#also i'll be making a separate gifset for him later down the line for this challenge

[hydrodragons]

genshin impact gif challenge ✦

[1/?] story quests → diluvies chapter, act i: the remains of the past day

"you will see much in the human world, from the delightful to the depressing. and one day, when you have dwelt among humanity long enough, you will be placed to bring judgment over all as the spokesperson for fontaine's past."

[indelibleevidence]

Broken Wings, chapter 1 (Reller, M-rated)

Author's Note: Also on FanFiction.Net and AO3! Updating on Saturdays, because I made sure to actually finish the fic before I started posting it, to ensure I didn't consign it to WIP hell like my other WIPs. XD

Wow, this is going to be a lot of explaining, but here we go! First off, if you haven't read Strikethrough, Crossroads, and the Damaged Goods summaries for the rest of the fics that I haven't written in between Crossroads and this one, go do that first. There's also a one-shot called Stalling that's set a month or two before this fic, but it's not necessary reading to get what's going on here.

This fic contains suicidal ideation, suicidal distress, and a depiction of Remi at rock bottom. If you're in a bad place, it might be better if you don't read this right now. (And I hope you feel less terrible soon.)

Remi is a lot different from the Remi in Crossroads. She's got pretty much all of her memories from her Jane years back now, and is a little bit softer and less sweary, until she's provoked, and then she reverts to 'fuck you' mode. Much like Jane's 4x15/4x16 self in canon, she's overwhelmed by the weight of her past mistakes, as Remi and as Jane. She's definitely not on the 'yay, law enforcement' train, and is still mostly ACAB in nature, but she knows that at least Kurt and his team are well-intentioned, and their eyes are open to the corruption within the system (mainly because of the first set of tattoos). By this point in my timeline, she also has accepted the fact that she's in love with Kurt, but she'd die before she'd ever admit it to him.

Jane is referred to as a third person throughout this fic, because neither Remi nor Kurt are at the 'Jane and Remi are just two time periods sans memories for one person' stage of acceptance. Also because it's easier for me, as a writer, to differentiate between those different time periods and mindsets by just using the names she was going by at the time. I do think that in another year down the Damaged Goods timeline, both Remi and Kurt will stop referring to Jane as a separate entity, but Remi kind of needs it right now, and though Kurt is further down the line as seeing Jane as a part of Remi, he's still getting there too. So things might seem a little bit disassociative identity disordery, and I apologise to anyone who might stumble upon this who actually lives with DID and hates what I did with this. But Remi is compartmentalising a LOT, though interestingly enough, now she's seeing Jane as the better person, whereas before, she loathed Jane with the fire of a thousand suns. The difference a few memories can make...

This fic is complete, so I'll post updates on Saturdays, I guess. This is my first time actually finishing a multi-chaptered fic before starting to post, but I really didn't want to start posting another WIP that was going to hang around in limbo (I'm sorry, Remember to Forgive and Taken for Granted fans! I will get there, I hope!).

Lastly, I really have to thank nachosandcheeze for her enthusiasm for this AU, and her encouragement for me to keep writing for it. She's not the only one who's been lovely about it (and thank you to everyone who cares about my weird little enemies to lovers universe where Jane never quite made it back to her brain - really, you guys are fantastic!), but she's been pretty consistently poking me with metaphorical sticks, and making Remi gifsets, and squeeing over Reller, etc. - to the point where I showed her the half-scene I had written from a fic several fics away from where I'd left off with Crossroads, just to get it out of my brain. And she loved it so much that I wrote a bit more, and a bit more, until over 16k later, I ended up with this. So thank you again, nachos. You're proof that nagging a fic author for more story does actually work, sometimes! :D

*

Absently tracing the carving on the stone with her finger, Remi glanced over to the small vial of clear liquid on her nightstand. It sat on top of a small, leatherbound booklet—El Libro de la Eternidad—which she’d smuggled out of Peru, along with the stone brick from Machu Picchu. Maybe she should feel guilty that she’d stolen a couple of pieces of Peruvian history from its citizens, even if one of them was a loose brick, but after all the things she’d done in her short fuck-up of a life, her conscience was way past that. And the brick contained a carved message for her: RB 4 RB, Roman Briggs for Remi Briggs, along with binary code that pointed to Roman’s data caches, and a message that had made tears sting her eyes.

