#a big on it terms of significance not actual size unfortunately

[meadow-roses]

I realized I'd never drawn Delia before! So I had to fix that.

Also, chapter update finally 😭😭

[tkingfisher]

I have a question I just thought of. I remember reading that the potato is something that you can discuss at length. I'm curious about the Irish potato famine (as it's called by many people) of 1845 - 52. The potato blight killed a whole load of potatoes, and blight warnings are still a thing today. But... honestly, why? Was just one variety of potato grown? If not, wouldn't different varieties have resisted? The only thing I'm even remotely familiar with is Panama Disease, which is killing off Cavendish bananas because they're all genetically identical - was that the case for the potatoes being grown at the time?

Oh boy. Okay, this is a huge complicated topic and I can only do the Cliff Notes version and even that is absurdly long, but here we go.

The cause of the Irish Potato Famine were, in order:

A) the British

B) the British but moreso

C) still the British but also capitalism

and

D) monoculture

I am not nearly so equipped to talk about A-C as many, many other people, so let’s talk about D.

Now, the humble potato is frankly one of the most glorious products of agricultural science ever created, for which we must thank the indigenous people of Peru, who produced some goddamn geniuses at potato breeding (and also figured out how to freeze-dry potatoes centuries before Idahoan.) The Incas had literally thousands of potato varieties, every size, shape, color, growing condition, right down to sacred potatoes only for consumption by the royal family. They did seriously epic shit with a weird little tuber, a feat perhaps only surpassed by the geniuses who made corn out of teosinte.

Quite a long time later—by which I mean about ten thousand years after the potato was domesticated—the Irish were growing a potato variety called the Lumper. It was a big, coarse, ugly-ass potato which apparently didn’t even taste that great. Irish farmers had other potatoes that they liked a lot better! But the Lumper had three things going for it—it gave huge yields, tolerated nutrient-poor soil, and it didn’t mind wet feet.

(Wet feet is the gardening term for plants with their roots in waterlogged soil. Most potatoes do not actually like wet feet and will rot. But the Lumper was fine with it, which meant that basically you could grow the things in poor soggy soil, which large swaths of Ireland had in generous supply.)

Because of a whole lot of really abusive shit by various landowners, a lot of Irish people ended up dependent on the Lumper for their diet, and I mean dependent. You can live for a really long time on cow’s milk and potatoes if you have to, and a potato that would produce massive yields in crappy wet soil was a godsend. So you had vast areas that were planted with just the Lumper. (There are some reports that other, better-tasting potato varieties were grown for the landlords, but while the workers dug them, they were not allowed to eat them. I can’t speak to the truth of this or not, but it’s definitely worth looking up a full history of the socioeconomics of the famine, if you ever happen to be feeling too good about the world and want to be crushed.)

Unfortunately, the Lumper has one other significant trait—it is extremely vulnerable to potato blight, a disease caused by Phytophtora infestans, which is a weird little thing called an oomycete. It’s more like a fungus than it is anything else, but it’s actually in a separate kingdom called Chromista. (Currently, anyway. Taxonomy is where idealistic young scientists go to become old before their time.) Nevertheless, for our purposes, let’s just call it a fungus. (Also, Chromista is a great name for an alicorn in My Little Pony.)

P. infestans loooooves members of the Solanum clan, which include tomatoes and potatoes. This love is not returned. In a tomato, it’s usually called late blight, in a potato, it’s potato blight, no matter what you call it, it’s bad news. It likes damp, cool conditions, and of course Ireland is basically one big damp cool condition, so once the blight got established, it was in heaven.

Blight on a potato takes about five days from start to finish. This sucker is FAST. One day there’s a blotch on a leaf, next day there’s some whitish stuff under a leaf, then the tubers are suddenly turning black and mushy and stink to high heaven. You may even think you got a good tuber and put it in storage and then you open the door to the root cellar and the whole bin has rotted practically overnight.

The spores can spread by wind, and once it landed on a potato plant, all it needed was like two days above fifty degrees with high humidity, and it was off and running. And it gets in the soil. But worst of all, it lives in the tubers themselves.

Potato cultivars, for those who don’t know, are almost always a clone of the parent. All Yukon Golds are basically the same Yukon Gold. You pop a tuber off a plant, you pop it in the ground, it grows another plant just like the first one, asexual reproduction at its finest.*

Now, potatoes can and do set seed, but there’s some variation even in a seed with two parents of the same variety. Two Yukon Golds might give you Yukon Goldish. Mix up multiple varieties and you don’t always know what you’re gonna get.** (I have grown potatoes from mixed seed and thus made my own cultivars, it’s fun, but the results are wildly variable. Some don’t set tubers at all, some contain high levels of solanine.***)

If you want specific, uniform varieties that all perform the same way, you probably use the tubers. More importantly, tubers start growing right away once you wake them up, whereas potato seedlings can be finicky and often won’t do anything impressive the first year.

To make matters more confusing, the little tuber clones are referred to as seed potatoes.

Anyway, back to the blight. Everybody was growing from little tuber clones, which could be infected with the blight. This means that if your seed potatoes are infected with blight, even if they look fine, if you plant them, your whole crop is infected. The minute you get a cool wet day, the oomcyte wakes up and goes to town. And if you leave an infected potato in the ground, it infects everybody else—and if you’ve ever dug potatoes, you know that you always, always miss one.

Well. The blight came, it hit the Lumper, and it spread like wildfire. The Lumper grew in the wet conditions the blight loved, and was also really susceptible to it, so it was a match made in hell. There were potato varieties even then that were more resistant to the blight, but they were tiny islands and a sea of blight was washing over them daily, so they eventually succumbed. Even if you planted a different potato, if it was in soil that had previously held the Lumper, it was likely doomed.

This is the problem with monocultures. You plant all one variety and it’s susceptible to some particular bug, when that bug hits, you have no fall back position. And potatoes, being more or less clones, are even more vulnerable than most seed-grown crops, and this bug is particularly nasty and the spring of ‘45 was exactly the right weather and the British government was being particularly evil and ultimately a million people starved to death because of a perfect storm.

The Lumper still exists. Somebody turned up some heirloom seeds back in 2008 and grew them out, and what they got is probably pretty close to the original. Being seed grown, it doesn’t carry the blight. It’s an ugly, watery, kinda waxy potato that even its champions think tastes sorta okay, I guess. Cultivariable, one of the few sources I can find, says that in addition to not being resistant to blight, it’s not resistant to anything else either, and there’s not much point in trying to grow it unless you have long dry summers and no local blight.

And that is the saga of the Lumper, the blight, and why I personally always plant at least four varieties of potato.

* There’s some subtleties here, but for layman’s purposes, we’ll go with this.

** It’s actually way complicated, but this is already hella long.

*** Same stuff that makes green potatoes toxic. Super bitter, so you know right away it’s inedible and spit it out. We still refer to taste-tasting the new crop from seed as “the Potato Suicide Pact” but it’s not actually dangerous.

[hawkinasock]

Hello, it's me, Geno.

I thought for a long time, but unfortunately I did not find information related to the theory of Yanqing Abundance.

But I found one detail that might just be of interest.

Like...have you noticed that Yanqing is great at pretending? for example, from a recent event, when he first met Luka, he said his fake name: Lenfen (I don’t remember what exactly the name was, sorry); or from the plot, where he perfectly played the role of a “silly child”, calling March 7 his little sister.

that is, when he needs to, he can completely hide his identity and pretend to be a completely different person..

this is just a detail that I noticed and am sharing with you.

(sorry if there are mistakes. I'm using a translator.)

Hi again, Geno :) Don't worry at all, I can understand you just fine. I'm sorry for how long this took, I got really caught up.

I did notice, but I didn't initially think too much of it. It's probably because the examples are currently pretty limited that It's hard for me to find any deeper meaning to it. Idk if I'd go as far as to say he's capable of being that deceptive, to be honest.

Looking at both examples, the common comparison between the two is Yanqing trying to avoid or get out of a certain situation. With Luka, Yanqing knew about his role in the Wardance and lied to keep that information from his potential opponent (probably because he didn't want to make things awkward, and he seemed to just be enjoying interacting with someone unaware of his status), while with the "big sis" example, Yanqing recognized a dangerous confrontation and was getting himself, Yunli and March out of that situation. Notably, these are small white lies, and he wasn't looking to gain anything significant from them.

Because of the small sample size, the conclusion I've come to is that Jing Yuan just raised Yanqing way too well, and that's why we hardly see him deceive.

Till next time, Geno o7

Edit: i actually just remembered another example of Yanqing being a little deceptive that I wanna add. During his story quest, he runs into two cloud knights and lies to them about his pursuit of Blade, saying he's part of an nonexistent "covert operation", and later expresses frustration in being seen as "incapable". He wasn't really pretending to be someone else, as you put it, but it was definitely a lie someone of his authority shouldn't have been telling.

So that's three examples so far, this one, imo, being the most blatant in terms of him being in the wrong, as he was going behind Jing Yuan's back for the entire quest. All these examples do have explanations behind them, but there is def a pattern here. Dare I say, you might be cooking...

[emmersreads]

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors - 2/5

I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.

I picked up this book not because I had any particular reason to expect to like it, but because in terms of publicity, it has everything going for it. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is all over Instagram thanks to its memorable title and compelling cover design. Its author looks like the secret fifth member of ABBA with a name like an early 00s tabloid star. Seriously, I spent a long time googling her trying to uncover a previous career as a less evil Perez Hilton that I was certain I half remembered from 2004.

Anyway. What a disappointment.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is fine, but that’s about it. A big influence I felt while reading this book was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (which, controversially, I liked). This is a much more optimistic take on the same high-flying New Yorkers with artistic careers and mental health disorders. The appeal is both the human drama of unhappy people with the kind of eccentricities that you really only seem to get in New York (can you imagine some of this stuff happening to a person from Ohio? I can’t), and the voyeuristic literary tourism of the New York setting. Unfortunately, Coco Mellors is no Hanya Yanagihara. Yanagihara was a travel writer before becoming a novelist and you can absolutely tell. Her New York is illustrated with lush descriptions of expensive meals, humid parties, champagne-scented art shows. The book’s deep tragedy is juxtaposed with the greatest delights of a world class city. It’s something Mellors can’t match.

I felt this most acutely in the scene in which Frank and Cleo meet Cleo’s parents at a seafood restaurant in Grand Central Station (also, what’s the deal with this restaurant? The characters visit the same one for a tense family reunion in The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Surely y’all have more than one restaurant). The food arrives, interrupting the mortifyingly awkward conversation with this flaccid description:

The ruby-red lobsters sat at the center, their shells cracked open to reveal the plump flesh within. Nestled around them were freshly shucked oysters, chubby pink prawns, green-lipped mussels, and clams the size of a human palm. Flimsy white paper cups of tartar sauce and thick slices of lemon finished the impressive display.

It’s clearly meant to evoke the glittering decadence of New York’s overpriced tourist traps, but the paragraph falls flat. Perhaps it’s the clichés of the ‘ruby-red lobsters’, ‘plump flesh’, and ‘chubby pink prawns’, or the tell-don’t-show of the ‘impressive display.’ I was underwhelmed before I’d even finished the paragraph. I still remember Yanagihara’s “JB snored juicily” because that adjective surprised me. The seafood is a microcosm of the whole book, which just isn’t written well enough to support its loose plot construction. When the subject matter is otherwise so mundane and naturalistic, I expect the writing to provide something more of interest.

The actual plot was fine. Whatever. It didn’t exactly blow my skirt right off. I preferred the young artist looking for direction in Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress. If we want to look at the young artiste involved with an older man who isn’t good for her, I liked it better in My Dark Vanessa, My Last Innocent Year, and Green Dot. I don’t really feel like Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s more neutral and ambivalent take on the relationship dynamic is really adding anything super significant. Sometimes people can just be bad for each other and being twice as old as your girlfriend isn’t actually that predatory — okay? I guess? I can watch a forty plus year old guy being an ill-suited date to a twenty-something in any romcom. I didn’t find Frank particularly charming and it felt like his flaws were mostly raised just to remind the reader that he isn’t necessarily malicious. Cleo’s problems didn’t hit any more effectively. After reading The Guest by Emma Cline, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and three quarters the of books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I was starting to get exhausted by books about women who are dazzlingly attractive but also sad. There’s a limit to how much an ugly bitch such as myself can empathized with the experience of being suffocated by men throwing themselves at the hollow projection they’ve made of a beautiful woman. Believe it or not some of us go through our lives without men every throwing themselves at us in any way. This exhaustion was underlined by Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s one blindingly great scene.

I glimpsed, for a moment, a reality in which I loved this book.

Like A Little Life and Sirens & Muses, Cleopatra and Frankenstein bounces between narrators within Cleo and Frank’s social circle. One of these is Eleanor, a former screenwriter, who at thirty-seven, finds herself living back in her mother’s house, with a job she hates, no friends, no romantic prospects, and a father slowly dying of Parkinson’s. Unlike other narrators, Eleanor’s sections are told through extremely short vignettes, dramatically limiting Mellors’ usual ruminations, forcing her into dialogue and action. In one scene Eleanor and her mother go shopping on Black Friday, where, surrounded by pajama-ed customers, Eleanor breaks down.

“All men leave you!” I scream. “I still have a chance!” “What exactly are you saying to me?” yells my mother. “YOU CANNOT BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!” A man wheeling an overflowing shopping cart appears at the end of the aisle, gives me a terrified look, and heads the opposite way. I hold on to the display towel rack and bow my head. “I want more, Ma,” I say. “Wouldn’t you?”

After this tiff, her mother ignores her until they are both coerced into a massage chair demonstration by an enthusiastic salesperson

“Eleanor!” she calls over the vibrations of the chair. “Ma!” “I never wanted you to have less!” she says.

This scene reached down my throat and into my lungs to grab my heart. I cried reading it. I’m tearing up now just from copying it down.

It was like a keyhole into a book exploring the crushing existential weight of disappointment, of the relationship between two people, neither of whom understand why their life just somehow didn’t work out. I’m way deeper in my feels about this theoretical story of wasted potential than I am about yet another book about a girl who is so beautiful she can have whatever she wants if she could only want things that are good for her. Disappointment and underachievement aren’t easy to explore in fiction because they defy narrative and are inherently unsatisfying. Narratively it is more satisfying for Eleanor to eventually get together with Frank and live happily ever after, fulfilling her need for partnership and demonstrating his emotional maturity. But existentially it is disappointing that Eleanor’s answer is to just keep waiting, fulfillment will come along, eventually. Just keep waiting.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein wants quite badly to be a grounded book about emotionally ambivalent characters. A key theme is characters that are unhappy and unfulfilled even when they feel like they should be. Apparently good things — a rich patron, a beautiful younger wife — have unexpected consequences. Frank and Anders, the emotional immaturity brothers, have both been acting like nothing is wrong unless they acknowledge it for so long that they’ve become entirely incapable of self-reflection. Oops! All Manic Pixie Dream Girls. The various happy endings feel therefore trite and vaguely embarrassing. The only one that hits right for me is Cleo’s, which is by far the most ambiguous. If a few more of the characters had been invited to reflect on why the want the things they want, rather than just getting them, it might even have turned the story around for me. What doesn’t hit right is that the book’s only queer character, self-identified Gay Best Friend (yikes) Quentin, is the only character to get a truly bad ending. His narrative is set up for him to battle shame, embrace a more feminine presentation, and become less codependent on shitty boyfriends and expensive drugs. Instead, Cleo loses contact with him when he becomes addicted to meth. It’s by far the darkest fate in the book and feels particularly out of place since everyone else gets a happily ever after. Even serial philanderer Anders gets a long-term girlfriend and a dog. The optics of Quentin’s fate are deeply unflattering in a book that otherwise seems to take the criticism that Friends has too many white people in it as a personal challenge.

