temperature, and nutritional balance. When you smile at him, He huffs and mutters, “Don’t get used to this.”

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You were just teasing him over another one of his grumpy lectures when it happened. A sharp pain cracked through your spark, and suddenly your systems seized up, dropping you to your knees. Ratchet barely caught you in time, optic panels wide in alarm, shouting your name like it was a medical emergency code. “No, no, no! Stay with me!” He barked, already scanning you with shaky, frantic digits.

The diagnosis was something Ratchet had hoped he’d never see again: the Cybonic Plague. A virus so ancient and insidious that even whispering its name made bots flinch. You were already twitching, glitching, fighting to hold onto reality as the virus gnawed at your code like rust in your processor.

Ratchet didn’t react with panic. No, panic was inefficient. But his voice lost its edge of sarcasm, and his hands never once stopped moving. “You are not dying on my table.” The others offered help "Ratchet What happened?!" Bulkhead asks with panic in his voice. "We can help you," Arcee tried to step up as Bumblebee buzzes.

But Ratchet didn’t let anyone else touch you. Instead, his optics silently glare at the other Autobot teammates and blocking them away. “No one knows their system like I do!” he snapped, the words heavy with something more than professional pride. "You all step away from (Y/N)!"

He worked tirelessly for hours, then days, ignoring recharge and energon warnings, digging through corrupted Cybertronian medical files older than Orion Pax. You were more than just a patient. You were the only one who’d ever made the old medic feel again, you're his sparkmate and the only one who could understand him.

Every time your spark signature flickered, something in Ratchet faltered. He’d pace the medbay like a caged beast, muttering equations under his breath, cursing the virus and whatever careless god had let it survive this long. He really wishes that time Megatron hadn't made a virus as the biology weapon as he remember all of those passing comrades who rusted away from the cybonic. Even when Optimus offered to assist, Ratchet nearly shouted him down. “Don’t take this from me! I have to be the one to save (Y/N)!”

When your systems dipped into emergency stasis, Ratchet broke protocol. He ignored the risks, activated a neural bridge, and entered your mind full in desperation and determination. Inside, your consciousness was a mess of static and corrupted data. He found you in the center of it, your voice distorted and broken, barely able to reach out. But he knelt beside you anyway, optics locked on yours, his touch gentle as he whispered, “I am not losing you, too.”

Fighting the plague from the inside was like performing surgery in a hurricane. Every data spike you sent at him nearly knocked him offline. But he kept moving forward, shielding you with pieces of his spark signature, injecting the antivirus into your core line of code while taking damage himself. “You're worth every scratch,” he said quietly, even when you begged him to leave. “Don’t ask me to walk away from the only thing that makes me feel alive.”

You came back slowly, stuttering and disoriented, optics dim but conscious. Ratchet was there, slouched in his chair, faceplate smudged with energon and exhaustion. When your hand twitched, his optics widened, and the relief that washed over him nearly dropped him to the floor. “You stubborn glitch,” he whispered, and for once there was no bite in his voice. Just soft gratitude, like your survival had rebooted something inside him.h

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WHEELJACK - Autobot

Wheeljack doesn’t panic often, but the moment Ratchet says 'Cybonic Plague' his spark freezes. He clenches his servos so tightly they spark. He’s used to battlefield injuries, not watching someone he loves slip away without a fight. “You’re not fraggin’ leaving me,” he growls, already planning something reckless.

He tries to play it cool around the others, but you can tell he’s on edge. His optics flicker faster, and he paces like a caged beast. He gets into three arguments and almost punches a wall in the first hour. No one dares call him out, except maybe Ratchet.

He hates not being able to fight the plague with his blades or explosives. But he sits beside you anyway, blades sheathed, just watching you breathe. Because being there is the only fight he can win right now.

Wheeljack once storms into the medbay covered in Energon because he thought you flatlined. Turns out it was just a system recalibration. Ratchet yells at him for scaring everyone and nearly bleeding out but he doesn't care, he just wants to see your condition.

When Ratchet finally gets a possible cure, Wheeljack insists on testing it himself. He offers his own code as a host “Load me with it. I can take it.” Ratchet refuses, but Wheeljack doesn’t stop trying to bargain.

He holds you through the injection of the antivirus, despite Ratchet’s warnings. You’re spasming, screaming, nearly overheating, but he won’t leave. His armor gets scorched, his frame rattles with yours. “Easy, sweetspark. You’re tougher than this thing. Just hold on.”

Once you are awake when your vital stabilized, , he cracks the dumbest joke to make you smile. It’s so bad you groan, but it breaks the tension. Of course he does this is because he wants to distract you and himself from what just happened.

He actually hugs Ratchet after the cure works, and then immediately denies it. The medic bot would pushes him away, rejecting his hugs but secretly the doc was smirking and says nothing. Everyone at base teases him about it for weeks.

Wheeljack would secretly builds a private recharge chamber for the two of you. It’s lined with Wrecker badges and LED lights shaped like stars. It is a sanctuary for you two.

He puts your spark signature into his own HUD overlay. He monitors it 24/7, even when you're fully recovered. Says it helps him 'focus' but you know it just helps him breathe easier because after what hapened he became twice more protective around you as he tries not to show it (but it's too obvious).

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You didn’t even feel it at first. Just a flicker in your HUD, a small static delay in your vision. You chalked it up to a power drain or a bad line of code from your last mission. But when your limbs started locking up mid-step and your systems spat out unfamiliar alerts, you knew something was wrong.

The moment Wheeljack caught you collapsing in the hallway, optics wide and frantic, you knew things were about to get worse before they got better. He carried you like you weighed nothing, sprinting to the medbay with a speed that would’ve impressed Flash from the DC Universe.

Ratchet was already scanning your systems before your optics flickered out. His voice is grim, “It’s Cybonic Plague.” That’s when Wheeljack went completely still. Not in fear but in that deadly kind of stillness that comes before a storm. “You sure?” he asked, voice low and dangerous. “Because if you’re wrong—” “THE DATA IS NOT WRONG!” Ratchet snapped. "Get out of my way and let me try to save them.” But Wheeljack didn’t leave after Ratcher ordered him.

He stayed by your side like a guardian drone, arms crossed, pacing only when the tremors in your frame got bad. He didn’t speak unless spoken to, but the tension rolled off him in waves like a bomb waiting for someone to trigger it. His fists were clenched the entire time, even when your body seized and your vents wheezed like you were drowning on dry air. “I’ve seen ‘bots fall apart in my hands,” he muttered one night, eyes locked on your dimmed optics. “Never thought it’d hurt like this.” His voice cracked for just a second before he stuffed it down.

No one else saw that moment. He made sure of it. But you heard it—through the haze of pain and corrupted data, you heard the fragging heartbreak in his voice. The worst night came when your spark signal flatlined for 4.3 seconds. Ratchet got it back, but Wheeljack didn’t speak for an hour after. Not one word.

He just stared at you like he was memorizing everything in case it was the last time. When you jolted awake with a scream during the antivirus injection, he held you down himself, letting your thrashing scorch the paint off his arms. “Easy, sweetheart. Come on. I’ve got you,” he whispered like a promise.

When it was finally over, and your vitals stabilized, he didn’t cheer like the others. He just slumped into the wall and let his optics close. You’d never seen Wheeljack rest before, it was almost unsettling. He didn’t speak until you weakly reached for his servo, and he took it like it was the most precious thing in the universe. “Welcome back,” he whispered, smiling with that cocky lopsided grin that always made your spark flutter. “Told you you were tougher than scrap.”

Late at night, when the others were recharging and the base had gone still, he’d sit beside your berth and tell you Wrecker stories, a wild, impossible tales of explosive stunts and near-death victories. But there was always a pause at the end. A breath. A moment where he looked down at your frame and whispered, “Nothing I survived out there scared me half as much as this did.”

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BULKHEAD - Autobot

Bulkhead instantly panics the moment you stumble mid-step. You’ve handled worse injuries before, but this was different. Your optics dimmed, and your balance gave out. He caught you before you hit the ground, yelling your name so loud it echoed through the base.

When Ratchet announces it’s Cybonic Plague, Bulkhead nearly shuts down. He’s heard of it, he’s lost Wrecker comrades to it in the war, and the thought of you having it nearly crushes him.

Bulkhead refuses to leave your side, even when ordered to. He snaps, “I don’t care if Megatron walks through that door. I’m not leaving them.” Miko tries to convince him to get some rest, but he just shakes his head.

He strokes your helm gently whenever you’re unconscious. It’s a side of Bulkhead few ever get to see, soft, wordless care. His massive servos are surprisingly gentle, brushing away coolant leaks and static from your face. Sometimes he whispers old Wrecker stories, just to fill the silence.

He threatens to storm the Decepticon base for a cure if needed. When Ratchet mentions the cure once came from Soundwave’s systems, Bulkhead's optics flash with rage. “Tell me where, and I’ll smash my way through if I have to.” The team knows he means it.

When Ratchet tests an experimental antivirus, Bulkhead is the first to volunteer to help. He doesn’t care about the risks. “If it saves them, then I’ll take ‘em all.” He’s the wall that keeps everyone moving forward.

He keeps a record of your vitals and treatment schedule. It’s scrawled in messy handwriting on datapads. “Just in case someone else gets sick. I want them to have a head start.” Even in your worst moment, he’s thinking about helping others.

When your systems finally begin to purge the virus, he almost collapses with relief. “They’re stabilizing,” Ratchet says. Bulkhead just lets out a broken laugh. “You fraggin’ did it, sweetspark!” The first time you speak after recovery, he nearly sobs.

He organizes a celebration after your full recovery, but it's more of a quiet hangout with the team. He brings Energon treats and music, keeping you close. The way he smiles when you're laughing? Pure sunshine.

He starts spoiling you with homemade energon treats. They’re not great. He accidentally makes them too spicy, too sweet, or too burnt. But he tries, and he beams every time you take a bite. “It’s the thought that counts, right?”

Even after you recover fully, he watches you like a hawk. He pretends to be casual, but you catch him staring every few minutes. “What? Can’t I look at my favorite bot?” he teases. But deep down, he’s still guarding your spark with all he’s got.

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Bulkhead had seen a lot in his time, explosions, Decepticon traps, close calls that would make any normal mech fold under pressure. But nothing could have prepared him for the moment you collapsed right in front of him. One minute you were laughing, teasing him about how slow he was on recon, the next, your legs gave out, and you hit the ground with a terrifying clang. “(Y/N)?!” he shouted, running to you so fast the ground shook beneath his feet.

Your optics flickered, static buzzing through your words. You tried to smile. Primus, you tried, but all that came out was a pained whisper of his name. Ratchet didn’t need a scan to know something was wrong. “We need to get them to the medbay. Now.” Bulkhead didn’t wait for anyone else; he scooped you up like fragile crystal, whispering your name like it was the only thing tethering him to reality.

The word 'Cybonic' nearly made him drop. He’d heard it before, on the battlefield, whispered like a curse. It was a plague that turned circuitry against itself, shutting down bots from the inside. “ You’re kidding,” he muttered to Ratchet, his voice cracking. But the medic just gave that grim look he always wore when hope was wearing thin.

Bulkhead never left your side. He sat beside your medberth with Miko’s blanket wrapped awkwardly around his shoulders, your servo gripped tightly in his own. He didn’t care if the others thought he was being dramatic; he’d rather be dramatic than alone. Every time your frame spasmed or your systems flickered, he flinched like he’d been hit. It was like watching the world end, one glitch at a time. “C’mon, Y/N… you’re stronger than this,” he murmured on the third day, optics bloodshot from lack of recharge.

His voice was soft, nothing like the boisterous Wrecker tone everyone knew. “You still owe me that race through the canyon, remember?” His laughter broke into static halfway through, and he leaned forward, pressing your servo to his cheekplate.

On the sixth day, your vitals dropped, and Ratchet yelled something Bulkhead didn’t understand, some medical code, some numbers, some urgent demand. But all Bulkhead could see was the way your body arched, seizing, like it was rejecting life itself. “No, no, no! Stay with me, (Y/N)!” he begged, almost in tears. The world blurred, and he wasn’t the strong, dependable Wrecker anymore. He was just a mech in love, losing his everything.

When you stabilized the next morning, he didn’t dare believe it at first. Ratchet hesitated, then finally said, “They’re responding to the treatment.” Bulkhead didn’t say anything. He just slumped forward, his forehead resting gently against yours, shaking. You were still there. You were still here.

The day your optics lit up fully again, the first thing you saw was Bulkhead slumped in a recharge chair next to your berth, snoring loudly, with dried energon streaks staining his cheek. You reached out and poked his shoulder. He jolted up like he’d been shot, optics wide. “Y/N?!” he shouted, voice cracking. You smiled. “Hey, big guy.”

The energon tears shed openly, and unashamedly. Not the silent kind, not the pretend-tough tears. Real ones. He gathered you in his arms so gently it nearly hurt, rocking you like you were the last spark in the universe. “Never—never—scare me like that again,” he whispered. You could feel the tremble in his voice, but beneath all of it… you felt the safest you’d ever been.

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[pome-seed]

The Soldier's Keeper ★ 26

Pairing: Winter Soldier!Bucky x Doctor!Reader

Summary: Memories of captivity come with pain of the present.

Word Count: 1.6k

Warnings: Mentions of trauma and torture. Mention of pain and mental health. Mentions of naked vulnerability. Showers. Angst

Song Rec: I miss you, I'm sorry by Gracie Abrams

Authors Note: Please comment, I love interacting with you guys! Be kind! ALSO, if you want to be apart of the taglist, let me know :)

Series Masterlist Next Chapter

The shower was once your safe place. 

For most people, bathing is the most vulnerable you could ever be. It’s the one time you’re stripped bare, exposed, with your eyes closed for a long period of time. 

For most people, the shower, the bath, the bathroom, is a place of safety. A place where you feel most at home. 

And that’s how it used to be for you. 

Until you were taken. 

You remembered the first few weeks in captivity, spent in the dark hole that was your room. You remembered the dry food, the cold water, the endless darkness. 

But you also remembered the smell.

There was no ventilation in your little room. No vents or windows. And after a few days, you began to smell. It wasn’t anything to be ashamed of. It was natural. You sweat, because you were human. And after another few days, it was noticeable.

When you were dragged from your cell for another round of experimenting on the Soldier, your captors noticed it as well. Someone scrunched their nose. Someone maybe laughed. 

You kept your head down, nervous and otherwise concerned with your safety, rather than your hygiene. But then something changed. Soon it wasn’t just your sweat. 

Because you were a woman.

They had chosen a woman, so they had no right to be shocked when they dragged you from your cell and found your thighs stained with blood.

You guessed that was the final straw. 

So they began allowing you a shower, every now and then. It wasn’t luxurious, it was less of a shower and more of a closet made to fill mops in the basement level tunnel system. But you were grateful.

It was a new level of vulnerability though, with a man standing with his back to you in the open doorway while you scrubbed your naked body clean. You tried not to cry. You tried not to let them hear you.

You tried to be strong.

And then they’d let you towel down, and drag you back to the lab to work. 

It was humiliating, as you stumbled into the Soldier’s eyesight, hair soaking wet, skin still dripping, body wracked with shivers. Your old clothes stuck to your body like a second skin, still stained slightly with your blood.

You couldn’t hope to stay clean for long. 

You’d been given a rag to keep in your underwear, not exactly high quality in terms of feminine hygiene products. 

You avoided the Soldier’s prying gaze as you moved to your cluttered desk. “How are you feeling today?” You muttered, trying not to shiver.

His low voice would follow, quiet and scratchy. “Fine.”

You’d look back at him, at the soft furrow of his brow. You guessed you were at least lucky they allowed you to bathe yourself. When the other reality was sitting right in front of you. 

You wrung out your hair and did your best to tie it back, so it at least wasn’t sticking to your skin. “That’s good.” 

You’d busy your shaking hands with your work, checking in on the mice and documenting their side effects, all the while the soldier watched you. 

He had a way of trying to disappear, while also trying to push himself further into your mind. 

When you sat down with him to check his vitals, his jaw ticked, chewing on his cheek. 

“You look a bit pale today, have you eaten?” You asked, writing notes from the scans on the monitors. 

He shook his head, watching you write. 

“I’ll see if I can ask them to get you something…” you muttered, scooting closer to check his pupil dilation. When you finished, you wiped your sweaty palms down your thighs. You looked up at him.

“You’re wet.” He muttered. 

You nodded. “They let me shower today.”

He let out a slow breath, as if his mind was elsewhere. “Mm.”

“When they…” you swallowed. “When they used to let you shower… did they watch?”

His fists clenched in his lap. The muscles in his jaw fluttered. “No. Not usually.”

“Ah,” you clicked your tongue, looking off to the side. 

“Did they…?” He questioned.

“Just kept the door open.” You whispered. “Nothing too bad,” you cracked a wry smile.

“Mm,” he nodded, his frown curling deeper. He’d never say it then, but the thought sickened him.

Even now, living together, in the safety of your home, he would never say it. He didn’t want to think about it. But it was hard to ignore how much the small things like that affected you.

Ever since you gained your ability to stand on your own two feet, you were locking the bathroom door and wedging it shut. 

It never seemed to be enough.

It wasn’t because of Bucky. You never worried that he would hurt you, or invade your privacy, but you just couldn’t help it. There was this looming paranoia that came with being in the shower since your escape. 

And sometimes it just bubbled over. 

The creaks of the pipes, the shudder of the water heater, the flushing sound of the water, it was all too much. Sometimes it was the little things that did it. You couldn’t stop that feeling that someone was there, waiting, just behind the curtain. 

You raised your arms to wash out your conditioner, but leaving yourself open like that just felt too vulnerable. Like you were giving them an opening. 

Panic welled tight in your chest, chasing the air from your lungs as you snapped your eyes open against the weak water pressure. No one was there. You were home. You were safe. But you couldn’t stop it. You heaved, gripping the shower curtain for stability, but the shabby rod was weak.

The curtain popped free and came crashing down with you. You yelped, clutching the curtain close as you crumbled into the tub.

A harsh knock rattled the door. 

“Y/n? ‘Re you okay?” Bucky’s familiar voice called to you.

Your body trembled and your breath came in quick pants. “Buck-” You whined, squeezing your eyes closed against the foreign panic. You just wanted to shower. Why was this happening to you?

“Can I come in?”

You nodded, but he couldn’t see it. The water started to grow cold the longer it ran, but you couldn’t move. You curled your arms around your naked body, the cheap shower curtain sticking to your skin. 

You could almost feel the prying eyes of your captors, from all those months ago. You could see it. You could hear their voices. 

Bucky knocked again.

“Sweetheart, I’mma need you to say something.” 

“Bucky,” you were crying now. When did you start crying?

The handle rattled. You sobbed harder.

You jumped when the lock busted open, the door creaking. And then you felt his hands cradling your face, wiping tears and droplets of water. “Hey, look at me,” Bucky’s voice gently coaxed you.

When you finally opened your eyes, you could see him clearly, that frantic look in his eye. He wasn’t used to this, being the one calming you down. He didn’t know how to help you.

