#WOO. Finally able to start posting Sodium stuff

[cosmoknightchaos]

Kirby AU go brr. Ramble under the cut

(In case it's hard to read, text says Bandana Waddle Dee: Defender of Dreamland)

So nearly a year after I drafted the original story, I've finally fixed up my silly little Kirby AU enough to start posting about it!

It has no official name, though I have been and will continue calling it the Sodium AU (might've mentioned it on here once or twice?). It can be broken into two parts. There's Bandana Waddle Dee: Defender of Dreamland!, which plays kinda like a subgame centered around the titular Dee, and there's Kirby: Heros of the Stars, which plays out more like the main story mode. Though I hesitate to call them the main mode and subgame bc it's more of a Splatoon 3 fake-out situation.

The whole concept of BWD:DoD is that while Kirby was out training* with Meta Knight, a mysterious wanderer by the name of Aeon crash-landed on Planet Popstar seeking help. Since Kirby wasn't there to offer it, Bandana Dee decided he'd step up! The two end up going on a small adventure to find four mysterious artifacts... Though only one is found before Aeon gets fucking murdered and everything goes to shit.

The concept of the Sodium AU in general is a bunch of What-ifs I wanted to mess around with. Mainly, what if we made every single Galactia Knight encounter canon, what if Meta Knight was corrupted by Dark Matter, what if Kirby lost the ability to protect his home and friends, and what if Bandana Dee finally got to be the main character of a subgame. And he doesn't just get a subgame. He gets the entire AU with him as the main character, which would be great if it wasn't completely post-apocolyptic and everyone he ever knew and loved was dead, possessed, or secretly trapped in a basement in a cage in a castle on a Dark Matter infested planet waiting for their inevitable death where Dark Matter will possess them therefore causing the destruction of the galaxy as we know it (cough cough Kirby). There's a lot more to it than just this, as I also go more in depth on the Heros of Yore, Morpho Knight, and a bit of Magolor and Bandana Dee's relationship during BWD:DoD (slaps roof THEY CAN FIT SO MUCH TRAUMA). Arguably there is also a prequel that involves Magolor and Zan Partizanne, but I'm still working on it and it may get scrapped or turned into a separate thing. It (somewhat) follows the plotline of Star Allies' Guest Star mode, and involves a lot of arguing, angst, and poor coping mechanisms.

*It's not actually training. It's Kirby getting fucking wombo comboed by Dark Matter

[apostatively]