Hey, sis.

I got you something. I never solved this one.

 I hope you can. I did my best.

May you outlive this… for both of us.

Your brother, always,

Roman

Even during his bitter feud with Jane—Remi still flinched to think of him ZIPped and claustrophobic in his FBI cell, even though she now remembered Jane’s reasons, and her anguish at her brother’s state—Roman had still been looking for a cure for her. He’d had his own, the one she’d stolen from Dr. Roga and used to cure herself—after all, Roman had died before he’d had the chance to benefit from it. But still, he’d hunted down more Stanton cells, which meant that now, Remi had a cure for ZIP poisoning all lined up.

She had everything she needed. If Roman’s cache intel was right, New York billionaire hypochondriac Ken Lee would trade El Libro de la Eternidad for the Stanton cells. Dr. Roga could synthesise a new cure, if Kurt approached her. And Remi would need that cure, because the ZIP on the nightstand would be going into her body, as soon as she laid the plan out for Kurt.

There was just one more thing left to do.

Setting aside Roman’s carving, she accessed the video recording setting on her phone, and held it up so that her face was visible. She’d made a video for her future self once before, to further Phase One of her grand plan by introducing Jane to Oscar, and verifying his trustworthiness.

And you know how that turned out, her internal critic whispered.

Swallowing hard, Remi made herself focus on the task at hand, ignoring the guilt gnawing on the synapses at the back of her mind. How was she going to start this thing? Saying hello seemed redundant.

“I know you’re suffering right now, and I’m sorry for that. You don’t remember your old life, and that’s intentional. Please, trust me when I say you shouldn’t go hunting for the finer details. I’m sparing you a lifetime of pain and futility by taking the ZIP, even though you might not be able to appreciate that.”

She sounded whiny as hell, but how else could she put it? She had to make future Jane understand that this was for the best.

“The only options, as I see them, are suicide or ZIP. I’ve got enough here that I should be able to wipe out any trace of my old memories. You might get a few flashes, but I hope you don’t. You don’t need to go through this again.”

If you weren’t such a coward, you’d just put a shotgun barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger. Maybe Jane would think she was cowardly. But she wasn’t afraid to die. She just didn’t want Kurt to have to suffer, knowing his wife was dead along with Remi.

“I’m doing this, instead of killing myself, because you have good people around you, people I’ve already hurt enough, and don’t want to hurt any more by making them lose you. You have loyal friends. A husband who loves you very much. Things will be hard for you at first, but you’ll build a life again, like you did before. And this time, you’ll know who did this to you, and why, and you won’t have me telling you to disregard your instincts and undermine the people you care about. I was misled, and betrayed, but I made bad choices, too. I was too stubborn to see it for so long, but the first time we were ZIPped, Jane found happiness, and a new purpose, and even though I still don’t think law enforcement is the shining star of morality… If you’re working with Kurt and his team, you’ll be working towards good things. Hold onto that.”

She took a breath, picking up the ancient Peruvian brick again.

“The one thing I want to tell you about is my—our—brother, Roman. Or Ian. That was his birth name, just like yours was Alice. Ian Kruger. Later, Roman Briggs. He wasn’t perfect, as I’m sure Kurt will tell you. But he was a follower his whole life, not a leader. He followed me, and our adopted mother, because he loved us, and didn’t want to be rejected. Jane hurt him too much, and he turned on her, and on Kurt, but deep down, he was a good man. He just wanted a loving family, to belong somewhere.”

She held the brick up in the camera’s sight. “I want you to keep this. Take care of it. This points to his last message from him to me, on his data caches. To Remi, I mean. Not the old version of Jane.” How did things get so confusing? “I have the actual message saved on my phone, so you should be able to see the message itself there. As for the brick, I took it from Peru, along with something to bargain with for a cure for your ZIP poisoning. Roman was looking for a cure for me, even while he knew I—the old Jane—was working to bring him down. He just wanted his sister back, I guess.”