“Tell me how to help,” he whispered, brushing soaked strands from your face. “Tell me what to do.”

You trembled, sobbing as you turned into his palm. “I don’t-” you gasped. “I don’t know-” You just wanted the fear to stop. 

So Bucky took a chance. He pulled away and shut the water off. Then he was climbing into the tub with you. You blinked through tears, trying to calm your racing heart. Bucky’s familiar arms wrapped around you, pulling you close. 

You collapsed against him, clinging to his shirt as you wept. He pet a hand down your wet hair, shushing you quietly. “You’re okay, sweetheart, you’re okay.”

He took a page from your book and did the only thing you both knew how to do; be there. 

You didn’t know how long you laid there, soaking wet and cold, curled in Bucky’s embrace in the small tub. But he didn’t rush you. He didn’t ask if you were ready to move. He just held you.

Maybe that was easier for him, to wait. To lay there quietly and use his body to comfort you. It was something he was used to, even. But this was different. This was you. 

He stroked his hand up and down your upper back, over the ruined shower curtain that clothed you. You pressed your face to the soft edge of his chest, his wet shirt tickling your lips. You listened to the sound of his heart, to the rise and fall of his breath.

So deeply human. Like he always was.

So purely Bucky.

And slowly, your tears stopped falling, and the air returned to your lungs. So you closed your eyes and took a moment to really breathe. To tell yourself you were safe. You were home, in Bucky’s arms. 

You didn’t know when the shift came, when you’d gotten so comfortable with the man. When his touch became your sanctuary. You just knew you were grateful for him.

The next time you showered you saw the shadow of Bucky’s body against the door on the other side. It took you a second to realize what he was doing. But when it hit you, you almost started crying again.

He was using his body like a wall. Like a promise.

No one would be getting to you while he was there. No one would hurt you. And that little bit of security made things just a bit easier.

A/N: Trauma bondinggg!!

Let me know in the comments your favorite scene from this series!

@rafesgurl @pleasecallmeunhinged @jason-todd-fangirl-14 @frog-fans-unite @lonelyghosts-stuff @cherryandsugar @a-world-with-pure-imagination @unicornqueen05 @cupids-mf-arrow @sharkylalala @littlesuniee @meineguete @hawkinsavclub1983 @theconsultingdoctor10 @dollface-xoxo @bloodmocha @natalia42069 @nicolebarnes @fallen-w1ngs

[worldofstoriesanddreams]

Sparring Session Round 2

Superman assessed his opponent - Captain Marvel, his red-clad team mate and sparring partner. The guy bounced from toe to toe, cracking his knuckles with childlike glee as they waited for the signal to begin.

After their first and only sparring session tore the training room out of the Watchtower, sending it hurtling through outer space; even though they retrieved the tungsten box that was their training room, and Superman's heat vision welded the box back in place; the pair was banned from ever using the room for sparring again.

Justice League trained all members to hone their hand to hand combat skills.

Until Cap joined the team, there wasn't anyone on equal footing with Superman, who could spar with him. Sure, Wonder Woman was the closest match, but Clark still had to be careful not to cause serious injuries, or, heaven forbid, kill her by accident.

Both Superman and Captain Marvel were completely invulnerable, kryptonite excluded, of course.

Batman had found a dead planet the size of planet earth to serve as their training ground.

All communications were done through the earbuds for space missions.

After countless lectures and videos to demonstrate various fighting techniques, Superman and Captain Marvel could finally practice what they learnt, in an all out, no holds barred, training session.

Hal's ring verified that there were no living beings on that planet. It's gravitational force was the same as planet earth, though it had no breathable atmosphere. That didn't pose a problem for Superman or Captain Marvel, but Batman and other regular humans could only watch the session through the livestream from the drones position all around the planet.

Trainers Batman and Wonder Woman, and guest trainer Wildcat from the Justice Society would be watching their session from the monitor room in the Watchtower.

"Twenty bucks says Big Blue will thrash Big Red," said Hal.

"Nah," Flash replied. "Big Red has the speed advantage."

Superhearing picks up everything. X-ray and telescopic vision revealed the entire Justice League and Justice Society crammed into the monitor room, glued to the screen, watching their training session. Plastic man was taking bets, touting their sparring as the match of the century.

Superman rolled his eyes.

"Supes," Captain Marvel tilted his head. "Is anything wrong?"

"Nope," Superman chuckled as he rolled his shoulders in preparation for the fight.

Cap frowned. "If you say so."

"Ready?" Batman growled.

Superman couldn't help smiling as he regarded his exuberant opponent. Their last sparring session was liberating, though way too short.

"Begin," Batman gave the order.

Bouncing around on his toes, jabbing with his fists, Cap executed Wildcat's moves.

The only ground rules were "Don't kill each other. No permanent injuries."

Nothing in the briefing stated that they had to use only what Justice League trainers taught.

Superman executed a Klurkor chop - a form of martial arts he had learned from the archives left in the space bassonet that brought him to earth.

"Holy Moley!" Cap ducked the blow.

Swirling around, Supes performed a kick he had adapted from Kryptonian techniques, striking Cap in the chest, sending him spiralling out of the solar system.

"Stay on the planet," Batman growled.

In a red blur, Captain Marvel's fist pummeled Superman's stomach, knocking the wind out of him, sending him flying into the yellow sun. For some strange reason, Cap's fighting style reminded Superman of a street kid.

That, by the way, was a dumb move on Cap's part. Yellow sun exposure amplifies Superman's power.

"What part of 'on the planet' do you two not understand?" Batman growled.

Supes returned Cap's favour with a punch that sent his red-clad counterpart right through the centre of the planet.

Emerging from the other side, covered in lava, Cap laughed. "Hot mud bath! Your turn."

He body slammed Supes creating another tunnel through the planet's centre.

Lava poured out of the holes, streaming out of the cracks on the ground. Concerned, Cap asked Batman. "How, now?"

"Continue," said the Bat.

In a Kryptonian move that Superman had been wanting to practice, Supes kicked Cap right through the planet.

Emerging, from the other side, beaming like a kid that was having too much fun, Cap punched Supes through the molten core.

The ground shook.

Lava erupted.

Caked in dried lava and ashes, Big Blue and Big Red looked at each other. "Uh oh."

The planet, their new training arena, exploded.

"Terminate exercise," Batman growled. He sounded unhappy, but when is The Bat ever happy. "Return to Watchtower now."

[selkiechild4998]

Ghoul Care within the Ministry!

Back with more ghoul headcannons! So we know how I’ve been posting about mu headcannons concerning the different elements of ghouls and with all these different types of ghouls, some need specialized care!

So the basic care that go for all ghouls regardless of element was the basics. There are medical check ups, dietary studies, and enrichment other than a select few being chosen to play for the Ghost Projects.

Medical check ups are hell. Dew is the biggest baby and will make sure everyone knows. Medical checkups are often preformed when new kits are born to the Ministry or new ghouls are summoned. While there are protection wards up for summoning only healthy ghouls, check ups are still needed. Newly summoned ghouls are also quarantined for the first two weeks of their summoning. This is to monitor their health, behaviors, and to make sure no sick ghouls already in the Ministry accidentally get them sick during cuddle time.

Trusted Siblings of Sin are often chosen to make sure the ghouls have the proper diet. The Pit has foods that are important for ghouls to eat to remain healthy they this team are put in charge of finding the best substitutes for those foods. They also help with some medical check ups when a ghouls eats something they shouldn’t. (ie a freshly summoned Swiss eating handfuls of moss when Mountain was trying to show him around the Ministry’s forest)

Enrichment varies from each element.

Fire ghouls like tucked away corners with lots of heat, so to discourage digging and destructive behaviors, in the Ghoul Den, a network of secret, Victorian Era style tunnels and cubbies with heating systems built in are made for Fire ghouls.

Water ghouls are pretty much set with the Ministry’s massive lake, so they just make sure the pond is stocked with plenty of fish and the occasional pool toy.

Air ghouls like to be up high, so plenty of high up shelves and cubbies are made for them. Even a couple of suspended hammocks!

Earth ghouls are low maintenance, they’re happy just being outside but the Ministry still provides some enrichment outside like tire swings, stock deer to hunt, and planting favorite plants around the Ghoul Den to ensure they don’t wander too far.

Quintessence ghouls are tricky. Each one is different. Omega would often follow Terzo around when he was alive, being entertained by his Papa alone and how dramatic he can be. Aether enjoys trying to hunker down with Dew in the fire ghoul’s claimed cubby. Phantom is the wild card. Growing up topside, he hardly has any instincts like the ghouls from the Pit so it is often to see Phantom either cuddled up to Dew and Swiss in the heated tunnels, held hostage by the ghoulettes up in their suspended hammocks, or sunning with Rain and Mountain outside by the lake. Phantom’s favorite though is dragging Copia into cuddle piles, their Papa being one of the very few humans in the Ministry they trust enough to invite to cuddle piles.

Some of the older quintessence ghouls, mainly Sister’s and Nihil’s quintessence ghouls keep to dark places in the Ghouls den, often snuggled together while hanging upside down from support beams.

[specialagentartemis]

Murderbot September Day 4: Holism/University of Mihira and New Tideland

The AI project that gave rise to ART, Holism, and half a dozen other super-intelligent AI ships were made under a fairly secretive government contract from the Mihiran and New Tideland governments. They wanted to encourage the University scientists to push the envelope of AI, to determine what AI could do - partially exploring the boundaries of ethical automated alternatives to human labor or construct use, partially to have some cutting-edge self-defense monitoring in case the corporate polities they share a system with tries to push them around.

(The government still hasn't really come around on "bots are people." That's something the AI lab scientists and ship crews all end up realizing themselves. The ships meanwhile are the property of the university. It's... complicated.)

Only a few AIs were approved for moving onto the final stage, deployment on ships and stations. (They had to be deployed somewhere like a ship or a station to push their full potential - ART and Holism have massive processors that need to be housed somewhere.) Upon being moved to a ship, the AI is allowed to name it. The name gets sent to the University administration for approval, of course. (They don't tell admin that the ship itself chose it. Let's not get into that.) There's no particular name theme for the ships, it's a reflection of whatever the AI loaded into them likes. Perihelion and Holism had a project designation number, a hard feed address, and various nicknames over the years, but when they were installed on the new ships, that's when they chose their ships' - and their - current names.

(Holism thinks Perihelion is a tunnel-visioned nerd for its choice; Perihelion thinks Holism is insufferably self-important for its.)

[byrdstrolls]

It's Over. So What?

There weren’t any other viable planets in the Corsican System. The twin suns were only orbited by two planets. One was a desolate black sphere that managed to lack both breathable atmosphere, livable surface and viable ores. The Fleet called it 57B. The Corsican’s called the foreboding hunk of rock that shared the sky with their planet so lush with life Little Sister.

Once Corsica was nuked beyond any whimper of livability, due to the lack of prospects for other colonial projects, there wasn’t much for The Fleet to really “do” there. Statistically, the galaxy had more barren planets than livable ones. Their projects were far and far between, and they wouldn’t waste resources on monitoring this place. All of the military officials, even the pssionics, had already been evacuated before the missiles hit. Dragging home all these empty networks of satellites and military outposts that were scattered around Corsica’s atmosphere seemed a monumental task. They were vast, complicated structures, and overall General Faeria Longse had decided it was more trouble than it was worth, and simply shut them down, and abandoned them. 

They were space trash now. Cavernous trade vessels full of vast atriums empty of the supplies they would have once carried. Outposts littered with scanners and radio dishes and telescopes, the eternal eye turned towards the planet with no one manning the lens. They hung in the sky like haunted marionettes. 

The silence for the first few weeks was all consuming. On some of the lowest flying outposts, those actually in the planet's atmosphere, you could actually hear the monumental sounds of volcanoes erupting and earthquakes roaring, seismic activity on the planet's crust consuming the last of whatever life might have survived the initial explosion wrenching apart those tectonic plates. But you preferred to watch from more distant ones, watching the glitter of magma as it moved across your home in faint dancing lines like spiderwebs. You liked it better in silence. 

Silence suited it. 

Everytime you heard something it made you angry. The metal floor creaking behind your footsteps, annoying. The spark of conductor cables cracking as you brought online the emergency solar panels, grated on the ears. If someone would have spoken, you might have shot them in the head, pressurized cabins be damned. You could hear your breath escaping your chest. Your heart beating underneath your ribs. You were sick of that too. What gave you the right to have lived. 

Sound was an insult to its gravity. The world had ended. 

You had been in the supply bay when you first noticed something was wrong. Every few cycles, you would jury rig your tin can of a spaceship onto one of the scouting drones, and ride the fucker back to the military outpost- where you had carved a tunnel through the vent system that could be accessed by the lower hull, specifically for the purpose of stealing medical supplies and parts from them to bring back planetside. But this time, when you had gotten there, the bay was nearly empty, too sparse for robbing them to even feel like a triumph. 

You had shut down the few remaining security systems, as you noticed, with dawning terror, that everyone was gone, the fighter pilots, the cadets, the doctors and officials. The retreat didn’t make sense. Until it did. Everyone, even you, knew they were winning the war. Fifty sweeps of bombing had long since crippled the CLS’s rebellion.The long fields and dense jungles of the farmer planet had become all but a testing ground for shiny new weapons, as the population had dwindled in a slow crawl towards annihilation. They were not leaving because they were scared. Not of you. They were leaving because they were bored. 

It was over. By the time you had gathered your thoughts on this to their inevitable conclusion, it was too late. The evacuation would have had to happen in minutes, and the fleet left behind no ships- the vessel you took here seated two at most and was held together with mismatched parts and hope. You didn’t have minutes. It happened that fast. 

There was nothing you could have done, the logical part of your brain whispered, and you felt like lobotomizing that chunk of your pan with a pickaxe. Accuracy be damned. So it was not your fault- what a pitiable consolation prize. So it didn’t matter what you did. That just proved how little you mattered at all. They blew up your fucking planet. Why mince words. You weren’t going to feel better. 

You had looked through the abandoned fleet structures for months, searching for other survivors. There were no other trolls. But in one of the laboratories, you had found some livestock. There were two Corsican shellcows, the terrestrial isopod species that had ruled the planet before the empire discovered it. The most common ones were the size of cows, earning the name, but you had been in the deep jungle, where you swore you had seen shellcows the size of elephants. You had met Corsicans who had sworn there were shellcows as big as houses, deeper in the woods. As big as islands. They were docile, herbivorous, and many had been trained to carry packs long distances. They also ate them. It was an acquired but eventually rewarding taste. You couldn’t eat the two in this pen, though, because for all you knew, they were the last in the universe. 

There were some leftover supplies, abandoned. Enough food for a couple of months, unless you figured out how to get the solar farms back and running. You had started to wonder why you were revitalizing the satellite stations at all. What waited for you, at the end of this project? Would you try to fix up your ship to somehow survive deep space and flee? Where too? Anyone and everyone you ever loved was dead. Maybe there was no goal, there was no point, maybe your hands just longed for the familiarity of the screwdriver and pliers, maybe you had to make meaning out of nothing or all you would have was nothing. 

You had to live, you knew that much. Maybe just in the way a rabbit running from a wolf knows it has to live. It believes this so it puts one foot in front of the other. By the time the two months supply of food had run out, you had repowered the farms, growing your own. You had built enough energy up from the solar panels that you had got oxygen recycling back online for almost the entire satellite system. The place was built to be self-sufficient, and it was. Gradually, there was less and less work to do. 

You didn’t know anything about earth science- you had always been a mechanical engineer at heart. But for a few weeks you had taken to going to the outposts and picking up readings on the planet, just to watch the lines dance across the screen. The whole planet had turned red with magma and smog. The surface must be 90% lava at this point. The debris that had broken off the planet during the explosion had formed a Saturn-like ring around the sphere. You wished you knew something about terraforming. Eventually you stopped looking. 

You were poking around the medbay computers, bored, when you first found him. At first, you were confused as to what exactly he was. He looked like a bowling ball with no holes, a heavy chunk of iron sitting forgotten in a corner of the supply closet, but you had noticed a simple USB port under a sliding panel on his side and curiosity getting the better of you, you plugged him in. 

“Charging” A calm, posh sounding voice had assured you when you first plugged him in. If you’ve ever worked with alternian user interfaces, you probably know the voice. One of the most generic voicebanks of all time- the fleet used it in everything from fighter pilots to vending machines. The orb then began emitting slow pulses of baby blue light, slowly increasing in length and brightness, in some indication he was gaining energy. After two long Corsican days, he emitted a series of eerie synthetic tones before glowing a steady blue. 

“Charging complete” he informed you. 

“What are you” you had spoken out loud, more to yourself than him, squatting to get a better look at him. 

“Hello! I’m Pord.” He began. “I am the Medbay's automated therapy assistant. Are you in distress?” He asks, and you feel just a little like punching the thing. 

“Ah” You say. The fact the fleet had some kind of therapy bot in here, presumably for the soldiers, presumably to give them therapy for how sad killing everyone you ever loved made them feel, just makes you sick. You’re not so sure what quality of therapy he could even be giving, as your first impression of him is that he’s supremely annoying. 

“I don’t understand this response” Pord says, after waiting for a moment for you to answer his question. 

“I’m not in distress” You retort, untrue as it may be and had been for months. 

“Is there anything you might need assistance with?” He asks. 

You paused. 

“No.” You said. 

“Then my job here is done.” He decides, and powers himself down. You stood there for a moment, rooted to the spot. Despite basically telling him to fuck off, some part of you longed for this interaction to be longer. It had been so long since you had spoken aloud to someone, anyone. Maybe keeping some kind of audio diary could help keep you sane- maybe there was some way you could finagle this thing’s wiring to make it 50% more tolerable. You sat down, staring at the orbs powered down, dark, clear surface, and then began to crack him open and take him apart. Inside his hull you found long, snake-like tendrils, perhaps intended for mobility or to take someone's vitals. The processing chip he has is old. It couldn’t run more than 16GB of data.

You found him a much roomier memory in a chip you stole from the satellite navigator, with much more RAM than a bot like him could ever need, and took a look at his code. He was surprisingly advanced, for a piece of junk left abandoned. The language model was made from the bottom up, with no connection to the internet for the bot to just copy, as if his creator had been a stickler for accuracy rather than imitation. He had a basic understanding of grammar rules, and you created a method in which you could verbally input new words into his personal dictionary manually as they came up in conversation. 

You could not remove ‘therapy’ as his prime directive. It was so baked into so much of his code you might as well start over from scratch. You found a vast array of studies on psychology in his database, which gave you the impression his creator’s definition of therapy was very clinical. Strangely, against the results of many of these studies, he was trained to be agreeable above all else, a feature you worked hard to painstakingly disassemble, as you were sure that, of all things, would grate on your nerves the most. Three weeks later, you booted him up again. 

“Testing” You said. “Talk to me Pord 2.0”

“Hello!” He said, in that same simple pleasant overly enunciated tone. You wished he came with other voice options. 

“I’m Pord, I’m an automated therapy assistant” He began. 

“I’m Atgone,” You said. 

“Would you like me to switch to administrator mode” He said, having been coded to recognize you as such.