I try not to post a lot about my personal life on here as with all social media, due to the little voice in the back of my head insisting that my life is way too boring and/or depressing to bother anyone with. But I really need to vent, so here it is. I feel like a total failure. The last year has been hell for us, and part of it is the monsters running this country who continue to suck any hope for the future out of me to the point where it's difficult to function day-to-day, and part of it is finances. Some terrible decisions were made, championed by me, to uproot us from Baltimore to Augusta, GA, which cost a few thousand dollars all told because the movers apparently took us for a ride and then didn't even log our move in such a way that the military would reimburse us for it as they should have, effectively losing us $4k. The job we moved for became disputed by another company and any hiring was frozen, leaving me unemployed for a few months: by the time I'd found multiple retail jobs to try to tide us over due to savings running dry, the contract was resolved, but the company said that "the customer" was no longer releasing/filling my job area in Augusta. On top of that, the Limited went under and I lost one of my retail jobs. I started interviewing and applying for other Intel jobs like crazy, knowing that a five-month hiatus from my very tech-driven and fast-moving career field wasn't something I could really afford. This was in February. We were reduced to a ramen noodle budget and I was donating plasma as often as I could to try to make ends meet, but it still wasn't enough. At this point we had already borrowed a lot of money from family and friends, which we have yet to find a way to pay back. You know the images of the food they cook in FFXV? I was starting to get legitimately resentful of that delicious-looking fictional food because what I could afford was ramen, and I was still gaining a ton of weight due to a combination of a cheap, high-sodium/fat/sugar diet, intense anxiety, and simply being too depressed to work out. In February I got what could have been a life-preserver for us, if not for the fact that the job came at the expense of my mental health. Since February I've been a 911 call-taker, which pays enough for us to barely make ends meet, and was still working at Teavana. Unfortunately, this job is the most legitimately terrifying thing I've ever done. It's like anxiety Russian-roulette: every time I answer a line it could be a sweet little old lady with a question about the noise ordinances in our town, or it could be a hysterical screeching person so loud I literally jump back in my chair, giving me no information and screaming abuse at me when I can't make responders appear for them within eight seconds. I hate it. I do it for us, but it's the worst thing I've ever had to do in my life. I hate working in a technical law-enforcement field, I hate having to fight so hard not to let this sour my view of humanity, I hate that the 12-hour overnight shift they've assigned me to has left me nocturnal on top of the anxiety-riddled sleeplessness I'm already struggling with, I hate the constant compulsion to eat a ton of crap that is just making me bigger and bigger, I hate that I can't seem to find anything better, and when they sent me for my mandatory week of (essentially) boot camp for this job back in June, I had to read transcripts of dozens of emergency services calls placed on 9/11 as the towers were coming down, and I had an outright breakdown, knowing with certainty that if I couldn't handle my own stress I wasn't going to be able to handle anyone else's under a similar emergency situation, and the knowledge that I had to get out or I was going to get someone killed has stuck with me. In the meantime, I have nothing in common with most of my coworkers: they're a loud, close-knit group of Southern women who have all grown up in this area, they pray before each shift (at a government job???!) and gladly pay $20 per pay period to the shift's fund for birthdays and bereavements. It's intimidating, and I'm slow to open up in a new work environment anyway, and I'm pretty sure they think I'm stuck up when I'm just trying to keep my head above water and have trouble reaching out to my own family, let alone coworkers. They've never gone out of their way to include me, and I feel completely isolated both by myself and them. In mid-July, after months of working my ass off to woo potential recruiters for companies in my area, the company that wanted to hire me for GA initially finally came forward with a solid offer for me, for a job for which we'd need to relocate back to Baltimore. They had me go through urinalysis, sign a metric ton of paperwork, basically commitment-implying things. I've never gotten this far in the hiring process with them before, and my recruiters were communicating with me fairly regularly. It seemed like there was finally an end in sight to this year from hell. I gave two weeks' notice at my jobs before being warned not to "just yet" by my recruiter - thanks for the timing there, bud. I explained the situation to the 911 administrator and he generously doubled the time I had left, allowing me to stay for a month instead of the two weeks I'd given. (The day after my "last day" at Teavana I heard that Starbucks is shutting us down, which hit me hard, because unlike 911 I related to and love my coworkers there, they're amazing people and this news was seriously distressing; I couldn't go crawling back there asking for an extension when they have enough problems without me.) My new last day at 911 is tomorrow's night shift, and I'm completely terrified, because new job has yet to give me a start date, a full month after starting the hiring process with me. I get paid on Friday but that may be the last full-sized paycheck I can expect, and it's mostly going to go to rent. I keep running our budget over and over in my head, trying to figure out how to make it stretch when the money stops coming in. I may have to start donating plasma again to the tune of about $60 a week, when the very experience of having a massive needle shoved in my arm draining stuff out of me is a horrific experience that makes me want to scream. Even if I can manage to pay all our bills until I can start getting paid from this new job - unlikely - I still have to figure out how to afford to live day-to-day until then, alone in Baltimore while Michelle is here *alone* until we can get paid and afford to move, and I'm hoping one of the few friends I have in Baltimore will let me crash on their couch until then bc we have no money for a cheap hotel or Airbnb room at this point, and it's not even worth the attempt to try to get a loan unless we feel like depressing some bank tellers pointlessly. There is literally no other financial place to turn. I check my email about fifty times a day hoping for an update and immediately getting disappointed when there is still nothing. I've gone through this cycle so many times with at least seven different companies this year but never so far along in the process: sometimes there will be a week where *everybody* wants to talk to you, they want their bosses to talk to you bc they're so impressed, they want to know about your experience and salary requirements and spend hours on the phone with you each day and you think they're really serious, that you finally might really get an offer....and then radio silence, for weeks, bare-minimum answers when you contact them, bc recruiters don't like to talk to you when they have all the information they need from you and have no positive updates to give. I've spiraled from this routine more times than I can count, and this is exactly what it feels like to me. What's taking so long? Is there a problem? Can I be doing something else on my end? (How can I make you see how crazy this is making me without looking unprofessional?!?!?) This feeling of hopelessness and rejection is crushing me. Between this, the chaotic evil bodies at work in our government, and nearly a year of intense depression, I'm barely functioning. I have no motivation to do anything, I'm just eating and breathing for news on this job that could finally, finally save us/me. On top of my already-nocturnal schedule, I keep going days without sleeping and then doing nothing *but* sleeping for days. Our pantry is full of ramen again bc I'm rationing for the worst. I don't know what to do, and I can't go on like this for long. I just literally have no idea what I'm supposed to do. How to I outlast this? How do I save us? I've given up on staying strong or healthy; I'm just trying to stay mobile and functional, because that's what I'm good for. But it's been so long, and I have no idea how when nothing is in my control anymore.