Considering all the hype it has received, I was hoping that Cleopatra and Frankenstein would be really good, but it isn’t really anything at all. There are some good ideas, but frankly I just don’t get why the novel went in the direction it did. Why invest so heavily in the ambivalent emotional crises of a bunch of characters just to pair them off with their one true love at the end? Why invoke so many iconic sights and sounds of New York if you have little to offer but clichés? Why carefully construct a diverse social group if you’re going to end with your only gay character dropping out to drug addiction? If all you see in this novel is an easy way to fill up an Instagram graphic then, genuinely, I get it, but beyond that this book barely holds up to the most cursory read.

[boop-le-snoot]

PARTY FAVOURS I CHAPTER 35

💖first time reader click here💖

Reader and Eddie going on their mission. They're all morons, okay? Some canon-typical violence, bad guys being bad guys. You guys can see that I treat the fighting plot points as total crack, right?

Eddie Brock was pissed, at the Avengers mostly - for not telling him of my accident - but also at me, for the fact that I didn't call him sooner. Venom had taken over at some point, eager to participate in my plan - and it I was being honest, my uncle's space boo was the one I had relied on to participate in the mayhem that was to be caused to finally let my family breathe in peace.

The Avengers wore various expressions of guilt when an angry Eddie stormed the tower, berating them for not getting into contact with him when I was in danger. Venom growled at them, too, just the right amount of teeth and drool for Tony to quickly usher me out to 'take a walk, have some fun, build a snowman' with uncle Eddie and Venom. It was almost too easy, too predictable. The guilt that reared it's ugly head was stomped down by me and two glasses of whiskey in Eddie's rented Airbnb as I went into the fine details of my plan.

Both I and Eddie were equally surprised when Venom dropped their sarcastic, angsty teenager attitude and approached the topic with maturity, giving valuable input. The goth space goo was much, much smarter than their first impressions showed. I belatedly remembered their remark about being an apex predator species... Scary.

The plan was pretty simple.

Eddie was a professional investigative reporter and an unregistered mutant, his files being hidden so deeply due to the alien nature of the symbiote that it was unlikely that underground gangs would have any idea as to who he truly was. His involvement with SHIELD was buried under so much red tape, even Coulson himself had very little idea about Eddie's body-mate.

My uncle would sniff around the mutant underworld, just enough to catch a whiff of the mercenary's whereabouts. It should be enough if he was as famous as Natasha claimed him to be. And if it wasn't enough... I'd be bait. I doubt that the merc knew the box has been retrieved and secured; every now and then, I still caught chatter about the SHIELD agents trailing me catching a person sent to monitor me. They weren't even trying to hide that hard.

I had my suspicions SHIELD was indirectly using me as bait, too, and both Eddie and Venom were inclined to agree with the notion. Over beers and ridiculous amount of chocolate cake, a third side of the operation Baby Thief had been formed. SHIELD played their own game, the Avengers and SI threw a ridiculous amount of resources on their own and then there was me and Eddie, two halves of a whole idiot.

For once, the plan didn't go south immediately off the bat. Eddie and Venom got the information - there was a lot of uproar in the mutant community, rumours about an artifact that would let them assume their rightful place in the world, pushing the pesky humans off their pedestal. I definitely supported mutant rights - but the common notion that violence was necessary to achieve the recognition of said rights didn't sit well with me at all. Eddie agreed with me, his own curiousity pushing him to dig deeper into the situation.

My uncle could be a brilliant investigative reporter with the proper motivation and his significant other at the side. I could never tire of Venom's stories: each and every time they saved Eddie from making a clown out of himself was remembered, documented and brought up at the quickest available opportunity. I haven't laughed so hard in months.

The positives of our plan? We got a hot trail and enough information to know about the mercenary's whereabouts. We possessed the manpower needed to off him in record time, Venom eagerly offering his digestive system for our convenience.

The negatives? We'd need to bring me. Apparently there was a hefty bounty on my pretty little head and the merc himself had given up trying to chase me, hiring a bunch of muscle to do the legwork for him instead. The mercenary, a man who went by the nickname Cadre, was an ex-shield agent, who knew enough to successfully avoid the organisation following hot on his heels.

And neither SHIELD, nor Tony nor Eddie knew who had ordered the retrieval of the artifact. The mysterious person had deep pockets: all of the men were supplied with high grade weaponry and the mutants participating in the missions had equipment specifically tailored to their powers.

Perhaps, I wasn't as clever as I wanted myself to be. There was something big and ugly brewing and the bounty on my head was just the tip of the iceberg. But what was done, was done, and Venom was looking forward to a hefty meal and we set the date of Eddie "kidnapping" me in a few days time.

I hoped I'd make it home for Christmas.

The biggest surprise was that nobody suspected anything. Not even Natasha's watchful eye and inherent knowledge of shit about to be stirred - somehow, Nat always just knew those things - had revealed itself and that's how I knew it was absolutely necessary for me to be successful. There was no room for failure. In the day before my planned trip to Cadre's lair, I forced the team into a movie night and took extra time with everybody, seeing as even the most cheerful people - Thor and Wanda - walked around with sullen faces for most of the time. Perhaps, deep down, I knew that chances of my plan going awry were pretty damn high.

It felt like I was leaving for war. And perhaps, I was. The nervous, anxious energy increased as the hour X drew closer and I couldn't hide it anymore. My insomnia wore Tony's face: I could see his disappointment as clear as day, but I figured he'd forgive me for the betrayal eventually. Every single thing I hid from my newfound family made me feel a traitor. Unfortunately, there was simply no other option.

That afternoon, Eddie picked me up from the tower and drove me to one of the hideouts that belonged to Cabre. He'd tied my hands together and blindfolded me, all for show of course, whilst Venom briefly connected with my body to induce a drowsy state of mind. I didn't actually mind to be drugged and was way more wary of the symbiote's effects on my body but the space pudding extended his tentacles so quickly, I barely had the time to even swear at them.

To my (and their) surprise, it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. In my hazy state, I briefly head Venom growl that I could be a decent short-term host if something would to happen with Eddie; I did not know how that information made me feel but did not disregard it completely. I was out of my depth on this one yet marched on towards the danger with grim determination.

"Here's the girl," Eddie's voice penetrated through the curtain of chemicals that Venom had dosed me with; I was tossed none too gently on what felt like a mattress, the landing haphazard but not painful. Venom must've dulled my pain receptors, too. "Where's our money?"

I was unceremoniously groped, my face examined by a man with ice-cold hands. Whatever he found, he deemed it satisfactory. "I'm impressed," He whistled. "We've been trying to get her for months. Care to share how you achieved this?" The strange man sounded suspicious.

"WE HAVE OUR OWN TRICKS," Venom's deep voice filled out the room like thick smoke and I just knew that the man who had been groping me was twitching in discomfort. "SO?"

"Alright, alright," The man mumbled, voice unsteady. My drowsiness slowly began to recede and I finally could focus my eyes somewhat; Eddie was partially obscured by the writhing, onyx mass of his symbiote and the man was dialing up the phone, speaking in a rapid-fire dialect I did not know. "Cabre will be here in an hour. Care for a beer?" Just like that, the man was obviously attempting to placate Eddie.

"HOT CHOCOLATE," Venom announced flatly and I had to struggle to hold back my laughter at the image of a seven feet tall tentacle monster sipping hot cocoa from a tiny porcelain cup. My nerves had me feeling ten types of way, as usual, and props to Ven making me unable to speak. I would have already killed myself by running my mouth ten times over.

The hour passed by with me floating in my mindsphere, Eddie loudly playing Candy Crush on his phone and Venom consuming ridiculous amounts of hot chocolate. It was absurd and the eerie calm was beginning to make me suspicious; I had expected... More. Threatening thugs with guns, experiments, blood tests and physical violence. Instead, the man who met with Eddie was sitting with a vacant, bored expression as he practiced card tricks in the corner furthest away from Venom.

Finally, a knock on the door forced all of us to pay attention to the newcomer. It was a tall, massively built man in his early forties. His face was covered in scars, narrow red lines that looked like small cuts; one of his eyes was completely black while the other was blue. He looked like the man at the coffee shop but at the same time, nothing like him at all.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," His voice was low and quiet. If not for the heavyweight weapon hanging over his shoulder, I would have considered him to be one of those men who only look threatening but actually are gentle giants. With steps too quiet for a man his size, he approached me, crouching down to look me in the face. "Hello, child. I've been looking for you for a long time. It's a shame we had to meet this way," He removed the strands of hair sticking to my face. For all purposes, his touch could have been considered fatherly. "Richard, bring the money." With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the man who was babysitting me and Eddie and he promptly disappeared behind the steel door.

"Hello," Eddie briefly shook his hands with Cabre after the merc left me alone. I noted Venom had disappeared into the reporter's body completely. "We are Venom," Eddie introduced himself (they introduced themselves?).

"Cabre," The Merc watched my honorary uncle with a sharp eye, taking note of Eddie's lack of weapons, his worn clothes and the shaggy hair, the bags under his eyes. "Tell me, Venom, what do you know of this child?"

"Not much," Eddie shrugged, convincingly. "Just that the Avengers picked her up for some reason and locked her up in Stark's tower. We're guessing she didn't like it much 'cuz she kept sneaking out and trying to shake off the tail. Had to go through quite a few SHIELD agents to get to her," Just like we agreed, Eddie spoke with slight disdain towards Tony and SHIELD, making sure to let Cabre believe he was on the mutants' side. "We just need the money, man. Not many people will hire us," To top it up, Eddie spread his arms, showing his skin ripple and move on it's own prominently under his ratty t-shirt. Atta boy!

Cabre appeared to have bought the lie, chuffing sympathetically, before pulling out a tablet and typing on it. "Well, not for long. My superiors have found an artifact that, if unlocked properly, will render most of the technology suppressing mutant powers useless. They won't be able to get rid of us that easily anymore."

Eddie nodded eagerly, for all purposes appearing to be ecstatic about the news. "Yeah, heard some rumors here and there. Well, you and your superiors know where to find me. I could always go with some extra cash," He scratched his head, carefully watching Cabre's fingers dance on the keyboard. "What's the kid got to do with it anyway? Seems like an ordinary spoiled brat to me," Eddie threw me a look, blinking twice. The fatigue and wariness, courtesy of Venom, had begun to recede quite some time ago; with Eddie's signal, I knew the shitshow was about to start very soon.

Eddie was smart, however, finding out the bits of information SHIELD hadn't bothered to disclose to me. The residue that the cursed box had left in me was removed, so I could not understand why SHIELD was still guarding me. There had to have been another reason, a reason that neither of us knew for sure.

Cabre paused his typing. "We've been watching her for years. She's a genius. We were hoping she could help us solve a few problems..." The merc paused to rub the bridge of his nose. "We tried to get her to come willingly but her parents forbade her from it. My superiors suggested to use the artifact but something malfunctioned." For all purposes, Cabre was looking apologetic. "I am not overly fond of kidnapping children but some things just need to be done." With that, the man turned around, landing his eyes on me. "Glad to see you're up and about." Something about his smile was unnatural, forced, malicious.

"Charmed to meet you," I sat up, dazed and confused about the turn of events. The things he was saying, they didn't add up. I hadn't received any requests for my participation in ANY kind of project, illlegal or not. No scholarships, no internship offers. Something was very, very wrong.

As soon as Cabre's back was turned, Venom enveloped Eddie, turning themselves into the seven feet tall outer space monstrosity I had seen on the first day. Their combined form was terrifying - but Cabre's fingers merely twitched at the rapid change of the situation as he took slow steps towards me. "Hmm," His voice still quiet, he once again crouched in front of me. "You fought us off once but we are many. There is nowhere to run, child," Cabre's eyes began to darken, his speech turning flat.

I recognized the speech pattern, recalled the expressionless, vacant face that stared at me. Cabre was infected with the Legion from the cursed box; I hadn't prepared for that, hadn't even regarded that, thinking the little epic speech the demon had given me was a mere intimidation tactic. Fear bloomed within me, opening it's jaws like a hungry Venus flytrap but I refused to succumb to it, clenching my fists against the waves of paralyzing terror.

Venom made a confused growling noise behind me, extending a tentacle to push Cabre away; with a sickeningly wet splat, their whole form collided with the opposite wall, sliding down it like a puddle of misshapen goop. "MORSEL, GET OUT." The symbiote growled, reforming itself back.

"Silence, beast!" Cabre shrieked, unstrapping his weapon and aiming it at Venom. No bullets came out as he pressed the trigger but my ear started ringing, eyes watering as the whole form of the symbiote began to morph and ripple. Pained groans and whines came from them. A sonic gun?

"Screw you, man," I attempted to draw Cabre's attention to myself by kicking out a leg towards the gun, disrupting his arm briefly. Things were going to shit faster than a party full of teenagers and alcohol. "Fuck you, listen, FUCK YOU!" I knew antagonizing people was my best skill and that's what I did, figuring the time needed for Venom to reassemble themself could be acquired if Cabre was pissed off enough at me.

The backhand hurt, not going to lie. I saw stars from that one sloppy hit the possessed merc delivered to my face. The adrenaline rush allowed me to stay somewhat coherent and just like that time when I was trapped in my nightmares, I dove for Cabre, winding myself around him as both of us landed on the floor in a heap of limbs.

Despite my best hopes, Venom remained a puddle of black on the floor. I saw something shiny attach itself to Eddie's chest; apparently that something prevented them from combining into one again. My smaller size proved to be a great advantage; I remembered Venom's words about being a suitable short-term host and with a shriek, I placed my palm into the nearest piece of symbiote I could reach, my vision being obscured by blackness a second later.

THE TAG LIST IS NOW OPEN! @another-stark-sub ​ @mostly-marvel-musings  @vozit ​ @littlegasps @pilloclock ​ @shereadsinquiet @downeyreads ​ @hermione-grangers-wife ​ @individualistfem ​ @sleep-i-ness @capbrie @lillsxd @agustdowney @dee-vn @justanotherblonde23 @fanngirl19 @persephonehemingway @softie-socks @schemefrenzy @letsby @romeo-the-cactus @jelly-fishy-babie @mikariell95 @gladiosamicitias @warrior1-19 @toomanyrobins @i-cant-hangout-im-drumming

[zee-writes-and-draws]

NaiLiu HCs bc I continue to be on my bullshit

- it takes forever and a day for them to get together officially because they both don't want to make it awkward.

- 'I brought you a snake' 'Why?' 'It reminded me of you'

- Naidan's giving love language is acts of service. Liu's is physical and verbal affection. It works well because Naidan loves hearing Liu's voice and Liu doesn't mind being spoiled now and then.