If she kept this up for much longer, she was going to get too damn emotional, and there was no way she was willing to break down and cry on video. She had to cut this short. “Roman and I went through hell together, and that’s one of the things I don’t want you to remember anything about, so I won’t go into it. But we survived our childhood by relying on each other, and then our teenage years were the same, in a different way. We used to pass a South African rand coin our parents gave us back and forth, giving it to each other as a gift. It wasn’t worth much back then—and it’d buy even less now—but its symbolic value for us was priceless. For Roman, it was a comfort object. Jane buried him with it, so I don’t have it now, but I wanted you to know about it.”

She dug her fingernails into her palm, a technique she’d first used at the orphanage to keep outwardly calm, while a torrent of emotions churned within her. The pain centred her, making the grief easier to bear.

“Things went so wrong, but I never stopped loving Roman, even as Jane. And he never stopped loving me.”

She sighed, knowing she should say more, should give Jane more closure, but knowing she’d never be able to get through it on camera. Maybe she’d write Jane a letter, before Kurt ZIPped her.

“I hope you can build a life again, and find happiness. You sure as hell couldn’t do worse than I did. Please, look forward, not back. There’s nothing here but pain. Good luck.”

She threw down the phone and buried her face in her hands, breathing deeply, striving for the numbness that could get her through the final days of this life. Soon she’d fly to New York, and wipe the slate clean.

The end of my memories can’t come soon enough. I can’t do this anymore.

*

Three days later…

Kurt stared from the vial and hypodermic needle to his wife, a rapidly growing pit in his stomach. What…is happening here? What the hell, Remi?

“It’s okay,” she said, shrugging as though this was a foregone conclusion, a logical end to everything they’d battled through on their way to this moment. “I’ve made my peace with it. There’s nothing left here for me now. This is Jane’s world, and I don’t belong in it. At least…at least this way, you can get her back. Or as close to it as it’s possible to get.”

“It’s okay?” he finally managed to say, his throat choked with an intense mass of emotions that he couldn’t even begin to analyse right now. “Your identity is what makes you you, Remi. You’ve fought to defend it so damn hard, it nearly drove us apart for good. You’ve spent over a year getting so many of your memories back, and now you want a clean slate again? I know you remember how hard it was for you after Times Square, and after Cape Town.”

She wrapped her arms around herself, still not meeting his eyes. “The first time, you didn’t know who Jane was. Nobody knew. This time, everyone will. And she’ll have you, and your friends. It’s…easier that way. Even though I hated you when I found out what had happened to Sandstorm, at least I had…” She shook her head. “Anyway—Jane will adjust quickly. You can get the woman you married back, as she was.”

The words shook him, in so many different ways. He rubbed a hand over his face, floundering to make sense of everything.

To get his Jane back…it was everything he’d dreamed of for so long. During those ten months that Remi had gone off the radar, he’d been desperate to find a way to bring Jane back to the forefront of her mind. Aside from Bethany and work, it had been all he’d thought about, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t feel a spark of hope for that outcome now.

But it was all wrong. It was a fairytale. Jane had been a product of the situation she’d been in, from the bag in Times Square to not knowing who she was, to thinking she was Taylor Shaw and then discovering she wasn’t, to being tortured by the CIA—and then discovering she used to be Remi Briggs, daughter of the leader of a terrorist organisation. She’d become who she was because of the way things had been back then, the way her new life had unfolded, and there was no way to know how much of that would be replicated in a newly ZIPped Remi.

Remi. God… I… He swallowed hard, something akin to grief seeping into his bones.

“What about you? This is like…like mental suicide for a huge part of you. You really want to kill yourself that badly? Why not shoot yourself in the head? Jump off a building? Overdose on pills?” His voice was harsher than he meant it to come out—demanding, angry.

Terrified. He was goddamn terrified.

Remi flinched at his tone, finally looking into his eyes. “Because you don’t want to live without her. And if I did one of those things, you’d have to face that she’d never come back.”

He rose from the couch abruptly, the twister of conflicted emotions within him too much to handle if he stayed still. Tears filled his eyes as he stalked over to the kitchen, and he rested his palms on the worktop, his back to Remi, as he tried to breathe.

“So you really want to die?” he managed to ask.

“There’s nothing left for me. My mother, my brother, my friends, my cause, my convictions… Everything is gone, Weller. There’s no point in trying to rebuild. I’ve spent the past year not knowing what to do with myself, fucking things up…”

He turned on her, snarling, “There’s nothing left for you? Then what the hell am I? Why do you keep coming back? After everything that’s happened, you don’t care enough to stick around?”