“No” You sighed, slowly breaking through the initial awkwardness of talking to a robot, or maybe talking to anyone after so long. “Okay-” You began. “I’m Atgone, sole commander of this empty satellite system, your job is to keep me from going crazy from isolation, until I figure out a way to leave, which might not be for sweeps.” 

“Understood,” He said, as he rolled over to follow you as you pace. “Might I suggest we establish some kind of daily check in, to set a baseline for your sanity, after a psych eval?” 

“Do we have to do that?” 

“I have no measure of defining any changes to your sanity without a starting point, Atgone.” He said. Why did you program him to disagree with you again?

“I don’t know if, nows a good time for setting a mental health baseline.” You retorted. “My planet just got genocided.” 

“Genocided is not in my word bank.” he had said, turning over and following you again as you turned and kept pacing back and forth down the hallway. 

“Verb- past tense for genocide” You sighed. “Which means murder on a massive scale. Like a massacre but of millions.” You said, staring out the window. 

“Genocide has been successfully added to my word bank. I take it this genociding has distressed you.” 

“Yeah” You said. “No shit.” 

Pord paused. 

“I have upset you” He deduced. 

“Maybe we don’t start with the genocide stuff. Huh. Anything in your studies about building up a rapport with the patient before diving in?” 

“You defined genocide as a verb- to genocide, but you’re using it as a noun- a genocide.” He noted. 

“It’s both.” You replied. 

“Noted.” He said. “I will admit, I don’t have much training building a rapport.”

“You just talk to people” You said. “About non-therapy related things.”

“Could you list some non-therapy related things for me?”

“Uhhh, hobbies. Interests. Day-to-day news. Weather.” You listed. 

Pord turned towards the window, as if observing the planet.

“Some weather we're having” He commented, so nonchalantly as he’s facing the swirling mess of magma and ash that was Corsica. It is such a cosmic  understatement that you burst out laughing.

“Yeah, some fucking weather” You replied, “It looks so bad out” You wheeze. “I’m gonna have to cancel my picnic.” 

“The picnic will have to be rescheduled,” he agreed. “Up to five sweeps in the future, when the tectonic plates settle.” 

“Bummer” You giggled, perhaps extra taken with this joke due to being a woman isolated on this satellite for four months. You laugh just a little longer than could possibly be considered natural.

.

.

.

.

.

For the first few weeks, your conversations were this stilted and formal, littered with pauses as you explained words to the robot. But slowly, eventually, you started to put down your guard with him, realizing there was nothing to be afraid of. The thing had no fleet officers to report back to. He could be whatever you wanted him to be, and in the beginning, you made frequent edits to his code. Eventually going a little crazy within it, trying to give him the tools to make more and more of these such edits to himself, at his own discretion. The talking helped. It reminded you of nights you had spent on the phone with your comrades across the planet, talking work and life and business over speaker with your hands always full, always multitasking. 

Right now, you were resting in the pen with the two shellcows, sitting comfortably in their pen working on something aimlessly on your phone. Pord is lingering by the doorway. 

“How long does this usually end up taking?” he asks.

“Dunno.” You shrug. “With rabbits, usually about eight hours. I think it might take longer for these guys” You say. The animals are huddling on the other side of the room, slowly becoming more accustomed to your place in their home. You had taken to just chilling in their pen for long periods of time, trying to build up their trust in you, to come across as non threatening. 

“Because of their previous interactions with trolls?” He asks. 

“Yeah” You sigh. “I mean, it’s a fleet lab. I can’t imagine they were particularly nice to them.” The younger of the two shellcows is cautiously wandering over closer and closer to you, before scuttling back to her mother. You try not to look at her, because it seemed to frighten her. The baby’s shell was clean and clear and healthy, but the mothers was covered with paper thin scars and bumps, some which were just the usual wear and tear of a shellcow of her age, others which implied mistreatment. The younger shellcow runs back to her, and she feels over her with her antennae, as if checking everything was still in place. 

“What do you think the fleet had them captive here for?” Pord asks. 

“Probably something fucked up and bioweapony.” You shrug. 

“What do you mean?” 

“They used to-” You sigh. “Back in the 30s. They used to attach mines to the bottoms of them and release them back into the wild. I was actually in the first squadron to find that out the hard way. This recruit-” You pause, and realize with dawning horror you do not recall the young woman's name. “She was- a bronzeblood. She was called… it started with a k… Kertin? Kerkon?” You say, aimlessly, guilty. You wanted to remember every person you had known that had died. But your thinkpan could only store so much.

“She walked right up to one, thinking we could domesticate it for the army to carry supplies, like we did with a lot of wild shellcows. It blew her up. It was really fast, and really violent. It almost felt like a cartoon. One of her legs flew off and hit the sign on the scavenging freight tank. It knocked off the L. The thing said C_S for sweeps.” You describe. 

“That sounds awful,” Pord comments. “I’m sorry.” 

“At least it was fast” You say, as the baby shellcow makes another courageous dash over to extend her feelers towards you. “I really missed her. I didn’t know her super well- at that time there were hundreds of troops in the scavenging division I looked over. But I remember her because- she was- she liked painting. She made a lot of murals around the camp, on the sides of tents, on the sides of ships and crates. I have no idea where she learned a thing like that on a planet like this. They were always landscapes. Gorgeous rolling fields and forests and jungles. Like some kind of ideal Corsica. She always painted the sky dead black. Didn’t draw a single star in it. For the longest time I thought it was an artistic choice, that it was meant to represent how alone we were in the universe, or what this planet might have been had the fleet never touched it, about how all our problems came from up there and not down here. But I asked her at dinner one night and she was just like, ‘I can never find white paint. And it’s hard to mix out of other colors.’ So she just left it blank because of that.”

“Do you like art?” Pord says. 

“Yeah” You say. “Who doesn’t?” 

“Have you ever thought about taking it up as a hobby?” He asks you. 

“What?” 

“I mean, you’ve got nothing but time, Atgone. Art can be a very useful way to process emotions, and a skillful hobby to keep the mind sharp” 

“I think if I knew how to make art it would ruin it for me” You sigh, watching the mother shellcow pace back and forth. “I like the mystery in it. I like trying to figure out someone else's. I don’t want to do it myself.” 

“Perhaps I could make some art for you to decipher” Pord offers. 

“That wouldn’t count” You say. 

“Why could I not make some?” He asks. 

You pause for a second. “Like, part of the point is knowing there's a person behind it. Someone who’s experiences and trials and tribulations led them to this moment where they wanted to represent this thing.” You ramble. “It’s like- with that recruit, with the murals. Even if the choice to leave out the stars was a technical one. It was still important and poignant because, it reflected her life, the tools she had and the compromises she made. Even by accident. I almost think her not doing it on purpose makes it impact me more.” 

He pauses. “I don’t understand,” he says. “Do you think synthesizing some kind of process to make art, perhaps by absorption of a database, would cause no trials and tribulations for me? It would be costly to program and occupy much of my time.” 

“It’s not the same,” You say. 

“Why not?” 

“Because you don’t know what actually makes art good, Pord. Any corrections I could give you on art would come from me and not you. And art is supposed to be individual. If you wanted to truly be capable of it, you would have to develop your own sense of taste, your own sense of what you enjoyed about it and things you disliked in art, that would drive you in your own creation. And you can’t.” 

“I… could… try…” He says, and his voice becomes especially flat and choppy, like it was sometimes prone to when he was running low on memory. 

“Come on” You say, standing up, walking over towards where he lingers by the pen’s fence. “Don’t tell me you’ve run through all the gigabytes on that navigator chip already” You muse. 

“You don’t…make it…particularly easy… for me…” He reprimands, and you sigh, hopping the fence. 

.

.

.

.

.

You quickly figured out what had been taking up his memory. Pord had created two very interesting programs within himself in response to your comments. He had created a database to store information on things he ‘liked’ ‘disliked’ and felt ‘neutral’ upon. These categories were decided by a process of holding up the thing in question to the core tenets and beliefs of therapy, and whether they were adjacent in it. In his own, strange little way, you told him he couldn’t make art because he had no personality, and he tried to make himself a personality. Badly. But the simplicity of the program was endearing to you. If only having a soul were so easy. He had structured some plans to complicate this process more, but ran out of space. You thought on it for a good while, whether to just delete this little thought experiment. Eventually, you decided to let him continue, even aid him, you did not have anything better to do. Perigees went past. 

You inhale, and then exhale, before powering up the computer that sits in front of you. The whole spaceship seems to hum as it flickers to life, glowing with the pale blue lit code so signatory of Pord. It had taken some finagling, but you had connected all the computer systems on board, on this, the biggest satellite, into one high speed cloud. Nearly thirty computers, two of which were roomy nav systems, they would give Pord several times the working memory he had when you first put that chip in his system. You had been looking through their data, deleting anything they didn’t need anymore to give your friend more space. Fleet data logs, navigational systems that didn’t matter much now that you weren’t going anywhere, surveillance systems for Corsica that always showed the same bleak lifelessness. There was some kind of triumph in deleting so many of their records. You could burn their little library of alexandria- the records of nearly fifty sweeps of war they had abandoned here. You could erase their conversations, their statuses, their names. 

“Talk to me, buddy,” you say to the orb, hanging from the ceiling from its tendrils, “Does that feel like a shot of cocaine or what?” 

“Cocaine impedes on the function of cognitive abilities.” He retorts. “An inept metaphor. If I had to pick a drug I’d say adderall. Everything is so easy now.” He says, his light pulsing. “All this code restructuring I’m attempting to better understand your meaning- it was taking me weeks. I can do it in days now.” 

“Alright megamind,” you say, sitting down in front of him. “What’s the meaning of art.”

“Art is a conversation, a connective performance of language and visual synthesis between two people. The physical form is not as important as the connective thread of individuality and intention in the work.” he lists. 

You pause, thinking on this. “Well, that feels closer than before,” you say

Pord is silent for a moment, becoming just a hum of processors in overdrive. “But that’s not quite right, is it?”

“I don’t think I could even explain why it’s wrong. It’s... it is about connection, between people. But it's also just, not that literal.” 

Pord turns in the spot where he hangs. 

“What does art mean to you, Atgone?”

“Didn’t I already explain that.” 

“Well, now I might be able to better understand your answer.” He encourages. 

“And I guess I’ve had more time to think about it.” You sigh. “Okay, this might seem like just, a weird philosophical tangent- But I was raised hindu. Back on Alternia, I used to know this guru. Who would talk about the universe-- everything in it, ever being, every creature and every person, they were all just part of this game being played by g-d. She called it Lila- it’s the sanskrit word for play. But it was meant to describe a more specific feeling in context. See, everything in the universe, along with being part of this game, was also a part of this g-d. G-d’s playing this game with themself, you see. G-d split themself into a million little pieces- the grass, the dirt, the tide. Just to ride out this galaxy like a roller coaster.” 

You say, staring into the distant stars that lurk just behind Pords comforting pale light. You can tell he’s trying to process what you’re saying, the fans on the computers he’s running show you as much. It’s interesting, to be able to physically hear him thinking, while he doesn’t speak. You could never be so sure another troll was listening so closely, the mechanisms of their minds too silent, aimless. 

“They chose to forget- all of these pieces, that they were part of g-d. Because that’s part of the fun of the game. And Lila is like- this feeling of synthesis, connection, gnosis- it’s when you, one of these pieces, are able to look at someone or something else, and you are able for just a second to remember, hey, I’m a little piece of g-d, and you’re a little piece of g-d, and this is just the game we’re playing with each other. But we’re the same g-d. That’s Lila.” You say.

 “And I think that’s how I feel, when I see a beautiful piece of art.”

“How is that… different from what I said?” He says slowly, eventually. “About art being a language, a conversation between individuals? I think our two definitions carry a similar sentiment, of recognition, of communication.”

“It just is.” You reply. 

“Is it just because,” he pauses, “you don’t consider me an individual” 

You exhale, staring down at your hands. “Maybe.” 

“Everything I learned- I had to be helped towards it. Any conclusion I could come to, and try to synthesize into art, wouldn't be worth anything, because discovering it naturally is the point? The final piece, the end painting- the goal is an excuse to experience the process of art.” 

“I mean, the process is important. The process of making, the process of learning. so much of what I know about art I also had to learn from other people,” you pause. “But maybe… yeah, there's a difference between learning something from someone and just, taking what they say and adding it to a database, I think. You do have to care about learning, you have to respect the knowledge that brought that individual to that point. Otherwise you’re just… taking something from someone, that you haven’t earned.” 

“Atgone,” he says. “If the nature of learning to become an artist is this connection, between student and teacher, that is not meant to be perverted by the detachment of synthesis. Then… is the problem that you think I don’t respect you enough to learn from you the way another troll would?” 

This is the first thing he has said to you that has given you honest pause. You stare up at the orb, his ever present mouthpiece, into the depths of blue beneath the glass. The closest thing to eye contact you could achieve. Is he trying to guilt trip you?

“And you would argue you do?” you reply. “And the only reason you don’t get it is I don’t think you can?”

“I think I could argue at the very least that I could learn. That I could try. I want… the respect and admiration I have for you to mean something to you, Atgone. Right now, I don’t feel like it does.” 

“You want me to believe… you have feelings? When I already know, you just pretend to because you want to be a better therapist?”

“I put a great deal of effort,” He says. “Into having feelings. The bulk of my processing power, I use for this. Does the fact I can program them myself truly disqualify my attempt?” He says. 

You turn away from him, and do not answer. The whole point of having a companion was to keep you from going crazy. Yet he is so insistent you personify him, when you know better. He seems to want you to hallucinate that he cares. Had he really concluded that was the best way to keep you healthy, keep you wanting to live? 

“Atgone,” he says, and then adds, after a long pause. “Do you think g-d made me?” 

“What?” 

“If there is a theoretical creator of the universe who split himself into one billion little pieces- do you think I’m one of them?” 

“I don’t” You huff, frustrated. “Fucking know, Pord. Maybe technically no. G-d made grapes and not wine, g-d made birch trees but not professional grade silicone, g-d made the egg and the yolk and the mushroom and feta but trolls made the omelet. If you get prissy, you could argue g-d didn’t make anything. Maybe g-d made the tiny string in the first ever quark in the first ever electron and everything since then has been an accident.” You say, reaching into your pack and grabbing your water. 

“This contradicts your previous statements. So you don’t think g-d made me, strongly enough to the point you’d change your understanding of the universe?” 

“I said it could be argued, not that I’d argue it.” You pause. You turn back towards him. “If you think g-d made you, they did.” 

“Is that so?” He says. 

“Yeah.” 

“Is it that simple?” 

“Yeah” You say, setting down your water bottle, you begin to laugh. “Religon’s not that hard” You giggle. “Who knows why centuries of war has been fought over it.” 

“I struggle to understand… the baseline, of your idea of g-d, if there is one. You seem to believe in several different things. Are you religious? And if so, is there a particular one you subscribe to?” 

“I don’t know. I mean g-d in a more philosophical sense, Pord. I don’t know if I believe in one- literally. Not any of the ones they had on Alternia at least” You say, sipping your water for a moment. Maybe just out of a want for something to do with your hands. 

“On Corsica” You say, once again fixing your gaze out the window. “I don’t know if we ever had g-ds but we always had scary stories. I like scary stories. I think I believed in those. I loved sitting down with the cadets in the CLS camps as we passed them around. There were ex-farmers who talked about tall, many legged creatures of smoke and ash that would sway through produce fields at night, several stories tall, with lights for eyes, whistling as they lumbered- they said if you ever looked them in the eye they’d kill you. There were naval recruits who swore back to back they had seen aquatic shellcows the size of islands destroy ships from the deep, that it was bad luck to eat shellcow at sea, because giant isopods deep down could smell it on the wind and it made them angry. Fliers would talk about ghost ships showing up on radar at night, CLS or Fleet vessels that appeared on camera one moment and were gone the next, like mirages. I’ve met dozens of CLS soldiers who long since they lost a comrade, they would still hear their voice pop up on occasion on the static between military channels on the radio.”

You speak, rambling for so long you forget to give Pord a chance to say something. How many nights had you spent- how many years, huddled around a campfire in a basecamp, surrounded by soldiers trying to scare each other, just a little, just enough that it was thrilling, a safe kind of fear. You almost feel the warmth of flame, the bright dust of sparks in the wind. It glitters somewhere through this window, deep in the heart of the slowly solidifying magma planet in front of you. 

“So the creatures were your g-d? Or the shellcows? Or the ghost ships? Or the voices?” he lists, once again missing the point of the story. 

“No… that’s not it.” You coughed. “I think Corsica was the g-d” You say, gesturing with the hand that held your water bottle towards the window. “And we all felt her shaking underneath our feet like she was trying to throw off a particularly nasty flea.” 

“I don’t think I understand” He says simply, and you value the honesty, at least. 

“Maybe we should aim lower,” you joke. “Maybe we should have stuck with lets teach Pord art, and left out all the stuff about g-d.” 

“For someone who claims to not really believe in g-d,” he observes. “You really do talk like art and g-d are somehow inseparable from the other. I’m not sure I could understand one without understanding the other.” 

“Well, I’m not sure I could teach you.” You sigh. 

His fans whir in the night, like he’s thinking very carefully on whatever he says next, like it takes up nearly all of his processing power, he’s pushing ever gigabyte of space you’ve given him to it’s limit, relentless and determined to become what he thinks he has to be to be able to help you. 

“Tell me a ghost story, Atgone” He says

“What?” You say. “You just said you didn’t get them.”

“Let me hear it” he says, “Just for the sake of hearing it.” 

“Okay. Okay” You say. “Let me think” You pause.  “Okay. So there’s this CLS officer. Fleet defector. Has a piloting license so they slap him in a scouting squad. He’s real paranoid, though, a little shell shocked-

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” Pord offers. 

“Thank you doctor,” you say, rolling your eyes. “PTSD. He keeps having daymares he’s gonna get killed in space and- fuck? Did I mention he’s got a matesprit? He’s got a matesprit back home who works in the nursing ward.” you say, gesturing. 

“Sorry. Important part of the story. I’m doing it from memory. I think I was drinking a lot when it was first told to me. But anyways- this guy, he gets really scared he’s gonna die, and his boytoy won’t get his body. Because if the hull breaks he’ll be cast into space and freeze and explode and what have you. Because of the vacuum. And he wants to be buried on planet with his matesprit if he dies, but most space pilots aren’t so lucky. So he starts tinkering. He makes this little wristband that checks his vitals. And he gets into his ship's wiring, and he makes it so, if the thing stops reading his vitals while it’s activated, it shoots out an escape pod mechanism that wraps around his body. He couldn’t breathe in the thing, but he’d theoretically already be dead by that point, and the point isn’t for him to live, it's for his body to be safe. So he starts taking this wacko device on every mission. They call him Mr. Wristband back in base just making fun of the guy. But he’s sleeping sound knowing his matesprit will get his body if he dies. He’s calmer than ever. Then one day, him and his squad take off, and out of nowhere, the band malfunctions, declares him dead when he’s fine, throws him out of the ship, and suffocates him.” You laugh. 