- Naidan sometimes help Liu with his hair. (A/n: this is actually canon, my fucking god)

- Liu is a pretty good cook, nothing particularly special or outstanding, but even new recipes turn out pretty well for him. Naidan is 50-50 it's either the best food in existence or somehow the kitchen is set on fire while making a salad.

- Liu is the one who will casually say some version of 'love you', kiss Naidan on the cheek/lips in public, use 'boyfriend' without panic, etc.

- The couple that spars together stays together.

- No trading clothes. Their sizes are too far apart and they both forget to trade back stuff.

- Naidan is the one who falls asleep on long subway rides. Liu is the one who falls asleep during movie night.

- Custom-size bathroom so they can both fit in the bath and more importantly, so Naidan can actually take a shower without having to crouch.

- Both of them have very few tangible fears. The intangible ones are much more pervasive in their day-to-day lives unfortunately.

- Liu is terrified that he'll wake up with amnesia one day and forget Naidan and Naidan won't say anything because he'd think it's pressuring and weird. Naidan's biggest fear is that there's gonna be a day where he might have to die for the Worm or, worse, kill people in Purgatory and Liu's name will be on that list.

- They haven't told each other about those fears. It seems like a cruel thing to do.

- Naidan almost never says serious declarations of affection, and has only said it without lots of planning once. Liu freezes up each time it gets said because he knows how much Naidan has a hard time verbalizing those things.

- Pet names in native languages. 'Asshole', 'jerk', 'inconsiderate snack hog' in Japanese.

- Among the nicknames are affectionate versions of 'snake' and 'hawk'.

- Liu mostly refers to Naidan in Chinese as 心肝 (meaning 'heart and liver') or 大郎 (literally meaning 'big guy') or will translate Naidan's surname and call him by the literal words in Chinese (Breakdown: Mönkh - 'Eternal' Bat - 'Strong'). He also switches to saying ' I love you' in Chinese in serious situations, and in day-to-day it's in Japanese. To him it feels much more serious in his first language and he doesn't want to diminish that significance.

- Naidan mostly just sticks with 'snake' (affectionate) or very old-fashioned terms. He also uses 'beloved' in affectionate moods, 'my eternal rival' for deadpan or to make him laugh, and 'My Liu' in Japanese when he's feeling jealous or possessive.

- They both have some really strong superstitions and they both stick to them. Liu mostly has to plan for worst case scenarios alone because Naidan vehemently believes that talking about it is just inviting it to happen.

- Liu has a small circle of friends from outside Purgatory, all of whom give terrible advice. Queue the 'my bf is too tall what should I do' meme.

- A compromise is reached: Liu is allowed to (at home and provided Naidan isn't holding anything) to jump at Naidan either pull himself up via core strength or let Naidan catch him and then kiss him. In exchange, Naidan is allowed to pick Liu up whenever he feels like in (same conditions) and kiss him.

- When they're in a long argument, they refuse to talk and fight petty wars instead. Liu will intentionally move some stuff around by about two inches because Naidan is a very habitual person and thus ends up walking into furniture for weeks without knowing how to move it exactly back. Naidan aggressively puts things just one shelf higher so Liu either has to jump and risk being seen, or ask Naidan for help, thus breaking the silence first.

- Short-term arguments are followed either by Naidan aggressively Mongolian throat-singing everything he can, or by Liu playing a remarkably passive-aggressive playlist on Chinese violin.

- Cuddling face to face, but sleeping little spoon and big spoon (switching who's holding onto who depending on what they both need rn). Will also just sometimes collapse on each other because they're tired.

[moved-attre]

info dump for my v! was gonna make this into a whole tag meme but the prompts aren’t very original. oops.

THE BASICS:

FULL NAME: Valerie King.

ALIAS: V / Veronica Li.

DATE OF BIRTH: August 27th, 2049.

AGE (AS OF 2077): 28.

PLACE OF BIRTH: Heywood, Night City.

RACE/CULTURE: Chinese American.

RELIGION: It’s complicated. (Raised Catholic... Now unsure.)

SEXUALITY: Bi

GENDER / PRONOUNS: Cis female, she/her.

SPOKEN LANGUAGES: English and Spanish.

RIGHT OR LEFT HANDED: Right handed.

EDUCATION: College drop-out.

OCCUPATION: Agent at the counterintelligence division of Arasaka, second to Assistant Director Jenkins. Later, mercenary. 

APPEARANCE: 

HAIR: Black. Mid length. Straight. Loose. Briefly changes to neon green, bob cut. Then, back again.

EYES: Dark brown. 

NOTEABLE FEATURES: Freckles on face and body. 

TATTOOS: Snake wrapped around left wrist / Dragon wrapped around left shoulder / Lovers tarot card on left inner forearm / ‘LUCKY YOU’ on left hip joint just above crotch. Angel wings & halo with ‘JACKIE’ on right inner wrist / Collection of roses on right hip and upper thigh / ‘DEATH CAN WAIT’ on bottom of right ribcage. “Johnny + V” in a heart on right inner forearm. 

PIERCINGS: Right and left lobe, double piercing. Philtrum piercing. Navel piercing.

CYBERNETICS/PROSTHETICS: Visible golden cybernetic... plate? on her neck. It can have a skin-like texture covering but it’s sorta transparent. Replaced right hand, and again: has a skin-like texture finish but slightly transparent so the gold chrome is visible. Kiroshi eyes (natural color). Enhanced knee caps/ankles for long distanced jumping. Mantis blades. Cardiovascular and Respiratory system is almost all tech, as is much of her nervous system etc. 

SCARS: None from combat. She has stretch marks on her butt, boobs and tummy.

BODY SHAPE: Curvy / plus size. Not skinny or muscled. Soft.

HEIGHT: 5′3. 

FASHION SENSE: Neon, metallic, holographic. Short skirts, crop tops and big coats / jackets. Wedged sneakers or heeled boots. (Johnny says her style is “hooker”, but what the fuck does Johnny know. He’s worn the same outfit for like 70+ years. Get with the times, grandpa.)

MAKE UP: Neon. Loves yellow or green eyeshadow / eyeliner and shiny colored lip gloss.

NAILS: Long and pointed, like triangle shaped. Always with a metallic finish, colored either: Red, blue or silver.

PERSONALITY: 

ZODIAC: Virgo sun, Aries moon.

MBTI: INTP.

5 FLAWS: Anxious, high maintenance, clingy, emotionally unavailable, jealous.

5 STRENGTHS: Patient, detail-oriented, ambitious, witty, passionate.

SECRET TALENT(S): Can sing.

LIKES: Crappy daytime soap operas, artificial strawberry flavored foods and skin care, MONEY!! and NC in the rain at night.

DISLIKES: Healthy food (She has never touched a vegetable... She’s pretty gross.), other people’s mess, anything with a matte texture and rock music (Sorry to Johnny. But she’s never heard a Samurai song and never will.)

HOBBIES: Boxing. (Not that she ever actually goes more than once a month... She’s got 50+ missed calls from Coach Fred.)

FEARS: Loneliness / being left behind. Being replaced. FOMO.

DREAMS: Stability. A family, whether that’s with a romantic partner or friends. Just someone who’ll stick around.

MUSIC TASTE: Pop, dance, rap. The majority of her library is filled with “girl power” tracks about making money, beating people up and being sexy. 😙

DRINK AND DRUGS: Weed. Likes beer. Smokes cigarettes, thanks to Johnny. Tried various other, harder drugs as a teen but outgrew it.

BAD HABITS: Chews her bottom lip / plays with jewellery when nervous. Tends to bottle up her emotions until she explodes. Has a perpetually messy apartment and will not tidy up.

REASON FOR WANTING TO MAKE IT BIG IN NC: To prove a point. She’s not quite sure who to, sometimes it’s her mom... Other times it’s herself... (She puts a lot of importance on being “self-made”.) For a while, she wanted to succeed for Jackie. Until it got him killed. Now she just wants to survive.

CHILDHOOD HERO: Morgan Blackhand. Corpo-backed mercenary who took on Adam Smasher and may or may not be alive yet? He was like a comic book character to baby V. 

COMBAT/VEHICLES: 

COMBAT STYLE: Netrunner. (Stealth.)

PREFERRED WEAPONS: Her hands. Hacking. A pistol with a silencer. Mantis blades, in an emergency. 

WEAKNESSES: Open combat. She can be slow to react, as she’s overthinking everything. This isn’t the Matrix, unfortunately. 😔

SIGNATURE VEHICLE: Type-66 Avenger, or Jackie’s ARCH.

FAMILY/OTHER RELATIONSHIPS:

FATHER: Everett King, deceased. Low level office worker for Militech.

RELATIONSHIP WITH FATHER: Generally positive. He was her only family for a long time, so V grew very attached. When he passed, she was very angry.

MOTHER: Chloë Li, unknown. Housewife.

RELATIONSHIP WITH MOTHER: Non-existent. Her mom left the family years ago when V was a young child, so her memories of her are vague at best - and clouded by V’s feelings of abandonment.

SIBLING(S): Jordan King (younger brother), deceased.

RELATIONSHIP WITH SIBLING(S): She loved her little brother lots, for the very short time she knew him.

PETS: Nibbles the (creepy) cat.

SIGNIFICANT OTHER: N/A. Briefly, River Ward. (Johnny... but it’s complicated. 😢)

CHILDREN: N/A. She doesn’t want children, ever.

OTHER MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS: Jackie, Mama Welles, T-Bug, Misty, Vik, Judy, Panam, River, Kerry, Padre. Jenkins, in a mentor role.

META: 

LIFE PATH: Corpo. 

CHOSEN ENDING: Worst ending. V [redacted] and dies with Johnny by her side. She doesn’t see the point in struggling on and letting other people die for her, nor does she want to run away. She’s bound to Night City, for better or for worse, and she’d rather go out on her own terms with the most important person in the world to her by her side.

ACTUAL ENDING: V explores the Old City ruins, finds Arasaka’s top secret cryogenics facility. Johnny’s body is recovered, his engram restored and they live happily ever after in Night City. Tah dah! The end!

PRIMARY SKILLS: Intelligence and Cool.

SECONDARY SKILLS: Body and Technical ability.

[disneytva]

Matt Olsen Uploads The Douglas Furs Series Bible Of The Rejected Disney XD Series From 2015 All Art Belongs To Jesse Ledoux

Matt Olsen from Sly Cooper fame & co-creator of Douglas Furs uploaded in his website the series bible of the Douglas Furs a rejected Disney show for Disney XD who sadly was rejected.

The Douglas Furs is an original cartoon series about a community of animals living together in Douglas, an otherwise unpopulated corner of the deep forest Pacific NW. Though they hold down jobs, use complex machinery, and return their library books late, they still remain animals. It’s like William Shakespeare said, “A bear will always be a bear, even if he’s wearing overalls.”

Characters Names

Barry The Bear: Optimistic Bear with a big heart and that fixes all the problems,supports Douglas to the absolute max, innocence and naivete are components of Barry’s character, he’s no wide-eyed child, speechless and dreamy in the presence of wonder. Quite the contrary! Barry is a loud, active celebrator of every new experience. He loves life! Even the most normal, everyday things can get Barry excited and revved up to a surprising extreme. Though it’s also true that his rabid interest may change in an instant with the discovery of some new stimuli

Mary Margaret: Mary-Margaret attends Rutherberry Elementary, She is the Bullhorn’s star investigative journalist, a role which she takes very, very seriously. The position feeds her all-consuming curiosity, or as her peers simply call it, “being a nosy-pants”. Her efforts have single-handedly made the Bullhorn the most-read paper in Douglas, all but putting the “professional” paper, the Douglas Herald-Gazeteer, out of business. Mary-Margaret is the elementary-school age daughter of Douglas’ leading intellectuals. Her father, Myron, is a critical studies professor at the local university, while her mother, Dagmar, is Douglas’ most esteemed (and only) deep-Jungian psychiatrist.

Beverly:  Beverly is the single force that keeps Douglas functioning as a city. As Deputy Lieutenant Mayor, she performs all the responsibilities of not only her own position, but also the Mayor’s and several other government officials. She’s vastly overworked but somehow manages to hold it together, fulfill all her duties and put out the fires. Sometimes, literally. (She’s also a volunteer firefighter.)

Her hectic home life does not provide much of a relief from her career. She’s happily married to Garland, who in addition to being father and primary care-giver to their children, is a semitalented landscape painter. Her six kids, three sets of twins, are all very energetic and clamor for her attention.

Viktor:  Viktor was a celebrated Cosmonaut of what we would call vaguely Eastern European descent. On his final lift-off – a mission that would have sent him hurtling past Mars and Jupiter to be locked in orbit around Saturn – the rocket he was piloting failed, veered way off course and crash-landed in Douglas. (He suspects the rocket was tampered with by a jealous rival.).  Since that time, his main pursuit has been to repair the rocket and resume his mission. However, due to Douglas’s non-advanced state of technological development that goal remains far outside his reach. So, he remains an unwilling resident, but he’s gradually warming up to living in the township. Maybe.

Viktor is skeptical and even paranoid of almost anything outside his world. As such, he rarely leaves his home for fear of saboteurs. He’s not against helping others, but he wants all the information first and would really prefer it if there was something in it for him, too. This is probably a holdover from his Cold War-esque training.

Rainier Somersett-Psymthe:   Rainier is not only the wealthiest citizen of Douglas, he is also the town’s single-largest employer. He is the current scion of the storied Somersett-Psymthe lineage and, through no effort of his own, inherited the family business: the Silky Beast line of personal shampoos for Him and Her. Due to the hirsute nature of the population of Douglas and surrounding woodland areas, Silky Beast is in extremely high demand. Since the day-to-day running of the plant is handled by underlings, Rainier lives immune from responsibility and has plenty of free time on his hands. The main focus of Rainier’s efforts is feeding his fame. He has a continual hunger for attention and thrills to read his own exploits chronicled and discussed in the local paper. He is a strict adherent to the no such thing as bad press ideal and will perform any manner of ridiculous acts solely to guarantee his presence on the front page. 

 Barry and Rainier are roughly the same age and share many of the same memories of growing up in Douglas, albeit from completely different perspectives. Where Rainier lives in a gilded mansion built by his great-grandfather and passed down from Somersett-Psmythe to Somersett-Psmythe, Barry lives in a one-room yurt that he constructed himself. There’s still a bit of work to be done around the back. No one would ever consider them rivals. No one except Rainier, that is, who considers everyone his rival. It’s possible that Rainier could be envious of the simplicity of Barry’s existence and attempt to out-simplify him, but that hasn’t happened... yet.