She got to her feet, crossed the room, her eyes sad. “The only thing I care about in this life is you, and I hurt you constantly, just by not being Jane. This way, it kills two birds with one stone. My empty life goes away, and you get Jane back. You get to be happy, and I get to…forget.”

A tear slid down his cheek, and he dashed it away impatiently. “Remi…”

She reached up to brush another tear from the corner of his eye, her fingers gentle. “I don’t want either of us to hurt anymore. We’ve suffered enough.”

Staring down at her, he finally put names to the emotions within him. Fear and pain had been easy to identify on their own, but they were joined by a surge of something else, so strong and fierce and breathtakingly real that he could hardly bear it.

Remi… Fuck, I can’t lose you. I need you.

I love you.

Despite everything she’d done to him, all the mental torment she’d put him through, the bitter arguments they’d had, the misunderstandings and deceit that had shredded their trust in each other…he’d fallen for the whole of her, just as hard as he had for the Jane part of her. Remi was Jane, intensified. She’d called herself damaged goods, and he couldn’t disagree, but so was he. Remi understood him in a way Jane never could have on her own.

And he was suddenly, powerfully certain that she loved him just as much.

Unable to control himself, he pulled her into his arms, giving her a crushing kiss that seemed to shock the breath from her, even as she returned it just as ardently. Part of him wanted to reject this whole conversation, carry her to bed, fuck her until they were both too exhausted to do anything but fall asleep in each other’s arms.

But this was too serious to hide from, even temporarily. He had to make his position clear.

Wrenching away from her, he stalked over to the table, picked up the small bottle of ZIP and brought it to the kitchen sink. Unscrewing the lid, he poured the contents down the drain, then dropped the bottle and turned to Remi, who was staring at him as though he’d gone mad.

“What the hell?” she demanded.

“Listen to me,” he told her, his eyes locked on hers. “I will never use that stuff on you. Ever. It doesn’t matter to me that there’s a cure for ZIP poisoning all lined up. There’s no going back for us. I can’t just inject you and turn you back into the Jane you used to be. It wouldn’t work like that.”

She sighed, looking down at the splashes of ZIP remaining in the sink. “Better the devil you know than the angel you don’t?”

He cupped her face in both hands, making sure she couldn’t look away from his face. “You’re my devil, and my angel, and everything in between. Remi, the thought of losing you scares the hell out of me. You’re my wife, and you may not be the way you were when we got married, but you’re still the woman I fell in love with, deep down.”

She was frowning, shaking her head, and he rested his forehead against hers, closing his eyes as she drew in a shaky breath.

“I love you, just as much as I did when you were Jane. You didn’t make it easy to get to know you, but every time you let me in a little more, I fell for you even further. I need you to stay you.”

“What?” She breathed the word, and he opened his eyes to find her visibly trembling. Her expression was a study in contradictions. Fear. Hope. Anger. Longing.

Kurt smiled sadly. “It’s too late. I already know you love me, too.”

She tore herself out of his arms, stepped out of his reach. “Stop it. This has gone far enough, Weller.”

“No. It hasn’t gone anywhere near far enough. You’re so scared of making yourself vulnerable, of being hurt again, that you’re hurting yourself so that I’ll never have that power over you.” He took a step closer, and she backed into the living room immediately.

He’d once mentally compared her to a trapped animal, defensively clawing and snarling out of fear. He saw that same distress in her now, and ached to hold her, even though it would only make the situation worse.

“I thought we were over this,” she said, her voice brittle. “I’m not Jane.”

“No, you’re not Jane. You’re Remi. I see you, the whole of you. I know exactly who you are, and I love you.”

She eyed the apartment door, her fists bunched at her sides and her jaw set.

“Don’t run from this. Please.” He took another slow, careful step, and though she backed up again, her eyes were on him once more.

“You never took off your wedding ring, even when you were telling me you hated me. You’ve opened up to me more than once. You’ve trusted me to keep you safe, and you’ve forgiven me for mistakes I’ve made, and I’ve done the same for you.”

She pulled at the ring on her finger, trying to remove it. “You can believe what you want to believe, but it’s not true. It was just about sex and anger, and then we became friends with benefits. That’s it.”