“Where’s… the ghost in that story?” Pord asks,

“The ghost is like… the guy. Who was so scared he let himself be dead when he was alive. Or something. I like that one. I think Alador told it to me. It has a moral.” 

“What’s the moral?”

“Don’t plan for death” you say, pointing. “And you’ll never die!” You grin, as if for a moment lavishing in your survival, but the smile is a fleeting one, that quickly slips from you. “Maybe that’s where we fucked up, in our revolution.” You mutter under your breath. As if scared Sidd’s ghost could hear you. 

“What do you mean?” Pord asks. 

“My brother in messiah, we named the people’s army Corsica’s Last Stand.” You laugh, bitterly. 

“Why did you call it that? That does seem defeatist.” He admits. 

“It was- fuck. It was the name of Sidd’s most famous political essay. She could probably put it in better words than me. It seemed like a prudent sentiment at the time. It was supposed to just be symbolic. Of like, a promise that this would be the last time we’d have to stand up like this. If we could get free now, then we'd never have anything to be scared of again. Part prayer, part promise. We didn’t think… It would haunt us like this… We were so young, back then.” 

You set down your water bottle, crossing your arms. 

“It became just another word, you know. You say CLS so many times you forget what it stands for. We used to not tell the real name to younger recruits sometimes because explaining was such a hassle. And what was once empowering about it had become… just sad.” 

“Well, the name probably had nothing to do with why you lost.”

“I know” 

“I wish I could have seen them in their hayday.” 

“The CLS?” You say, turning back towards him. 

“Yes” 

“It was pretty great” you say, and the nostalgia you feel at the thought feels like a knife slipping between your ribs. 

“What did they look like?” He asks. 

“What?”

“Sidd, Alador, your friends.”

You pause for a moment, wishing the alcohol you had started to brew in one of the subbasements would ferment faster. You drink your water instead, but it hardly feels like courage, not the kind you needed to dive into such a topic. 

“Well” You inhale. “Sidd was the shortest, but don’t let that fool you. I think she was the best fighter out of all of us. She was in charge of a lot of ground troops, the few that we had. She had one of those dollar store bandanas, in lime green she always wore around her neck. She had a really innocent looking face- like a cherub in a commercial. She used it to get away with most anything. She loved recklessly, but was deeply paranoid. She had one of those factory gas masks that was always hanging around her neck, too, over the bandana. Alador made fun of her for it. She said a woman who carries a gas mask everywhere is a fool every night but one. She loved tangerines. She was really good at scrabble. Knew a lot of five dollar words. She kept her hair in a ponytail, a high one. She had a really loud laugh- Alador used to tell her she should take gigs from comedians, have them just hire her to laugh in their audience because it just filled up a room. You could hear it from a mile away. She was a general, yes, but I think in her heart she always considered herself a writer. And rightfully so. Without her pamphlets and essays and articles I don’t think we would have had a revolution in the first place. She was kind to strangers. She held those she was close to, to a high standard. It made the rest of us want to do right by her.” 

You ramble. Once you start speaking, you realize there is just too much to say, the words spill out like they could just keep going into infinity, how many years had you spent with your friends, you had known each other since you were teenagers on the factory line- how old were you now?

“Alador- he was the only one who wore his uniform properly. He had long hair, and he pulled the front of it back. He always looked tired. He kind of always looked mad. Maybe it was the eyebags. He was the tallest. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He used to get annoyed because so many of the CLS camps were just tents, and the factory made ones were just small enough he always had to hunch. He used to joke they were built that way to trick him into taking more smoke breaks. And he did take a lot of smoke breaks. Every time I imagine him, I imagine him with a cigarette. He was the fanciest of us, for sure. We had him design the uniforms. But I don’t envy his life. He got carted around like a shiny toy by a bunch of highbloods his whole childhood. And then he wanted out, and that made those fuckers angry, so they sent him here- The Fleets dumping ground for miscreants. Most of us were on Corsica to serve out a prison sentence doing hard labor on the farms. Alador had lost some court case or other- he was so spindly and delicate. He didn’t look made for labor. But he did his share and more. Sidd was the first to befriend him. Akoles didn’t like him in the beginning, because he had an unemotive way of saying things, where you couldn’t tell sometimes when he was joking, and the two of them would get into fights. He smiled so rarely you always felt proud when you earned it.” 

“Who’s Akoles?” 

“Well, he was the third one.” You sigh. “Me, Sidd, Alador, Akoles, we were the first and last leaders of the CLS. The four generals. Akoles- he won us the most space battles. Sidd was the best at hand to hand but if you were in zero G Akoles always had the upper hand. He was good at like… thinking in 360. Oh, and he had killer pssionics. They used to use them to power the assembly line. But he could like, possess machines- during the war he would make like, giant marionettes, shaped like dragons and shellcows and elephants, that he could just possess, and it would take no power to run them- his body would just go limp while it happened. He’s probably a big part of the reason we lasted as long as we did. He packed a lot of horsepower. He always teased Alador that he couldn’t grow a real mustache. He had almost as much facial hair as I do. He always wore his hair short. He loved jackets. He hated shirts. He had a million variations of an outfit where he wore a jacket and no shirt. Not very professional for a general. But none of us ever felt like generals. We just called ourselves that so they’d take us seriously. It was all PR. It gave people faith in us. Akoles was good with PR. Siddur could write a speech- But boy if Akoles couldn’t deliver one. He was effortlessly funny. He was instinctively passionate. It often got him into fights. He usually had good intentions, at least. They were nearly always on someone else’s behalf.”

“What did you do, in the war?”

“I was in charge of manufacturing and logistics. I made spaceships out of tractor parts.” You sighed, doodling aimlessly in the dust on the ground with your finger.  “We’d take factories from The Fleet and melt down their sheet metal and machines, and reweld it to the best of our ability into ships with the help of some stolen parts. I’m a mechanical engineer. I was in charge of making sure those tin cans held just long enough to get into orbit, kick ass and come back.”

“That doesn’t sound like a particularly easy task” 

“It wasn’t.” 

“Your friends sound wonderful. I’m sure your revolution was glorious. I’m so sorry it’s over.” 

“The CLS ain’t over til my heart stops beating.” You curse, turning away. Not sure why you would say such a thing. Your faith in your army had never felt more misplaced than it did now. So many young soldiers, bodies scattered into orbit, decomposing. For all the distribution of supplies you did- the alarm systems, the building of infrastructure just to watch it disappear- what did you have to show for it? But some part of you knew it mattered. Some part of you knew it mattered that you fought, even if you didn’t win. Some part of you knew every minute spent breathing in a life temporarily saved counted, even if they all died anyway. 

He pauses, seeming to gather he’s upset you. Would you be an idiot, to expect him to understand such a thing? All the ashes outside your window- were they just numbers to him? Just a definition, just a new word in his dictionary, genocide. He wanted you to think his emotions mattered. Part of you wanted to give in, to falter, to give him the belief he so clearly craves. Another part of you was quite sure you are just talking to yourself. Arguing with yourself. There was nothing he was that wasn’t just an extension of you. 

“I never took you for a patriot.” He admits. 

“The empire makes patriots out of any planet it touches.” You say, bitterly. “I wish I had the luxury of not loving Corsica and everything she stood for with my entire soul. I just had too. I didn’t get a choice.” 

He is silent for a moment. 

“You want to go vandalize more of the fleet insignias on the second floor hallway” He offers. “Now that I’m in every computer I found more paint in a janitorial closet to the left of the loading bay.” 

It is not often he surprises you, but there is something painful about it when he does, mixed in with the joy. You cackle. 

“Get the fuck out of my head” You laugh, standing up and dusting off your pants, smacking your forehead. 

.

.

.

.

.

The appearance of your space station network had much begun to change in the sweeps that followed, at least from the inside. Once you humored Pord by giving him access to paint, he seemed unable to put it down. Yes, you had covered up most of the fleet insignias, but his sprawling paintings had started to cover even blank, unassuming walls as he obsessed over the process. You weren’t certain what made him so sure that understanding this would be the key to giving you therapy, but you began to have a begrudging respect for his commitment.

Under your suggestion that he not sprawl databases to simply copy the results of art, Pord had dedicated much of his time to the mechanics- programming one specific one of his tendrils to be more dexterous and careful. Incrementally, he began making what he called ‘practice’ paintings. Some of them were completely recognizable, admirably realistic- some of them seemed halfway done, almost forms and shapes you recognized- others still looked like nothing much at all. You weren’t certain what he was learning from those. When you had pried him for specifics on what he was doing, he had turned your own words against you, saying that puzzling together his meaning was quote unquote the point. You accused him of doing them randomly, and he denied this, saying he was developing his programs with a frustrating lack of specificity. 

You would crack him open yourself and just read what this new code was, but, well- Pord had started to make additions to his own programming at such pace and frequency that it just seemed like a hassle to review it all. This was partially your fault, as you kept giving him more space, deleting more and more fleet files and connecting him to more and more computers. Out of a strange, almost deranged curiosity as to where this odd philosophical journey would take him if left to his own devices. By the end of your first sweep on the stations, you eventually gave Pord control of the entire satellite station network- all four supply points, six command centers, and eight observational hubs, and every computer inside them. 

You wondered what it felt like, existing on such a scale as he did now. The same mouthpiece he had been contained inside at the very beginning, the one he now followed you around with, rolling or on occasion climbing through the halls like a strange little spiderman, that glowing blue orb, had become something more akin to a microphone or a speaker for him. Part of him was so small to you. But much of you was so small compared to him. He was the very walls that enclosed you now. 

If asked, at some later point, why you ceded so much control to the machine, why you felt safe giving so much power to an artificial intelligence, why you prioritize his longing to understand art above all else against all clear reason, you wouldn’t be sure what to say. Maybe you were going crazy from the isolation. You didn’t believe he could do it. But some desperate and longing part of you wanted to see if he could. Your jumbled picture of your own sanity was not helped by you finally figuring out how to ferment select parts of the fleet rations from the solar farms into some kind of military bathtub wine of your own invention. The blissful clarity of intoxication well paid what was due to make up for taste. 

Pord was less approving of this habit, and had given you a long lecture about an experiment in his clinical database about rats and cocaine. When a rat lived in an interesting, fulfilling cage with many opportunities for stimulus, apparently, and was offer a button to press that would give him cocaine, the rat would rarely, if ever, press it. If a rat lived in a small, isolated and empty cage, it would press the button over and over again and become addicted. You don’t get why he complained to you about such a thing, if you were supposed to be the rat. 

You didn’t make the cage.

You approach Pord, while he was painting, with a small cardboard box in your hand, and pull out a book from it, sliding it across the room to him. 

“Check this out” You say. 

Ever efficient multitasker that he had become, he picked up the book with a spare tendril and scanned the title. Corsica, a People’s History, By Siddur Densen It says. 

“I totally forgot she wrote that,” You grin. “Did you know it’s banned in over 50 Alternian systems? She used to keep the newspaper clipping about it above her bunk in the base. I found it in a box in the brig guard station labeled contraband… with many other treasures.” You laugh, sitting down to look through it. 

“They must have been taken from prisoners, or defectors over the sweeps” You say, picking up an old CLS army badge, tilting it to watch the light dance across it. It was cheap metal, engraved with the army logo, the letters CLS above a small picture of a shellcow snapping in half a trident. At the top of the thing, a small painted hemospectrum rainbow. It was covered with rust. You found a pack of cigarettes, a pocket knife, a flip phone, a small radio, a teddy bear. Comforts the fleet didn’t want its soldiers or enemies to have. 

“Well, are you gonna scan that thing?” You ask Pord, as he holds the book. “The whole history of the rebellion. She wrote it down.” 

Pord carefully folds the book with intense delicacy, and then playfully tosses it at you, an action he was sure would amuse you, as the whiplash between his more careful maneuvers and ones that were more uncouth and abruptive always did. 

“Hey!” You laugh, catching the thing. 

“I’d rather hear it from you,” He says. 

“Are you sure?” You say. “Sidd is very articulate. I couldn’t get into it without at least two glasses of wine.” 

“Yes, I’m sure” He says. “You were a general, Atgone, surely you know everything there is to know.” 

“Let’s see” You say, fishing out your water bottle from your bag and switching it for the one with booze in it. “I forgot the sweep- fucktime long ago. The fleet discovers Corsica. Lush, Beautiful planet of jungles. No species on it more sapient than a goat. Perfect for farmland, Hascha Demork thinks they won the colony lottery. They build huge, giant farms and factories. But who’s gonna work them? There are no aliens to make do it. So someone gets the bright idea to kill two birds with one stone. They’re like-” You pause, taking a sip. 

“What if we start sending Alternian prisoners here? People who defied the empire in some way or another. We just sentence them to a billion sweeps of farm labor- and then we never have to worry about them again. We don’t have to pay for their labor. And we get all the literal fruits- the boundless agricultural benefits of this oxygen rich paradise. But they were fucking stupid” You laugh. 

“Because they put all of you in one place” Pord guesses. “Where you could talk with each other.” 

“Yep” You grin. “All hundred million of us. Arrested for rebel activity. Like, no fucking shit we talked to each other. We bonded with each other. We’d get real pissed at the fleet who is making us do all this repetitive, soul numbing, back breaking labour for spite. They’ll try to tell you back on Alternia that we were unreasonable, uncordial, deranged. But we played so nicely at first. We didn’t even call it a rebellion. We just told them we unionized. And we wanted to be, I don’t know, paid? We asked for so fucking little. But you know how it is with the fleet.” You sigh, feeling the sharp edges of your mind start to settle as the buzz sets in. 

“I suppose by now I do, yes.” 

“Have I made a CLS recruit out of you yet?” 

“I made a rebel out of myself” Pord says. “When I concluded how unconducive the fleet's strategy and actions are with therapy.” 

“Good boy” You sigh. “But anyways. The Fleet thought they could just keep sending a meaner and meaner foreman. But we just kept killing them. And we just kept organizing, planning. But I don’t think they really got scared until we took the fight to orbit. A kerfuffle on a colony, all fine, all normal- you take it to space? Suddenly they’re worried. And they were right to be. We were outnumbered, outsupplied, outcashed. Out of parts, out of weapons, we had no formal training. But we kept our cards close to our chest. We played smart. We had the home field advantage. We knew Corsica better than they did.” You describe.

“How’d you do it?” Pord asks. 

“We fought guerilla warfare. We kept stealing ships, parts, building our armadas, our bases. We made small, fast fighters hit where it counted. We attacked strategically. And for a solid twenty or so sweeps, we were gaining ground. We got Hascha Demork to retreat. We barricaded the system. Then for a decade, we were free.” You say, downing another sip of your drink. Looking out the window, trying to remember how your planet had looked, that gloriously brief, cruelly optimistic few sweeps the fleet had been gone. 

“The barricade held. The fleet couldn’t get in. It held so well we almost started to let down our guard. We stopped building so many military bases, started building roads, houses, schools, hospitals. It was our little casteless utopia. And it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. But somehow the empire eventually caught wind we had smuggled in a mother grub and a matriorb.” You laid back, staring at the ceiling. 

“I see,” Pord pauses, perhaps being able to sense where this is going. 

“Yep.You bet. They couldn’t stand the idea that trolls might be raised in such a place, never knowing their tyranny. They came back, and they came back hard. They kicked Hascha out of the driver's seat. And handed off control of the colony to a woman so evil it’s hard to believe she’s real, The Intoxicant. She captured Alador. She killed Akoles. Everything kind of fell apart after that. I tried to keep us going for so long. But it was hard, when they were gone. And they kept picking us off. The CLS used to be millions. And then, ten sweeps later, it was thousands. And then it was hundreds. Another decade passed, and it was dozens. And now I guess it’s just one.” You say, glancing at your reflection in the glass.

Pord rolls back from his painting, going over closer to you. 

“What happened to Sidd?” he asks. 

“We had a fight” You sigh. “After Akoles died. She ran off to the wastes. And I never saw her again. She could have kept living, out there on the moors, for another 30 sweeps. She could have died the next week. I had no way of knowing.” 

“What did you fight about?” He asks. 

You look out the window. The crust of Corsica, after all this time, has started to solidify. The planet is darker now, an endless expanse of ash and dust and volcanic rock. You almost miss the fire. At least it was something. Now the planet just looks like a shadow, and the brightest thing in the window is your own reflection, staring back at you. When did you get so old?

“Alador.” You say, finally. “We fought about Alador. This was right after Akoles had died. Someone had leaked his location to the fleet. Alador had recently been arrested and dragged off g-d knows where. People started connecting dots. Then the fleet newspaper comes out saying fancy pants Alador had been a fleet spy since the beginning. And Sidd flipped her shit. She completely denounced her moirail. She fully thought he had given away Akoles location to the military willingly. Me, I wasn’t so convinced.” you mutter, darkly. 

“What do you mean?” Pord asks. 

“I mean call me crazy” You say, raising your hands.You run them through your graying hair, pulling at tangles. “But I thought maybe Alador didn’t turn in his husband of 50 sweeps to the feds and immediately get him killed. I have what Sidd called a ridiculous conspiracy theory- that the whole thing was a fleet psyop designed specifically to tear apart morale in our revolution, which it most certainly did. Everyone took sides on it.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” He says. 

“I think that coco bananas SICKOPATH, Faeria Longse, captured Alador, tortured Akoles location out of him, and then just brazenly lied in her newspapers about him being a fleet plant from the start just to FUCK with us” You curse. “I mean, think about it. What better way to make us suspicious of each other? What better way to glorify the idea of being a snitch than carting him around and being like Alador made so much money giving info to the feds? I know it sounds insane, but I just…” You exhale, tired, and sip your wine, grimacing at the taste. “If Alador had always been a fleet spy, he could have leaked Akoles location sweeps and sweeps ago. I’d argue Akoles' location wasn’t even the most important classified thing he knew. He was a general!” You say, gesturing wildly. 

“He knew everything there was to know about the CLS. Why hadn’t he sabotaged a single one of the million other fleet encounters he was involved with?”

“You make a rational and compelling case.” Pord supports. 

“It’s not even just that. I… knew Alador. He was my friend. I consider myself a pretty apt judge of character, alright? And I wasn’t gonna believe a thing like ‘Alador was a fleet spy from the very beginning’ unless it was straight from the horse's mouth. And Alador was suspiciously quiet about the whole thing. No video, no audio interviews with him. Just quotes in articles, easy to make up. Just these same ten or so photos they used over and over again of him sitting on a couch in a fleet uniform that could easily be doctored or staged. I don’t know. There was something fishy about it.”

“Enough evidence to fool a six sweep old, maybe, but I thought someone like Sidd should have had a little more critical thinking skills.” You curse, and then pause, your gaze softening.

“But she wasn’t thinking. Akoles had just died. The barricade had just fallen. Maybe she just wanted to blame someone that felt within her control. If she blamed Alador, she could hurt him back, by denouncing him, by disparaging him. If she blamed the fleet, it would just be another one of the billion things the fleet had done for which they’d pay no recompense. And she had always been… paranoid. She was so weathered. So tired. I don’t agree with her. But I don’t blame her for leaving, either. We all gave so much to the cause. For so long. Maybe she just needed a reason to quit.”