Carl:  Carl is Mary-Margaret’s classmate at Rutherberry Elementary and the staff photographer for the school’s newspaper, The Rutherberry Bullhorn. His ability to fly means that he excels at aerial photography and can get shots from many different angles. Carl is drastically near-sighted and requires a large pair of corrective lenses to approach “eagle-eyed”. With the glasses on, he can see slightly better than most of the other animals in Douglas, but without them the world is a predominately blue and green blur. In a lot of ways, Carl fits squarely into the classic “nerd” stereotype, e.g., he’s quiet, bookish, shy, a little physically awkward, etc., but he has other qualities which don’t fall so easily under that sad rubric. His parents have imbued him with a strict sense of personal responsibility, justice and honor. It’s a code of ethics that has been handed down his proud family line for ages upon ages.  What Carl doesn’t realize is that he is also the subject of interest by many of the other girls at Rutherberry. Unfortunately he is too singleminded to notice their adoration, even when it is at its most blatant. He lives every single day on the verge of either making his feelings known to Mary-Margaret or giving up on her entirely

Mayor Trewfuss:  Quincy Trewfuss is the oldest citizen of Douglas and has served as the town’s extremely popular mayor for an astonishing forty-two terms. With one brief exception at the beginning of his career, each of those forty-two terms have been consecutive. At the close of his first two-year term, he declined to run for re-election and happily handed the mayoralty off to someone else.  Trewfuss is entirely unsuited for a life in politics. He is skittish, fearful, apprehensive, easily bewildered and opposed to any and all conflict. He lives in an eternal state of being overwhelmed. His frequent response to any crisis is to follow his natural tendencies and play possum. He literally pretends to be dead. It may have stopped fooling most folks a very long time ago but they understand that whatever calamity has come up has pushed him to the edge. So, in response, he is given time alone to regather his senses. As it turns out, it’s become a very effective tool for him. Those on the inside know that he is only a figurehead at this point. His deputy lieutenant mayor, Beverly, actually handles all the significant mayoral duties. Trewfuss reluctantly appears at ribbon cutting ceremonies, poses for photographs with civic leaders, sleeps his way through city council meetings and that’s about it. Still, he remains perpetually on the verge of a total nervous breakdown.

Link And Louie:  These two live in a homemade tin roof shanty just outside Douglas, beyond the treeline. Though they attempt intimidation, the town generally regards them as more of a nuisance than a threat. Link and Louie, of course, are oblivious to this and sincerely believe they are genuinely terrifying to the regular squares. Though they’ve never revealed how they ended up around Douglas, popular opinion holds that the last town they harassed, finally had enough and chased them out in a most embarrassing fashion. This accounts for the chips on their shoulders and their “somethin’ to prove” attitudes. Link is the instigator, with Louie always willing to go along blindly with any of Link’s plans. Though he’s never been tested, it’s a safe bet that Louie is not very smart. He lets himself be talked into a lot of Link’s fairly stupid ideas, most of which involve putting himself in danger of imprisonment or bodily harm, while Link remains safely at a distance. Link consoles Louie by claiming this as an occupational hazard, their biggest fear is Gordon The Sasquatch.

Gordon:  Gordon is supremely boring. His company invariably brings a slight level of discomfort to everyone he encounters. His stories are long-winded, circuitous and off-topic. He speaks in an exhausted, physically draining monotone. Still, it’s hard to say a bad word against him since he’s never done any harm to anyone. So, those he encounters will often endure the conversation out of kindness and for fear of hurting his feelings. He’s staggeringly sensitive. Now, this is not to say that he’s not without value. Gordon possesses great strength and is very tall. So tall, in fact, that his head is always out of frame or behind a tree branch or perhaps hidden by a low-hanging cloud. (The home viewer will never see his face.) Just on physical presence alone, he’s an intimidating force and may be called upon to act as anything from security to heavy lifting. In those situations, his size and strength becomes a large enough asset to overcome his crippling dullness. Even though he’s not a “true” citizen of Douglas – he camps nomadically in the woods outside town – he’s generally happy to be of service and always enjoys being around others. Gordon is also a budding folksinger and can often be found with an oversize acoustic guitar, singing his terrible songs to the ears of nature, since no one else – given fair warning – is likely to listen. Overall, he’d really like to meet some other sasquatches

Douglas is a township surrounded on all sides by dense Evergreen forest. Within this clearing is a fully-functioning community of various animals indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. The town is constructed of available materials with homes and buildings suited to each animal’s own preferences. For example, as a beaver, Beverly lives in a log cabin-esque dam on the river. Wood and stone dominate the local architecture, while brightly colored mosses, ferns, wildflowers and lichen provide the embellishments. Greens, browns, grays and blues dazzled up by pinks, yellows, oranges and purples provide the palette. Technology exists only to the level it is needed. 

Since the town itself is rather small, cars were never necessary and therefore, not invented. A refrigerator, on the other hand, is an absolute necessity. I mean, how else is one expected to keep one’s salmon puffs fresh? No specific number has ever been ascribed to the population of this small town – they’re not sticklers for data gathering – but as a sort of reference to its size, here’s some semi-useful factoids: 

• 1 TV channel. All of the programming is made in Douglas by Douglas for Douglas. Not surprisingly, a majority of the shows take place in Douglas. “Hot Douglas Nights” is appointment television.

 • 1 fire department and 1 hospital. Accidents do happen. Of course, when they happen to cartoon characters they’re hilarious.

 • 2 school districts, each with its own elementary, middle and high school. This is really only done so that the grammar teams have someone to compete with... er, I mean, with whom to compete. 

• 36 square miles in area. That’s the legal US definition of a Survey Township and, by pure coincidence, a remarkably close measurement of our own township. Go figure

 • 200 years old. Douglas was founded in the year 1812*. Of course, that’s by our calendar. Here, they use a completely different system to measure time. It’s like dog years, but then you have to modulate the formula for each species. It’s very complex. 

[dol--blathanna]

I don't know if you'll even answer this because of spoilers, but mixtape and wild card for Tye? Haha, if not, wild card for Gwenllian and Ameer

Thank you so much for the ask!!! These are always so exciting to receive!!! :D

Oooooh I wasn’t expecting anyone to ask about Tye!! I’m impressed haha!! Of course it’s going to be very difficult to answer this question as many facts about him are Classified™, but I like the challenge!!

So for mixtape: Obviously I can’t give some of the very specific tracks that I’ve listened to when thinking or writing about him (because BIG spoilers), so I’ve selected a couple of tracks that don’t have much lyrical significance or anything, and that I just like because I think the ~vibes~ are cool and match his character, or scenarios with his character (both in posted chapters and unposted chapters!)

Shadow from Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Battle March from Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Norupo by Heilung

The Angry River by The Hat (ft. Father John Misty)

The first two I chose because of vibes, I can’t explain further sorry! The last two I picked less because of how they related to Tye necessarily, but because I thought they had very spooky Velen vibes and after all Tye has been on a mission for unknown reasons to find the Crone!

As for the wild card, I decided that I’d try and do the microscope prompt, simply because I think it’s the only possible one to do without spoiling anything hahaha! So here are some random, insignificant details about Tye.

He has a fringe (or bangs I think Americans call them?) and his hair is a bit longer than his jawline, but he hasn’t been taking good care of it. The back of his hair is quite tangled.

The red strip he wears around his forehead is somewhat dirty and tattered, and it smells of sweat. It doesn’t appear to be made of any fine material – it looks poor in quality.

Although he is a very nervous individual, he has steady hands – he was able to heal a bite wound one handed, as seen in Part 2 Chapter 2, and had the witcher Oskar not been attacked by a leshen, he would have noticed that the wound from Tye’s severed ear was an extremely clean cut. If one were to ever study his handwriting, you’d also notice it’s very neat.

He’s ambidextrous (he was left handed first)

Aside from the scar on his forehead (the size and origin of which is unknown) he has a small scar on his hand from where Ameer bit him.

I also wanna do the wild cards for Gwenllian and Ameer hehehe hope that’s ok! For them both I decided I just wanted to do little fun facts about them!

Ameer:

Ameer loves learning languages, and can speak several: Ofieri, Elder speech, the language of Fox Mothers, Common and Nilfgaardian. Nilfgaardian was very easy for him to learn (as it’s very similar to Elder Speech), whereas Common was the most difficult language to learn, and is overall his weakest language.

Although Ameer loves to sing, he does not play any musical instruments. Various humans across Ofier have tried to teach him how to play various different instruments as he travelled, but he never got the knack of it. He was always very jealous of those who could and had great admiration for musicians. He also cannot read music, though simply because he never bothered to learn how.

Ameer is a tall individual, as most elves are. As a fox, however, he’s actually quite small. Fennec foxes are the smallest species of fox, but even compared to his older sisters and mother, Ameer is significantly smaller than them in his fox form, which was a source of teasing for him.

Since Ameer is not a true Fox Mother, he possesses the ability to use magic. This was something his mother was very concerned about – she had no idea how to manage his burgeoning abilities or teach him to control them. One day, while exploring the mountains, Ameer came across an elderly man who was travelling. The man was a sage of sorts, who often came into the mountain for meditation, herbal gathering, and studying the magic sources in the area. He ended up spotting Ameer and they formed a friendship of sorts. The man believed that Ameer was some sort of fey so knew not to harm him or take him away from the mountains. His mother initially disapproved of Ameer talking to the man, until she realised the old man possessed magical abilities like Ameer. She allowed Ameer to learn magic from him, and he was able to control his abilities a lot better after that. The old man was the first ever human Ameer spoke to.

Gwenllian:

Gwenllian loves poetry and literature. She’s something of an expert when it comes to Nilfgaardian prose and verse. In her old home in Nilfgaard, she had a collection of books from over the decades – she found it very interesting to compare the works between generations (not just in terms of style, but also how literature became far less outspoken or critical of the empire and ruling family in recent years, as those who did often wound up dead). Unfortunately when the other vampires cast her out of Nilfgaard, she had no choice but to leave most of these behind, although she managed to save a few and bring them with her to the North.

When Gwenllian fled Nilfgaard and was hiding in the Northern kingdoms, she was heavily injured and had huge cravings for blood. Raw and bloody meat would help satiate these cravings a little, but she was so weak she struggled to hunt any animals. Instead, she would forage for various medicinal herbs and sell them for money, which she used to buy meat for herself (then would hide and eat it raw). While selling herbs, she would try not to speak out loud and communicated through writing and gestures instead – revealing herself as Nilfgaardian to either side was dangerous, and her accent always gave her away.

Like Regis, Gwenllian can talk to ravens. Upon moving to Novigrad, she created a network of ravens to act as spies throughout the city – at this point, she was still extremely paranoid of other vampires finding her and killing her, and wanted to be informed of any vampires or other sketchy figures entering the city. When she explained her situation to the ravens she befriended, they didn’t care about her dark past – ravens like vampires, but don’t care much for their social hierarchies or rules. Gwenllian was nice to them, so that was good enough for them! She was always grateful for that. The three ravens who would often perch on top of her roof were nicknamed Rosemary, Camelia, and Marigold.

Gwenllian is a very good cook. When she was still struggling with blood cravings, and when she finally reached Novigrad, she tried her best to create big, heaty meals with plenty of flavours and seasoning to try and whet her appetite. As a result, she got quite good at cooking, and even after she no longer experienced blood cravings, she still enjoyed cooking and eating the meals she concocted. Aside from the fact she doesn’t particularly like Northern cuisine, the Nilfgaardian-style recipes remind her of home and help her with homesickness.    

Thank you for sending in the ask!! Just what I needed to cheer myself up while I’m doing this damn essay ahaha!

[essence-ofme]

Struggle of a Shopaholic

Over the past year, I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that I am a shopaholic. In other words, I’m kind of really materialistic, obsessed with clothes and other items I feel I need for whatever reason, but especially clothes. Blame my Auntie Karen. She was once a personal shopper for a very wealthy couple back in her day; she was notorious for finding the best deals and bargains— would send my mom to school in designer brands from Gucci to Givenchy. Coming up myself, I would spend hours at the thrift store with her and my granny, sifting through clothes. My Auntie Karen would also give me hand-me-downs— bags filled with clothes she’d never worn or were too small to fit (her and I were roughly the same size, with me filling out a bit more in certain places). Watching her as a kid and even ‘till this day, I marvel at the way she dresses, clad in outfits you can tell that she puts a great deal of consideration in, even when she’s not particularly going anywhere. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember as well, carefully planning out my attire almost every day, taking pride in my sense of fashion and combination of clothing choices, probably a bit more so than the average Joe. But what can I say? That’s just the way I was raised, what I was taught, what I’ve seen. So yeah, blame her.

OK, she’s not really to blame, although I definitely think she’s a significant part of the reason. A while ago, my mom even slightly (not so slightly) mocked me for my excessive spending on clothes while we were in the midst of discussion about possibly getting a car for me in the future.

“You stay spending your money on clothes you don’t need,” she scolded. “If you had stacked your unemployment, you coulda been had a car. But you felt the need to buy shoes in every color for some reason.”

I had chuckled at this. OK, fair point. But hey, I’m not exaggerating when I say my shoe collection had been looking very shabby, minimal. I had to get more, especially in a variety of colors to match my outfits! Duh.

“Hey, blame Auntie Karen for my obsession with clothes,” I joked, to which my mom shook her head. But then, a bit more seriously, I added, “Just kidding. I don’t know. You’re right. It’s definitely a problem.”

“It’s a sickness,” my mom had declared brazenly. “If I were you, I would think deeply about why— are you trying to get attention, are you filling some type of void?”

It was kind of funny because deep down I had known the reasons myself for quite a long time already. But to hear her question it so bluntly like that had really made me start to think about some of the underlying issues I really did have, but were trying to pretend as though they were no big deal. Was I trying to get attention? I mean the wording of that made it sound so desperate and pathetic, but I did often intend to get noticed a little bit more from people based on the clothes I specifically chose to wear. With my wardrobe came a certain confidence, a new me coming to life every day and making myself known. Even on days when I dressed more casually. And I was definitely filling a void, I mean, who isn’t? Shopping and the feeling of buying new clothes and things, but once again, especially clothes, just makes me feel better when, unfortunately, most times I’m used to feeling shitty and insecure. Everything about it is fun for me, from looking around and discovering clothes to imagining where I’d wear them, there is even great excitement once I get home and begin to put all of my things away.

I know I said blame my Auntie Karen, and I was partly joking, but let me just say that the fact that I work in a retail store does not help at all. In fact, I think it’s only made my shopaholic tendencies even worse. Ironically enough, my Auntie Karen was the one who actually pointed out the T.J. MAXX job opening to me, and well, she is the reason I have this job ‘till this day. Thank you, Auntie Karen. But seriously, what is the lady trying to make of me? A clothes-obsessed, materialistic bitch who unnecessarily wastes all of her money? All I do is shop on the clock, wander around the shopping floor looking at things to possibly buy. But OK, I’m deflecting. Once again, it really isn’t her fault. But she is a major influence.

Sometimes I even find myself embarrassed by how much I shop, believing that it’s something others notice as well. Usually I’ll pile items on the counter about a good two or three times per week, and every time someone rings me up, I can’t help but wonder if they and other surrounding coworkers at the registers are wondering why I buy so many things from there. I mean, it’s not like I’m the only one who does, but still. Knowing what I now know about myself, I feel slightly self-conscious about my excessive shopping habit.

All I know is that something’s gotta give. I can’t keep spending money on clothes I don’t need. (OK, well actually I don’t think I can just quit cold-turkey. I think it would be better to modify my shopping, going back to my old ways and buying a bunch of clothes at thrift stores instead, so that way I get more for less.) Maybe one day, hopefully, I’ll realize that I don’t need clothes and other items to complete me. But for now… I mean, why not shop?

[oxtoxtoxto]

Kara Danvers: Ornithologist

Ao3 Mirror

(tags): Supercorp, Ornithology, Fluff, One-Shot

It all started about a year after she had landed on earth.