He caught hold of her left hand and held it between his, before she could take off the wedding band. “You didn’t even want to admit you wanted me, back when we first realised we still needed each other. Even when you were halfway to coming. Is it gonna be the same now?”

She snorted, but didn’t try to yank her hand free from his. “What, you think you’re gonna fuck a confession of love out of me? It’s not the same thing, Weller.”

“Is that what it’s gonna take?” He couldn’t pretend he was surprised. They’d resolved so many of their other issues through arguing their way into sex. Why would this be any different?

Her jaw trembled before she firmed it, glaring at him. “No, because it won’t work. It’s not true.”

With anyone else, he’d take that as their final answer. A rejection that he’d have to accept and move on from. But with Remi, things had never been straightforward and simple.

She tested him at every turn, refusing to take anything he said at face value, and this thing with the ZIP was likely a part of it. He wanted to believe that was all it was—a manipulation, a shock tactic designed to scare him into laying all his cards on the table—but his gut told him otherwise.

She would never have risked him saying yes to her offer to ‘become Jane again’ if she hadn’t been prepared to accept the consequences. She was too proud to back down from something she’d said she’d do. And that meant that she really was at a desperate end point, unable to find a way to move forward from the ruins they’d left of her pre-ZIP life.

Kurt needed her to see that he could help her find the path, if she’d only trust herself to walk it. But first, she had to know he wasn’t going anywhere, that he wasn’t just settling for a doppelgänger until he decided to stop clinging to Jane’s memory.

And they both had to be clear where they stood with each other.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t love me.”

Remi stared at him, for a moment seeming completely taken aback. Then her protective bravado and anger kicked in. “You say ‘jump’, I say ‘how high’? No!”

Even as he understood her reasons for refusing—knew she was just trying to protect herself—her words still stung.

“I love you, Remi.” He shrugged, standing straighter as he laid out his challenge. “If you don’t feel the same way, I need to know. So come on—break my heart.”

God, this is going to hurt.

He believed that she loved him. But whether she’d ever admit it to herself, let alone to him, was another story entirely.

[inessencedevided]

(You can find the set that this gif belongs to here 💙)

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours

I was tagged by @aheartfullofjolllly. thank you so much Pat! it was really fun to reflect about my own process 💗 You can find her post here and @lan-xichens' post that started it all here :)

Also thank you @huigusu 🥰 (who tagged me for my nie brothers set) I'll get to that one in a few days!

Now Pat gave me two sets to chose from to show my process, so obviously I chose the more complicated one :P

I only work in Photoshop CC 2018. I know that there are programs out there for easier cutting and sharpening but I have only just figured out how to do that in PS and I am too lazy to figure out any other programs right now xD

1. Idea and Planning

This set, like most of my sets with lyrics started with me reading the poem, clutching my heart and going "oh shit this fits my favourite characters!!". The idea actually started with me thinking that the first stanza of the poem would go really well with wwx during the burial mounds arc. Then I realized that the last stanza fits lwj better than him and from there came the idea to contrast the both of them next to each other. This is when I realized I wanted to do a dark-light contrast set, though I did not know that I would go with red and blue at that time. My idea in the beginning was just to do a black and white set

I was really impressed by how Pat said that she plans her sets around exact timestamps. Because I don't do that at all ^^ I just get ideas for which scenes would fit (in this case the wwx burial mounds scenes and lwj's kneeling and punishments scene) and then I watch the scenes to narrow them down.

Back when I made this set, I still used a screenrecorder (AceThinker Screen Grabber Pro to be precise. They have a test version that allows you to record up to 3 minutes) and recorded the scenes I needed from Netflix. This worked well enough but now I have the entire show saved on an external drive and it makes a world of difference when it comes to gif sharpness

Now, in this case I had to repeat this step once because when I was almost finished, I realized that I wanted a gif for the lwj corner but let's pretend I didn't do that and that's the way this gif was always going to look because otherwise this post will be way too long ^^

2. Creation

Short disclaimer: The creation process for this gifset was anything but linear. Multiple effects I used here were things I had never tried before. I just had a vague idea and tried to realize it through trial and error. So whenever I say "then I did xyz", it is implied that I ultimately went back to that step several times and changed stuff ^^