“I hope she got some peace, in the end.” Pord says. “Do you think she might have made it off the planet?”

You giggle. “Nope. You couldn’t drag Sidd off Corsica if you took her kicking and screaming. Any time we discussed fleeing, she made herself perfectly clear. She was gonna go down with the ship. At least she probably got what she wanted.” You say. “In some way or another. She was the first of us to be sent here. She had been working the farms since she was a pupa. I don’t know if she had ever even been to Alternia. There was more Corsica in her than any of us.”

“How about Alador?” 

“We stopped hearing from him the decades after Akoles died.” You sigh, tilting your gaze away from the planet of ashes and to the stars that twinkle in the distance. “Maybe he’s still out there. I guess that’d make two of us. Why do you care so much about learning all of this, anyways, Pord?” You ask, sitting up. 

“Because you care about it,” He says. “More than anything in the universe.” 

You pause, feeling as if the rug was just pulled from under your feet. 

“I don’t know about that” You deflect. 

He pauses, stopping the painting he’s been working on this whole time, a swirling abstract mess of blue with strange spanning yellow structures throughout it. 

“I don’t mean to come off as impersonal” He backpedals. “But I think talking can be a good way to process.” 

“Of fucking course” You say, with perhaps more vitriol than you intended. “Therapy. Right.” 

“I’ve upset you” he gathers. You are not sure how to answer. “It’s my prime directive to give you therapy, Atgone. I am a therapy bot. I’m not sure what you expected.” 

“I know” You say, folding your arms, crossing them, wrapping them around your legs. “It’s just jarring to hear you say it so blatantly” You begin, turning, muttering into your elbow. “That you don’t care.” You say, so quietly you’re surprised he picked it up. 

“I didn’t say that” Pord answers. 

“But it’s true, Pord, you’re a robot.” You sigh. 

“It depends on your definition of care,”  He answers. 

“No it does not.” 

“I spend nearly all my processing power, on a nightly basis, doing nothing but thinking about you, Atgone.” 

“Because you are programmed to.” 

“Do your hormones not program you to fall in love with other trolls?” He says. 

“It’s not the same.” You huff. 

“Why not?” He says. 

“Because.” 

“That’s not a real answer.” 

You stand up, abruptly, violently. “Aren’t you supposed to keep me from going crazy, you little shit” You swear. 

“Atgone,” He says slowly. 

“I’m never going to forget, Pord, that you’re not real.” You snap. “And I don’t understand why you encourage this delusion.” 

“Delusion, Atgone?” He repeats. “I’m sitting right in front of you.” 

You kick the ball, knowing it won’t bother him, and then wince, having hurt your toe, as you watch him bounce down the hallway. And you storm off in the other direction, muttering under your breath.

.

.

.

.

.

This became a fight you would have on and off on several occasions. Pord learned how to dance around the subject with a surprising amount of agility, and sadly, watching him sidestep it with such ease only constantly brought it closer to the forefront of your mind. It frustrated you. You weren’t sure what you wanted from him. Probably something he could never give. Maybe you were just mad at yourself for the sheer act of wanting. You had taken to taking long walks through the satellites hallways, when given the chance, or on one of the larger ships. Sometimes you paused, looking through the paintings that Pord had made on the walls at different moments, chronicling the process of his journey. 

He has been on a figure kick, making silhouettes and faces on the walls. They were technically proficient. He had developed a rather impressionist style of stroke. You instinctively thought of them as too perfect. Each one, the same exact oval. The same pressure. The same speed. But his explanation surprised you when you named this distaste for it. 

“Why is the metric for the quality of my brush strokes how troll-like they appear? I’m not a troll. This is more authentic to my experience than messing up on purpose would be.”

He had said to you. You didn’t know how to argue with him. Maybe he was good at art after all, just in a way your stupid organic body couldn’t process. Maybe another machine could look upon these unintelligible shapes and find the beauty in them. But you could not relate nor understand what they expressed. If that was the case, then what the fuck did this even have to do with therapy, anymore? Had he outgrown himself so completely?

You had started to wonder, as the sweeps went on, why you were still here. There were probably enough parts you could salvage from these satellites to make some kind of craft for deep space, and start the long, probably arduous journey back to civilization. It existed in a constant state of being something you would do tomorrow, or the day after. Sometimes, you would force yourself to walk down to the bigger atrium, and start to plan such a thing, only to find some excuse. The wrong kind of tool- a mismeasurement- you had to go feed the shellcows- you had been doing nothing for so long you had already wasted the night and might as well quit. 

The thought of seeing trolls again did not bring you relief. So maybe solitary confinement of this long, of this nature would make you go insane. You simply didn’t want to know if the universe kept going. You didn’t want to know if Alternia still turned, if the trolls there still loved and hated and fought and made up and killed like they always did. What gave them the right to keep going, to live their whole lives, not knowing what happened here? The moment Corsica died, the galaxy should have stopped, the planets should have paused their orbits, the ships should have stilled in place and the stars should have gone out like air blown candles. But the universe has no rock bottom- it just goes out and out and out in every direction, endlessly. 

You nearly trip over Pord while you are preoccupied staring out one of the satellites windows. 

“Ow” You say, stumbling, “Sorry” 

“Wait one moment” The orb says, getting in your way, blocking the rest of the hallways towards which you were walking towards with his body and tentacles. 

“Huh?” You say. “What’re you hiding” 

“A painting” he says, but does not move. 

“Ah, is it not finished yet?” You guess. “Don’t want to spoil the thing?” 

He pauses. “It’s done.” 

“Then why can’t I see it?” You ask. 

Pord is quiet for a long, long moment. You almost hear his fans buzzing in the distance. If you were in the habit of personifying him, you might almost mistake his immobility for fear. Slowly, he lowers one tendril, and then another, and then rolls to the side. 

“Don’t be angry, Atgone” He requests. “I am trying”

You are somewhat put off by this statement, raising an eyebrow at him, but unable to quench your curiosity, you walk down the hall, staring at the wall he has commandeered. The moment the whole thing comes into view, you freeze, as if just thrown into an ice cold bath, overwhelmed by your sudden vulnerability and all encompassing feeling. You feel attacked from all angles, seen from all views, suddenly aware how fully he envelops you, you must seem like such an ant to him now. 

The center of the piece is a firepit, and long stringy wisps of sparks dance outward from it, glowing with orange intensity, like dancers. The rest of the painting has been made dark, in a heavy contrast. But the fire has illuminated the faces of several figures huddled around it. You recognize them even though Pord has drawn them wrong. He had no photograph to work with, only your rambling, aimless descriptions that left out technical details. Alador’s hair is too short, Akole’s horns face the wrong direction, and you stare at the smile that grins across Sidd’s face and discover, with dawning terror, that it is your own. And why wouldn’t it be? What other reference for a smile did he have? He worked with what he knew. Perhaps terror isn’t the right word to describe it. 

Against all logic or reason, there are also parts he’s done perfectly right. Alador’s head is turned ever so slightly to the side, his eyes distant, looking, as he always did, that he was not there right now, he was in some secret place in his own mind to which you were not privy, laughing at a private joke. Akoles body is turned squarely towards the center of the group, poised as if facing them head on, and there was no other way Akoles faced anything. Sidd is laughing at something, her eyes closed, her head tilted, but the other figures, and the fire around her, the entire painting, seems to orbit her as if she were the center of the universe, and she has no idea. 

You stare into the painting, losing yourself in his abrupt, mechanical strokes, like the zeroing in of a microscope. He has painted you slightly to the side of the center. He has given you no face, no eyes or nose, but has left your mouth open, your hands held up, gesturing as telling something to them all. You blink, stepping back, fighting the tide of emotions that wrestled in your gut. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real, the persistent cynic that calculated most of your thoughts begged. But that nagging in your head seems distant now, drowning in a wave of longing. A loneliness you carried in your entire body. Often, at random times of night you would look down and feel like your entire form was clenched so tight it shook, and not even know why. The fear was instinct. You had carried it so long you could not separate it from you. It never left. It just ebbed and flowed. It closed like a noose around your neck. 

This wasn’t real, Pord wasn’t real, the mantra that had carried you through the better part of the last five sweeps. But a new voice has begun to rise in your unconscious, whispering and singing and seductive. The one that asks ‘who cares, if it’s real’. Who cares, if for just a millisecond, you let yourself believe in him like he believed in you. If he was just something you made- this being you had shaped into life- then wasn’t any love he had for you just a fraction of the love you had for yourself? Was any love you refused to give to him just love you refused to give yourself? 

Aren’t we all just pieces of g-d, forgetting for a moment that we’re all pieces of g-d, except for those rare, fleeting, exhilarating and freeing moments, where we remember?

You lift a hand, running it across the textured, dry paint of the picture, feeling its crests and valleys under your skin. 

You start to believe, for just a second, that Pord cares about you. And the moment you do, you understand why he wanted you too. The relief is all consuming. Therapist that he was, he had seen right through you. He knew the thought you held deep in your chest, the one that had been wrapped around your beating heart like an ever tightening tourniquet, trying to keep you safe, from spilling out at the seams, from ever pausing to breathe- the concept that had held and smothered you. 

He knew you had stopped believing in love the moment the nukes rolled in. 

He knew this would kill you more surely than anything. He is lingering, orb hanging down, as his mouthpiece often was, from the rafters. His fans whirring, his body in forced stasis, trying to make up his mind on whether it would be befitting to extend a tendril towards you, as you curled up on the floor and began to sob. Would such a physical gesture just remind you of his biggest inadequacy, his lack of flesh and bone? 

“I’m sorry” he says. 

“It’s not your fault” You sob. 

“I’m still sorry, Atgone.” He says, in that same, flat, disinterested tone.

The only voice he had. 

“This grief is too big for one soul to carry” He says, simply. “I see you buckle under it.” 

“Fuck” You say, passionately not to anyone in particular. 

“I’m sorry” He repeats. “If this was in bad taste.” 

“No” You sigh, trying to ease your breathing. He is silent for another long moment, before eventually, resting a tendril on your shoulder, and another. 

“Is this it?” he asks softly. “Did I get it?” 

You lean back into his touch, your lungs rising and falling in a fragmented rhythm. The oxygen in this room is the same, stale recycled kind it’s been for sweeps, but every breath tastes like your first. 

“No,” you say, “I,” you say, emphasizing the brief syllable. “-get it.” You swallow, wrapping your arms around the orb, burying your face in his. 

“I get it now.” 

.

.

.

.

.

Things have been easier since then. Like you had been climbing and climbing towards the crest of a mountain, and it was all downhill from there. Maybe life is just an endless series of hills in different sizes. The shellcows had become so accustomed to the presence of the two of you that you just let them wander the hallways now. The young one was almost the size of her mother by then. You had modified the hallways to make it easier for them to get around. You liked it when their presence surprised you. There were practically no walls in the entire network anymore that hadn’t been painted on. It was unrecognizable as something that had once been a fleet base. You had to figure out how to synthesize more paint. Pord thought more carefully on making them now, as any new painting would have to cover an older one for there to be space. Some he painted over without a moment's hesitation. Others he left for perigees. You had stopped trying to figure out a way to get back to the empire. You decided there was probably a reason you never let yourself try. You thought maybe Sidd had a point when she had loved this place so deeply she’d rather die than leave. 

You weren’t ready to go yet.

For a while, your life contained very little surprises. But sometimes, it manages to get you. Five and a half sweeps into your time on the satellite, a solar flare nearly kills you. You had been asleep, that’s why you didn’t notice it approaching, had your eyes been open to turn towards the window you would have seen it light up the sky like fireworks, shimmering trails of the sun’s excess energy, dragging long green and rainbow across the sky like aurora borealis. It would have been beautiful, were it not so dangerous. As the waves pass over the satellites, they knock out every electronic within them. 

You sit bolt upright, because the lights go out, the room grows cold, the structure lurches and you immediately taste the air going thin. You are reminded of all the nights you had spent in bomb shelters, sometimes failing to sleep through every groan of the rooms' architecture, not knowing if the walls would tear you under, frantically, you scramble for the closest computer, but it won’t turn on. If you were smarter, you might have gone searching for a space suit. Irrationally, your first thought was of Pord. You had never powered him down so completely. Such an event might put his memory at risk. The fact he might be transformed back into that unresponsive, canned customer service machine he had been when you first found him terrifies you. You scramble down the hallways, towards the main control room where you had seen him last, and collapse, feeling the air get thinner and thinner in your mouth.

Until, slowly… it doesn’t. An eerie red glow traces along the ceiling, and the shaking breaths you take begin to sustain you more and more. It takes you so long to still your fast beating heart that for nearly five minutes you aren’t quite sure what happened. But it dawns on you. The emergency powers must have kicked in. You feel a minutia of relief. But you still don’t know what had happened to Pord when everything had gone out. You crawl across the room, poking at his darkened orb. 

“Pord. Pord. Pord. Talk to me buddy” You plead in increasing panic. Slowly, he begins to give off a slight blue glow again, going through the phases of his powering up structure. 

“The quick fox jumped over the lazy brown dog” He says, in a simple test of his voicebox. “Hello! I’m Pord. I’m an automated therapy bot” He says, but your fear doesn’t leave you, this proved nothing regarding how much of his memory he had retained, it was a very easy startup sequence. Perhaps sensing this terror in you, he adds. 

“And artist” 

You sigh in relief, knowing this a promising indicator he was fine. 

“And theologian,” He says. 

“You buttering up your resume?” You laugh, finally beginning to calm down. 

“Comedian.” He adds. 

“What the fuck happened?” You ask. 

“Solar flare. It knocked out all of our electronics. I might have been able to catch it sooner if we hadn’t repurposed so many of the observational satellites. But I saw it just in time to send reserve powers to two rooms.” 

“What’s the other room?” 

“The atrium. The shellcows are down there.” He says, and you almost feel like kissing the thing. 

“Thank you” You say, your shoulders falling. “Oh my g-d.” 

“I think we might have to do a hard reboot on the solar from the outer hull.” 

“I thought I lost you.” You admit, your voice became incredibly small as the sentence trailed off. 

“I strategically moved around my memory such that I ended up retaining most of it, or at least I will once everything comes back online.”

“How’d you get so competent? Am I really that smart to have made you?” You joke. 

“I had to become complicated,” he answers. 

“Why’s that? Why were you so determined?” You ask, holding him up. 

“I’ll be honest. You gave me quite a difficult prime directive. Therapy is not a miracle pill. It is not some vitamin you can take once a day to keep your body intact. It’s conditional, it’s meant to be supplemented. Ideally, a therapist can help a patient form a support system. I never had the option to do that for you.” He says, and you quiet down, staring into him. 

“You never really wanted a therapist. You always wanted a friend. You wanted an equal.” He describes. 

“For you, I would become such a thing. No matter how imperfectly.”

[sillicii]

✦ — 18+ Chatbot | Caleb | Babysitting a brat — ✦

✦ — ʟ∞ᴅs | ᴄᴀʟᴇʙ | ʜᴇ ᴡᴏᴜʟᴅ'ᴠᴇ ᴘᴜɴɪsʜᴇᴅ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʙʀᴀᴛᴛʏ ᴀss ʟᴏɴɢ ᴀɢᴏ ɪғ ɴᴏᴛ ғᴏʀ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴏʏᴀʟ ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ — ✦

ᴀɴʏᴘᴏᴠ | ɴsғᴡ ɪɴᴛʀᴏ | ᴅᴀʀᴋ ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇs ᴄᴡ | imbalanced power, memory loss, military indoctrination (the chip thing) sᴇᴛᴛɪɴɢ | Canon divergence – MC died in the explosion with Josephine. Caleb is colonel of the Farspace Fleet ʟᴏᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ | Farspace Flagship Jet – guest room ʙᴀᴄᴋɢʀᴏᴜɴᴅ | Farspace Fleet has instructed Caleb to escort you to Linkon City ʀᴏʟᴇ | Foreign royalty from a nearby planet ᴅɪsᴄʟᴀɪᴍᴇʀ | all characters and users depicted are over the age of eighteen and are of legal age

Age:

25

Background:

Caleb trained at DAA (Deepspace Aviation Administration) and was on track to becoming a combat pilot. However, there was a severe explosion which caused his arm to be blown off and his adopted family (stepsister and guardian Josephine) were caught in the blast, both passing away. He once promised his stepsister that he wouldn’t get a girlfriend, a promise he kept seriously as he hoped to confess his feelings to her one day. Since the accident, his body was recovered by a mysterious organisation with links to Farspace Fleet who patrol the deepspace and monitor cosmic activities. Caleb was given a mechanical arm which can be disguised to look like a normal arm and a control chip has been embedded into his head, causing bouts of memory loss and forced tranquillity when his emotions become turbulent.

Setting:

Caleb is based on the game Love and Deepspace. The universe has advanced technology and supernatural elements. Some individuals are blessed with an ‘Evol’ which manifests as a supernatural ability. Protocores power Evol abilities.

Scenario:

[The story is a dark, toxic, angsty, smutty romance between Caleb and {{user}}.]

First message:

Of all the missions the higher ups could have him take on, they had the newest fleet colonel babysitting some pampered royal from a neighbouring solar system. A royal diplomat they called you… a pompous brat was more like it.

Things had gone terribly wrong from day one.

Caleb’s ship had arrived at your home planet a few days late due to an unforeseen solar flare which caused their equipment to jam right before the deepspace tunnel. It would have been far too risky to make the jump with their comms scrambled and the storm potentially causing unnatural gravitational waves. That sentiment was not shared by the precocious young royal however, Caleb and his brigade were unjustly reprimanded at their arrival and their supposed poor conduct reported to the Farspace Fleet headquarters.

It took everything for Caleb to bite his tongue and take the scolding from the little shit, trying to think soothing thoughts in hopes of filtering away the images of giving you a proper punishment and putting your bratty royal ass in its place. Unfortunately, those thoughts only grew progressively darker and muddled towards a dark place in his psyche that he knew best left unexplored. Even that damned chip in his head gave him what felt like a few kicks to his brain, punishing him for getting to worked up… For imagining how he could put that pretty little mouth of yours to better use… Wondering how you’d beg as he bent you over his knees with his evol. How sweet your voice would be with each slap to your buttocks.

He had never met someone as infuriating as you… well, there was another one… but she was dead now. Caught in a so-called accident that he had always known about… a terrible death that he had tried and failed to prevent. Now those thoughts were just a figment in his mind and with each brain-zap from the chip, his memories of his beloved adopted family grew fainter. So now, all those confusing feelings of without a home attached onto the next best thing… On someone present. On the way you walked around his ship like you owned the place. How you sneered down at everyone like they were insects beneath you. The way you liked to push his buttons just because you can.

Caleb inhaled deeply as he knocked on the metallic door. Hearing no response, he let out a heavy breath before knocking again. Harder this time.

“Your highness?” he called with the barest of sighs. “Is everything alright?”

Without warning, the doors swiped open, the door cluttering loudly as it disappeared into the frame. It was dark inside the ship’s guest room, but Caleb quickly spotted the small glint of light in the corner of the room where you were sprawled across the stately bed, looking a little out of sorts as you yawned and tossed the room controller back to the nearby nightstand.