By that time, Kara had, at least in her own opinion, grown moderately used to the effects of a yellow sun. People, social norms, fitting in—those would take more time to come to her, to chip away at what humanity saw as being socially stilted, but had been in her memories just how people acted. Still, she’d figured out the whole strength thing, had stopped randomly floating at inopportune times, was steadily working her way through weekly nightmares, and she felt, for the first time since she’d watched Krypton blast apart into chunks behind her, like she was making progress, that she had finally found some sort of equilibrium.

Which, of course, meant that the world had to drop something else into her lap.

Now, let it be said, Kara knew that wild animals were not, in fact, harmless, even despite her immense durability. They might not be able to harm her, but the chaos they could cause - and more to the point, the damage they could cause to other people - was significant. She knew that, okay? She’d had it drilled into her head repeatedly by Eliza and Alex - who she was finally getting along with after all this time - and, just. She wasn’t careless.

The duck was an accident.

She’d been out on one of her nature walks at the time, the handful of hours she graced herself with whenever the world got too... restrictive. Memories of the pod still weighed on her head like a leaded blanket and every once and a while even the house felt a little too enclosed. She’d spend her time tracing the trails walked by others, glancing up at the sky, wearing whatever she wanted, moving at her own pace, to her own whims.

There was a body of water somewhere between a pond and a lake further into the woods surrounding her home. It wasn’t quite big enough to call a lake, nor was it small and shallow enough to justify calling a pond. It was just barely deep enough that the average-sized adult - using Eliza as a reference point, anyway - would have trouble keeping their head above water at the deepest, and it stretched out across the uneven forest floor for some distance, tucked away into the side of a few rolling hills.

It was a favourite of hers, mostly because it was a hotspot for birds. She hadn’t expected to find any when she’d arrived, admittedly, it was winter and most of the birds had fled further south outside of the ones who stayed year-round. The occasional chickadee, a handful of crows—not exactly social demographics, for sure, but it hadn’t stopped her from watching and enjoying the sight of fluffy, black-feathered birds hop and gutturally scream at one another over a discarded tin can.

Except, what she found wasn’t crows or wintering birds or even the random occurrence of other wildlife, like squirrels.

She found a duck. A duck not twenty paces from the body of water, one wing bent at an unspeakable angle, letting out little noises of pain. It kept trying to waddle its way towards the body of water, but would falter, one of its flippers always giving out on it. It’d likely hit something mid-flight, she even could recognize some damage to a nearby tree, where pine needles had been stripped away from something hitting it hard, and the ground nearest to the tree was scuffed, thrown up around the edges, frostbitten lichen scraped away due to an impact.

For a moment, she couldn’t help but just kinda... watch it. There was no real justification for it then, to let something suffer and attempt to meander its way over to the body of water, to stand there, stock-still and unsure, as something else tried to overcome its pain. Do nothing to help it.

Then, she took a step forward.

The duck’s head snapped around to her, a croaky warning quack bubbling in the back of its beak, edged by more pain. Its feathers fluffed, its body tightened, it looked all the world both terrified and intensely hostile. It did not want her there, it did not want her help, if anything it actively could not imagine taking it.

So what compelled her to take another step, and then another, ignoring the increasingly intense noises of warning from the waterfowl, was frankly completely and utterly beyond her.

Before she really knew what she was doing, Kara had closed the distance between herself and the duck and had crouched down, despite all warnings, despite not knowing how to actually tend to a duck. Even though it was wild, even though it clearly really hated her and despite every last warning Eliza had made her repeat like a mantra, she couldn’t help herself.

The duck was wounded. That, simply, would not do.

    “Kara,” Eliza said the word with unhidden exhaustion.

Jeremiah, hand pressed over his mouth and shoulders shuddering with restrained mirth, stood beside her.

Alex was, of course, up in her room, completely unaware.

“She’s hurt,” Kara explained, the duck tucked against her mud-soaked shirt. She’d figured out that the duck had been a girl sometime during the period where it had repeatedly tried to maul her, to little effect. It had taken two hours of persistent cajoling, but at this point the duck was mostly sedate.

That or resigned, she couldn’t really tell.

“Yes, honey,” Eliza tried again, this time her voice going for soothing. “But sometimes animals get hurt, you can’t just take every hurt animal in.”

Kara stared blankly ahead. “Of course I can’t.” That was obvious, thank-you-very-much. She knew she couldn’t house every last animal, okay? “But this one?”

“It does seem pretty docile,” Jeremiah said, considering.

Eliza snapped her head around to him, a look of betrayal on her features. “It’s wild, Jer!” She hissed right back, as though Kara wasn’t here and didn’t have enhanced hearing abilities and could literally hear what they were saying.

“We tamed wild wolves,” Jeremiah tried, again.

Eliza threw her arms up. “As newborns! That’s a fully grown duck!”

The duck in question, name still to be decided, quacked tiredly.

Jeremiah’s smile broadened, almost teasingly. “And yet, it seems to be handling Kara well.”

Eliza stared daggers at her husband for a while, bringing to mind vivid memories of the time she’d caught her own mom reaming her father for eating the last off-world cookies they’d brought back on one of their trips. After a moment, she glanced back at the duck, then to Jeremiah, before huffing. “Fine, but if that so much as tries to bite one of us, I am going to cook it.”

And that was, in the end, how Kara ended up spending the remainder of winter break putting a duck house together with Jeremiah.

    Sally - the duck, name decided on by Alex in a moment of frustration when Kara hadn’t been able to figure one out, and it had just kinda stuck - outlived Jeremiah by a year.

Both deaths had been crushing, and so had the things that followed it. Alex pulled away again, Eliza was overcome by grief, the house grew a bit too quiet, a bit impersonal over the year after Jeremiah’s death.

She took to walking the trail over and over again after Sally died, not entirely sure what to do with herself. Sally hadn’t ever quite acclimated to being house-bound, but at the same time, in hindsight, she hadn’t had much of a choice, either. Her wing had been broken in all the wrong ways, it would never be fully operable again, and eventually Kara was pretty sure she had come to see the small little region of the backyard they’d fenced off for her as her own.

Kara got better, in her own opinion, at social things—at blending in, for lack of a better term. She didn’t make any new friends, and going into high school hadn’t brought any new changes with it either. Midvale was a small town, affluent, yes, but very, very small. Everyone who went to middle school went to high school together, and her reputation carried, however unfortunate that might be.

She made a friend in Kenny Li.

Lost a friend, just like Jeremiah, just like Sally.

It was not long after that, tracing that same old trail, that an impulse overcame her. An impulse she hadn’t had in a while, but an impulse nevertheless. She knew better than to feed into it, knew better than to consider it, but it’d always been there, floating in the back of her head like an intrusive thought. She had just been in a better place to overcome it.

Her steps took her out of the forest, down the long, winding sidewalk into the actual city, up the road, to the right, and up to one of the farming retailers. She walked in, mud-caked shoes and all, ignored the odd looks she was getting from the cashier, and very, very firmly asked for a baby chicken.

When asked why, she told them it was for school.

They believed her.

    Clucks was a considerably easier venture to handle. Eliza hadn’t made a comment on it, and Alex was too busy getting into fights with Vicki Donahue to pay any attention to her. She was pretty sure Eliza didn’t approve, especially not after she spent a lot of time and a solid 90% of her “savings” - however much that can mean anything when you’re getting an allowance - to retrofit the waterlogged duck house into a proper henhouse, but the occasional bag of feed would randomly pop up, and Eliza’s silence was, in a way, itself its own form of permission.

Watching Clucks grow, however cliche, felt like it... unlocked something in her, for lack of a better term. The process of biological growth, the sleepy blinking eyes, the little calls she made—it made her curious. She hadn’t been curious in years, not since Krypton, not since she was slated to join the Science Guild and all that entailed. Earth was, for better or for worse, strictly speaking completely and utterly behind her for the most part. Her advantage would probably wean off if she followed scientific education into college, to be fair, you can only teach a child so much in so many hours, but she didn’t really have to try at school - hadn’t had to try at anything, really, outside of social situations and look where that had gotten her - in a very long time.

She started watching birds, more than she normally did. She’d spend the hours she wasn’t beholden to caring for Clucks and her fussy eating habits staring at them in the trees, keeping a record of them in her notebook, sketching them. Doing everything in her power to look them up, find out what made one bird different from the other, even if they looked very similar. Christmas that year netted her a high-quality camera and a small collection of encyclopedias specifically for avians.

To be completely honest, that was about the point where her fascination with birds turned into a passion.

    “What do you want to do?” Mrs. Hubbard, the guidance counsellor, finally asked.

Kara stared back, completely and utterly not sure how to respond to that. It was her last year at high school, she could do more or less anything she wanted outside of maybe history and English literature. Those were places where her interstellar knowledge could do her precisely nothing to aid and she was almost always too busy looking after Clucks, having aged to the point where it was starting to become necessary, or looking for new birds, photographing them, adding them to a wall.

Instead of vocalizing any of that, Kara shrugged.

Mrs. Hubbard frowned, a thoughtful expression slipping over her features shortly after. She spun in her computer chair, reaching down to one of the drawers on her desk and, with a few short tugs and some rummaging, pulled out the local newspaper.

On it was one of her photos. One that Alex had sent in after she had refused to do so. It was of a red-crested cardinal, very rare in this part of the continent, almost unheard of, really. They didn’t like people, but she had spent the majority of an entire day lying in wait until she could get just the right perfect shot. It had come out really good, in her opinion.

“You took this, right?” Mrs. Hubbard asked, flicking through the scant few pages that made up the school’s newspaper. “You said you had an interest in birds, what about that?”

Kara shrugged. Again.

“Just, please consider it?” Mrs. Hubbard tried, and Kara forced a reassuring smile to her face to give the woman some room to breathe. She was fifty-going-on-sixty, with a head of curly gray hair and a perpetual wrinkly cast to her face. Kara was sometimes worried she’d fall over at any time, frail-looking enough to be daunted by a weak breeze.

“Alright.”

    She got into National City University almost accidentally, really. She’d sent out applications more or less to wherever they would fit, throwing Mrs. Hubbard’s idea at the wall to see if it would stick.

Turns out, National City University, alongside a relatively well-known arts and marketing department, and its regularly-lauded bio-engineering course, had courses for ornithology. Well, more specifically, she was accepted for a Bachelor’s in Wildlife Biology and intended, as far as Eliza had helped her plan, to get a Master’s - and possibly, eventually, a Ph.D. - with an emphasis on ornithology.

She got in on a scholarship too, which was nice. Her own scientific background was starting to come up a bit empty, though, too many things that humans hadn’t quite figured out yet combined with gaps that would’ve been filled, had she continued her career on Krypton. Still, it said something that she could think about Krypton nowadays without that pervasive ache, that emptiness that drove her to walk in circles on a muddy path until her head would stop being so noisy.

Clucks died the summer leading into her university admission. She took apart the henhouse and buried her with it out back, capped by a small stone that only she, Eliza, and to some extent Alex knew the importance of. It wasn’t much, but it felt... nice, final, like putting everything to rest after all this time.

Alex had been, admittedly, less than impressed she was following her to National City, but then Alex wasn’t impressed with her a whole lot lately. She spent a lot of time out partying, she’d heard the yelling matches - albeit from a distance - that Eliza and Alex had spiralled into as of late. So she just took her opinion into account, acknowledged it, but did precisely nothing more with it, primarily because she wasn’t well-equipped to deal with Eliza’s constant pressuring of Alex or Alex’s habitual need to prove herself.

At least this time she didn’t buy a bird.

    That was a lie. She bought another bird.

Well, not bought. Found might be more operative, really. A pigeon’s egg that had been haphazardly left on her dorm’s windowsill like a gift from an outside influence. The dorm had, with the exclusion of medical aid animals, a wholesale ban on pets. Understandable, if anything it made a whole lot of sense not to trust university students with pets like cats or dogs because not long after you’d probably find out you’ve made an entirely new ecosystem just in the dorm buildings alone.

That, however, did not stop her from keeping it. Or incubating it. Or getting special permission from one of her teachers who really liked her to play the entire thing off as a long-term project towards her study of how city-dwelling has modified the behaviours and physiology of native bird species in the region.

It technically wasn’t a pet if it was a project, and all that.

Thank god she didn’t have a roommate. She wasn’t great at lying but she was pretty sure it would not hold up in the face of someone who was around her for any length of time.

Cook, the male pigeon she was now rearing, was docile, fat and the laziest bird she had ever met. It was fascinating, but also very very nice. Cook was really the first bird which let her touch them, brush her fingers over their crest, observe their talons and all the other fun things. She hadn’t known how to properly handle Sally back when she first got her, and by the time she had, Sally was old and holding her would only ever end up with her thrashing, so it wasn’t safe. Clucks was better about it, but had been a notoriously flighty hen with snappish tendencies that had made physical contact largely impossible.

Cook was the equivalent of a male ginger cat: spoiled rotten, but too lazy to be particularly rotten.

Birds served to be something of a perpetually rotating door of new and interesting things. Kryptonian birds, aside from being extinct for hundreds of years due to core mining destabilizing their cliff habitats, were only abstractly similar. They were both feathered, both laid eggs, but Kryptonian birds, for starters, did not have gizzards. She wasn’t sure why - though, her guess was that it was because after a certain point there weren’t really any rocks the birds could eat that weren’t also poisonous - but they just didn’t, and finding out that birds ate rocks to grind food up had been absolutely one of the highlights of her youth.

The worn pages of her encyclopedia could attest to that.

Just, gizzards. How could something like that even evolve? She wanted to find out, wanted to know, and she did everything in her power to find it out. She read papers, did research, she had avenues open to explore all those questions that high school science teachers couldn’t answer, or things which only had theories and weren’t taught as a direct consequence. It was like being a fish in a pond for her.

She didn’t even realize she was reaching the end of her Bachelor’s until someone brought the fact up to her.

    “I want you to try for this,” Professor Vance said, sliding the slip of paper over to her.

Curious, Kara plucked it by one edge and brought it up. At the very top, ‘CATCO WORLDWIDE MEDIA’ was written in a huge, distinct font, and below that was a rather blunt four paragraphs on the new nature magazine they were working on. They were looking for prospective photographers and scientists to apply for a chance to be hired or at least interned for a promised three editions at the minimum, with more if the magazine’s profit margins were high enough.

Kara glanced back up.

Professor Vance smiled. “You’re nearing the point where you have to start looking for experience work, right? I mean, keeping your grades as they are will keep you in a scholarship if you want to just move straight to your Master’s, but I’d really prefer it if you considered this. I’m friends with one of the people who pushed for this, she promised she’d give your work a look if you sent it in after I showed her a few of the pictures you left me with of Cook.”

This was... definitely an option, for sure. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do it, but the fact that she could get in on the ground for something like this, that it was there, that there was no real harm in trying - after all, despite the rule about not being involved with newspapers or the news in general, this didn’t technically qualify, did it? - for better or for worse. She wanted to try, wanted to do something, wanted to explore more and maybe have the way she saw the world be something other people could empathize with, or even understand.

She thought back to the newspaper for a moment, to how it had put her here in the first place. After waffling so much on what she wanted to do, on where she wanted to go, to find out that the option of taking up this line of study had been such a smart option, one that had been so fulfilling, well.