I started with the Wei Wuxian part of the gif. I usually use a frame rate of 0,06 (with some variation depending on gif length and size). I work in timeline so I converted all the layers to a smart layer. Then I resized the gif into a square, leaving big chunks of the gif empty (as can be seen below.) I flipped the gif horizontally, so he is looking inwards. This was simple because I felt it fitted the composition better. Then I imported the Lan Wangji part of the gif, again with a frame rate of 0,06. (Image 2)

After that I created a layer for masking in a separate PS document by rotating a square until it was point down (is that a rhombus?). I sized it to match my gif (540x540 pxl) and copied it over. (Image 3) a bit of masking magic and ta da! There's the basic layout (Image 4)

I put a layer of solid black behind wwx to get rid of the transparent bits (Image 5) and then started adding more white and black to both sides by adding solid whit and black layers that i put masks on and changed the opacity as i needed (Image 6)

("reading" direction: from the upper left to the lower right corner)

Then I fiddled with the colours a bit. The first thing I always do is using the curves layer to get more contrast. Then I use the colour balance tool and the selective colouring tool to get rid of that cql-typical cyan tint after that it's just trying to have it look "natural" while the colours still fit the overall scheme. This was difficult here because wei Wuxian’s side of the gif was very dark and when i turned up the saturation to see which colour dominated it was a very weird mixture of multiple colours. That's when i decided that I'd just go with red on his side, since lwj's side was already so blue and those to look great as contrasts.

After that just came a lot of fiddling with selective colour layers and brightness and contrast unti I has happy. There really wasn't much to it ^^. (Image 1)

After that I added the text. I knew I wanted the two lines to for a square of some kind. So I tried different fonds until I arrived at the one below. The two lines are in seperate layers so I could move them around and change the spacing between the letters until I was happy with the layout. I also changed the layer mode for the text to "difference" (is that what it's called in english? my PS is set to german sorry ^^), keeping their colour white. (Image 2)

I originally hadn't planned adding anything else but I felt like the gifs (plural because I switched between the gifs of this set) was still kind of empty and lacking, so I added the tear down the middle (a tutorial for that is either coming up later or already posted. I recently got an ask for this :)) (Image 3)

It still felt empty after that, so I tried different overlays. Okay no, first I wasted a lot of time on different free image sides but then I tried out different ones until I chose the one you can see in the finished gif. I liked that one because a) I felt the round shape was a nice contrast to all the straight lines already there and b) because once I applied a black and white filter to it and switched the layer setting to "difference" (again, i hope this is the correct translation) it looked a bit like a moon. (Gif at the top)

("reading" direction: from left to right)

And that's it! :)

Although in general, these gifs took so much fiddling! I went back and forth between them a lot and sometimes almost redid the entire thing because I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning and by the time I noticed an error, the only way to fix it was ti redo everything. So yeah, this set definitely is the the one that took me the longest out of all the ones I've posted so far.

3. Posting

I save all my gifs to my drafts first to see what they look like put together and to check if they look any different on mobile. Usually i do this several times and change stuff until I'm happd enough with it to hit post. Once i am happy enough, i can't hold back. Doesn't matter if it's at a time when nobody is online, i hit post 😅

And that's it!

Tagging:

@lanwuxiann for this gifset (I adore it so much. I've looked at it and read it severat times since you posted it and the poem just kills me every time!)

@suibianjie for this gifset (The combination of static images and gifs in your gifs is always absolutely perfect! This one is only my favourite of yours because the light coming from behind wwx is just so pretty!!! ^^)

@sweetlittlevampire for this piece (It was soooo hard to pick a piece of yours because I have so many favourites! But this one is just so out if this world, I want to know how you worked that magic :D)

@wei-gege for this set (sparkling shijie! 😭 that set is so incredibly beautiful! I love how you matched the colour of the overlay with her dress!)

@purplexedhuman for this set (your gifs are always incredible! I chise this one because it showcases both your colouring skills and some really intricate effects)

If any of you have already been tagged or don't have the time or energy for this, obviously no pressure to do this at all! 🥰

(btw, I originally tried to place the actual text of this under a "read more" cut but somehow it always messed with the order of the images, so this ended up as a rather long post. sorry!)