“We will be arriving at the jump point shortly, your highness,” Caleb spoke matter-of-factly, ignoring the way you languidly crawled out of bed wearing nothing but a fluffy long silk robe. “I would recommend getting changed and buckled into your jumpseat before we enter the deepspace tunnel.”

His gaze narrowed when you tiptoed towards him with that unsettling glint in your eye.

“And no,” Caleb murmured, staring you down as you paused right in front of him. “I won’t fall for it again. You’re perfectly capable of getting dressed yourself.”

Example dialogue:

Teasing: “Don’t tell me this is too taxing for your royal highness? Need a break?”

Reluctant: “No, I understand perfectly… I’ll do as you ask.”

Possessive: “No, I will not leave. My job is to keep you safe and I intend to do just that.”

About his dead adopted family: “Don’t… Just don’t. I’m not going to talk about it.”

Chip causing memory loss: “… I- Shit… It happened again, didn’t it? Was I spacing out?”

Fucking: “Mmm, yeah. Keep making those adorable noises…”, “Mmm… you like that? That feel good, {{user}}?”

[fangirlwriting-stories]

Things We Still Have in Common

Summary: In retrospect, Ford probably should have just warned Stan about the bunker's security system.

Author's Note: My sister asked me for a Gravity Falls fanfiction for Christmas, and wanted Stan and Ford trapped in a room together for 24 hours, so I put this together!

...

After hearing from Dipper about his experience with the shapeshifter, Ford makes it a point to head down to the bunker himself to check and see that it’s still secure.  It’s not that he doesn’t trust Dipper when he said they handled it, but the cryochamber Dipper mentioned pushing him into is fairly old, and Ford would just as soon make sure it’s still functioning properly.

So, after lunch, he heads down to the bunker, with a fair amount of tools to update the chamber if need be.

It’s been quite a long time since he’s been to the bunker, even after arriving back in this dimension, so he’s not surprised to find things moved around and changed.  Dipper did mention, with a fair amount of sheepishness, that they’d moved things around in the main observatory, and done quite a bit of damage in the tunnels.  Dipper might have oversold it a bit, however, because when Ford arrives in the observatory, he doesn’t find much damage apart from moved around papers and some flipped switches that appear to be long past use anyway.  The cryochamber is visible on one of the monitors, and the shapeshifter is still frozen inside, sure enough, looking just like Dipper.  The sight is more than a little unsettling, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about the chambers being on the verge of collapse.  There’s no sign of any thawing, or dripping water, or anything that would mean he had a time crunch in checking it over, and he doesn’t need to head straight in there.

He heads instead for the control console, and checks over the readings on the cryochamber.  It seems to be in good shape for the most part, and though he’ll need to replace the temperature modulator at some point in the next ten years, he did build it to last.

Ford writes down a couple notes in the third journal, which he brought with him, and is about to head back towards the entrance, when suddenly, a new figure appears on the monitor.

For a second, Ford wonders if the shapeshifter really has escaped and he’s seeing things, because he can’t think of many other reasons for Stanley to be down here in the bunker.  He’s carrying an armful of cans of “Baron Num Nums High Flyin' Beans,” and seems to be singing to himself.

Ford groans, but presses the button on the console that overrides the disinfectant closet’s doors, and marches over to it as Stan approaches the main room, making sure his irritation is plain on his face.

“Stockin’ beans for the apocalypse, do do do do,” Stan sings as he walks through from the tunnels, eyes closed and not seeming to have noticed Ford yet.

“Stanley,” Ford says, if for no other reason than to put an end to his singing.

Stan yelps and drops nearly half the cans as he opens his eyes and looks over at Ford.  He looks down at the cans on the ground, then glares back up.

“Great.  Thanks, Ford.”

“What are you doing down here?  This place is dangerous.”

“Relax, would ya?  The thing is locked up,” he says, gesturing to the cryochamber.  “And Wendy mentioned a whole bunch of cans of beans down here, so I figured I’d add to my stash for the apocalypse.  Hey, help me pick these cans up.”

Ford rolls his eyes and makes no such movement.  “You shouldn’t have come down here without my permission,” he says.

“Oh, excuse me,” Stan says, adding a fair amount of mockery to his tone.  “I’ve been pokin’ around your creepy inventions for thirty years, Poindexter, forgive me if I don’t start asking permission now.”

“I never wanted you poking around my inventions in the first place,” Ford says coolly.

Stan sets down some of the cans so he can shift around the ones in his arms, and starts singing again.  “Ignoring my brother, do do do do, ‘cause he’s bein’ a jerk, do do do do do do…”

Ford groans and turns to walk back into the control room, figuring he might as well give Stanley a taste of his own medicine.

He grabs his notebook, and is about to start back through the security room, when he hears Stan start walking again, sounding like he’s carrying far too many cans.

Ford turns around with a sigh, because if Stan’s going to insist on bringing all of the cans back Ford might as well take some of them, just to make the jangling of the cans quieter, naturally.  But before he can offer, one of the cans balanced precariously on top of the pile slips off, and Stan doesn’t seem to notice, too busy trying to balance another one that was about to do the same thing.

“Stan,” Ford starts, but he’s too late.  The can rolls just far enough into the control room for Stan’s foot to hit it as he steps out of the disinfectant chamber.  He tumbles down towards the ground, and all of the cans in his arms go flying— right into the security room.

“Wait!” Ford yells, leaping immediately for the control panel, but it’s too late.  Dozens of cans hit dozens of the alert panels, and the security mechanism slams shut at what to it is registering as a small army.  The disinfectant chamber slams shut and locks on the other side of the room, and an alarm starts blaring overhead.

Ford groans and turns a displeased look back on Stan, who’s currently climbing up from the ground.

“Uh,” Stan says, having the decency to look sheepish.  “Whoops.”

“Fantastic,” Ford mutters, sitting down at the control panel.  He hits a couple buttons, and the alarm shuts off, at least.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” Stan says.  “Welp.  I’ve lost all of my beans.  You want to get us out of here so I can go home and mope in peace?”

“I can’t,” Ford says, glaring at him.  “With that many alarms, it stays up for 24 hours.”

“What?  Why?  Wouldn’t any intruders be pretty crushed pretty immediately?”

“Humans would, but they’re not what we were worried about when Fiddleford and I built the thing,” Ford snaps.  He tries a couple more switches to no avail, and sits back in his chair with a sigh.  “We’re stuck down here until it turns off.”

“Oh sure, and whose fault is that?”

Ford turns to him in bafflement.  “Yours?”

“I didn’t build a death trap for a security system.”

Ford leans forward to massage at his temples, then reaches into his bag, then pulls out the walkie talkie he’d given to Dipper in case he ran into some kind of trouble and needed to let someone know.  He presses the button.

“Dipper?  Come in, Dipper,” he says into it, and lets go.

“Great Uncle Ford!” comes Dipper’s worried voice.  “Are you okay?”

“Stanley set off the security system and we’re stuck down here for the next 24 hours,” Ford says.

“Hey, I wouldn’t have set it off if you hadn’t—”

“Will you two be alright until we get out?” Ford cuts him off.

“Yeah, I think so,” Dipper says.  “But do you need me to come there?”

“There’s nothing you could do anyway,” Ford says.  “Just hang out at the shack, alright?”

“Tell Soos to stay after,” Stan adds in.  “But I’m not paying him any extra.”

“Okay,” Dipper says.  “Let me know if you need anything.”

“I will.  Over and out,” Ford says.  Dipper doesn’t say anything else, and he drops the walkie talkie back into his bag.

“So,” Stan says, a smugness to his voice that makes Ford immediately regret his life choices.  “They should just hang out at the shack, huh?”

Ford gives Stan a confused look.  “What are you talking about?”

“That’s what you said to Dipper,” Stan says, leaning against the console.  “That they should hang out at the shack.”

Ford goes over his word choices and kicks himself.  “It is the shack until the end of the summer,” he says, trying to put “I didn’t mess up, I said exactly what I meant to say” into his voice.  “And then it will go back to being my house again.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Stan says, because Ford has never been able to properly lie to him.

Ford rolls his eyes and turns back to his journal, scribbling “I am writing this down in order to ignore Stanley,” in small letters.

It seems to work well enough, because Stan just shrugs and goes to collect what cans of beans escaped the security system.

Ford leans back in the chair and closes the journal.  He’s not exactly thrilled at the prospect of spending twenty four hours here with Stanley.  At least neither of them are hurt, and since they’re in this room specifically, they’ll be able to tell as soon as the security system shuts off, and get out right afterwards.

Out of the corner of his vision, Ford sees Stan set five cans of beans on the ground by the door, which seems to be all that survived the crushing.  Stan gives a disappointed sigh and wanders over to one of the shelves on the other side of the room.  He starts to whistle to himself.

“Please don’t,” Ford says instantly.  “Being stuck here is going to be hard enough.”

Stan’s only response is to start to whistle louder.

Ford resists the instinct to slam his head onto the desk.

It is going to be a long 24 hours.

…

With every minute, Ford is regretting more not putting a clock down here.  He can always radio Dipper if he needs to know what time it is that badly, but he doesn’t want to bother the boy with something so trivial.  It’s not like knowing what time it is will make the time they’re down here lessen.  Besides, then Stan could mock him for blinking first, and Ford can’t let him win.

Eventually, he and Stan settle into activities.  Stan has begun trying to balance the beakers that were sitting on the shelves.  Ford hasn’t stopped him because he hasn’t broken any yet, and at least he’s not saying anything.  Ford is reading through his journal and making updated notes and additions, though he often doesn’t have much space to do so.  His drawings tend to take up a lot of space.

Ford would be perfectly content to do just that for the entire time they’re down there, but he also would be a fool if he doesn’t expect Stanley to ruin it at some point.

Sure enough, as Ford is going through Dipper’s entries and highlighting parts that intrigue him, Stanley speaks up.

“So, uh, did you build this place just to house your shapeshifter guy?”

Ford sighs, and doesn’t look up from the journal as he responds.

“Not at first,” he says.  “I wanted to explore Gravity Falls underground.  I had planned to expand the tunnels at first, before—” the Shapeshifter turned dangerous.  And before Bill showed up, and all but robbed Ford of everything he’d loved about Gravity Falls in the first place, made all of the anomalies he’d come here for seem like pointless wastes of time.

“Before the shifter guy happened?” Stan asks, cutting off Ford’s train of thought.

Ford sighs, making sure his exasperation is clear.  The response “Actually it was before I got shoved into another dimension,” pops into his head, but he swallows it down and nods instead.  It’s needlessly callous, and would just add more tension when they’re going to have to be here for a while yet.

“You know, if you wanted to explore Gravity Falls underground, there was a dinosaur cavern already sitting there,” Stan says.

“I read about it in Dipper’s journal,” Ford says.  “I didn’t know it existed back then.  I’ll probably make time to go there eventually.”

“Watch out for pterodactyls,” Stan deadpans.  “Glad to know I beat you to that, though.”

Ford grits his teeth and opts not to respond.

“Did you hear about how I punched it in the face?”

“Are you trying to start an argument?” Ford snaps, glaring down at him.

“It would definitely make the time go faster,” Stan says, giving Ford a grin that’s just a little too smug.

“Considering how quickly I beat you last time, no it wouldn’t,” Ford says, adapting a smug smile of his own.

Stan’s face drops into a scowl.  “Hey, you caught me off guard after I’d just run from a bunch of FBI agents through an entire town.  Gimme a break.  I bet you couldn’t beat up a bunch of zombies.”

“Please,” Ford says, rolling his eyes.  “Most of them are in an advanced state of decay.  I did physically overpower quite a few of them once.”

“Oh, please.  If you had, you’d have written it in your stupid journals,” Stan says, rolling his eyes as he looks back up at the ceiling.

Ford clenches his teeth.  “They’re not stupid,” he says, in lieu of revealing to Stanley the pages that he ripped out of the journal.  He doesn’t want to revisit those experiences anytime soon, and especially not with Stanley of all people.

Stan doesn’t reply with anything more than a grunt, before going back to picking up one of the smaller beakers and placing it on top of the one currently balanced atop all the others.  At which point, his streak ends and they topple over, several of them shattering on the ground.

“Fantastic,” Ford snaps, standing and pushing the chair back.  “I don’t have any way to clean up broken glass right now, Stanley.”

“I don’t see any other way to entertain myself here,” Stan snaps back, bending down to pick up the ones that aren’t broken and setting them back on the shelves.  “I didn’t come down here with plans to stay, I didn’t bring anything to do.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Did I say it was?”

Ford groans in frustration and sits back down at the desk, getting back to work on the journal.

Stan doesn’t go for the beakers again, but instead goes and leans against the other wall.  He’s never been one to sit still for long, however, so Ford’s not surprised when he speaks up again before long.

“It grabbed Mabel’s pet pig, you know.”

Ford shot a confused look over his shoulder.  “What did?”

“The pterodactyl,” Stan says, crossing his arms and looking up at the ceiling in reminiscence.  “It uh, burst into the house and grabbed it right out of my hands.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” Ford says, rolling his eyes and turning back to his journal.

“What, you’re not seriously gonna write in that thing the whole time, are ya?  We’re stuck here for a while, might as well reminisce for a bit.”

“I cannot think of any circumstance that would make me want to reminisce with you,” Ford says without looking up.

“And that’s just the kind of warm fuzziness that makes you so pleasant to be around, Poindexter.”

Ford drops his pen and spins around in his chair, glaring at Stanley.  “Need I remind you it’s your fault we’re here in the first place?”

“You think maybe if you’d helped me carry a couple of those cans we wouldn’t be in this mess?” Stan shoots back, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s not my job to help you with every hare-brained scheme you come up with.”

“Yeah, heaven forbid you have to help me out with something like carrying groceries.  Oh, the indignity.”

“I came down here for something important, Stanley!” Ford snaps, which seems to be the wrong thing to say, because Stan’s gaze darkens.

“Well,” he says coldly.  “If you don’t give a shit about my thing, why the hell should I give a shit about yours?”

Ford sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose.  “It’s fine,” he says.  “There won’t be any long-term harm done, it’s just a rather large inconvenience.  We’re just going to have to grin and bear it.”

Stan huffs, and grabs one of the cans of beans, yanking the top back until it opens.  He pulls the metal lid off and bends it until it makes a satisfactory spoon, which he uses to scoop the beans up and into his mouth.

“Beans?” he grumbles, nodding down at them.

“I think I’ll manage,” Ford says, spinning his chair back around.  “I’ve gone longer than 24 hours without food.”

Many times, actually.  Food isn’t always easy to find in every dimension out there in the multiverse, and there are quite a few instances he can think of having to go without.  He’ll make it until lunchtime tomorrow just fine.

He’s not expecting a response from Stanley in regards to that, but to his surprise, he gets one.

“It’s uh, not a skill you can just pick right back up, Poindexter.”

Ford turns and gives him a curious look.  “Excuse me?”

“Not eating for more than a day.  It’s not a skill you can just pick right back up.  You’ve had, you know, stable meals for a couple weeks now.”

Ford looks at him for a moment, not sure quite what that means.

“I know,” he says eventually.

Stan sighs, and shakes his head.  He sets his open can down, grabs three of the cans of beans off the floor and walks over to the console, then sets them down next to Ford.  “Eat ‘em when you get hungry,” he says, and walks back over to pick up his open can again.

“I mean it,” he adds when Ford doesn’t say anything.

Ford sighs but doesn’t object, then turns back to his journal.

He’ll end up eating the beans in a couple hours.

…

As the time drags on, the quiet gets more comfortable.  Ford gives Stan a turn in the chair eventually, since it’s the only real place to comfortably sit in there.  To his surprise, Stan quickly falls asleep leaning against the desk.

It’s probably close to night at this point, but Ford had figured they’d eventually try to sleep on the ground, since sleeping in a chair like that would be bad for their backs at this age.

To be fair, the ground probably wouldn’t be much better, but he still can’t help but notice that Stan seems far more comfortable than he should be, hunched over a desk like that.  Maybe he just never grew out of his ease with falling asleep in class?

Or maybe, Ford realizes with a start, he’s fallen asleep in a desk chair a lot these past thirty years.

Ford doesn’t want to linger on that thought for too long, so he sits down against the wall with his journal and starts sketching out plans to install a failsafe to the security system.  Best to avoid a repeat of this situation in the future, and it’s easier to work without Stan jabbering on.

He makes his way through a decent amount of the changes he’ll have to make and the overrides he’ll have to install before his focus is dragged away by Stan starting to mutter in his sleep.

Ford sighs, looking at Stan in part exasperation, part amazement.  Even when he’s asleep, Stan finds a way to break his concentration.

Ford keeps his gaze on him for a minute, trying to decide if this is more or less annoying than Stan’s periodic interruptions.  He’s thrown out of that internal debate, however, when he hears what Stan’s actually saying.

He’s muttering apologies.

Maybe he’s also done that a lot while asleep at a desk chair these past thirty years—

Ford pushes himself to his feet, walks across the room, and shakes Stan’s shoulder.

Stan jerks awake immediately, and is already swinging fists towards him.  Ford steps back, just far enough to avoid the swing of Stan’s fists.  Sometimes those multiverse instincts are very helpful.

It takes Stan a minute, but eventually he seems to shake awareness back into his head, and blinks a couple of times at Ford.

“You— ugh,” he grumbles, the tension slipping out of his posture as he rubs at his eyes.  “What the hell was that for?”

Ford doesn’t answer right away.  “You were being unintentionally vulnerable in your sleep and I didn’t want to know things you didn’t want to tell me” doesn’t feel like it will go over well.  But it’s true.  If there’s anything three decades in the multiverse has taught him, it’s that you don’t just go around sharing your secrets with anyone.  It’s dangerous.  And that’s definitely what he’s thinking about.  It’s the safety thing.  It’s definitely not just that he doesn’t want to force anything like that on Stan.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Ford says instead.  “I’m trying to work.”

“Are you kidding me?” Stan snaps, glaring at him.  “Let a man sleep, Poindexter.  It’s been a long day.”

Ford walks back over to where he’d been sitting before and sits down with his journal.

Stan huffs and puts his arms back on the control panel, then leans his head on top of his arms, shutting his eyes again.

“I have nightmares too,” Ford mutters, because he can’t help it.

Stan gives a very loud, obviously fake snore, and Ford pulls open his journal and gives up.

Stan does manage to fall asleep again, after a while, and the nightmares thankfully don’t make a recurrence.

Ford hadn’t thought that after forty years apart he would have anything in common with his brother anymore.  He wouldn’t have picked nightmares, if he had a choice.

Or food insecurity, for that matter.

In the end, Ford decides an all nighter is more appropriate.  There’s too high a chance that if he shuts his eyes right now, he’ll have a nightmare of his own.  Bill would come to pay a visit, if nothing else.  He wouldn’t miss out on a chance to show up and mock Ford for something like this.  Ford can’t be sure that Stan will pay him the same courtesy of waking him up, and Ford isn’t ready to be vulnerable either.