It felt like a sign.

She just hoped to Rao it wasn’t an omen.

    She had learned, maybe in her second year at NCU, that most of her wardrobe was not going to work with the outdoor labs and observation studies that had become part of her life. She’d, with great reluctance, shucked her fondly-loved pastels for a wardrobe mostly consisting of heavy-duty and androgynous clothing. A lot of durable pants, a lot of t-shirts, few skirts, more shorts than anyone had any right to own, boots. So many boots.

Which, as it would happen, is not the type of wardrobe you should be wearing in the event that you’re meeting one of the richest women on the planet. Cat Grant, media mogul, she had clawed her way up from her beginning as an aide to Perry White and had carved out a cranny for herself in the international media circus that defined human culture.

She might be five-two on a good day, but she was as intimidating as any person Kara had met.

Cat’s eyes, roving over her dress pants, dress shoes - that she had borrowed from Alex after panicking, they didn’t quite fit right—too small for her feet, left her toes cramped like nobody’s business - white dress shirt and tie, felt at the same time an attempt to observe her and to criticize her choice in clothing.

Not that it had been a choice, considering this was about all she had left in terms of “formal wear”. She hadn’t needed to be formal in years! She was a researcher for birds, do you know where birds generally like to be? Not in places you can navigate in a pencil skirt, is where.

“Very...” Cat Grant, the woman who had taken time out of her day to assess whether or not she deserved to belong to the fledgling nature magazine, a woman who didn’t have to do that since she was pretty sure she could hand the job off to anyone else, hesitated. She hesitated, tilted her head, glanced askance towards one of the monitors behind her, one lit up by a rainbow. Something about another country in Europe legalizing gay marriage. “Butch.”

Kara felt her face heat up, opened her mouth to correct, but couldn’t quite manage it. At all. Words, in general, were beyond her right now because Kara was pretty sure Cat Grant thought she was a butch outdoorswoman and it was very surreal. Oh god, please help. She should’ve listened to Eliza’s rules, she should’ve just kept doing labs and got her Master’s instead of trying for any of this—

“Close your mouth, for Pete's sake,” Cat—no, er, Miss Grant? That felt better—Miss Grant said in that sort of tone parents used on unruly children.

Kara’s mouth clicked shut. Thankfully she could at least follow orders.

“So this is mostly a formality, Lindsey has reassured me repeatedly that you're a good student of hers and that she has all the trust in the world for you,” Miss Grant drawled, leaning back onto one of her too-thin heels, eyes narrowing. “Can’t say I personally see it yet, but then Lindsey hasn’t lied to me yet.”

Professor Vance hadn’t said her friend was the woman herself.

She really should’ve! That was pertinent information—

“Are you going to say anything?” Miss Grant interrupted.

Kara reached up on impulse, fiddled with the frame of her glasses, pushing them back up the sweat-slicked bridge of her nose. “I like birds,” she said, stupidly. On impulse. Because she was a moron and all of her social interaction over the last four years of study had been with other people who were equally socially inept.

Miss Grant blinked, looking for a half-second completely bewildered, before her face settled back into neutral semi-disdain. “Yes,” she confirmed easily. “Your pictures said as much.”

“I would like the job?” Kara tried, the words coming out in a rush.

“Then you’ll have it,” Miss Grant said, raising one hand up to prevent any words coming out of her mouth, not that she was about to speak or anything. “But, sincerely, work on... talking. I expect more from my employees, and interns are no exception.”

    The first couple of months working as an intern and balancing her continued studies was, in all honesty, pretty rough. It took a while to find an equilibrium between the two, where she wasn’t constantly behind on one thing, and it had taken some pretty severe restructuring to her schedule.

Most of her coworkers for the new potential nature magazine were older, people who had worked in the field for more years than she had been alive for, including those she’d spent in the Phantom Zone. Most of them were men, with a few women thrown in for good measure, and a handful of them weren’t very fond of her. She was the youngest by no small margin, and she hadn’t made much of an impact yet, hadn’t yet proven herself to them.

But things got better. Alex at some point finished up her own schooling and went on to do secretive lab things that she thought Kara didn’t know about. Eliza got back to working in the xenobiology field, on-and-off, and the time spent over Thanksgivings and Christmases were defined by a near-constant chatter of scientific intrigue. It was nice, not quite a change, but more of things settling in.

She got her own apartment, even. It had been grandfathered to her by Alex, to be fair, and was absurdly cheap for the region and it required she balance a part-time job with an internship and a university degree but, well. She managed.

“You raised a pigeon, right?”

Kara blinked up at her coworker, one Richard Blackler. He was an older gentleman, in his mid-to-late sixties, with a head of absurdly thick graying hair that showed no sign of receding. “Yes?” She answered, or at least tried. Social things were still hard, she again hadn’t spent much of any time in university bothering to socialize and her restrictive friend pool hadn’t grown beyond Alex and a few others in a long, long time.

“They still around?” Richard continued.

Kara shook her head. “No, died five months ago.” Normally, pigeons lived to about six years—Cook had made it to four, in large part due to her spoiling him on food and his general distaste towards anything athletic. He’d just passed away in his sleep one day, and unlike Clucks, due to how she’d pitched Cook, she didn’t get to bury him.

Or, well, she didn’t in theory. Cook went ‘mysteriously missing’ after he had been acquired by the university and while people probably had their suspicions, there was no way to prove that she did it, considering she had flown to the roof of the building and broken in that way. She’d buried him back home after another flight, right beside Clucks.

“Either way,” Richard began, smiling guilelessly. “How would you feel about a short trip to Metropolis?”

...Not great? Clark was uh, upset wasn’t the operative word. Clark didn’t really get upset with her. Maybe ‘disappointed’ might be better? He just, they hadn’t talked in a while. Like, three years a while, because she had been busy and she was bad at opening up lines of communication and—

“You’ll get your name on the article. It’s about how city birds have adapted.” Richard’s smile grew significantly less guileless, and suddenly Kara had the ominous sensation that she had walked into a trap. “After all, that’s what you were doing an extra study on, right?”

...Ah. Shoot.

She’d forgotten about that.

    Clark met her at the airport with Lois. He’d taken one long look at her, her outfit - jeans, big mountain-hiking boots, a huge backpack, and a massive sweater - and pulled her into a tight hug, saying how he’d missed her.

She’d returned the hug, empowered by her own guilt and the fact that Clark was among some of the few people she could hug at full strength without risking crushing them to a pulp.

“So, you said a few weeks, but do you know how long you’ll be staying with us exactly?” Clark asked sometime into their drive towards his place, one hand steady on the wheel as he stared, looking utterly bored, at the red light in front of him.

“Twenty days, if that’s okay?” Kara managed to get out, folding her hands together. “I can find another place to stay if—”

“Nope,” Lois interrupted brightly, and Kara couldn’t help the tug of her own lips pulling up into a smile, even as she buried her chin in the fluff of her oversized sweater. “You’re staying with us, and if Clark has an issue with that...”

“Which I don’t,” Clark said airily, pulling the car back into motion as the light turned to green. Someone behind them leaned on the horn, and Kara winced.

“Which he doesn’t,” Lois echoed, not missing a beat. “But if he did, he’d be sleeping on the couch. Outside. In the rain. Because I’m not letting my boyfriend’s little cousin get exploited by the absolute shit housing market in our fine city.”

“Wait,” Kara interrupted. Because, well. Wait. “Boyfriend?”

Lois and Clark turned to look at her. She shrunk back.

Lois, without looking up, aimed a swat at Clark’s head. He yelped, the car lurched a little, but didn’t stray too far. “Eyes on the road, Smallville, and seriously you didn’t tell her?!”

“I thought she knew! I wasn’t exactly subtle!”

“Yeah, well, she clearly doesn’t!”

“We’ve been dating for nearly ten years now! I thought it was obvious!”

    One of the benefits nobody tells you about when you’re gifted yellow sun derived superpowers is that you don’t get sore, or achy, or anything. Kara had vivid memories of having regular morning cramps as a kid in her legs during her growth period, the sort of charlie horse-esque bundles of agony.

Normally this wouldn’t really be a very real benefit. Sure, she might never wake up with an ache in her back because she slept wrong, but in any other line of work that would just be nice. Not something that informed her day-to-day.

But when she spent hours on her stomach, perched into awful positions that she knew should be doing some pretty awful things to her musculature, all to take a photo of a pair of pigeons and a crow in some half-lit, dingy alleyway smelling like a laundromat, well. It became important. Very important. She got a lot of very real envy for being able to get up after a photoshoot like this sort of thing without even wincing, still limber despite the horrible things she had been doing to her posture.

Admittedly she wasn’t totally fond of the fact that she was laying in an alleyway with her camera out and it was really not hygienic under any definition of the word, and everything kinda smelled, and there was a cigarette butt a few feet away from her that didn’t really smell like nicotine, no sir, but she’d take the upsides to the downsides. She kinda had to, considering the series of events that led her to laying down in some alleyway on an alien planet.

Finally, after hours of patience, after everything, she was lining up her shot. The camera Eliza gave her all of those years ago still felt sturdy in her hands, perfectly suited to fit between her palms. She could see the pigeons finally settle in, looking relaxed even despite how close the crow was, who themselves seemed to be content as well. It would be a perfect image to run with for her article and—

“Oh my god, are you okay?!”

The birds flew away.

Kara felt something inside of her die.

Turning her head slowly, achingly, to find the source of the voice which had just ruined hours of sitting around on the awful shitty ground of Metropolis all to get a single photo she kinda didn’t need but that sunk cost fallacy had rendered impossibly important, Kara finally set her sights on the person in question.

It was a woman, about her height, with long, black hair, bright green eyes, and lips almost cherry red. Her skin was that sort of pale that seemed almost washed out, though there was a hint of colour to her cheeks from the cold outside. She had high cheekbones that led down into a defined jaw and chin. She spoke with a slight Irish lilt, very disconnected, a long-faded accent, a bit like the one she had.

She was, in a word, very, very pretty.

Stupidly pretty.

Like, end of the world pretty.

“The, birds,” Kara managed to get out between her stupid lips and stupid brain that was currently trying to process the pretty woman staring down at her. The one wearing the sort of business casual with long pants and heels, all the things she had tried to be with her wardrobe during that one meeting with Miss Grant that had brought her here in the first place.

The woman’s eyes flicked up, caught sight of the birds flapping wildly to new spots. Her eyes glanced down, caught sight of her camera, clutched tightly, and her face widened into shock, then guilt. “Oh, shite”—the last word was murmured beneath her breath quickly, like she was afraid of someone overhearing it—“I am so sorry, were you about to take a photo?”

Kara nodded, because words were frankly beyond her and—actually, thinking about it, why did this always happen around women? She could look a man down and say exactly what she thought but when it came to women she just, y’know, couldn’t.

Actually, on second thought, now really wasn’t the time.

“Jeez, I just—that’s bad. I am so sorry, I don’t think they’re coming back down.”

Kara spared the birds a glance, all puffed up and looking mightily offended by being interrupted in their naps. They probably weren’t, yeah.

“Here, uh,” the woman reached into one pocket, rummaging around until she could procure a card-sized piece of paper. Reaching up to one ear, she plucked the pen out from behind it, scribbling something down before, finally, crouching down and handing it off to her. “I know this is really suspect, but, if you need any help within reason, call this number? I have to go and yell at someone.”

Kara glanced down.

The words ‘Lena Luthor’ and a long string of digits which constituted a phone number stared back up at her.

Her mind ground to a shuddering halt.

    Jack was laughing hysterically by the time she stormed back into the classroom.

“You absolute dick!” Lena yelled, pointing at him.

It only made him laugh harder. The ass, the childish, fucking absurd ass.

“You could’ve told me!” Lena continued, unabated, because Jesus Christ was that fucking embarrassing.

She’d walked up to the window not five minutes ago because Jack kept getting distracted by something out there, and she’d looked down to find a woman on her face, legs splayed out, tense as a wire. Assuming the worst, and not having Jack to rectify that assumption, she’d run down to check to make sure she wasn’t out cold or worse yet dead and—and—

“Stop laughing!” She wailed.

Her best friend doubled over, laugh sputtering off into a wild series of unsteady breaths. He wiped his eyes, a snort escaping him in a woosh every few seconds. “You didn’t ask,” he teased, glancing up at her from between his fingers. “She had to have been down there for like three hours. All for some pigeons.”

Lena had been trained to be socially adroit, had been all but groomed to be publicly adored, and despite Lex’s continued attempts to ram the family name into the dirt, she had managed that much.

Or at least, she had thought she did.

“God damn it, Jack,” Lena managed to get out with a sigh.

Jack started laughing again, the prick.

    Clark and Lois sat around the table with her. The card was in the center of the table, innocuous blue ink standing out against the white-and-black of what, upon closer inspection, was a small advertisement for a gay bar.

She, purposefully, did not look at Clark.

“You’ve been here for five days,” Lois said, not sounding terribly surprised.

“Under a week,” Clark agreed with a hum, voice gravelly. “New record?”

Lois, out of the corner of her eye, paused, head tilting thoughtfully. “Think so?”

“It’s the Kryptonian curse,” Clark said sagely, or at least, sagely enough that Kara had to remind herself he was being sarcastic and there was, hopefully, not a literal curse attuned to Kryptonians out there. She had been given bedtime stories about the cults who had worshiped Yuda Kal and what they would do to kids who stayed up too late. “But, more seriously, you probably shouldn’t do anything with this.”

“I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do with this,” Kara muttered, reaching for it.

Lois swatted her hand. “A pretty girl gave you her number on the back of a girl bar advertisement, I think that warrants something.”

“Lois,” Clark said, voice tinged with a warning. “She is a Luthor.”

“And Zod’s a Kryptonian, but that hasn’t stopped me from—”

Kara leapt to her feet with enough force to send the chair away, snatching the card up and pressing both hands to her ears. “Nope!” She yelled, waddling back and towards the guest bedroom, ignoring Lois’ unbidden cackles. “Not thinking about that! I’m going to go study!”

    Idle curiosities, if not previously made clear, were her banes. The card had sat like a hunk of particularly volatile uranium in her bag throughout the remainder of her stay in Metropolis, even after. Her thoughts had constantly been dragged back towards it, even when she’d been awkwardly congratulated for her article and the interest people had taken in the magazine. Even when she was raised from intern to part-time - she had an actual salary now, she didn’t have to work at Noonan’s, and however much she would miss the free food, she wouldn’t ever miss working retail - her thoughts would, inevitably, be dragged back to it.

The curiosity never really left her. Not even after Lex Luthor was arrested after killing over 30 people in an attempt to murder her cousin. Half the reason she knew anything about it was because she’d become fixated on seeing how Lena responded, seeing her take the reigns, seeing her push for a rebranding.

She didn’t forget about her when she decided to finish her Master’s early, stopped taking her time with the sciences and pushed herself far, far ahead of where people had assumed her to be, finishing everything out before the year ended.

Even when her sister’s plane fell, even when she plucked it out of the sky. Even when she revealed herself to Winn, a coworker who regularly came over to the nature magazine’s office for reasons completely beyond her. Even after Astra, even after Myriad, even after Non and Fort Rozz and flying up into space and nearly dying.

She never forgot. It was the intrusive thought to end all intrusive thoughts, the card still tucked away in her sock drawer, waiting for the chance to be used.

    It had been a while since she needed to dress up. This time, however, she had the disposable income to afford some things and didn’t have to steal her sister’s shoes, so that was a plus. It wasn’t that much different from the ensemble she’d worn those years ago when she’d met Miss Grant, though at least this time around it was refined. She wore the same dark dress pants, and with her own set of dress shoes, alongside a button-up white dress shirt, with sleeves rolled to her elbows.

Lena Luthor’s secretary stared back at her, utterly unimpressed. “Name and appointment?” She drawled.

Kara tried not to fidget. “Uhm, er—Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature? Here to interview Miss Luthor about her new push for environmentally friendly tech?” More specifically her recent developments in helping regrow the redwood forests, in the canopies of which were actual ecosystems that needed protection.

The secretary stared narrowly at her, suspicious and unwelcoming but, thankfully, Kara had grown up enough not to fold beneath it.

Letting out a sigh, the woman motioned towards the door. “She’s waiting for you.”

    Lena Luthor had been having a trying few months. Lex had gone insane, she’d had to help sentence her brother to multiple life sentences,  she’d had to take over L-Corp, break off her friendship with Jack - as, despite joking about it, both of them weren’t comfortable with being any more than each other’s beards - by leaving Metropolis. She’d had to deal with Clark motherfucking Kent breathing down her neck not a few days ago. She’d had to deal with the fact that Supergirl likely didn’t trust her because her brother had, repeatedly, tried to murder her cousin.

She’d had to deal with a lot. Too much, really. It was actually starting to get to her. Lena knew she could be suited to be a CEO—that much wasn’t up for debate. She could do it, she just... didn’t want to. She liked being a lab worker, liked exploring the field of study she so enjoyed, liked a lot of things about her old life.

But she had to step up to the plate, considering the other alternative was her mother and if she thought Lex handled the company’s money poorly, Lilian would be a nightmare.

Running her hand over her eyes, Lena glanced back down at the report on her desk. Another bit of cash Lex had illegally squirrelled away for anti-Kryptonian weapons development. It was starting to become a pattern, to the point where she was worried she’d start finding the damn ledgers under rugs or on high shelves, considering how much he’d done to actually hide them.

Then again, nobody had even tried to look into Lex’s personal files, so it’s not a surprise he considered his own security airtight.

The door to her office opened with a steady swish, and she flicked her eyes up, catching sight just as the person opening it walked in.

Bird girl stared back at her.

...It was probably bad that it was the only name she knew her by, but ‘bird girl’ had become something of a myth among her and her close friends. Jack had made it into a joke, and it’d kinda proliferated, especially when they found out she had given her her own name and number on the back of a Frozen Strobe advertisement—that being one of the more popular gay bars in the area. Nothing about it to her had been all that funny, it had, in fact, been extremely embarrassing and she had just finally started to forget it happened.

Apparently, life was not so easy. “Ah,” she said, voice coming out awkwardly.

Bird girl smiled back, just as awkwardly, reaching up to fiddle with her glasses. “Hi,” she said, voice soft. “I’m, uh, Kara Danvers, with CatCo Nature. I’m here to talk about the redwood project?”

Oh. She could work with that.

    One hour turned into two, then three, and one meeting into two, then three, then four. Lena really wasn’t sure how things had progressed to this point, but if you got past the shy outer shell of Kara Danvers you could find for yourself a bumbling, broadly-smiling sweetheart with an absurd love for birds.

It was... weird. Lena didn’t really have friends, hadn’t for most of her life. Her family name before had been a daunting point of prestige, the Luthors were wealthy in the way that few people were. They came from old money, and lots of it, with a fair amount of prestige chasing their heels. People hadn’t wanted to be friends with her, and the ones who had just wanted what she could give them through her reputation.

She’d managed to find some friends, though. Jack, Sam, Jess, even to a certain extent Andrea of all people—and now, in National City, she had none of them. She and Jack didn’t talk much, Sam was too busy cleaning up after Lex, Jess was around, yes, but also too busy, the restructuring wasn’t a simple task, after all.

After Lex, her reputation had been ruined for different reasons. Xenophobia, hatred, things she didn’t associate with herself—people kept their distance. The gay clubs she’d gone to that one time out of a need to just get away had rejected her at the door, even despite being a long-term visitor. Nobody wanted her, she tainted everything she touched.

Except for Kara, apparently.

Kara, who was sweet and kind. Kara, who didn’t care about her last name. Kara, who stayed with her until three in the morning once, all to have an interview that was more them chatting than anything else. Kara whose Instagram was surprisingly popular and utterly devoted to birds. Kara, who loved ducks and had duck-print pyjamas she’d shown off during one of the movie nights she’d invited her over to, which she had endured even when being stared at by distrusting eyes by Kara's adoptive sister.

Kara, who was Supergirl.

Because, really, she wasn’t stupid.

But that was okay, because even if Kara was Supergirl, she could keep that secret, or at least the approximation of one. They all had their secrets, all had their wants and needs and... well, Kara was her want. And her need.

Which was not something that could stand.

So she’d done as all Luthors did and planned. Showing absurd amounts of affection to people she felt things towards before had always backfired. Lionel had been distant and unresponsive to shows of childish affection, Lillian had been worse, she’d gone so far as to complain to her about wasting money when she’d tried once, during the holiday, to give her flowers. Lex had just never been comfortable with strong displays of affection, hadn’t known how to respond to it, and so, like Lionel, he never had.

In the end, she sent Kara an office full of flowers in the hopes that maybe it’d be juuust enough to scare her off.

    Lois’ words had been something of a seedling for a long, long time. A number written on the back of a girl bar ad, the sort of plot point you’d read out of a trashy romance novel you got for free or very cheap on Kindle.

She and Lena had never really talked about sexuality. Kara’s had always been up in the air, and considering she’d been socially ostracized and not particularly invested in any of it, she hadn’t really dated in the first place. It was hard to explain to Alex and Eliza that Krypton didn’t really have a concrete concept of gendered attraction. The matrix did everything for you, you didn’t need to think about it. Pregnancy wasn’t an issue either, considering everyone was birthed through the matrix.

Girl, boy, neither, or something else—she hadn’t been raised to care, because, in the end, the matrix would choose the person she would have the best chance of loving, and any obligations to continue the progeny of the House of El would be handled by technology. She didn’t need to think about pregnancies, sex had been an almost primal concept on her planet; people did it, sure, but people didn’t talk about it because that wasn’t the primary focus of any relationship.

How could you explain that to someone who grew up being sorted into boxes? Whose concept of sexuality was tied to hard yes-or-no questions? Sure people who didn’t answer yes or no existed too—bisexual, pansexual, asexual, but these labels, they weren’t... relevant, to her. She didn’t even know what to call herself, how could she explain it to anyone else?

But, like. She wasn’t ignorant, or stupid. Or even that unaware. She knew that she had feelings for other people, however stifled, she knew what feeling attraction was like.

So, yes, she might’ve been blindsided, stumbling into her office only to find it literally almost overflowing with red roses. Yes, she might’ve been a little overwhelmed too. Sure. She might’ve felt awkward for the period of time she didn’t know who it was from, or why.

But she felt... hopeful, when she found out it was Lena.

This was all new to her. She’d put aside sexuality, put aside romance in large part because, well, it didn’t... work. For her. She’d never been given the option to explore it as a teenager and attempts to romance her, well, she’d shut down. Hard. She was over a decade too late to begin exploring that part of herself, she had resigned herself to just existing, and she’d been fine with it, you know?

Rolling the stem of a rose between her fingers, Kara wasn’t so sure if that was the case anymore.

    There were three things in life Lena had come to expect would never happen, even if it was, technically, possible.

The first was that Lex would become her brother again. Not that she had been disowned, but rather in the sense that he’d drop his xenophobic obsession and just, be her brother again. Be the person who consoled her, who took care of her when her adoptive parents couldn’t be bothered.

The next was one day clearing the Luthor name, if the first wasn’t possible. Some day, down the line, the Luthor name would no longer be associated with a mass-murderer and xenophobic technology, but she knew better than to fully expect that. Knew that it would take generations before Lex’s impact retreated from public knowledge.

The last, and final thing, was Kara asking her out on a date. Bit of a light subject to include in those other two things, she knew that, but Kara had become something of her only support line in the city at this point and you could, frankly, excuse her for putting a lot of emphasis on that.

She’d expected Kara to retreat, to pull away, to respond to her show of affection as most people had in her life.

Instead, Kara, shy, demure Kara, stood with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, wearing the very same outfit she’d met her for the second time in. Her face was beet-red, eyes wobbly and embarrassed, unable to focus on any one thing at any one time. If anything, the severity of awkwardness Kara worked under was always surprising. Supergirl was always confident, always sure, and Kara was the dead opposite. Kara was never sure-footed, always cautious, always ready to apologize.

But here she was, of her own volition, with a bouquet clutched in one hand, wearing what Lena was pretty sure was the fanciest thing she owned. After having just rushed in, ignoring Jess’ protests, and asked her on a date.

Jess, shell shocked and stunned, stood in the entryway to her office.

Kara, awkward and sheepish, stood not too far from the couch, fidgeting in place.

Lena, breathing in, then out, kept the smile from her face, if only to not look like a complete doofus. “You could’ve texted me.” Or called, really.

Kara’s flush grew brighter. “I wanted to ask in person.”

That was Kara for you. An oxymoron in every sense of the word, kind and caring and so, so very passionate. A girl who was very set in her ways, a girl Lena didn’t deserve, but couldn’t quite bring herself to resist.

“How does Friday at twelve sound?”

[frostiifae]

Top 5 most underated T-Dolls!

GASP

kssshksh Eagle 1, this is big bird, hot takes are weapons free, over

A lot of these opinions boil down to “everybody is so obsessed with ending battles as fast as possible they forget that sometimes you HAVE to go long and up-front burst isn’t always the best gameplan”, just in various flavors of underrated tdoll archetype

also i’m super cheating because this is about a lot more than 5 tdolls, it was hard to narrow it down to 5 because of how weapons in GFL kinda exist in archetypes, so it’s more like “top 5 most underrated skill archetypes in gfl” 

alright counting from the bottom!

5. M1911 and M9

OK, maybe I’m just sentimental about my preferred CoD WW2 sidearm. Maybe so. But.

Most of the time, when we pick handguns, we look for dolls whose skills match their tile buffs - Calico and Grizzly being great examples. Handguns have extremely strong buffs as a result, with their tiles already being much more powerful than any other weapon type to begin with and their skills stacking multiplicatively. For some weapon types or team compositions, this makes sense, particularly for RFs that rely on that multiplicative scaling to tear through powerful enemies. 

But you don’t always need that much scaling. Overkill doesn’t help you, and a lot of weapons risk hitting the RoF cap if you layer too many buffs on at once. This is a part of why we tend not to put HGs on ARSMG teams during the day - ARs kind of already hit their peak potential without help. But sometimes we need HGs for night battles, right? 

M1911 and M9 are unique among HGs for having very powerful skills normally reserved for SMGs - M1911 has a smoke grenade, and M9 has a stun grenade. Both of these are really strong survivability tools, and ARSMG teams sometimes become accustomed to having them, but it gets trickier at night when most players want to replace one of their SMGs with an HG for visibility reasons. 

The primary difficulty with these guns is that their formation buffs are designed for back-line placement, not front-line, so... it actually kind of makes sense to use 2SMG 1HG 2AR, which might sound bad at first (2 AR

tl;dr M1911 and M9 are unique among HGs for their much stronger utility skills, which can be really helpful on night ARSMG teams, but also very strong on RFHG if you’re willing to give up one of your other HG spots. 

4. 100 Shiki (ARSMG Shield Setups)

While I admit I haven’t finished raising mine, I’m confident enough in the theory to put her on this list. 

What’s the problem with 100Shiki? I dunno, honestly, perception? Image? I guess you look at her skill and go “wait, 8s initial cooldown? Her shield maxes at only 42 hp? That’s it?” but no, the skill description doesn’t stop there. 100Shiki’s shield is, basically, a free hit. She gets to dodge one more attack than her Evasion stat would normally allow - maybe even more than one, against enemies with lower FP. 

If someone shoots her shield, she gets a 65% Evasion steroid, further boosting her survivability. That might not sound like a lot, but remember that evasion has diminishing returns; with an adequately enhanced exo (even an X-type, for reasons I’ll mention in a second) she reaches the 90s before her skill activates and around 150 afterward, before accounting for fairy or formation buffs. That gives her a dodge rate of 90% against most enemy units and gives her a decent chance to dodge Jaegers and other massive-accuracy enemies.

By pairing 100Shiki with other dolls with similar abilities to shield their allies - MDR’s skill giving her a massive 80% bonus evasion and a 40 HP shield at 4 seconds, and 64Shiki providing either additional offensive ability or additional shields at 8 seconds - 100Shiki becomes much, much tankier than most other SMGs, and in longer fights against huge streams of infantry, boss enemies or even armor, her ability to repeatedly shrug off stray lucky shots makes her a very consistent main tank. 

tl;dr 100Shiki can rely on her base evasion or good kiting for the first 8 seconds of a battle and is rewarded by becoming WAY tankier than she has any right to be afterward, especially when you layer similar skills on top of her from her allies.

3. STG44 (High-Explosive Grenade ARs)

Generally speaking, when we talk about good grenade ARs, it’s assumed we’re talking about Anti-Personnel grenades - SOP and 416 being the most well-known of these, but that also includes G3, ARX-160, AR70, and XM8. These grenades have a long initial cooldown but deal a huge amount of damage in a moderate area, something like 10-12x the doll’s base damage. 

HE grenades are obviously much weaker, but hit a much wider area. These grenades tend to be completely ignored in terms of viability. I think this is a mistake. 

In a side-by-side comparison of a level 100 XM8 and a level 100 FAMAS, most of the time, their skills aren’t even a factor - in which case XM8 might win out because of her more balanced statline, but obviously that doesn’t make FAMAS an inferior doll by itself. Their skills only really begin to matter when you reach a point where you’re fighting a large crowd of high-level enemies, the sort of encounters that actually take 8 seconds or more to clear in the first place. 

That’s important enough to be worth repeating: the difference between grenade ARs doesn’t matter at all until they actually get their grenades off - which only actually happens in battles where those ARs are actually being pushed to their limits. Endgame content. Right? 

So let’s consider an event like Singularity ranking, mobs of high-level infantry are very common. XM8 will deal something like 575 damage at base with her grenade in an area of 1.5 meters, which is excellent, and will definitely kill any basic mobs Sangvis are throwing at her. STG doesn’t even deal half that much damage at the center of her grenade, so she has very little kill potential at base. But what if we include formation and equipment bonuses?

See, the only way grenades can be made “better” is by giving them more damage, but in the case of AP grenades, they already do enough to flatten most rank and file enemies, so there’s not really much you can do to improve them. They’re plug-and-play, but that limits their potential. HE grenades, however, can deal way more damage if you push them hard enough. 

Not sure I could recommend this exact formation, but a formation like this - using HG-boosting skills such as Ribey’s or Grizzly’s, stacking multiple FP boosts, and possibly even an FP-oriented Fairy - can push a grenade like STG’s much, much further. With a powerful enough Fairy attached to this team, STG can deal almost as much damage as XM8 in an area almost twice as big. 