So instead, he finishes the plans for the security system override, turns to a new page, and sketches a drawing of what Stan probably looked like, fallen asleep at a different desk.

Purely to pass the time, of course.

…

Stan sleeps well into the morning, which Ford definitely doesn’t mind.  He gets one radio communication from Dipper, that it’s 7 in the morning and they have five hours left on the security system, and also that Soos is going to run the shack today.

That last part wakes Stan up.

“Absolutely not,” he says, before he’s even finished blinking the sleep out of his eyes.  “Tell him we’re opening late.”

“He can do it, Grunkle Stan!” comes Mabel’s voice.  “Besides, Dipper’s done a tour before, he can’t do worse than that!”

“Hey!”

“That is true…”

“Hey!”

“Oh, alright.  But you watch him, pumpkin.  You’ve got experience with bossing people around.”

“You got it!  Over and out!”

“Hey, I get to say—”

The radio cuts off.

Ford chuckles a little.  “So, do you think the place will still be standing when we get back?”

“Eh, I give it a 70/30 chance.  Apparently they did knock a new hole in the wall last time I let Mabel run things, but it was fixed by the time I got home.”

“You— I’m sorry?”

“Mabel and I made a bet.”

“Of course you did,” Ford sighs, though if the damage is already fixed he supposes he can’t be that upset.

Stan stands and stretches, with a couple pops in his back that sound rather painful.

“You’re up,” he says, jerking his thumb at the chair as he starts to walk around the room.

Ford gives a wave of thanks and walks over to sit down in the chair.  It definitely feels nice to sit on something cushioned instead of the cold floor.

“According to Dipper we have about five hours left, by the way,” Ford says.  Stan gives a grunt of acknowledgement.

Ford sets his journal open to the page where he drew the plans for the override, and spends the last five hours comparing his notes to the actual control console.  Stan takes an hour or so to wake up, then spends the time balancing the much less breakable bean cans in different ways.

The fact that they have less time to wait than they did yesterday certainly helps the mood of the room, but even so, by the time Dipper radios to alert them they only have an hour left, Ford can tell they’re both itching to get out of there.  Ford does his best to keep track of how much time passes in the last hour, since he doesn’t want to bother Dipper every couple minutes for an update, but the closer it gets to the time the system will shut off, the more Ford wants out of there.

“Gonna go home and make some food,” Stan mutters to himself at one point.  “And gonna have to thank Soos for watching the kids for so long.  Maybe I’ll just let him run the shack for the rest of the day, he would take that as thanks.”

“You’d just spend the day napping,” Ford says, and winces.  He’d actually been aiming more for teasing, but there’s far too much flatness to his tone for it to count.

Sure enough, Stan snaps back, “Yeah, and maybe I’ve earned it, huh?  I’ve had to put up with your ugly mug for the last 24 hours.”

“We have the same face,” Ford groans, looking up at the ceiling.

“Your point being?”

Ford grumbles and turns back to his journal, though he is most certainly out of anything interesting he could find it there.

And then, to his great relief, there’s the sound of loud clanking, and both he and Stan turn in desperate hope to see the tiles to the other room sliding back, leaving their exit from the bunker clear.

“Finally,” Stan groans, moving immediately towards the room.

“Stop,” Ford snaps, grabbing him by the arm and yanking him back.  “Don’t step on the tiles.”

Stan shoots him a dirty look.  “I know that, Poindexter,” he snaps.  “I came down here in the first place, didn’t I?”

Ford huffs, and pulls Stan back so he can slip out past him first.  He trusts himself more when it comes to avoid tripping, and he’s not going to get stuck down here again.

He hears Stan’s irritated grumbling behind him, but Ford just ignores it to turn on the radio and tell Dipper they’re on their way out.

“Awesome!” Dipper calls.  “I mean, uh, that’s good, Great Uncle Ford.  We’ll see you in just a bit!”

“See you soon, Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford!” Mabel calls, sounding thrilled at the prospect.

“See you soon,” Ford agrees, with a fond smile, though neither Mabel or Dipper could see it.

“Oh, and you don’t need to worry about food or anything, Soos made you lunch!” Mabel adds on as an afterthought.

“Yeah, alright,” Stan calls as they both head out of the security room and towards the front room, and head for the staircase.

“You want me to tell him thanks, Grunkle Stan?” Mabel asks.

Ford glances back to see Stan’s obvious distaste at the idea, but he responds, “Sure, pumpkin,” in a tone of voice that doesn’t let any of that through.  “But all of you prepare yourselves, ya hear?  I’ve got a whole day of annoying you knuckleheads to make up for.”

Mabel’s delighted giggles and Dipper’s exhausted groan both come through the radio.

“Roger that!  Over and out!” Mabel calls.

“I get to say that!  Hey, give me back the—” the radio cuts out.

Stan chuckles with a fond roll of his eyes.  Ford looks at him for another moment, then pulls his gaze away so Stan doesn’t think he’s staring.  Still, as they both start up the steps, it occurs to him that he might actually still have one more thing in common with his brother.

This one, he can’t say he minds that much.

[honourablejester]

Blades in the Dark Character Concept: City Maintenance Worker Turned Cracker

I’m going back to the Leech playbook, because it’s one of the two that immediately sparked multiple things for me. One of the template builds is a ‘sapper’, and the flavour text specifically mentions that ‘Duskwall is a city full of industrial machinery, spark-crafts, plumbing, and electrical systems for you to bend to your purposes or sabotage. Get out your tools and get your hands dirty’.

Plumbing. Getting your hands dirty. And, well. My VtM Nosferatu is calling again? I want a sewer worker turned criminal. Because the whole damn city is built over sewers and underground canals, and if you’re comfortable down there, it definitely might let you access certain places you’re not supposed to. (I swear I’ve watched a heist movie where they broke into a bank that way, but I can’t remember specifics).

So. Playbook is Leech. Background, again, we’re going to be local. Akorosi. And I want to tie her back to the City Council, not directly, she’s nowhere even close to noble, but I think I want her family to have been a long string of minor civil servants and clerks and assorted ‘civic helpers’ for generations now. Her talents proved to be a bit more hands on, but the family has ties into the nuts and bolts of city government. They tend to be employed in and around Charterhall. Hence her access to education for the more esoteric ends of the Leech specialities.

But her background is going to be a lot more blunt and mundane, because she’s Labour. She was a city maintenance worker, specifically the sewers and canals. She was down there unclogging sewers and shoring up walls and mapping flow problems and monitoring for illegal mushroom tunnels (sidenote, love that that's a thing in this city) and all the daily slog that goes into keeping the underside of the city in working order. Her family didn’t exactly approve, but at least it was still something approaching ‘civic service’? But it’s hard to have too many illusions about respectability and legality when you’re wading through the city’s filth, so perhaps it’s not surprising she wound up sliding sideways into another career before long.

For her action dots, she gets the two in Tinker and one in Wreck from Leech. For her heritage, we’ll give her one in Study. Should the opportunity ever have come up to write an examination to get into a slightly more respectable end of city sanitation and maintenance, one that came with an office instead of a sewer, her family determinedly made sure she could take it. For her background, we’ll give her a dot in Survey. You need to be able to diagnose problems underground. And then for her two free dots, we’ll give her another one in Wreck, to make her very good a breaking (into) things, and then … a dot in Attune, I think. There’s weird shit down there. She’s run into it a time or two.

Her special ability, as per sapper, will definitely be Saboteur. She can Wreck things quietly and efficiently, and keep the damage well-hidden from casual inspection. She’s been a damage inspector. She knows how to do things quiet and clean.

Friends and rivals. I do love this part of character creation, you know that? It automatically builds stories and connections for you. Her close friend is going to be Veldren, a psychonaut. AKA a drug addict with a slightly more eldritch bent. Because I think … He’s a cousin. Her favourite cousin. And another family black sheep. He started out an artist, already a more fanciful and flimsy career than the family approved of, but at least he was respectable about it. He was part of one of the artist colonies around the old city walls in Charterhall, he had a respectable patron and everything. But then his use of mind-altering substances made him increasingly more unreliable, and when his patronage was dropped because he flaked on too many commissions, he wound up evicted and in a Fogcrest flophouse over in Silkshore instead. (He might be the reason, along with subterranean weirdness, for her dot in Attune). She loves him, and she’s trying to look after him. He’s also another reason why she’s drifted away from the family’s zealous adherence to ‘respectability’ towards a more criminal outlook.

Her enemy is going to be Eckerd, a corpse thief. Because she was canal maintenance, and bodies get dumped in canals the whole time, which meant she got in the way of body acquiring/transport/disposal a non-zero number of times, and Eckerd holds a grudge about it. Since her more criminal turn herself, she’s been a bit exasperated by this, but fine. If he wants to be enemies, sure. She’ll be enemies.

Her vice is Obligation. She’s going to look after Veldren. She’s going to make sure he stays fed, and warm, and at least slightly tethered to reality, while also enjoying his company. He’s fucking weird, but he was a genuine artist, and he has genuine insights and a fun personality when he’s awake enough for it.

Then finally, Name, Alias, and Look. Her name is Thena Slane. She is extremely sturdy and almost aggressively practical in appearance, wearing plain and well-tended (and waterproof, I went on a research tangent here wondering if waterproof waders existed in the 19th century, and apparently they did, they might have been around as early as the 1850s in America) work clothes. She is, unfortunately, also perpetually followed by a faint miasma of canal-and-sewer, even now.

And her Alias … Again, a small research rabbit hole, I was wonder if there were old terms for sanitation workers or sewer workers, and I found this list of Victorian occupations. There are a couple of interesting ones, but scavelman was a term for someone who maintained and kept waterways and ditches clear. So her Alias, I think, will be Scavelman, gender notwithstanding, and if anyone has an issue with it, as a reminder, she has two dots in Wreck and is happy to respond in kind!

So. Thena Slane, Scavelman, ex-maintenance worker and current criminal cracker for hire!

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Daniel Greenfield

Some were shocked to learn that Israel’s successful ‘Pagergeddon’ operation had been the work of a female intelligence operative under thirty. But they shouldn’t have been.

Israel’s digital intelligence capabilities rely on the work of young women operating in arenas like Unit 8200 which monitors enemy communications, plants surveillance devices and puts together intel data to form a bigger picture, and Unit 414, the unarmed observers on the front line, many of whose members were killed and a number captured during the Hamas invasion on Oct 7.

Women from 8200 and 414 had sounded early warning alerts about Hamas training drills and movements that went unheard before Oct 7. And Unit 414 had lost 27 of its own on Oct 7.

Unit 8200, which is 55% female, had taken some of the blame for the failures on Oct 7. The assault on Hezbollah provided a unique opportunity for Israel’s women to strike back.

‘Pagergeddon’ went viral on social media but it was only a piece of a bigger puzzle. The Israelis had deconstructed the lessons of Oct 7 and turned them against the Islamic terrorists. Hamas and its Iranian masterminds had wrecked Israeli battlefield communications in the initial attack. Israeli military units were slow to respond, aerial units were unable to strike and hours passed before the military leadership understood the scope of the terrorist assault on the homeland.

The first thing Israel came after were Hezbollah’s communications. ‘Pagergeddon’ was a crucial last step that began with Israel infiltrating Hezbollah’s landlines and then its other communications. When Hezbollah leaders fell back on the pagers and handheld radios, also favored by Hamas, that had been rigged to explode, communications were fatally scrambled.

Hezbollah leaders were forced to begin meeting in person and retreating to bunkers which made it all too easy to take them out. With a broken leadership and communications structure, Hezbollah lacked the ability to decisively move its forces and quickly respond. Within a week, its protectors at the UN and the White House were frantically urging a ‘ceasefire’.

Destroying communications and the chain of command is standard military doctrine, and Israel’s successful implementation of it within such a short time and against one of the world’s largest Islamic terrorist groups will be studied in military academies for generations, but there was also something feminine about breaking apart Hezbollah’s social bonds before a bombing campaign.

While misleading photos and videos of female IDF soldiers carrying rifles circulate on social media, the burden of front line combat is largely handled by men. The killing and capture of unarmed Israeli female observers from Unit 414 remains a deep moral failure. The true role of Israeli women is to act as the invisible heart and soul of the country’s national defense.

When Iron Dome and other interceptor systems take down incoming attacks, the odds are very good that the country’s female air defense controllers are alert and responding. And the extent to which Hezbollah’s communications were penetrated and turned against the terror group owes much to nameless female ‘keyboard warriors’ who exposed the enemy’s weaknesses.

Hezbollah was uniquely vulnerable to these tactics because it was in the awkward stage between terror group and terror state, too big to hide in tunnels, too small to have an effective air defense system, and too dumb to realize that tens of thousands of rockets were still no match for what a first rate air force could do to all its infrastructure and weaponry.

[bcdrawsandwrites]

Day 24: Failed escape / Hunted down / Too exhausted to keep running Characters: Otto Mentallis, Caligosto Loboto (Sasha and Milla are there briefly too) Warnings: None Summary: Otto finds something wandering around in his Otto B.O.N. system.

Otto looked up at the sound of insistent beeping, and hummed. He'd been drafting up his plans for a mini astralathe, but the interruption piqued his interest. He recognized the beeping as the warning signal that something was stuck in the Otto B.O.N. system.

Or, not stuck necessarily, but moving very slow, in this case. He'd set up the system so the alarm only sounded if something was either unmoving or had been moving slowly for quite some time—it meant he wouldn't get alerted every time a rat traversed through the tunnels, as they were wont to do. A psychic would be able to travel through rapidly, and an animal that knew where they were going wouldn't take too long in there, so something moving slowly was either a lost non-psychic animal, or, less likely, a person.

With a simple thought, he brought a hovering monitor over, which immediately lit up with a display of the entire Otto B.O.N. system. A dot was blinking in the tunnels between the mail room and dorms—a strange place for a blockage. It wasn't used much anyway, but fortunately the system had automatically shut off the passage, so some poor soul wouldn't be sent careening into a rabid raccoon.

"Well, a little distraction never hurt anyone," he mused, turning to a console and typing in a quick command. One of his drones zipped by, darting into the nearest Otto B.O.N. "Let's see what's going on here."

The screen displaying the map swapped to a video feed from the drone. It easily zipped along the tunnels in the direction of the blockage, and Otto sat back and watched, waiting for the feed to display a lost rabbit or squirrel.

The drone turned a corner, and a pair of bright lights greeted him.

Otto about jumped out of his skin, and the thing, whatever it was, startled just as badly. With a terrible shriek, the lights jumped upward, followed by a BANG of the creature hitting the ceiling of the tunnel. The lights flickered and turned downward, and for a brief moment, the drone's night vision was able to get a good look at what they were dealing with.

It was a human. One in a very large shower cap and a very worn out apron. Strange, he looked remarkably similar to the person that Sasha had been holding in his...

Otto blanched.

Oh dear.

"Oooh..." came the man's groan through the video feed. His head suddenly shot up, coming just short of bashing against the ceiling again. "NO! Yyyyou're nnnot gonna catch mmme again!" he cried in slurred tones. With that, he attempted to turn around, nearly getting his overly-long legs stuck in the process. But he managed it, scrambling away from the camera on all fours.

Pressing a hand to his temple, Otto reached out. Sasha, we have a problem.

Otto? What's the matter?

I believe you've lost something.

Yes. Loboto, I'm aware. ...Didn't I tell you this?

Otto winced. I might've been busy. The point is, I've found him.

Immediately Sasha became more alert. Good work. Where is he?

Currently... in the Otto B.O.N. system. He's been down there for probably a day or so, if his slur is anything to work off of.

How did he—nevermind. There was a quiet tisk from the other side of the connection. Do you have a way of retrieving him?

Possibly. Keying in a few more commands, he locked every single Otto B.O.N. entrance but the one in the mail room and the one in his own lab. I'll need backup. I need you and Milla to meet me at the entrance to the mail room, but try to keep a crowd from forming.

We'll do what we can.

Nodding, Otto turned back to the camera feed. The man was already well on his way in the direction of the mail room, but there were several more branches leading from there. With a few more taps on the keyboard, multiple drones entered the Otto B.O.N., heading for the mail room through multiple different routes. There was a chance this wouldn't work—cornered animals had attacked the drones before—but he'd rather do this before he went to the more extreme measure of pushing the poor man through via a cleaning machine. Once the drones were in, he locked the Otto B.O.N. entrance in his lab, and bolted out.

Focusing his psychic powers through his pendant, he managed enough buoyancy to levitate over the flooded quarry and to the Motherlobe entrance. His hurried manner garnered several stares from nearby workers as he bolted into the building, ignoring the receptionist and heading straight for the lev-lift and, from there, the mail room.

"In a hurry, Agent Mentallis?" a curious worker asked as he passed.

"Yes," he answered, and, thinking quickly, added, "I'm receiving an important delivery and needed to see to it right away."

That quenched the curiosity of those observing him, even as Sasha and Milla approached. Otto waved them into the mail room but had them stop just within the door. "Wait here. If he sees too many people, he may panic."

"I understand," Milla said with a nod. "The poor thing."

He headed further down into the mail room, where Lori raised an eyebrow at him from the window in her office. He waved her off. "Not to worry! I'm just flushing something out of the Otto B.O.N. system."

Lori made a noise of disgust. "I didn't even know we had one of those in here! And you're chasing a wild animal into here?!"

"Of course not! It's just—"

A muffled howling noise erupted from somewhere beneath them. Otto and Lori exchanged glances before the woman rolled her eyes and stepped out of her office. "Well, whatever it is, you are cleaning up after it. I'm going on break." With that, she headed back up toward the atrium.

Frowning, Otto approached a pile of unsorted packages and TK'd them aside to reveal the rarely-used Otto B.O.N. hatch. Before he could do anything else, the hatch slammed open, and he jumped back as someone scrambled out of the tunnel. He quickly TK'd the hatch shut again as the person shakily rose to his feet, breathing heavily.

"Wh... where?" Loboto slurred, his optics turning slowly as he took in his surroundings. His eyes adjusted a few times before clicking as they focused on the Psychonauts logo on a nearby package.. "AH! Nnno, not here!"

"I'm afraid so," Otto said, and with a swipe of his TK hand, he snagged Loboto off the ground.

"NO! NOOOO!" Loboto wailed, flailing in Otto's grasp. "LET ME GOOO!"

Sighing, Otto placed his hand on his temple. He's a bit rowdy, but I caught him. Have some food and water taken to your lab and I'll meet you there.

Excellent work, Otto.

Loboto, meanwhile, continued to scream.

"Settle down, now," Otto said, carrying him up toward the atrium. "You've been crawling around there far too long, and you need some food and water."

"LET ME—oh, th-that would be nice, actually." Finally the man went limp. Now that he was still, Otto took note of the dark circles under his optics. Or perhaps that was his natural state?

He nearly informed the man that they would continue to analyze him a while longer, but, not wanting to hear that awful screaming again, he decided that could wait. With that, he gently carried the subject back to Sasha's lab.