Of course, you could simplify things even further by just using two HE grenades - this formation but with FAMAS at the bottom will wipe a field pretty much instantly at the 8second mark against anything that isn’t heavy armor. 

tl;dr HE grenades aren’t as easy to use as AP grenades but have a much higher potential if you build around them. Also, STG44 MOD3 is terrifying. Just throwing that out there. 

2. Bren MOD3 

Did nobody read Bren’s mod3 details during the public vote??? No??? Who’s- who’s m14?? 

First of fucking all, Bren gains a massive 8 points of max FP throughout her Mod3 - 7 of which are in the first 10 levels, so it’s not like they’re hard to get. That by itself gives her one of the highest FP ratings of any MG available in NA right now, only surpassed by M2HB and narrowly edging her ahead of staple MGs like M1918, PK, PKP, LWMMG, etc. That’s so much by itself. 

The price of Bren’s massive strap energy raw firepower is her magazine size, which is among the lowest among all MGs, but her skill does kinda make up for that, and I know I’m not going to convince anybody here that doesn’t already believe me, but an MG needing to reload to clear an encounter doesn’t automatically kill their viability. MGSG teams can still function in long battles if they’re built at least semi-defensively. 

Meanwhile, Bren Mod3′s passive skill further increases her ammo capacity on every reload, and her special equip further increases her FP. What more could you possibly want? How about accuracy.

Bren’s base accuracy is so high that, during the day, you can easily run a critical sight instead of an EOT, which is a significant jump in damage potential. PKP and Negev also share this trait, and I find it’s very unfortunate how little it’s talked about, because it really does make a huge different in their damage output. But Bren’s mod skill grants her even more accuracy on reload, and her unique equip is a FP-boosting MARs scope, giving her even more accuracy. After one reload, Bren’s accuracy with a maxed special equip is, at minimum, 73. 

Seventy. Bren is as accurate as an RF. 

Accuracy is often thought of as a wasted stat a lot of the time, but it’s incredibly important for MGs for two reasons - the first being their consistency during the day, and the second being their versatility at night. Bren is so fucking accurate that, even at night, she can match RF teams’ accuracy while absolutely shaming them in actual damage output, and that makes her incredibly powerful for lategame night maps where you can’t be sure whether you’re wandering into enemy armor or a bunch of infantry. Night battles are often the ones where MGs are most likely to need to reload anyway, and that’s where a reload-stacking MG like Bren shines.

tl;dr NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT RAW DAMAGE OUTPUT YOU IDIOTS HAVE YOU EVER EVEN TRIED RUNNING MGSG AGAINST INFANTRY AT NIGHT DO YOU REALIZE HOW IMPRESSIVE 70+ ACCURACY IS

1. Mosin-Nagant

It’s so easy to misunderstand how powerful Mosin-Nagant is, so I totally get it. I talked about this some way back when I was still doing TDoll analyses on the sideblog, but I don’t think I had actually ever seen her full potential before, and since then I’ve played multiple events with Mosin taking the role of full-on boss annihilator and oh. my. god. 

You look at Mosin-Nagant on paper. You see a very middling FP stat of 131. Good, but not stellar. You see a very weak RoF stat of 30; that’s a strong negative. Her Steady Shot skill is unremarkable. Nothing about it could make her a definitively better choice than Springfield - who has the same skill, scarcely any less FP, and can fire much faster. You see a doll who is outclassed not only by other archetypes, but by her peers within her own archetype. 

And yet I’m going to insist that Mosin-Nagant might be the best boss-killing RF in the game. Better than M99 or NTW-20, better than IWS2000 or M200, better even than TAC-50. Not because she outdamages them; because she outdances them. 

Mosin-Nagant and Springfield both have access to a powerful special equip; where Springfield’s makes her more of a well-rounded DPS weapon with an optional damage nuke (and holy shit she’s good, you guys, she’s VERY good), Mosin-Nagant’s instead doubles down on her niche. In addition to a very impressive critical damage steroid and a mostly pointless evasion boost, the Hayha memory chip grants Mosin a terrifying +30 FP at max, pushing her into a very different category of RF. Rifles don’t normally have the means to boost their FP through equipment, so this is a very special distinction for the russian marksman rifle, effectively elevating her from “small bamboo” to “large bamboo” except with a shorter initial cooldown because fuck you.

But I think the most important part of the Hayha chip isn’t what it gives Mosin - it’s what it doesn’t take away. The Hayha chip allows Mosin-Nagant to wield her fullest potential in both critical strikes and raw firepower without losing any of her mobility. RFs’ base 7 mobility is enough to dodge Gager’s attacks as long as you’re quick on the draw, and that makes Mosin uniquely qualified against a lot of the game’s toughest bosses. 

In terms of damage potential, Mosin’s base attacks are a little lacking, but that’s fine; in battles where you need to be moving around and dodging AOE attacks, you don’t want limited duration DPS abilities where you can wind up wasting your damage against random attacks or unexpected forcefields. You do have to learn to activate Mosin’s skill manually (note to self: turn her back to forced manual) but, with a little bit of practice and some good teambuilding, you’ll find that she’s an incredibly effective bossing doll that can be relied on when specialized gimmick compositions like TAC-50′s just can’t quite cut it.

[chuffyfan87]

Growing Pains. Part 2b

"It really is."

They lapsed into a comfortable silence.

Sometime later Dylan returned to discuss the findings of the test results and the plans going forward.

“Everything ok?” Charlie asked as he reached for Duffy’s hand.

"Luckily your delay in seeking medical attention doesn't seem to have caused any significant long term damage."

Charlie breathed a sigh of relief, “That’s reassuring and good!”

"I think a slight increase in your existing medication regime will be sufficient to elevate the symptoms."

“Do I have to give up my hobby?” Charlie asked.

"Not completely but I would strongly suggest that you take things a little more sedately til your system has had chance to adapt to the change in medication regime."

“I really wasn’t planning on going so hard. It just kinda happened. You should’ve seen what she was wearing. I couldn’t resist.”

"Charlie!" Duffy blushed, unable to look directly at either man.

“She’s stunning.” Charlie replied, “Even you can see that, can’t you Dylan?”

"I make it a policy not to comment on the physical attributes of another man's wife."

“Such a spoilsport.” Charlie rubbed Duffy’s thigh. “Can I go back to the kids now?” He asked Dylan.

"I find it tends to cause disputes even when comment has been invited." Dylan explained. "You can once I have sorted out your new prescription. Though can I please suggest that you allow your wife to do the driving?"

“Ok that’s fine.” Charlie smiled, “Thanks Dylan.”

It took another hour or so but finally Charlie was discharged and they were on their way back to Kate's.

His hand rubbed her thigh again as they pulled up outside Kate’s house. “You drive me crazy, you know that?”

"Oh come on, my driving isn't that bad!" She giggled, purposefully misunderstanding his comment.

“Well, I don’t know.” He smirked.

She leaned forward to kiss him when the commotion by her mum's front door caught her attention. "What the..?" Realising it was Andrew she jumped out of the car. "Shit!" She muttered. "What the hell are you doing here?!" She demanded as she stormed over.

“Jake was supposed to come to mine today! Or did you forget that part of our arrangement, Lisa?”

"And you feel that gives you the right to come round here and intimidate my mum and children?"

“Did we really expect anything less from him, mum? He’s a bully. A pathetic bully.” Peter replied as he moved towards Andrew.

“And you’re a dickhead. That’s why I want nothing to do with you.” Jake replied.

"You heard him Andrew." Duffy remarked, giving Peter a warning look to back down.

Peter wouldn’t. He really struggled to control his temper around Andrew.

“This isn’t over, Lisa!” Andrew warned.

“Actually yes it is. You /ever/ come here again, scaring my siblings, I’ll do what I should’ve done, years ago.” Peter’s hands clenched into fists.

"Peter, no." Duffy sighed. "Andrew, can we talk about this in private like grown ups?" She suggested.

“Fine.” Andrew nodded.

She gave Charlie a look, concerned that he was bound to object.

Charlie nodded, “Yes. That’s fine with me.”

"Let's go over by the car." She suggested to Andrew, starting to walk away from the house.

Peter watched them closely as Andrew and his mum walked over to the car.

"I don't like this dad." Jake muttered as he stepped back into the house.

Charlie squeezed Jake's shoulder reassuringly. “Me either.”

"Why did you let her stay out there alone with him then?"

“I’m watching mum, don’t worry.” Peter reassured. “He dares lays a finger on her and I’ll kick him to the kerb.”

"I'll help you." Jake added.

"Daddy!" Oli yelled excitedly from the dining room doorway. "We're bored but granny said we had to stay in here."

“Just for a minute, Oli. It won’t be for too long.” Charlie replied.

"The man was mean!" Paul added sadly.

Charlie crouched down to his younger two children and replied, “I know, son. Daddy’s sorry, ok?” He kissed Paul’s forehead and then Oli’s. “Go and play with your sisters.”

The little boys nodded and ran off.

Jake sighed. "I remember you doing that for us too." He whispered sadly.

Charlie smiled sadly, “I’d do anything to protect my children. All of you.” He squeezed Jake's shoulder again.

Peter’s hands were clenching and unclenching repeatedly, he was becoming more and more wound up.

The voices outside were rapidly increasing in volume.

“Right, I’ve had enough!” Peter made his way outside and towards Andrew and Duffy.

The two adults were stood practically toe to toe, Andrew looming over Duffy in an attempt to intimidate her.

Peter pushed Andrew away and punched him in the mouth, “Try intimidating someone your own fucking size!!”

Charlie and Jake rushed over to try and stop Peter from hurting Andrew any further. The front door closing behind them both.

"Peter!" Duffy gasped, grabbing hold of her son's shoulder.

“Come on, big man!!” Peter shrugged his mum off and went for Andrew again. Only to be stopped by Charlie. “Son, listen to me. He’s not worth it.”

Jake stepped up alongside his brother. "Let's do this, it ends here!"

“I’ll make you all pay for this.” Andrew threatened as he dabbed at his lip. Without warning, Peter went for Andrew again. This time headbutting him and breaking Andrew’s nose.

Charlie had to physically drag Peter away from Andrew, “Son, please.”

Seizing his chance now that Charlie had hold of Peter and spurred on by the sound of his mum's tears Jake took aim at Andrew knocking him to the pavement. "Stay away from my family!" He hissed.

Andrew didn’t have the energy to get straight back up. “I think you’ve made your point, Jake.” Andrew replied before he got up slowly and slouched off. Duffy wasn’t so easy to intimidate anymore.

Once Andrew was finally out of sight Duffy began to shake, the fear she'd managed to hold in check until then finally coming out.

Jake turned to his mum and hugged her. “It’s alright mum, I don’t think he’ll try that again.”

"I'm so sorry. This is all my fault." She sobbed.

“No it’s not. He’s just a knob.”

"You boys shouldn't have done that." She sighed.

“Done what? Give him a taste of his own medicine?”

"Violence should never be the answer."

“No but some people need it.”

Duffy sighed. This was the last thing she wanted.

Peter was still being calmed down by his father. He was shaking.

"Peter?" Duffy reached out tentatively towards him, her other arm still around Jake.

“I’m ok, mum.” Peter smiled.

She gently pulled him towards her, holding both him and Jake like they were small boys again, despite the fact that both were now grown men who towered over her.

“Me and Jake are old enough to look after you now.” Peter said gently.

A watery smile broke out on her face. "I'm still fully capable of looking after myself for some time yet thank you very much!"

“You’re our mum. I don’t think Andrew is going to come back, now he knows you’ve got two big lads looking after you.” Peter sighed.

“He’s a dickhead.” Jake added.

"Once the holidays are over we'll have to go see the solicitors to make this official if that's what you want?" She asked Jake.

Jake nodded, “I’ve not wanted anything to do with him for ages.” He admitted, “I just didn’t want you to get into trouble with the courts.”

"So you two thought you'd start a street brawl instead?" She asked, rolling her eyes.

“He’ll live. Unfortunately.” Peter muttered.

"Peter!" Duffy warned. "You need to have a serious think about what you want before we go to the solicitors, Jake, do you just want to cut contact or do you want to go further?"

“Further? What do you mean?” Jake asked.

"I'm not completely sure but when you were younger I tried, unsuccessfully at the time, to have his parental rights revoked. We can try again if you want?"

Jake nodded.

"Ok. We'll book an appointment in the new year and explore your options." She promised.

“Thanks mum.” Jake kissed her cheek.

"Shall we head back inside now? If I'm honest I'd rather go for a walk by myself to clear my head but I have this sneaking suspicion than none of you three is likely to let me out your sight any time soon." She sighed.

“No. Not just yet. Not until we know he’s definitely gone.” Charlie said gently.

"Fine." She sighed. "I'll go sit in the garden for a bit then." She added as she walked back towards the house.

Charlie rubbed the back of his neck.

"At least we know where she is." Jake shrugged. "Bet this is the last thing you needed on top of being dragged into work on your day off?" He remarked to Charlie.

“Dragged into work?” Charlie frowned, before remembering what Duffy had told the kids. “Ah, Yeah. That’s right.”

"Yeh, mum said it was super busy..." Jake replied, a hint of suspicion creeping into his voice.

“Yeah, that’s right.” Charlie sighed, “I had a check up at the hospital.” He admitted.

"Hang on..." Peter started putting the pieces together. "Dad!"

“What?” Charlie asked.

"Why did mum lie? What's going on?" Peter was fast getting agitated again.

“I had a heart attack ok? A mild one so I don’t want anyone to panic ok? I’m fine. They’ve readjusted my medication and I’m gonna be just fine, boys.”

His father's reassurances did nothing to calm Peter.

“Peter, look at me?”

Peter slowly raised his head, his eyes wild and his hands twitching.

“I’m fine. I wouldn’t be home if I wasn’t.”

"Hmm." Peter looked unconvinced. He kept glancing nervously at the house.

“What’s worrying you?” Charlie asked.

"It just makes me nervous when mum starts lying about things. What else is she hiding?" Peter mumbled.

“What do you mean? She only lied because I told her to.” Charlie sighed, “Do you think she’s lying about something else?”

"With her who knows?" Peter shrugged, his tone bitter.

“Peter! Enough! Your mum’s never lied about anything unless it was to protect you and Jake!”

"If you say so." Peter muttered before skulking back into the house.

Charlie sighed heavily.

"You sure you're OK?" Jake asked.

“Yeah. I guess.” Charlie shrugged.

"I'm sorry I made things worse."

“You didn’t.” Charlie reassured.

"Maybe I should have just gone to Andrew's today." Jake sighed.

“You had every right to refuse to go.” Charlie sighed, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Peter but I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

"He was fine when I saw him a couple of days ago so it must be something recent." Jake shrugged.

“Thanks son. We should probably go inside, shouldn’t we?”

"Yeh. One of us should probably go check on mum too."

“I’ll go and check on her. You and Peter have done enough for today.” They went back into the house.

Kate hurried into the hall as she heard the front door close. "Is he gone?" She asked anxiously.

“Yes gran, he’s gone.” Jake replied. “Hopefully he won’t be back.”

"What happened to your hand?" Kate gasped.

“I punched him. He deserved it.”