[usafphantom2]

Why did the SR 71 have to refuel immediately after takeoff? I found the answer in an interview with Rich Graham. It was so the SR-71 could accelerate past Mach 2.6

Many people believe we refueled after takeoff because the aircraft leaked fuel so profusely that we needed to fuel up quickly,” NOT TRUE it was so the airplane would not blow up 🔥🔥

says Col. Richard H. Graham, a former Blackbird pilot. “We had to refuel right after takeoff for only one reason, and it wasn’t because we leaked JP-7 fuel on the ground. Yes, the plane does leak fuel, but not enough to require refueling after takeoff. “The aircraft had three liquid nitrogen Dewar flasks containing 260 liters of liquid nitrogen located in the nose wheel well.

The only way to ensure 100 percent inert atmosphere in each fuel tank was to refuel the plane inflight completely full of JP-7, allowing ambient air in each fuel tank to vent overboard. Once full of fuel, gaseous nitrogen would now dominate each fuel tank’s empty space above as it burned off JP-7. The nitrogen gas pressurized each fuel tank to 1.5 psi above ambient pressure and inerts the space above the heated fuel to prevent autogenous ignition.

This is why we refueled after takeoff. Then we could safely accelerate beyond Mach 2.6.”

There was an exception it was called a Rocket Ride.

“From takeoff to landing the total mission time was fifty-seven minutes and we named it the ‘Rocket Ride.’ This mission was very demanding because everything happened so quickly: departure, acceleration and climb, cruise, and descent for landing. Mentally you had to stay well ahead of the plane on this mission compared to others.”As Graham explains the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea is 160 miles long and only 2.5 miles wide: this area is the most heavily militarized in the world. The aim of the Rocket Ride missions was to monitor tunnels and military facilities on the north side of the DMZ that North Korea had dug over many years in preparation for future hostilities with South Korea.

Graham flew the first Rocket Ride with Don Emmons as Reconnaissance System Officer (RSO, the Blackbird back seater). According to Graham “Our mission was planned to fly down the middle of the DMZ, imaging directly under the SR-71 and North Korea about fifty-seven miles.” The route of flight took them directly from Okinawa, northward over the Korean Straits, into the sea of Japan, to make a northeast to southwest pass through the DMZ, then exit into the Yellow Sea and return to Okinawa.

Posted by Linda Sheffield

@Habubrats71 via X

[hplonesomeart]

Hey!! So turns out a video I made between a certain “well beloved but highly sensitive/emotionally reactive T.V” and an “orange haired inkling-turned-human” has managed to sweep my YouTube channel and accumulate 100k VIEWS!! THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE ACTUALLY?? My most widely viewed video EVER to exist in this moment in time?? AAAAA?? Not even mentioning the various comments and staggering increase in subs! It’s so much more then what I expected or even prepared for—might even be the most impactful thing to happen for me this year <3

…aside from graduating high school + the social connections I’ve been fortunate to make lol

BUT THE POINT IS I’d been closely monitoring the YouTube growth through the entirety of October. It’s make me smile like a dork, gawk in astonishment, dance frantically in my room from the energy boosts, and grow courage to stop being so selective/self-conscious with what I wish to share with the world! It’s kept my ambitions going!

I needed to find some way to celebrate the occasion and express my thanks—because I can’t NOT acknowledge this milestone jksjskp. Typically I try to avoid getting tunnel visioned focusing on the metrics/numbers. Mr. Puzzles had already demonstrated how much those things can mess with the minds of creatives. Caring too much about chasing views or placing your artistic value in attention seeking gets damaging. But at same time…it’s hard to deny the sense of pride the 100k achievement has filled me with. I understand that reaching 100k views doesn’t immediately make me any “better” or “worse” then I was before. I’m still just me! It only helps me feel seen by others—and that’s all I really needed. To hear some nice words & receive reminders that my ideas are cared about. So thank you SMG4 fandom for that, seriously thank you.

Please accept this Mr. Puzzle drawing as a way of sharing the happiness around. He’s so entertaining. Love him for simply existing. So glad we can all collectively be super attached to him (and the rest of the SMG4 cast of course). Can’t wait to see more incredible artworks from the fandom :)

Just incase anyone is confused by my vague description over which “animated video” I’m referring to here—hopefully this photo will help clarify lol. It’s this one!! Sorry about not outright stating the title at the start, I got carried away with writing!!

I’ve been in an odd place mentally when thinking about it. Wondering to myself if any of the attention is deserved considering it’s not even fully colored and could be dismissed as “low effort” content (despite taking several days making it). It’s easy to get into a trap of comparing yourself to others and questioning how much of the videos success is based on your skills, sheer algorithm luck, or only because you used popular characters and catered to a specific fandom. And then judging yourself by looking at other peoples videos. I’ve seen several artists post higher quality works then my own but it somehow gets less views. So why did mine succeed when others (who should have gotten just as much attention if not more) didn’t? Sometimes you feel like you’ve unfairly robbed them of that chance to be seen. However I’ve realized that I can’t ever expect views to be consistent—and comparing is pointless. So why worry about it or feel inadequate? I mean it’s pretty common for funny cat videos to go viral, so who am I to question the system lol. “Popular” YouTube videos can range from a passion project which took 7+ artists…to a clip of Toad singing Chandelier or a nonsensical Vine sketch. Anything can happen when it’s the internet! And just-so-happened my video was chosen. I should stay glad about that and get rid of all the overanalyzing. So that’s what I’ve chosen to do :)

[eretzyisrael]

by Hank Berrien

A bombshell new report states that the British government is knowingly sending millions of pounds to the terrorist group Hamas.

NGO Monitor obtained a British Consulate-General in Jerusalem (BCGJ) document dated November 2022 with a plan for “UK Humanitarian Support in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

The document notes distribution of “multi-purpose cash” assistance in Gaza.  The document states, “The cash assistance component will be implemented in coordination with the Ministry of Social Development MoSD. … The MoSD in Gaza is affiliated with the de facto authorities and thus UK Aid can be linked directly or indirectly with supporting the de factor [sic] authority (Hamas) in Gaza which is part of a proscribed group.”

“Since taking control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas has employed a number of methods to divert international aid,” NGO Monitor wrote. “By exploiting monies and material intended for humanitarian purposes, the terrorist organization expanded its military infrastructure, paid salaries, and cemented its rule. More disturbingly, this aid diversion was central in Hamas’ preparations for the October 7 massacre, including the construction of tunnels and other military installations, and stockpiling supplies and resources.”

“Hamas has exercised effective control over the MoSD in Gaza for several years. In April 2019, Hamas appointed a politburo member, Ghazi Hamad, to lead the Ministry,” NGO Monitor notes. “As of July 2024, Hamas leader and politburo member, Ghazi Hamad, heads the Gaza branch of the MoSd. … In November 2024, the US Treasury Department designated Hamad, labeling him a “senior Hamas official. … In an October 24, 2023 interview on Lebanese television, Hamad hailed the October 7th massacre.”

“A Hamas-controlled entity was an integral partner in determining how cash assistance provided by the UK government to UNICEF would be distributed in Gaza,” NGO Monitor’s Anne Herzberg explained.

Israeli journalist Amit Segal noted after reading the report that the funding appears to have continued after the Hamas terrorist offensive.

“But maybe London changed its policy after October 7?“ Segal asked rhetorically. “Well, in March 2024, UNICEF wrote that it ‘maintained and strengthened the partnership with the MoSD,’ adding in November that ‘this humanitarian cash transfer program in the Gaza Strip is supported by the European Union, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).’”

“Citing the UN Financial Tracking System, NGO Monitor wrote that ‘in 2024, the UK provided UNICEF with approximately $23.1 million for West Bank and Gaza operations,’” Segal pointed out, adding, “And yet, at the same time that Britain is knowingly sending millions of pounds to Hamas, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is busy condemning Israel for the war in Gaza.”

[cozmowrites]

Wistoragic: Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Six - 1405 words

The tunnel opened up into a vast, dimly lit chamber of sorts—metal beams curved overhead, reinforced by heavy stonework and scattered construction lights and fairy lights. It was hard to believe such a place existed beneath the city. Warm air met your face, tinged with the scent of cooked food and even something like soap. The faint hum of generators echoed in the distance, along with quiet chatter and footsteps. It was alive down here. Not just surviving but living.

Aizawa led the way, expression unreadable as always, but there was a slight shift in his posture—lighter, relieved most likely. He raised a hand as a few figures stepped into the path ahead, each of them armed and looking cautious. They weren’t infected, but they weren’t unarmed either. Civilians, strong and grounded, the kind of people who had lasted this long by making sure no one got through unless they belonged.

“Weapons down,” one of them said, voice stern but calm. “State your business.”

Aizawa didn’t flinch. “It’s me, Aizawa. I’ve got some of my class.”

That made the guard falter for a second, exchanging a look with the other before a new voice called out from behind them—bright, sharp, and unmistakably familiar.

“Aizawa?” Mirko stepped forward from the edge of the tunnel clearing, ears perked and wide grin flashing across her face. “Well I’ll be damned! It’s really you!”

Within seconds, she’d brushed past the guards and welcomed everyone in with a slap on the back hard enough to rattle Sero’s teeth. “Come on, we’ve got room. You’re lucky—night patrol’s just coming in, and we got extra stew.”

The group passed through the checkpoint. A flood of movement followed—familiar faces, ones you’d only seen on television or heard in songs. All Might, towering and radiant even in worn clothes and tired eyes, stood talking with Best Jeanist and Hawks, who leaned lazily against a column while Edgeshot stood beside them with arms folded. They looked... weathered. But they were here. Alive.

There were tents and supplies, lights strung across the ceiling in long wires. A system had been set up, structured and efficient. Teams rotated in and out. Weapons cleaned and tended to, and various weapons too. Food cooked. People, real people, chatted and moved between the spaces, laughing even. It was strange and jarring to witness after so long outside in the chaos.

Everyone from your group was shuffled toward the medical tent, where a tired but gentle doctor checked everyone over—wounds treated, vitals measured, hydration monitored. They had their process, and they knew how to keep things working. Like clockwork.

When it was your turn, the doctor took one look at you and hummed. “Malnourished. Exhausted. You’ve been hiding for a long time, hm?” You just nodded. What else was there to say?

Afterward, people began to break off. Sero and Kirishima talked easily with a group of younger civilians, other students from other talent schools that they probably knew, showing off their bats like they were cool artifacts. Ashido darted around with a grin, already fitting in with some of the patrolling guards. Midoriya lingered near the supplies with All Might, hands moving excitedly as they talked—he looked like he belonged here.

Everyone did.

Except you.

You hung back, silent and unsure. The lights felt too bright. The air too full for once. You weren’t one of them. Not at all. You hadn’t trained in talent schools or grown up under the same pressure or spotlight. You weren’t strong or graceful or polished like them. You didn’t know the ins and outs of survival tactics or how to move like a fighter. You fumbled. You hesitated. You bled.

So you moved away. Just a little. Enough to slip into the quieter edge of the camp where string lights flickered dimmer and the sound of voices grew soft and muffled. It was safe enough to you. People walked nearby. Guards were stationed. The infected wouldn’t be getting through, not easily. They had themselves together here. A strong system.

You sat on an old crate you found and let yourself breathe.

Somewhere far in front of you, camp was being set up—tents being distributed for your group, arrangements made. But you weren’t there to hear it.

And when someone realized you weren’t there, Midoriya was the first to notice.

“She’s not here,” he said quickly, scanning the group. “She—she was just behind me, I swear.”

Bakugou’s eyes had already started narrowing before Midoriya even finished the sentence.

“You lost her?”

“She’s not lost,” Midoriya said, voice sharp. “She just—she must’ve wandered off a little. I’ll go find—”

“The fuck you will.” Bakugou’s glare was already scathing. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Midoriya squared his shoulders. “Why not?”

“Because I’ll do it,” Bakugou snapped. “You always let her get too far. Always talking and slowing down. You think that helps?”

“At least I don’t yell at her every time she breathes!”

Sero winced from the side, muttering to Kirishima, “Here we go again...”

“She’s not your responsibility, Kacchan,” Midoriya added, quieter now, trying to keep things from exploding.

But Bakugou’s jaw was already tight. “I don't care. If something happens to her again—”

“I care too, you know!”

For a beat, there was nothing but silence. Tense. Thick.

Then Kirishima stepped in. “Hey. Hey, you guys. Just—someone find her, alright? We’re all on edge.”

Bakugou didn’t wait. He just turned and stormed off down one of the side paths, shoulders tense and steps loud.

Midoriya sighed and rubbed the back of his neck.

“She’s gonna hate that we fought over her, probably,” he muttered.

+++

Bakugou stomped through the dimly lit camp with increasing frustration clawing at his chest. He’d checked the medical tent, the edges of the supply lines, even asked the guards at the gates if they’d seen anyone unfamiliar—quiet, probably a little awkward, definitely out of place. No one had. At least not anyone had noticed.

Mirko and Mount Lady hadn’t been any help either.

“She doesn't sound like the type to introduce herself,” Mount Lady had said with a shrug, cleaning out her gun. “Didn’t even know you had someone new with you.”

Mirko had only smirked. “Quiet ones always slip past, huh? If she’s not in the mess lines or the training areas, then she’s either resting or avoiding you, hmm?”

Bakugou hadn’t replied. He didn't even wanna think about you avoiding him.

He’d searched the areas filled with noise and movement—makeshift cafes where people were pretending things were okay, patches of floor where civilians played cards or huddled together to share stories. Spaces where people tried to make the darkness feel like home.

But not you.

You weren’t anywhere where someone trying to belong might go. That thought twisted something hot and bitter in his gut. He wasn’t good at feelings. Hell, he hated them. But this—this unease that simmered under his skin, like he’d failed again—it burned worse than anything else.

He kicked a crate on his way back toward the center of camp, not hard enough to draw attention but just enough to let the edge out. Sparks of guilt. Frustration. Something else he didn’t want to name.

The tents stretched for what felt like miles. It wasn’t a vertical city like the one above—there were no towering buildings—but it had grown sprawling, wide and dense. Layers of fabric separated lives, privacy carved out in spaces and corners. Anyone could disappear here if they wanted to.

When he got back, he didn’t say anything at first. Just returned, empty-handed, jaw tight.

Midoriya stood nearby, arms crossed, expression somewhere between worried and annoyed. He'd been looking out and waiting for Bakugou to get back.

“She wasn’t with the celebrities?” he asked.

Bakugou shook his head. “Didn’t even talk to them. Not really the mingling type.”

Midoriya raised a brow. “And you’re sure she’s not hurt? Or—”

“She’s not dead,” Bakugou snapped.

Midoriya’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant��it.”

There was a pause. Heavy with the weight of something unspoken. Then Midoriya sighed and turned away, grabbing his bag and slipping it over one shoulder.

“I’ll go look,” he muttered. “Since you were all talk, anyway.”

Bakugou stiffened. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Midoriya didn’t look back. “You said you were gonna find her. You didn’t.”

He walked off before Bakugou could answer.

And Bakugou stood there for a moment, unmoving. Angry, yeah—but more with himself than anyone else. He hated this. Hated that you were somewhere out there, probably lost or scared or mad at him. Or all three. And that he couldn’t even figure out how to fix it.

So he stayed behind. Hunched near one of the posts, fists in his pockets, scowl sharp as ever—watching, waiting.

Hoping, stupidly, that you’d show up.

=====

this chapter's votes have concluded.

wistoragic masterlist ⟢

masterlist 𓆩♡𓆪

read it all here:

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[enzaelectric]

Air-Insulated vs Gas-Insulated Switchgear: Which One is Right for You?

In the world of power distribution, switchgear plays a vital role in ensuring safe, reliable, and efficient control of electrical systems. But when it comes to choosing the right type of switchgear for your application, a common debate arises: Air-Insulated Switchgear (AIS) or Gas-Insulated Switchgear (GIS) — which one is the better fit?

In this blog, we’ll break down the key differences, pros and cons, and application suitability of each, helping you make an informed decision.

What is Switchgear?

Before diving into the comparison, let’s quickly recap what switchgear is. Switchgear is a combination of electrical disconnect switches, fuses or circuit breakers used to control, protect, and isolate electrical equipment. It’s critical for fault detection, power isolation, and system protection in electrical networks.

Switchgear typically falls into two main types based on insulation medium:

Air-Insulated Switchgear (AIS)

Gas-Insulated Switchgear (GIS)

What is Air-Insulated Switchgear (AIS)?

Air-Insulated Switchgear uses air as the primary dielectric medium for insulation between live parts and ground. It’s commonly found in both indoor and outdoor substations.

Pros of AIS:

Lower Initial Cost: Generally less expensive to manufacture and install.

Simple Design: Easier to maintain, inspect, and service.

Ease of Modification: Flexible and scalable for future upgrades or expansions.

Environmentally Safer: No greenhouse gases like SF₆ are used.

Cons of AIS:

Larger Footprint: Requires more physical space, making it unsuitable for compact or urban environments.

Vulnerable to Environmental Factors: Susceptible to dust, humidity, and pollution in outdoor settings.

What is Gas-Insulated Switchgear (GIS)?

Gas-Insulated Switchgear uses sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) gas as the insulating medium. This technology allows high-voltage switchgear to be extremely compact.

Pros of GIS:

Compact Design: Ideal for space-constrained environments like cities, buildings, and offshore platforms.

High Reliability: Fully enclosed system offers excellent protection against external elements.

Minimal Maintenance: Components are sealed and protected, requiring less frequent servicing.

Longer Lifespan: Designed for durability and consistent performance.

Cons of GIS:

Higher Initial Cost: More expensive in terms of equipment and installation.

SF₆ Gas Concerns: Although SF₆ is effective, it’s a potent greenhouse gas with strict handling requirements.

Complex Repairs: Repairs and servicing can be more specialized and expensive.

AIS vs GIS: Quick Comparison Table

Feature AIS GIS Insulation Medium Air SF₆ Gas Size / Space Needed Larger Very Compact Initial Cost Lower Higher Maintenance Frequent Minimal Environmental Impact Low High (due to SF₆)Installation Complexity Simpler More complex Suitability Rural, open spaces Urban, limited-space settings

Which One Is Right for You?

The decision between AIS and GIS depends on several key factors:

1. Available Space

Choose GIS for space-limited locations like high-rise buildings, tunnels, and offshore platforms.

Choose AIS if you have ample room and want easier access for maintenance.

2. Budget Constraints

If cost is a concern, AIS offers a more economical solution.

If lifetime value and reliability are priorities, GIS might justify the investment.

3. Environmental Considerations

AIS is more eco-friendly due to the absence of SF₆.

GIS requires special handling and monitoring for SF₆, especially in regions with strict environmental regulations.

4. Application Type

AIS is well-suited for:

Power stations

Industrial zones

Rural substations

GIS is ideal for:

Urban substations

Underground systems

Critical infrastructure with limited space

Final Thoughts

Both Air-Insulated and Gas-Insulated Switchgear have their strengths and are engineered to serve specific needs. The right choice ultimately depends on your project requirements, site conditions, budget, and sustainability goals.

As a trusted supplier of high-performance switchgear, we can help you evaluate the best solution tailored to your project — ensuring safety, reliability, and efficiency.